Whta hpapnes fi it atclluy wroks?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury

Prior art

Even in a world without cause or effect, there are consequences. Sumit Paul-Choudhury explains why Shane Carruth’s Primer is the best time-travel movie ever made

"The universe is not going to explode or break down if you create a paradox. Whatever’s going to break is probably going to be you."
– Carruth, 2004

H umans are built to travel through time in just one direction, their wetware hardwired for cause and effect. We learn that actions have consequences, subjects have objects. Accidents happen; miracles don’t. Lives are lost, never won. Our laws are irreversible, our decisions final.

Our arrow of time points only one way; but what would happen if you flipped that arrow around? Back and forth? Cinema, itself a technological simulation of the passage of time, would seem the perfect medium to explore that question; editing, the process of assembling a film, explicitly manipulates and rearranges events.

Still, very few films bother to marry medium and message. Time travel is usually little more than a device to freshen up an old trope, whether it be a coming-of-age caper like Back to the Future or a gritty chase movie like The Terminator . Gloriously entertaining though such films might be, few push at the boundaries of cinema’s affinity with time travel. Or to put it another way: none have really explored what it might really mean to be a time traveller. Until Primer .

Shane Carruth’s 2004 debut hits the ground running, dumping us without ceremony into the garage workshop of a bunch of preppy engineers whose snappy patois is as compelling as it is impenetrable.

What they are building is initially unclear (there’s some superconductor lingo thrown around) but it turns out to be a jerry-rigged device that can partially levitate objects – and send them back in time.

The Box is a plausible machine, theoretically speaking: it generates what relativists call closed timelike curves – space-time paths along which the arrow of time is flipped, but otherwise unchanged. The upshot: you need to stay in the Box for as long you want to travel back in time – there’s no quantum leaping here – and the furthest you can go is the moment the Box was first switched on.

This is time travel you have to earn, and that doesn’t require the audience to ignore the obvious questions. (What about the Earth’s orbital motion? What about the conservation of energy?) "This isn’t frame dragging or wormhole magic," says Abe, one of the Box’s elementally named creators. "This is basic mechanics and heat 101." (Aaron, his partner-in-time, begs to differ.)

Abe and Aaron soon start using it to travel backwards in time. They are cautious at first; their zero-footprint approach is to hole up in a hotel and do little more than punt surreptitiously on the stock market. "I can imagine no way in which this thing could be considered anywhere remotely close to safe," says Abe, initiating Aaron in the mysteries of the machine. "All I know is I spent six hours in there, and I’m still alive."

As the film progresses, however, they become more impulsive, crossing and re-crossing their own paths and throwing off timeline after timeline as they strive to refashion and repair their lives. It gradually becomes apparent that nothing is as it seems.

What is not at all apparent, at any point, is "what really happens". In another deviation from usual movie practice, Carruth visits the time travellers’ disorientation on Primer ’s audience. Towards the end of the film, the by-now-veteran chrononauts complain that they can no longer write properly. "I can see the letters. I know what they should look like, I just can’t get my hand to make them easily," says Aaron. Their symptoms sound like those of expressive aphasia, the neurological condition which impairs sufferers’ ability to produce language. Something about the experience of repeated time travel is destroying their ability to relate to the world. Primer ’s viewers, for their part, are forced into a kind of receptive aphasia: an inability to comprehend the film’s visual language.

Aphasics and their associates use coping strategies to help them make sense of the world: notes, diagrams, recordings. Both Primer ’s protagonists and its fans use similar devices: the former to understand time travel; the latter to understand Primer . Viewers who go to the trouble of watching the film repeatedly, charting its convolutions as they go, find that Primer the movie is merely a slice, or a compilation of slices, through a much larger Primer multiverse. (To put it in critic-speak: Primer ’s syuzhet is only a small fraction of its fabula .)

This cinematic multiverse, much like its cosmological equivalent, isn’t directly observable, but we can decipher something about its form from clues secreted in the film. These are concealed, submerged, opaque; many are so subtle as to be almost undetectable. But they’re plentiful, and they’re there: minuscule variations in the cinematic background radiation. Carruth points to the detailed timeline maps painstakingly compiled by fans – an activity notorious enough to have been used as an episode punchline in the arch-geek webcomic xkcd . "If somebody out there built a chart that looks like mine, then the information must be in there somewhere," he says.

Except that, halfway through the film, an acquaintance of Abe’s turns up out of the blue. Thomas Granger’s literally anachronistic arrival implies that a betrayal has occurred somewhere – somewhen – and the protagonists’ tense discussion of how such a betrayal might have occurred is one of the film’s starkest illustrations of the ineffability of time travel. Granger’s presence is a fact – but the chain of events that led up to it can only ever be guessed at.

"They deduced that the problem was recursive, but beyond that found themselves admitting, against their own nature and once again, that the answer was unknowable," says the film’s enigmatic narrator. This is the only episode that Carruth confirms is truly inexplicable for both Primer ’s protagonists and its viewers. From this point on, no one, in or out of the movie, can be sure that Abe and Aaron’s destinies – or even their histories – are really their own.

Primer ’s Box bifurcates the travellers’ timelines. So, too, do their life choices and accidents of fate. Abe and Aaron, Carruth says, "are two guys who could easily have been in the same life if things had gone just slightly differently." As it is, Abe is a lone-wolf bachelor, Aaron a married home-owner. As the film progresses, the Box magnifies the differences in their world views, setting them on increasingly divergent paths and making their relationship steadily more adversarial.

