77 Minutes, Color, USA, 2004
Written By: Shane Carruth
Directed By: Shane Carruth
Dramatis Personae:
Shane
Carruth is Aaron, engineer and budding
garage entrepreneur.
David
Sullivan is Abe, Aaron's business
partner.
Carrie
Crawford is Kara, Aaron's longsuffering
wife.
Commentary:
Grendel over at Astrocritics sent me this
movie as a Christmas present. If you know Grendel at all, the fact that he
sends you a movie to watch is enough to make you fear for your sanity, if not
your immortal soul. Fortunately, however, I've already gone mad and my soul
gave up and left a few years ago, so I think I'm okay. Besides which, Primer is a pretty good
movie, and just the sort of thing I love watching: a deep, intelligent movie
that messes with your head, and when it's over it just makes you sit down and
ponder what the hell you just saw.
Our story begins in a garage, somewhere in
suburban Texas. Aaron, Abe, and two other partners run a side business,
producing electronic components for small companies and private users. Judging
from their conversation, they've been at this for a while and haven't had any
great success, and there's beginning to be some dissension in the ranks. It's
the classic disagreement about a business model: Aaron wants to be innovating,
and the others want to actually start turning a profit. The partnership doesn't
exactly dissolve, but Aaron and Abe do break away and start on their own
project. So they set about building a...thing.
What the thing they build actually is isn't
fully explained. Apparently they set out to build some kind of capacitor or something,
but what they finally created was far from what they intended. Once they cobble
the device together and turn it on, they're not sure what it's doing. It makes
a whole lot of noise and gives off a lot of heat, but it doesn't seem to do
anything else. They put an object
in the box with the device– a Weeble! – and the only side-effect it
demonstrates is that it comes out covered in some kind of organic gunk. The
gunk, they learn, is a naturally-occurring fungus that's found just about
everywhere, but the level of buildup on the Weeble would takes YEARS to
accumulate under normal circumstances. Putting a watch in the box confirms it:
time flows faster inside. One minute of time outside the box equals about 1300
minutes inside it. They've somehow managed to create and contain a temporal
causality loop.
Having made this brilliant discovery, Abe and
Aaron now have to figure out what to do with it. They're stumped to come up
with a practical application of their discovery, until Abe poses a theory: if
it were somehow possible to work the machine IN REVERSE, to enter the loop at a
specific point, it might be possible to actually GO BACK IN TIME. So Abe builds a bigger version, one big
enough to hold a human being, and he tries it out. And it works.
And that's where things start to go wrong.
Anyone who knows me knows that I have a
love-hate relationship with Independent Film. I love independent filmmaking as
a CONCEPT. The Hollywood system is largely a business, and a business makes
products, not works of art. So a
film made outside that system, by an auteur with complete creative control, is
a nice idea indeed. But complete creative control does not automatically make a
film BETTER. A bad idea is a bad idea, no matter how original it may be. And a
bad director is a bad director, regardless of how much or how little control he
or she has over the final product. And given the financial constraints inherent
in working outside the system, more often than not the budget cannot
accommodate the director's full vision, so you tend to get these movies that
either feel incomplete or are just too puzzling to fully appreciate. But while Primer certainly is a
puzzling little piece of indie filmmaking, at least it's more enjoyable than
most.
The thing that works so well in this film is
the sense of banality that permeates it. The shot-on-video lighting and
camerawork, the normalcy of the surroundings, the astounding plainness of our
lead actors, all lend a certain credibility to the work. You really get the
sense that this is the tale of painfully ordinary people who are striving
hopelessly for a moment of brilliance, and stumble into it completely by
accident. There is no Jarmusch-ian pretension to the proceedings. This is not a
celebration of urban hipster fringe culture; this is firmly rooted in suburban
mediocrity and quiet desperation.
This is no more evident in the initial reaction
Aaron and Abe have to their discovery: they wonder how they can market this
device. This is a shining example of everything wrong with their culture. They
have stumbled upon time travel, perhaps the single greatest scientific
discovery since fire...and all they can think about is how to make a buck off
of it. I suppose it says as much about the two men themselves as it does about
capitalist society: the sheer thrill of scientific discovery is secondary to
whether or not the thing discovered has practical, profitable,
applications. Aaron and Abe have
been struggling so long to make a profit that they are no longer capable of
thinking in any other terms. No great scientific discovery is worth anything
unless it can get them out of their dead-end office day jobs.
So naturally, the first thing they do with
their time machine is use it to make money: they look at what stocks made the
most money that day, then go back to that morning and buy as much stock as they
can. Granted, thatÕs probably what IÕd do with it too, but the way Aaron and
Abe go about it serves as an illustration of their spiritual desperation. ItÕs
only AFTER they start making money that they begin to ponder the ethical
ramifications of what theyÕre doing. And the possibility of altering the
timeline, possibly for the better. ItÕs worth noting that itÕs Aaron who first
comes up with this notion. Abe is the builder, the one concerned with the
practical side, and perhaps the one most concerned with the grave consequences
of time travel (mainly because he doesnÕt fully understand it, and that scares
the crap out of him). Aaron is the one with the ideas and the ambition. Aaron desires
to be great, consequences be damned, and when he raises the possibility of
traveling back in time, changing a select event in his past or someone elseÕs,
things start to get very complicated.
