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

146 Michael Wedelspiral as one of the film’s central visual tropes can be read less as a metaphorfor an inward movement, turning only upon itself, but should be understoodin a more Foucauldian sense as the emblem for the centrifugal forcesunleashed by the film’s rhythmical deconstruction of a diegetic world thatwould be dissociated from the social reality of its audience. 17That Run Lola Run presents its narrative on ever-shifting ontologicalgrounds and within an overall dynamic that points beyond the narrativeitself and sets up, in the words of Foucault, “not boundaries not to be crossed,but perpetual spirals of power and pleasure” (quoted in Michon 2002,p. 174), is once more reinforced by the film’s ending. In a strictly narrativesense, the final shot with Lola and Manni walking away with a plasticbag full of money may qualify for a happy ending, finally uniting the coupleand resolving the narrative conflict. 18 On the level of the concrete filmicpresentation of this apparently successful “escape,” however, the sense ofa neat narrative closure is ironically undermined by the fact that the protagonists’movement is frozen into another still image in the middle ofthe action: abstracting the liberating dynamic and violently interruptingthe dialogue over Lola’s knowing smile after Manni had asked “What’sin the bag?” What makes this final still image so ambiguous is that it refersthe viewer back to the series of Polaroid snapshots with which Tykwer,throughout the film, summarized the alternative futures of a number ofpeople met by Lola on her race through Berlin. In the final analysis, then,we are to understand that the film’s threefold narrative trajectory, whenfinally arriving at the point of harmonic equilibrium, constitutes nothingmore than one single modular interval encapsulated in a single snapshot,as other slices of future life had been summarized in an elliptical fashionbefore. What makes this ending so ambivalent is its radical opennesstoward both the futures of the protagonists – and the cinematic experienceof the film itself. For, just as the still image – into which the very movementof the film is discharged – stands in for the smallest possible unit oftemporal representation in the cinema, it paradoxically also encapsulatesthe temporal interval of the film as a whole and opens it toward the timeof its reception. At the closing beat of Run Lola Run’s narrative rhythm,narrative time and the time of narration, story time and viewing time areintegrated into a single interval mediating between the different levels andtimescales of narrative, narration, and reception within and beyond the film.Its historical dimension can be located exactly at this contingent point ofintersection between the different temporalities involved. Not every time,Chronos swallows his own image, this also means the end of history.