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Thursday, August 25, 2005
Primer’s Time
Shane Carruth’s Primer, budgeted at $7,000, is the most intelligent time-travel film I’ve ever seen (including La Jetée.) Though I can’t claim to be a time-travel film scholar like Chuck Tryon, I think he’s come to a similar conclusion. It remains vaguely obscene to compare it to The Matrix or Memento, as some of the understandably puzzled reviewers have done. Before getting into just what’s so good about it, consider the following thought-experiment: at what order of magnitude increase in budget could the film not have been made?
- $70,000--this level might have improved some of the cinematography and hastened the editing without compromising the film overly.
- $700,000--here, investor anxiety might have begun to affect how the film would have turned out. I can’t imagine how Carruth could have gotten this kind of money from anyone for his project. It remains faintly miraculous that the film was ever made and distributed. (I should note that the $7,000 figure could not include a market-value estimate of Carruth’s two years of editing labor. This may not matter.)
- $7,000,000--at this point, still virtually nothing in film budget terms, Primer would have been unrecognizable. Casting the Wilson brothers as leads wouldn’t have helped at all. And the professional technique available at this level, however basic, would have been corrupting.
Shot in 2001, Primer (I was going to write “captures the logic of invention in this unusually late capitalismistic moment,” but that doesn’t quite do it), explores the origin of the desire to invent. It shows invention more realistically and teaches us how to follow the engineer through society more aptly than any film I can remember. The two principals are named Aaron and Abe. You probably can’t help but suspect some of the old teleological suspension of the ethical in Abe and Aaron’s manufactured omniscience and the resulting paradoxes, but it’s just a smear. Nothing is laid on thick. And they dress just like I did when I worked at the nuclear power plant. No costume designer in the world could have found such sublime ties. And how subtle it is. You can trace the history of their friendship by observing how they throw a football. Note that Abe (the actor, David Sullivan, played football at Baylor, perhaps during the William Dembski era) is casually athletic while Aaron is uncoordinated. Perhaps in compensation, he’s more intellectually dominant and ambitious, a problem when it’s turned inward.
The film’s partial explanation of what’s happening spatio-temporally relies on the parabola, and I’m not yet willing to attempt to explicate it in more detail. The etymological connection of “parabola” with “parable,” particularly in reference to the allusion I noted above, is hard to avoid, however. If you can constrain the cycle, you have the power of the cycle. Carruth explicitly invokes recursion and strange loops in interviews (and perhaps also in the instructive director’s commentary). Historical inertia is easily disturbed. I can’t decide to what extent the film’s logic recognizes this. If, as I think, Primer is primarily about world-creation, then historical inertia is the main problem. The ever-growing boxes, which increase both the nesting potential and the length of the cycle, thus increase the user’s sub-temporal domain (and his avatars). Is the final scene meant to be in Africa, perhaps?
I know this is confusing as all hell if you haven’t seen the film (and perhaps if you have). But give it a try.
Comments
I’ve seen it, and didn’t love it much at all. Mainly because the dialogue recording was so corrupt that I couldn’t catch 2/3 of what they were saying to each other, and that meant I gave up trying to process the structural labyrinth well before the movie ended. (I’d not call it a film, either.)
I did enjoy the way the movie tapped the (new?) myth of the tech start-up, & then very smoothly funnelled that into a sort of traditional sf smoke and mirrors routine where the workings of the machine are very slowly and patiently “explained”. Crunchy lo-fi digital video is a really appropriate medium for telling that kind of story , it’s still got a decent advantage over spectacular 35mm in the reality-effect stakes.
Like you said, the two guys were just about perfectly pitched, but the same can’t be said of all the other people in the movie. I read the sub-sub-subplot about the party-crashing gunman as a pretext which the guys used to each other for embarking on more & more advanced Daedalusian shenanigans, but still, we needed to see more of the people involved, they were just random warm bodies.
& yes, I think the last shots were in “Africa”, or some other hot country where the Foreign Legion hangs out.
About your thought experiment: you’re suggesting that there’s an inverse ratio between a movie’s intelligentness and legitimacy, and how much money is spent making it & how much technological working-over is applied? DO you think that’s a reasonably generally applicable principle, or is it something about Primer and a few other movies only?
It was shot on Super 16mm, not digital video.
And I could hear it just fine, though I watched it on a laptop.