Unfortunately, itÕs at this point that movie
itself also begins to fall apart. In the last 15 minutes or so, there are at
least three copies of both Aaron and Abe running around trying to either alter
or restore their original timeline. A subplot with AaronÕs father-in-law
apparently discovering the device and using it on the sly is never explained or
expanded upon. The movie does not so much END as it simply STOPS; the action
quite literally screeches to a halt, Aaron and Abe go their separate ways,
nothing is explained, credits roll. ItÕs rather disappointing: there was such a
fascinating premise behind Primer that was successfully sustained for
three quarters of the film, only to fly completely out of control in the last
quarter. Unless thatÕs what Shane Carruth intended all along; after all, when
you start messing with the space-time continuum, you start screwing things up
on a cosmic level. Trying to work out just what happens at the end, which
versions of Aaron and Abe weÕre looking at during the last scene, what exactly
theyÕre discussing, is enough to make your brain hurt. And perhaps thatÕs the
point.
If the point of Independent Film is to present
a unique vision that normally would not come to fruition within the mainstream
system, then Primer is a resounding success in that regard. ItÕs
the rare mainstream film that can make my head hurt the way this one did.
Things To Look For:
- Shane Carruth has
moments of understated brilliance in his directing, mostly in small touches
interspersed throughout the film. One of the best scenes is the introduction of
the full-sized time machine: Aaron and Abe are sitting outside of a storage
warehouse, pondering how they might build a larger device and where they could
put itÉand a few seconds later another Abe walks into the warehouse and opens
the storage unit where heÕs built his device. ItÕs done with such subtlety that
you donÕt quite realize what you just saw. Little touches like those abound in the movie, and the
low-key low-budget way the movie was shot means your brain has to process it
for a second, because youÕre not sure if what you just saw was really what you
just saw.
- The design of the time
machine itself is delightfully low-tech, as are the mechanics of time travel
within the world of the movie. The human-sized device is an airtight box about the
size of a coffin. A time traveler has to bring his own oxygen supply, and has
to remain in the box for as long as he wishes to travel back in time - which
makes a weird kind of sense – and will exit the box at the exact moment
his present-day self will activate it. The sheer claustrophobic nature of that
arrangement makes my skin crawl to think about. When Abe describes his first
trip back in time, the lengths he goes to in order to assure as little
disruption of the time stream as possible border on the neurotic – he
checks himself into a hotel room, disconnects the phone, unplugs the TV,
completely isolates himself from the outside world, THEN goes back in time to
re-live the day – yet seem so completely logical. ItÕs not as if Abe is
Doctor Who or Captain Kirk; heÕs a complete amateur at time travel, and heÕs
trying to do as little damage as possible. As the multiple trips through time
take their toll on our protagonists, their symptoms are equal subtle and
incomprehensible: Aaron has some of hemorrhage that causes him to bleed from
the ear, but has no other ill effects. Abe suffers extreme insomnia and
exhaustion. Toward the end both men find they can no longer write properly.
None of these symptoms are ever explained, other than simply being side-effects
of constant time travel. And perhaps itÕs better that they are never explained.
These men are explorers in unknown territory, after all; how can we possibly
understand whatÕs happening to them?
- One of the naturalistic
touches of the movie is the dialogue. Abe and Aaron, being strong-willed
engineers, are constantly talking over each other – the way real people
do when theyÕre passionate or excited – and constantly arguing over
things that the majority of viewers couldnÕt possibly understand. The movie never
explains any of the science involved. We never know what our protagonists are
actually building – or trying to build – until itÕs finally
created. They rattle off facts and figures about parts and toxicity levels and
power output, but nothing is ever explained in laymanÕs terms. All we know is
that they built a big box and it doesnÕt do what they thought it would do. And
I suppose that works on some level; if we donÕt know what it is, it could very
well be ANYTHING, so the fact that it turns out to be a time machine isnÕt all
THAT farfetched.
- The one weak plot
device, I think, is the narration. Exposition is dealt out in a rather
scattershot manner by a narrator, whom we later learn is Aaron, speaking from a
point in the future long after these events have taken place. The only purpose
for this plot device is apparently to explain parts of the movie that we just
wouldnÕt understand unless we had someone to tell us what was going on. And
while it certainly does its job, explaining parts of the movie that would make
absolutely no sense otherwise, I canÕt help but think this a weakness. I mean,
if a filmmaker need to EXPLAIN a part of his film to his audience, then I think
that speaks to a flaw in the filmmaker. But this was Shane CarruthÕs first
– and to date, only – movie, so I can forgive it. And after all,
the presence of the narration also reinforces a basic truth of low-budget
filmmaking: effects are expensive, but talk is cheap.
Written words (c) 2006-2010 Tim o'Brien. Not to be used without
permission. Other content, including images, is intended as a Fair Use pursuant to 17 U.S.C. sec.
107.
Date Posted: December 10, 2006
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