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 "Man. Probably the most mysterious species on our
planet. A mystery of unanswered questions.
Who
are
we? Where do we come from? Where are we
going? [. . .] Countless questions
in search of an
answer... an answer that will give rise to the next
question... and the next answer will
give rise to the
next question, and so on. But, in the end, isn’t it
always the same question?"
Policeman in Run Lola Run.
Have you ever had the impression of being in front of a web
page when watching a movie? Have you ever found yourself trapped
in a labyrinth of multiple simultaneous options? If not, watch
Run Lola Run (1999) by Tom Tykwer, which is basically
a celebration of the simultaneity of possibilities and the
total annihilation of any original possibility. At a single
glance, this may appear to be a frankly postmodern work due
to its wide unfolding of greatly varied possibilities, reminiscent
of the seemingly infinite avenues and resources of the internet.
At the same time, it evokes a highly chaotic environment,
as the multiplicity of possible pathways would appear to present
no clear order or direction. However, a deeper analysis of
the wide range of possibilities in both the movie and the
internet does reveal, as the linguistic and anthropological
structuralism of Saussure and Lévi-Strauss suggest, respectively,
that all these options are in fact subordinated to a deep
structure governed by difference. In both Run Lola Run
and the worldwide web this structure is exemplified in the
binary opposition of information providing instant gratification
versus information which come neither fast nor gratifying
enough.
| In his Course in General Linguistics (1916)
Saussure makes clear that language is a system of interrelated
signs and that, apart from the diachronic studies of
language, "the scope of linguistics should be: [. .
.] to determine the forces that are permanently and
universally at work in all languages, and to deduce
the general laws to which all specific historical phenomena
can be reduced" (6). On the other hand, Lévi-Strauss
states in "The Structural Study of Myth" (1951) that
"[. . .] human societies merely express, through their
mythology, fundamental feelings common to the whole
of mankind, [. . .]" (207). It is the "spirit of the
nation" (Volksgeist) that Hegel had already formulated
in The Phenomenology of Mind (1807). It is along
these lines that I am organizing my reflections on Run
Lola Run and the internet with the object of explaining
the "general law" "common to the whole (of) mankind"
that governs our "dot com" civilization. |
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Briefly, the synopsis of Run Lola Run is as follows:
Lola receives a phone call from her boyfriend Manni at 11:40
am, who tells her that he is in trouble and needs 100,000
Deutsche marks before 12:00 pm, or he will probably die. Lola
has only twenty minutes to come up with the money, and in
the first moment following the phone call her mind flashes
through various possibilities. She tries several of these
possibilities -- three in particular -- through a series of
flashbacks and retries until she finds the possibility (or
link) that finally offers her the most gratifying solution.
As Sam Adams points out in his review of Run Lola Run,
"she does not quite make it the first time, and when she fails,
the film resets itself and Lola is back at the beginning,
getting Manni’s fateful phone call all over again. She
tries again, she fails again. On to round three" (1).
These different links or possibilities correspond with what
Mark Poster, in his article "Postmodern Virtualities", calls
"virtual realities", which are no more than "computer-generated
‘place(s)’ [. . .] viewed by the participant through
‘goggles’ [. . .]" (616). In fact, Lola sees these
"virtual realities" through the ‘goggles’ of her
imagination while agonizing on the floor following her pursuit
of the first failed possibility. Indeed, using a device which
evokes a striking similarity to "computer-generated places",
Tom Tykwer often depicts Lola as an animation in a cartoon
world, running through different tunnels and environments
encountering (and often destroying or avoiding) potential
obstacles that would rob her of precious time. These scenes
reminiscent of "virtual realities" set the stage for each
alternative possibility that Lola pursues.
It is in this sense that Run Lola Run is an allegory
of the deep structure of the internet. Like the multiplicity
of hyperlinks in the web, the movie by Tom Tykwer unfolds
a multiplicity of options to follow, with three possible scenarios
each being followed to a different conclusion. At the same
time, we are given a glimpse of how each of these scenarios
impacts the lives of secondary, largely incidental characters
in the movie, evoking similarity to the many sublinks encountered
while navigating the internet. On this device, Sam Adams comments
that "not only does the film shift into animation at regular
intervals, but the story spins off at tangents, using a series
of rapid-fire snapshots to show the future history of characters
Lola passes on her journey" (19)1. Clearly it is
not just the World Wide Web which, as Mark Poster puts it,
"allows [. . .] simultaneous transmission of text, images
and sound, providing hypertext links as well" (621).
