Blog Post 4: Primer

Blog Post 4: Primer

Written, directed, produced and acted by Shane Carruth, Primer is one of the most puzzling and mind-bending films that I’ve ever seen. While the film is primarily about intellectual engineers Aaron (played by Carruth) and Abe (who build and sell error-checking technology with the help of their friends), the film says a lot about the power of technology, the morality and desires of human beings and the mysterious effects and consequences of time travel. The film is a very low-budget one (7,000 dollars) yet the ideas presented and explored raise it to another level of indie-film making.

When Aaron and Abe accidentally invent what they think is a time machine, Abe is adamant to build a version capable of transporting a human to the past and re-living past experiences. One of the major themes that runs through this film is the idea of obsession. The act of repeating and practicing until the body deteriorates is examined.  Exaggerations of workplace hazards such as sitting too long in a chair at a desk, or the effect of improper lighting produce equally exaggerated results: bleeding ears, the inability to write, and the need to kill their own clones. (!)  These two scientists don't find a way to free themselves from their obsession with the device until they realize that their work is actually counter-productive to finding any sort of real meaning in their lives.  Aaron, the scientist who chooses to stay behind with the machine is contrasted with Abe, who is able to see the device for what it is: an infernal machine capable of destroying their families. It is almost as if the film is ridiculing the aphorism, "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again" (and the two scientists DO try again and again).  Instead, the film makes clear that obsessive work is EXACTLY like time travel - you make it to the end of your job, only to find out that there is a new kink to solve, and it takes you back a week, a month, a year, all the way back to square one, all the while unraveling everything beautiful around you.

Another interesting thing about Primer is its jargon. The film is a play on both hard science fiction and magical realism. While the film's setting is decidedly Midwestern American (though Abe and Aaron's fixation with the time machine echoes One Hundred Years of Solitude's José Arcadio Buendía's fixation with his scientific pursuits, which end up alienating him from his entire family (hence the solitude part of the title), the idea is the same: take a fantastical concept - time travel -and then integrate it in a matter-of-fact manner into a mundane suburban setting. In fact, the settings themselves - the offices, the storage room, the garage, the suburban houses - all turn the time machine into a seemingly normal part of these scientists' lives. However, where Carruth best integrates the time machine into mundane daily existence is through the use of jargon. The way the characters speak, their half-formed sentences, their thinking out loud, their use of technical language that is deliberately engineered for us not to comprehend the content but to understand the tone and weight behind the voices, all illustrate how we humans try to understand the new, the alien, and the frightening. The film is less about the time travel itself, and more about the ways in which people try to understand the unexplainable, how we apply mechanics and rules to an impossible occurrence so that we can hold on to a halfway tangible explanation.