"Run Lola Run": A Byzantine Narrative and A Box Office Hit

For Thomas Elsaesser, what he calls the “mind-game film” is not just about narrative experimentation. Rather, like film noir, it is symptomatic of a particular age in cinema because it reflects a new kind of engagement with the virtual world and the cinematic screen. For Elsaesser, pleasure is no longer tied to the “seamless dream” of cinema (its illusion of realism), or to the viewer's mastery over narrative. Rather, the pleasure is in the puzzle – of getting to reconstruct an inconclusive, or fragmented, film narrative. This is because the industry is faced with a different kind of viewer: a postmodern viewer conditioned to the accelerated, hyperlinked nature of reality in today’s contemporary media landscape.

The labyrinthine structure that might have doomed a film in the classical Hollywood era is now the very element that will entice moviegoers and satisfy their instinct for hyper-connectedness. The byzantine narrative can now be a box office hit. Elsaesser foregrounds this paradox as a reminder that we should not take a purely narratological approach to cinema, since films are products of a specific cultural and historical period with a specific kind of viewer – in this case, one that the industry controls precisely by giving him/her more interpretive freedom. One is reminded of Henry Jenkins’ "Searching for the Origami Unicorn," which similarly describes spectators as no longer intellectually enslaved by predetermined narratives, yet just as ever monitored by an industry that uses the mind-game film as a marketing strategy.

In many ways, Run Lola Run (1999) exemplifies this mainstream moneymaker that activated the minds of moviegoers. That it struck big at the box office at first surprised critics, given that foreign films had had difficulty reaching wide American audiences in the past. As Lewis Beale wrote in The New York Daily at the time of the film’s release:

“Now, there's "Run Lola Run," opening Friday, a furiously paced German flick that's probably the hippest movie of the year in any language. If nothing else, this energetic tale about a young woman who has 20 minutes to raise $100,000 for her boyfriend or he'll be murdered by mobsters is more proof that foreign directors are finally starting to make films that work in the international market.”

RLR achieved widespread appeal as a highly stylized, cerebral meta-thriller. The film’s prologue – “The game is 90 minutes long and that is a fact . . . everything else is pure theory” – echoes Elsaesser’s notion of the contemporary mind-game film as a radically open space of constructing meaning, in which “the rules of the game” are all the film is really “about.” RLR draws attention to its “puzzle essence” in the very first narrative shot, where two fragments of the screen join together to form a bird’s-eye view of the city.

Director Tom Tykwer delights in planting enigmatic symbols, and we delight in finding them. His ubiquitous motif in RLR is the spiral, which evokes each segment’s centripetal movement toward the intersection where Lola and her boyfriend, Manni, will meet. At the start of each run, Lola races down a spiral staircase, then exits through a door with a spiral-shaped window. As Manni makes the unsuccessful call from the phone booth, a spiral fan spins behind him. At the casino, we see a painting of a woman whose hair is coiffed in a spiral when Lola wins the bet. Appearing in scenarios with different emotional overtones, the spiral becomes ambiguous – some obscure sign of fate. Spiraling movements are even executed through the camera’s vertiginous three-sixties around the characters in moments of panic or hyper-alertness.

RLR fits Elsaesser’s definition of the mind-game film both as an experiment in post-modern storytelling and as an exercise in perception. “Mind-game films are more than complex narratives,” Elsaesser writes, “They represent a different way of engaging our senses and perception.” Particularly notable is the film’s video-game logic, through which the narrative is rewound after Manni and Lola’s deaths so that a different outcome can be achieved. The film's point of view is also versatile. At times, it presents us with overhead shots that bring us back to the idea of the film as a puzzle and encourage a more detached perspective. At other moments, camera angles draw us into Lola’s world, so that we experience a heightened reality, funneled through her panicked psychological state.

Some of the more striking segments are when Lola screams and shatters the glass clock in her dad’s office, when she watches the telephone and bag of stolen cash fall in slow motion, and when she watches the dial spinning at the casino - willing it, almost kinetically, to land on the 20 slot. Looming images of clocks are shown from both her and Manni’s perspectives. Ticking and drumming noises pulsate for the entire duration of the film, reminding us that this is a race against time. Tykwer also creates a real-time effect by having a film that is around 90 minutes long with three 20-minute episodes of Lola running. The use of a split screen also heightens our perception of timing as it relates to contingency. A mere second can cause Manni not to hear Lola in time.

When watching the moments just prior to the supermarket heist, as the yellow doors open and close with the split frame, one cannot help but think of Sliding Doors (1998). In this film, events similarly play out with precarious contingency, as represented by the train doors that determine whether a woman will catch the train and arrive home in time to catch her husband cheating on her. In both scenarios, however, (whether she finds him cheating or not), she eventually ends up meeting her love interest, just at different points in time. It shows how timing can drastically alter the course of events, yet, at the same time, how forks in the road are never definitively divergent.

In RLR, Tykwer collapses chance, determinism, and human agency into the complex phenomenon of contingency. On the one hand, seemingly minor happenings – i.e. the homeless man buying the bike – end up radically changing Manni and Lola's fates. Moreover, because of the film’s recursive structure, we start to get used to events unfolding in a particular way that make us complacent and cause us to underestimate the power of contingency. We feel prepped with the illusion of knowing what is going to happen, only to find ourselves stunned as events take unexpected turns. We see to what degree an accumulation of seemingly insignificant details and random transactions actually becomes the larger course of things.

On the other hand, we see Lola’s sheer will to override the obstacles that prevent her from getting the money and finding Manni in under 20 minutes. There is also a spatial determinism to the film as she passes through the same places, and the final destination of each run is the intersection with the phone booth, the supermarket, and symbolically, the Spirale bar. RLR’s mind-game is much like Memento’s in that it is not predicated on tricking viewers, but on situating them within its protagonist’s predicament. We are trapped not inside a deceptive perceptual premise but simply inside the compressed time structure itself and the psychology that it induces. Though we retain interpretive freedom, the film gives us no choice but to follow Lola along its adrenaline-fueled spiral. RLR’s ability to alter the viewer’s perceptual engagement through its highly crafted structure recalls Elsaesser’s central premise: that this contemporary wave of mind-game films is not merely about subverting classical Hollywood narratives. Its primary interest is in the nexus between viewer and screen – in film as an interface.