Both in the web and in Run Lola Run everything seems
to be a chaos of possibilities with little apparent organization.
In the first possible ending of the movie Lola lays dying,
whereas in the second scenario it is instead her boyfriend
Manni. Lola would, of course, prefer neither of these outcomes,
and utters the word "stop!" moments before her own death in
the first round, which resets the movie to the opening scene,
allowing an exploration of other possibilities. In the second
scenario Manni is the one who lays dying as he states a clear
"no", causing the movie to again revert and allowing the third
possible link or ending, in which neither of them dies. These
responses of Lola and Manni may appear as acts of autonomous
human beings reacting to a situation according to their own
will. However, in truth the only real ending of the movie
was the first one. The rest are a product of Lola’s
imagination, representing what could have been had other paths
been followed, and Lola, always running, is just a puppet
of the basic structure to which she is subordinated: is the
information that this possibility provides fast and gratifying
enough?
This is the structure governing the system. Thus, as Tom
Tykwer offers multiple endings, all of which are possible
if not real, to Run Lola Run, the clock serves as a
constant reminder that Lola has only twenty minutes to get
the 100,000 marks. In that twenty minutes the third path would
have resulted in the most satisfactory and efficient ending
of the movie according to the present cybernetic culture:
it has a happy ending, with Manni successfully resolving his
problem on his own, and Lola acquiring the money anyway. This
begs the question: what of the many other possibilities or
links that could have been pursued in the movie? What other
information would they have provided us? Tom Tykwer offers
the answers to these questions for only three of the possible
scenarios with his digressive snapshots summarizing the future
lives of several secondary characters in the movie. In truth,
the insight provided by such digression is irrelevant in cybernetic
culture. Once a satisfactory outcome or the desired goal is
achieved, no more exploration is necessary; other information
not ultimately a part of the most gratifying and efficient
pathway is disregarded.
In this sense, Run Lola Run is like a web page full
of links. The main character, Lola, chooses the "links" she
supposes to be the most efficient and likely to achieve her
purpose of finding the 100,000 marks. When she does not like
the ending that her selections have taken her to, she backs
up and makes another choice, following another "link", just
as we do while navigating the internet. If Saussure defined
language as a system of signs governed by difference, Run
Lola Run is the system, whereas Lola’s different
options are the signs characterized by a binary code composed
of that information which is timely and gratifying enough
opposed to that information which is not. Applying Saussure’s
theory to the web, we see the internet as a system and the
web pages as the signs, which fulfill the following main functions:
1) self-publishing; 2) research; 3) communicating with others
(most significantly via chatting and email).
Critics such as Mark Handley and Jon Crowcroft in The
World Wide Web define the internet as "[. . .] a great
tangled web of information" (31). Daniel Barrett states in
Net Research: Finding Information Online that "the
Internet is a jumble of facts, opinions, stories, conversations,
arguments, artwork, mistakes, trivia, and one-of-a-kind knowledge.There’s
little organization or consistency" (1). Moreover, he adds
that "the internet isn’t conveniently organized. It’s
too big, and it’s constantly being modified by thousands
of people who don’t know each other" (23). While this
latter assertion is correct, in truth there exists a deep
structure which drives these three functions of the web, despite
the appearance of little organization that these and other
critics find in the internet. This structure is evident as
a network of instant, gratifying information which, in the
case of function 1) and function 3), is reduced on many occasions
to the structure of what I call fast love. To this regard
Mark Poster quotes Howard Rheingold, who states "[. . .] I
and thousands of other cybernauts know that what we are looking
for [. . .] is not just information but instant access to
ongoing relationships with a large number of other people"
(qtd. in Poster 619). A deeper analysis of each of these three
functions reveals these points more clearly:
The first function, self-publishing, responds to the need
of presenting critical or personal (as is often the case with
personal web pages) information in a rapid manner. In both
cases, the publisher looks for recognition or fast love from
the cybernaut who receives the information. On the one hand,
creators of web pages with critical information look for,
at the least, acknowledgement and validation (whether or not
the viewer agrees with the ideas presented), and thus these
web pages distill to nothing more than the basic imperative
"look at me", the naive question "am I good enough?" or, more
simply, the plaintive "do you love me"? On the other hand,
personal web pages contain a great amount of false information,
since in the majority of cases the main motive of the page’s
creator is not truth per se but rather the desire to present
him- or herself in a likeable way, regardless of reality and
perhaps at the expense of frank honesty. Clearly truth is
not the basic structure governing the web system. Rather,
instantly gratifying information and fast love are2.