I mentioned the possibility of the last shot being somewhere on the continent of Africa because it points to the possible paranoid grandeur of the avatar’s motivation in building a much larger box--source of human life, etc.
It has specific relevance to Primer, but it is probably true for most. The Lord Acton corollary.
It may as well have been shot on video. Maybe HD video is too clean for the look that was desired.
I saw it in a 1000 seat cinema, which was full, projected on a really enormous screen. In fact we have not seen the same movie.
I thought the ending was Heart of Darkness.
The “I’d not call it a film” comment strikes me as a, inaccurate in this case, technicality or some type of snobbery. It was edited on a computer, decidedly imperfectly, but that’s part of why I found it so effective. There’s a cynicism that comes with professionalization.
Your print may not have had a crucial three second blackout, but I’d recommend giving it a shot on DVD if it’s available.
How you figure?
I try to avoid using the word “film” as a catch-all term for moving pictures, partly because of the lingering snobbery attached to <i>it</i>, & partly because it’s not an accurate description of the physical basis of increasing numbers of movies (though not <i>Primer</i>, mea culpa.) There, you’ve lured me into the Cul-De-Sac de Pomposity, good work Jonathan!
I figure an echo of Conrad because the inventors hollowed themselves out. Your idea is better.
Your idea is actually better. I’m terrified that the Kierkegaard reference, if that’s what it is, comes from an introduction to existentialism class.
OK, we did see the same movie. World creation, empire building.
I’ve just returned from Montreal to find Jonathan’s generous comments on my work on time-travel films. Like Jonathan, I think the film benefits from its low budget, although another $10,000 or so would have made it easier to avoid some of the continuity snafus (to save money on film, Carruth often filmed only a single take).
And, yes, I think it’s one of the best time-travel films ever made, belonging in a category with “La Jetee,” and perhaps a few others.
As Jonathan notes the film raises about invention, the desire to invent, incredibly effectively. But I’m curious: why state and then withdraw the claim about “late capitalism?”
The phrase has been overused, I think.
“Crunchy lo-fi digital video is a really appropriate medium for telling that kind of story , it’s still got a decent advantage over spectacular 35mm in the reality-effect stakes."
FWIW, also, in the commentary, Carruth mentions that a lot of the night scenes have that really grainy quality, especially on big screens, because of a mistake that was made in the post-processing. (I.e., he says something like, “we were going for a specific under-exposed look, and it looked fine after we first shot it, but during the printing process it had to be scanned to a digital format, and something was set wrong during that step so it looks too grainy, but fixing it would have meant it wouldn’t have been ready for Sundance.")
Just thought I’d point it out… I went and rented the movie last night, and watched it three times, after reading this post… and I should say, I thought it was excellent. I’m still a little weirded out by the “copying” quality of the machine, and I don’t understand, after the copies appear, do the originals still need to get in the box? Also—the comment about the process being recursive, and the ability to take a box in with you inside another box, thereby creating a copy… sort of blew my mind, a little.
It seems like, if you want to have a discussion on (or build a theory about) the movie, you need to decide what you think is the structure of the movie, itself. Which wasn’t really clear to me, even after watching it a couple of times.
You probably could make some hay out of the way that the David Sullivan character is discussed in Carruth’s commentary—he mentions that, although it was cut, one of the “points” was that Abram has diabetes, and thus is obsessed with time and scheduling and punctuality. There’s also a quick line about how Carruth sees Abram and Aaron as “basically the same guy,” which might mean something in a movie about creating copies. Also, you write “[Abram is] more intellectually dominant and ambitious", but I’m pretty sure that it’s Aaron who is “on the leading edge,” and “in control,” the entire time, right? Abram thinks that he’s “reset” the situation with his failsafe machine… but in fact, Aaron is one step ahead of him, which is the point of the ear-bleeding scene early on, right? I’m not sure.
But ok, despite all this, I totally agree with this being one of the most intelligent time-travel movies ever.
I wrote that Aaron was more so, perhaps out of compensation. This detail was very possibly just a reinforcing accident.
Sorry: I see what you’re saying now, in re-reading.
Also, just a random note: one of the commentary tracks has Shane Carruth mentioning that he had originally intended for the final scene to take place “somewhere in Asia,” but they “couldn’t find any Asians” (in Dallas) for the scene.