Buckland-Warren-Puzzle-Films-Complex-Storytelling-Contemporary-Cinema

144 Michael Wedelwithin the logic of the film, and insofar amount to that enigmatic “placelessplace” of which Foucault speaks, which is a utopian place (Foucaultcalls it a “mirror utopia”) but where there must be, as Foucault writes, “akind of mixed, intermediate experience” (Foucault 2000, p. 179). And indeed,in these scenes both Manni and Lola seem to be “here” and “over there,”in bed and on the street, at the same time, as if in a mirror where, to paraphraseFoucault, “I see myself where I am not, in an unreal space that opensup virtually behind the surface; I am over there where I am not, a kind ofshadow that gives me my own visibility, that enables me to look at myselfthere where I am absent – a mirror utopia. But it is also a heterotopia inthat the mirror really exists, in that it has a sort of return effect on theplace that I occupy” (Foucault 2000, p. 179).Not only from a strictly narrative perspective, then, it seems more thanjustified to ascribe to the utopian intervals in Run Lola Run a “return effect.”More than “a kind of highlighted ‘reset’ button, usually emphasizing mattersof timing” (Bordwell 2002, p. 94), they carve out for Lola and Mannia utopian space of being in the world by transcending it. In their multipledoubling and self-reflexive dimensions they also serve to (once more) openup the story space of the diegetic action towards the space of cinematicperception itself: via their exceptional formal status in terms of framing,coloring, and acoustic texture, as well as in view of the fact that the dialogueis directly addressed to the camera at the ceiling, the intervalsbetween the cycles also mark strong moments of a cinematic discourse turnedinside out, offering itself to revision and contemplation for the protagonistsand the audience alike. Vladimir Nabokov once spoke of somethinglike “true Time” that would emerge from such “tender intervals”: “Maybethe only thing that hints at a sense of Time is rhythm; not the recurrentbeats of the rhythm but the gap between two such beats, the grey gap betweenblack beats: the Tender Interval. The regular throb itself merely brings backthe miserable idea of measurement, but in between, something like trueTime lurks” (Nabokov 1969, p. 572).Conclusion: Spirals of HistoricityThroughout this essay it has been argued that the complexity of Run LolaRun’s mode of narration can fruitfully be located in the tension createdbetween, on the one hand, a sequential ordering of events on the narrativelevel and, on the other, the spatio-temporal suspension of linearity on