Abstract
Speculative narratives offer particularly rich and complex explorations of time and aging, exhibiting a tendency to play with 'queer temporalities' and imagine the lifecourse and human chronology in alternative ways. In this article, we employ an ageing studies perspective in our analysis of time, the lifecourse and aging in four visual speculative narratives. We focus on recent film/TV about increased longevity/immortality. "San Junipero" (in TV Series Black Mirror, 2016), Mr Nobody (2009) and In Time (2011) imagine societies in which forms of technologically enabled extended longevity have been achieved. The Age of Adaline (2015), on the other hand, follows the tradition of speculative fiction about exclusive immortality, achieved only by one or a small number of persons. All four texts play with linear and chronological aging and juxtapose youth and age in provocative ways, exploiting the possibilities of the visual mode. In Time and Adaline seem to yearn for normative social order and present extended longevity as the source of unhappiness and social crisis. San Junipero and Mr Nobody, on the other hand, focus on the possibilities of temporal disorder as a way of escaping normative expectations. They draw attention to the constricting nature of normative times and combine utopian and dystopian elements to explore the tension between normative and queer temporal orders.