Run Lola Run
1998, directed by Tom Tykwer
Three times in Run Lola Run, Lola emits a glass-shattering scream. Her three shrieks do not correspond neatly with the three episodes, but they reveal the pattern that the episodes follow, and in so doing they expose a hidden emotional logic.
Lola first screams during the phone call with Manni that precipitates her three runs across Berlin. It happens right after Manni predicts his own demise in ghastly detail: “He’ll rub me out, and all that’s left of me will be 100,000 ashes floating down the Spree to the North Sea and no more Manni!” Lola screams, two beer bottles explode, and she momentarily calms down. She screams again midway through the first episode, shattering her father’s clock at the bank while begging him to cough up 100,000 marks to save Manni’s life. Her third scream, in the third episode, breaks champagne glasses as the roulette wheel spins toward her big win, and it looks as if she’s steering the ball into the correct pocket with her voice. Lola’s first scream is pure fear; the next is rage; and the last is a kind of determination – but the difference in the last one needs to be put more precisely.
The opening images, like Lola’s arc, begin with fear. The wooden pendulum has angry eyes, sharp teeth, and a snake in its mouth. A demon in the clock swallows the camera, pulling it into a spooky cartoon tunnel with bats and three clocks that morph into monsters as Lola runs through them. The object of Lola’s fear is time itself, and an abundance of clocks counts down the twenty minutes in which Lola must run to Manni and raise a seemingly impossible sum of money. All the spirals, wheels, and telephone dials are surrogate clocks, always suggesting the flow of time.
Lola runs from her home to Manni three times, each trip belonging to an alternate timeline. The process of cause and effect magnifies tiny differences into wholly different outcomes, as if to illustrate the so-called “butterfly effect” (the idea in chaos theory that a butterfly flapping its wings may eventually set off a tornado). Random events, for example, cause Lola to arrive at her father’s office seconds earlier or later, affecting whether or not the father’s mistress reveals that the baby she’s carrying isn’t his, thus changing the mood and results of Lola’s encounter with him. The three episodes are full of parallels, as Lola’s path intersects with many of the same persons and vehicles. The differences are seemingly random, but they follow the same pattern as her three screams.
The first journey, like the first scream, is characterized by fear. Lola flees from the mean boy and his snarling dog in the stairs. She stumbles past the woman pushing a stroller. Her father’s mistress rambles on about her fears: “And then I’m afraid. Me! Afraid of the dark. I’ve never been afraid of the dark. I’ve never been afraid before.” He in turn hesitates to commit to her. The blind woman at the phone booth (to whom the film gives supernatural vision) holds Manni’s hand consolingly as if helpless to change his fate. The bank guard defers to Lola almost submissively. Forward flashes of Frau Jäger in the bank corridor reveal her impending paralysis and death. Lola catches her father and his mistress off guard, unnerving them. When her father balks at Lola’s request, the tone shifts momentarily to anger. Lola screams, and he tells her she’s a “cuckoo’s egg”, but when an old woman outside shows Lola her watch, the urgent fear comes back. Again, fear is linked to time, vanishing only between the shattered clock and the old woman’s watch. The episode ends with two shootings, each a nervous accident.
The second journey, like the second scream, is charged with anger. The boy on the stairs trips Lola, sending her tumbling down a whole flight. The music turns more aggressive, as does the run-in with the stroller woman, the bicyclist, and the bank guard. Herr Meier plows into the three tough guys’ car. Lola crashes into the lucky homeless man, whom she had merely passed before. The mistress reveals the brutal truth about the baby to Lola’s father, sparking a crescendo of tempers until Lola holds her father at gunpoint and robs the bank. Instead of dying sadly, Frau Jäger will wind up whipping the bank cashier in sadomasochistic role-play (even this note of comic relief shows the outward form of violence). The ambulance, which stops short of the plate glass in the crosswalk the other two times, now smashes through it. The ending is more brutal than the first, as the ambulance slams into Manni and runs him over.
Fear and rage are the usual reactions to stress, and we can see where Lola inherits each response. In broad strokes, her mother lives by fear and her father by aggression. Her mom apparently drinks all day and follows horoscopes, while her dad is so driven by money that his walls are decorated with currencies. After trying out these polar alternatives in the first two episodes, Lola must find her own path in the third.
