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Time, Place, and Character Subjectivity in Run Lola Run 137As Caryl Flinn points out (2003), Run Lola Run’s musical backbeat isnot only regulating time in the sense of a permanent forward drive. On theone hand, “techno is a perfect, if obvious, choice” because as dance music,“it immediately connotes high charged physical movement,” with “[t]hefilm’s techno tracks [being] closely knit to its activity” and the “musicalbeats dictating much of its rhythm, pace, editing, and energy.” On the otherhand, however, Flinn puts equal emphasis to the fact that “unlike traditionaltonal music, techno has no clear beginning, patterns of development,or resolution; unchanging and energetic, it is repetitive without standingstill.” As a musical idiom and temporal marker which is both a linear forwarddriving force that vectorizes movement and unleashes a pulsating energyand, at the same time, constitutes a highly “repetitively structured form,organized around beats per minute,” techno’s “compressed, hypnoticbeats, sequenced loops, and harmonic stability” indeed “seem the perfectaccompaniment” for a filmic articulation of time whose ultimate goal consistsin synthesizing linear and cyclical temporalities into the one commonlogic of rhythm. As Flinn detects, Run Lola Run “even modulates the soundof a heartbeat into one section” (Flinn 2003, p. 202).Flinn has also observed, a few notable exceptions notwithstanding, thatthe music in Run Lola Run does not change significantly throughout thefilm. The music might move from minor to major keys, or gradually changeinto much more of an overall sense of formal stability in the third episode,but these shifts and modulations, significant as they are, remain subtle:“While the textures shift,” she concludes, “the fundamental beat remainsunchanged” (Flinn 2003, p. 202). In this fashion, also the musical structureitself resembles and mirrors the dialectical tension between linearityand circularity which is at the heart of the film: under the rule of rhythm,techno’s internal forward drive – “music with a goal,” as Flinn (2003p. 204) puts it – is paired with the absence of a clear beginning or end:various modulations of the same beat, ever recurring, replace the orderedsuccession of the number principle in traditional background music, beit in the form of psychological leitmotifs or the MTV-style alternation ofreadily identifiable signature songs and melodies.Unity in Opposition: Rhythm, Repetition, and IntervalWhat Run Lola Run’s techno soundtrack establishes, then, seems to relateclosely to what Henri Lefebvre once called a “dialectical relation” or “unity