The second function, research, belongs solely to the structure
of instantly gratifying information. There are millions of
web resources within our immediate reach. The problem is,
according to Daniel Barrett, that there is no clear organization
or structure to the internet, and thus finding information
online might not always be an easy task. The author compares
the internet with "[. . .] a huge collection of libraries
scattered around the world", each of them with "[. . .] its
own method for organizing and accessing information" (30).
Furthermore, "there’s no roadmap to get from one library
to another" (30). Barrett continues on to discuss how "an
organized view like Yahoo’s imposes order on the chaos
and provides a structure for your search. But it’s not
the structure" (23). It is true that Yahoo, as with
many other web pages, imposes an interface that in reality
is not the structure of the internet. But this does not mean
that no structure exists. The structure of the internet is
not a superficial one, but rather is a deep structure not
explicitly displayable through dashes, sections, and letters
as pages such as Yahoo might provide. It is a structure based
upon gratifying information provided rapidly.
The third function of communicating with others via the internet
(mainly through email and chatting) is, like the first function,
a link in the structure of both instantly gratifying information
and fast love. When we send an email to a friend, a professor,
a business person, a librarian, etc., we normally do so because
we want to transmit and receive information as quickly and
conveniently as possible. In the case of chatting, particularly
in the "singles" chat rooms, there are the additional aspects
pertaining to the structure of fast love. For example, questions
such as "a/s/l?" ( = age? sex? location?) are prevalent in
chat rooms, which ask for personal information in a very immediate
fashion, using only a few letters in the place of full words.
Furthermore, if the answer to the question is not satisfactory,
he or she does not even have to bother answering. The web
confers an anonymity that allows the principles of politeness
to be ignored and societal formalities to be dispensed with
for the sake of instant gratification. If the chat inquirer
has not found information that is satisfactory or pleasing,
he or she may simply move on to a different person with the
same question: a/s/l? Each respondent does likewise: after
presenting him- or herself to the initial inquirer and receiving
no follow-up conversation, he or she moves on to the next
person without giving it further thought. This is a perfect
example of what I call searching for instantly gratifying
information or fast love.
These three functions with their multiplicity of links can,
at a single glance, give the impression of the web as a growing
monster with infinite heads. However, this monster of the
web and its signs are governed by a structure. It is a deep
binary structure such as the one evident in Saussure’s
linguistics or in Lévi-Strauss’ anthropological studies,
a structure that contains signs defined by their opposition
within the system3. The following comparative chart
illustrates this:
This chart illustrates the fact that the information culture,
just as the linguistic and cultural systems of Saussure and
Lévi-Strauss is governed by a binary structure formed by pairs
defined by difference. Saussure focused on the language system,
and Lévi-Strauss focused on the study of different cultures,
particularly on their myths. Influenced by Saussure, Lévi-Strauss
asserts (as reported by Mary Klages in "Claude Lévi-Strauss:
The Structural Study of Myth") that "[. . .] myth is language,
because myth has to be told in order to exist" (1). However,
the emphasis placed on the visual in the present information
culture obscures the fact that it is actually language that
is the operative system, just as Saussure and Lévi-Strauss
have stated. Although language occupies a great part of the
movies and internet today, this system increasingly shares
its protagonism with the visual image due to the rapidity
and immediacy of the information conveyed. As instant gratification
is the operative structure nowadays, images have become more
and more attractive in the communication culture, while also
competing on many levels with and acting to undermine the
linguistic element of this culture.