Her third journey differs markedly from the first two, while keeping many of the parallels. With some exceptions, things go more smoothly, though the irregularity of real life is maintained. If we want to put into words the feeling that Run Lola Run leaves us with, the problem is to define the difference in the final third. One roundabout way is to note the movie’s extraordinary similarity to Agnès Varda’s 1962 film Cléo from 5 to 7, which also traces an arc from fear to inner peace. Both are stories of a young woman’s journey across a European capital in a sharply delineated span of time, 90 minutes or 20 minutes. Each is interrupted regularly, either by intertitles telling the time or by actual clocks. Each journey begins with ticking sounds like a relentlessly advancing clock. The actual journey in either film would be impossible in the allotted time, although Cléo from 5 to 7 is more faithful to its city’s geography. (Lola’s path from Albrechtstraße to Tauroggener Straße is 6 km, which a woman running at world record pace might cover in roughly 17 minutes without stopping to rob a bank or detouring across the Gendarmenmarkt.)
Like Cléo, Lola’s transformation is not only from fear to calm, but also from passivity to engagement. Like her superstitious mother and her ambitious father, Lola’s fear and anger are tantamount to passivity, reacting blindly to the world around her. On her third journey she begins to take charge of her destiny. She leaps over the staircase boy and snarls back at the dog. She steers clear of the stroller lady, the nuns, and the cyclist. She acknowledges Herr Meier, saving him from a run-in with the thugs and sparing herself an ugly encounter with her father. When the blind woman directs Manni’s attention to his stash passing by on the bicycle, or when Lola wills the roulette ball into the winning pocket, the film may seem to cheat, assisting Manni and her with supernatural intervention, but these dei ex machinis are metaphors for the simple act of participating in life. The telling incident is when Lola gets into the ambulance, holding the hand of the man inside and stabilizing his heartrate.
In all these interrelated incidents and alternate timelines, the film makes no promises. Life can go in any direction, and even a happy ending is far from perfect. Lola’s father is in a car crash, and the homeless man is left suicidal. Nevertheless, all the patterns point to a faith that life goes better if we face it without the overreactions of fear or anger.
It’s probably tempting to read Run Lola Run as a more abstract philosophical game, speculating on free will or the metaphysical nature of time. The prologue raises a series of abstract questions: “Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? How do we know what we think we know? Why do we believe anything at all?” The bank guard steps in, however, dismissing these questions with a soccer ball in hand: “The ball is round. The game lasts 90 minutes. That’s a fact. Everything else is pure theory. Here we go!” Like any good film, Run Lola Run throws us back on life itself. It will not pretend to offer any insights that aren’t directly relevant to the way we live.
The biggest unanswered question is why Lola bets on 20 at roulette. The film never gives a reason, but if that’s Lola’s age it would put the film’s insight in a larger context. The story frees Lola from her fear of time, but its counsel is just as meaningful to any twenty-year-old entering adulthood as it is to a girl rushing to save her lover from a vindictive gangster. Like Lola desperately seeking 100,000 Deutschmarks, anyone her age might face the sudden financial responsibility that comes with independence. There’s a further implication if we consider that the film came out in 1998, when much of the world was nervously facing a new millennium whose years would start with “20”. These two readings are a sampling of the situations in which anyone might fear the advance of time. Run Lola Run tells us that facing time head-on, without abandoning ourselves to fear or rage, but taking an active interest in the world, is a sign of growing up.
CONNECTIONS:
Midnight – Prescription for living well based on a general pattern found in life
The Music Room – Starts with a pendulum motion; story about fear of advancing time
Cléo from 5 to 7 – Arc from fear of time to faith in life, from passivity to involvement; seconds ticking away at the beginning; improbable journey through a European capital with time constraints; frequent interruptions and reminders of passing time
Solaris – Puts philosophical questions in perspective instead of answering them directly
The Passenger – Intersecting narratives of background characters acknowledged
Blade Runner – Seems to invite abstract philosophical speculation but ultimately focuses on a more relevant human problem; truncated pyramid paired with eyes; character consumed with finance (Tyrell/father)
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown – Telephone as a surrogate clock
In the City of Sylvia – Ambulation through a European capital with passers-by making recurring appearances