Why did Carruth opt to use time travel to drive a wedge between them, rather than a bag of loot or a good old-fashioned gun?

"Because it’s bigger than death," he says. "It’s putting you in a position of complete vulnerability for the rest of your life, never knowing whether the path in front of you is the one you think of as appropriate, or whether someone has put you on a different one. To me, that is vastly more scary than just the end of life."

Primer ’s idiosyncratic expression of this idea owes something to the remarkable conditions under which it was made. Most of its minuscule budget – just $7000 – went on film stock and camera rental. The eventual film was stitched together from almost every scrap of footage shot. Carruth says there was only enough unused material to add perhaps two minutes to its 77-minute running time. One of very few scenes to end up on the cutting-room floor reveals Abe to be a type-2 diabetic, hence his obsessive attention to schedules: The Right Stuff for a chrononaut.

Artefacts of vision

The result of this extreme economy is a plethora of truncated shots and jump cuts. Footage was so precious, Carruth even left in shots of himself mouthing "Cut!" at the end of some scenes. Small wonder that the completed film is so riddled with mental saccades. Part of story’s genius is that it accommodates occasional defects in its manufacture: failures of voice dubbing; a slip in performance. Carruth says the flaws are all he can see when he watches the film now; the viewer can just as easily rationalise them away as artefacts of time travel.

Carruth wrote, produced and directed the film, as well as pitching in with its lighting, camerawork, sound engineering, set design and prop construction. He wrote and recorded its eleven minutes of soundtrack music. One has to wonder how this multiplicity of off-screen roles informed his on-screen performance as the doubling and redoubling Aaron.

All this reflexivity puts Primer into a category whose only other potential occupant is Chris Marker’s 1962 La Jetée , a 28-minute black-and-white photomontage that tells the story of a similarly paradox-bound visitor from a hellish future. Marker’s uncompromisingly experimental film was successfully made over as the tragicomic 12 Monkeys , directed by Terry Gilliam and starring Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt. If Primer were to get the big-budget treatment, what would it look like?

Probably not so much like a Hollywood time-travel flick as a film that plays tricks with memory and identity – notably those made by Jonathan and/or Christopher Nolan: Memento , Inception and particularly The Prestige . Carruth, when pressed for a like-minded film, cites Birth , in which Nicole Kidman plays a woman convinced that a young boy is the reincarnation of her husband. "It’s that one idea that bleeds in and exposes all of the sharp edges that already existed," he says.

Both Primer and Birth premiered in 2004. Carruth’s film was screened at the Sundance Film Festival, where it took the Grand Jury prize and the Alfred P. Sloan Prize for a feature film focusing on science or technology. Carruth spent the following year preparing Primer for wider release (its tag line read: "What Happens If It Actually Works?"), before moving on to his sophomore feature, A Topiary .

Seven years later, he’s still working on it. Where Primer had exactly one special effect, A Topiary will be much more effects-heavy, though still cheap by multiplex standards. "If Hollywood were to do it, it’d cost $150 million," he says. "We have a way that’s smarter and much smaller, but still unfortunately substantial. It’ll need about the money you’d blow on a romantic comedy."

As to what A Topiary is actually about, he describes it affably but unhelpfully as being "about everything: how different groups can look at the same magic and come away from it with different ideas of what it means and what they’re meant to do with it."

This emphasis on interpretation, rather than narrow plot, corresponds neatly with Carruth’s conception of science fiction. "I like it best when it’s used as a tool to explore ideas. Solaris is a good example. It’s not about a planet that magically brings people back to life; it’s about how much you can know about any one person, and how your understanding of them may be different to the way they objectively are. I think of science fiction as a sort of temporary notion. It would have been called something very different a thousand years ago, and it’ll be called something different a thousand years in the future."

Village Voice critic Dennis Lim’s description of Primer ’s style as "analog egghead" is dead on in several respects. Carruth deliberately used slightly antiquated props – brickish cellphones, clunky laptops – to give the movie an atemporal feel. Abe and Aaron are hardware hackers, garage inventors in the mould of Bill Hewlett and David Packard (or, closer to home, of Carruth’s dad and his buddies, from whom Carruth picked up the film’s engineering nous ).

Primer ’s time-travel is more like photocopying than digital duplication. Even the substrate of the movie is Super 16 film stock, rather than the digital video preferred by most microbudget directors, imbuing different episodes within the film with distinctive colour casts and spectra of visual noise. The world it suggests is one that’s assembled piece by piece. Interstices abound. The joins show. Nothing is certain.

We’ve become used to assuming that the human mind will always grow accustomed to its circumstances, no matter how attenuated and inhuman. Hollywood’s spacefaring greenhorns quickly acclimatise to alien worlds; its chrononauts rarely stay bewildered for long. Cinematic examples of mental strain exploding exponentially (rather than decaying asymptotically to zero) are few and far between.

Astrophiles can always fall back on 2001: A Space Odyssey . Kubrick, Strauss, the psychedelic fate of spacemen who stumble towards Jupiter and beyond the infinite.

But it’s Primer , whose static, silences and elisions suggest, entice, elude and frustrate, that gives us a glimpse of the existential crisis lying in wait for the unwitting time traveller. Its lesson: that it’s in the gaps, the missing letters and words and scenes and acts that the truth – the whole truth – of the story resides. And we will never find it.