Regardless of the system, be it exclusively linguistic or
not, the basic structure of the system is key in both Run
Lola Run and the internet. In Tom Tykwer’s movie,
Lola’s different options are interrelated as signs having
in common the same binary structure (information instant and
gratifying enough versus information not sufficiently rapid
and gratifying)4. In the same way, we see how in
the web the functions of self-publishing, research, and communicating
with others respond to the same binary structure. The third
function in particular comes at the cost of language in many
cases, due to the use of abbreviation slang, emoticons, and
different images (i.e. pictures) in chat rooms.
Thus, contrary to the anti-structuralist arguments of Handley,
Crowcroft, Barrett and others, the web (like Run Lola Run)
does present an organization that corresponds with a deep
structure. As Hans Bertens underscores in Literary Theory,
"[. . .] we are only dealing with variants upon what is essentially
an unchanging basic pattern" (64). In this sense, both Run
Lola Run and the web are networks of structuralist possibilities.
As the policeman states in the opening statement of the movie,
in the end, it is always "the same question", which in our
present world governed by technology is this: is the information
you provide instant and gratifying enough?
Notes
1 In her review of the movie, Karina Montgomery
relates these side stories to "the concept of ‘what
if’": "[. . .] this movie takes ‘what if’
to a new level [. . .] Run Lola Run [. . .] has the
bonus of having all kinds of interesting side stories –they
whisk by but still register- they are not important, they
are only secondary to Lola’s run" (1).
2 Lévi-Strauss points out in "The Structural
Study of Myth" that truth is not the structure governing
humanity’s myths either. What is important are the
relationships established between the mythemes: "There is
no single ‘true’ version of which all the others
are but copies or distortions. Every version belongs to
the myth" (218).
3 See General Linguistics Course by Saussure,
and The Raw and the Cooked by Lévi-Strauss.
4 In order to carry out the representation of
this search for instantly gratifying information, the director
of Run Lola Run makes imperative use of the image
in movement (ie, images of Lola constantly running) accompanied
by music with rapid rhythm, to the detriment of words. The
characters in the movie actually speak relatively little,
with much of the story being covered by the initial narration
and subsequent soundtrack. As Sam Adams puts it, "once Lola
has started her everlasting sprint, the music runs almost
without stopping for the next 70 minutes. Even when the
volume drops to allow us to hear the film’s few exchanges
of dialogue, an incessant tick-tick-tick keeps time underneath"
(1).
Works Cited
- Adams, Sam. "Run, Lola, Run". July 1-8, 1999. Philadelphia
Citypapernet. January 2003. <www.citypaper.net/movies/r/runlolarun.shtml>
- Hegel, George. The Phenomenology of Mind. Trans.
James Baillie, New York: Harper & Row, 1967.
- Barrett, Daniel. Net Research: Finding Information
Online. Sebastopol, CA: Songline Studios,
1997.
- Bertens, Hans. Literary Theory. New York: Routledge,
2001.
- Handley, Mark and Jon Crowcroft. The World Wide
Web.
London: UCL Press, 1995.
- Klages, Mary. "Clade Lévi-Strauss: The Structural Study
of Myth". September 15, 1997. University of Colorado
at Boulder. January 2003.
<www.colorado.edu/English/ENGL2012Klages/levi-strauss.html>
- Lévi-Strauss, Claude. "The Structural Study of Myth,"
Structural Anthropology.Trans. Claire Jacobson
and Brooke Grundfest. New York: Basic Books, 1963.
- ---. The Raw and the Cooked. Trans. John Weightman
and Doreen Weightman. New York: Harper and Row,
1969.
- Montgomery, Karina. "Run, Lola, Run (Lola Rennt) ". Cinerina.com.
June 18, 1999. Movie Reviews by Karina Montgomery.
January 2003. <http://www.cinerina.com/reviews/run-lola-run-lola-rennt/>
- Poster, Mark. "Postmodern Virtualities" Media and
Cultural Studies. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell,
2001.
- Run, Lola, Run. Dir. Tom Tykwer. Sony Pictures
Classics & Bavaria Film International. 1999.
- Saussure, Ferdinand. Course in General Linguistics.
Trans. Wade Baskin. London: Peter Owen, 1959.
Links to paper in PDF formats
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