The Potential of Meta-SF: An Analysis of Nacho Vigalondo’s Timecrimes as a Metacinematic Allegory of Postmodern Subjectivity

Abstract

This paper reconsiders Spanish director Nacho Vigalondo’s first feature film, Timecrimes (Los Cronocrímenes, 2007), a film characterised by a peculiar combination of science-fictional and metafictional forms, two fictional modes which are not often studied together. More specifically, Vigalondo’s movie is examined as a metacinematic allegory of postmodern subjectivity, arguing that the film’s parodic depiction of a time-traveller can be read as a reflection on some dilemmas of contemporary individuals–dilemmas such as ideological confusion and relativism, or individualistic isolation and helplessness. Among other considerations, attention is paid to the essential kinship of time-travelling and cinema as subjective experiences (a parallelism which provides the base for Timecrimes’s allegory), while, in parallel, contextualising the film within the postmodern historical epoch, in which audio-visual spectacles and entertainment exert a determining influence on human subjects and their experience of time. Thus, Vigalondo’s film is considered, first, from a more formalist perspective—looking at its systematic use of the metacinematic allegory and comparing it to similar devices in the director’s prior works and influences—and, subsequently, from a more narrative-thematic perspective, with the aim of disentangling the socio-philosophical implications of the story.