Run Lola Run

Upon watching this film for the first time, I am reminded first and foremost of Walter Benjamin’s 1940 essay On the Concept of History, in which he writes: “We have been endowed with a weak messianic power to which the past has a claim.” This power is weak because it does not command history and cannot force justice to occur. However it is Messianic, as it allows the subject to redeem the past and undermine triumphant narratives of past and present through interactions, remembrance, critical pedagogy, and many other facets of redemptive influence. For me, Lola represents a cinematic manifestation of this endowed power through her apparent ability to fundamentally alter each failed present by ever so slightly shifting minor aspects of the past. Furthermore, she is repeatedly granted the chance to do this not via a cliché omniscience or supernatural power, but by simply going for a run (with the occasional mental breakdown) after each symbolic rebirth. Following this, the film continues to successfully anchor its chaotic theme's of contingency and indeterminacy around the symbolic power of Lola’s scream. This added reinforcement of the subjects agency within time and space successfully avoids the Foucauldian blunder of absolute delegitimisation whilst providing an interesting modifier to Benjamin’s original thesis. Visually the film, very subtly, suggests that Lola’s scream has impacts beyond the physical realm. This is achieved with erratic shifts in camera focus, orientation, and visual style suggesting that the true focus of the shot is just beyond perception. Now perhaps my intuition has gone completely off the goddamn rails here (as it has been known to do) but I do believe this to be the earnest truth. Viewed this way, the scream becomes more than an expression of frustration, desperation, or some crude “feminine Jouissance.” More appropriately, it becomes a symbolic gesture of the liberating force of deterritorialization, breaking down artificial constructs, just beyond the veil of visible phenomena, to embrace new possibilities and radical change. This Deleuzian twist complements Benjamin’s original insight wonderfully while remaining perfectly in step with the film’s frenetic editing, genre-hopping aesthetic, and grounded refusal of linear certainty. To put it less pretentiously, Run Lola Run is fundamentally an attack on certainty. Through repetition, variation, and existential pillow-talk it demonstrates that the stories we tell ourselves about causality, fate, and necessity are often retrospective constructions imposed upon a reality that could always have unfolded otherwise. Entire lives are transformed by missed phone calls, split-second decisions, and chance encounters. Overall, Run Lola Run is a kinetic, exhilarating meditation on time, contingency, and the strange accidents upon which entire lives depend. References: *Benjamin, W. (1940). On the Concept of History. Marxists.org. www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm** * Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus. Bloomsbury. Gilles Deleuze, & Félix Guattari. (2009). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Penguin Books. (Original work published 1972)