Review of "Primer"

 

 

The motif of time-travel is one that has long been popular. It continues to exert a pull on the imagination, in part because of our fascination with the past and with our formative period. A popular phrase that has entered our lexicon is the one that muses, “If I knew then what I know now”, and it shows part of this obsession with changing our past, if we could, or perhaps, of rewriting history, as if it were a matter of changing isolated events, and not appreciating instead the role of institutional processes that are much less difficult to pinpoint and neutralize. Would we really go back and assassinate Hitler before he rose to power, or prevent the assassination of Lincoln? These scenarios certainly appeal to our storytelling sensibility, and perhaps, this is the reason why this motif has been so durable, because of the dramatic possibilities.

In the case of the movie “Primer”, a film released in 2004 and written, produced and directed by Shane Carruth, we have a film invested in a creepy sense of paranoia. This is a low-budget film that tries to capture a sense of these dramatic twists and turns, one that is more heavily invested in dialogue and the portrayal of a culture that that is, perhaps, uniquely American. We have a question of hubris, of course, with inventors who are ethically challenged by the possibilities of their invention, and who are unable to conceive of the notion of restraint. This is a notion that I would associate very much with an American mindset, one that is predicated on risk-taking, yes, but also on the idea that predominates in a consumer culture, in which everything is reduced to a commodity that is packaged and sold to be consumed, and if it isn’t to our satisfaction, as in the case with all the inconvenient details of history, then we have the right to demand either a refund or a replacement. Yes, it amounts to that: this time travel machine is the ultimate commodification of history, wielded by two young inventors who have very little sense of restraint.

 

As the film proceeds we see two friends who gradually lose touch with reality. The movie, shot in a sort of bright haze that evokes for some reason the sheen we associate with past years (light is a motif in time travel stories as well), details the exploits of two friends, Aaron and Abe. They are a pair of twenty-something engineers living in the Silicon Valley, friends who do what everyone else does as part of the culture that prevails in that region. They work in tech firms by day, and gather together at night to work in garages, tinkering with industrial apparatuses, trying to achieve the next technical breakthrough, the next circuit board or industrial chip, that will allow them to attract venture capital and establish the next big technical firm. This has been the history of this region during the past sixty years, after all, and that is part of the mystique of Silicon Valley, or of any valley populated by the young who wish to overtake and surpass their elders. What happens, however, is that they make an accidental discovery that isn’t anticipated, and it brings about fascinating moral conundrums.

To return once again to the question of social values, what we have in Silicon Valley is highly competitive proving ground. We have a culture that is consumed, not so much by a detached desire to make scientific advances, but to develop technology that can be exploited by the market. The paradigm was set by the founders behind such companies as Hewlet Packard or Apple Computers, and it entails what would seem to be appealing notions of young entrepreneurs who struggle to innovate so that the rest of the masses can enjoy iPhones or other consumer items. The motivation is, of course, profit, and the story is an engaging one, of young risk takers coming into their own, of the new guard vanquishing the old guard.

What becomes evident here, however, is that the collaboration between the partners breaks down. Both Abe and Aaron quickly decide not to inform their partners of the discovery that their mechanism isn’t what it seems to be, and they work to exclude the others, in a gambit that is all too common in a culture that is highly individualistic and is, quite frankly, predatory. This may be the “greatest discovery in the history of humanity”, and one is chagrined to find that they quickly reserve it for themselves, proceeding as they do in a feverish pitch of what can’t help but seem greed. The corporate framework is thus one that is predicated on exclusivity and control, and even if they don’t know that the machine does, it is evident that it is doing something anomalous, something that is rendered in technical language that the writer has not bothered to simplify, thus investing it with an aura of mystery. (For an ex-engineer such as myself, it isn’t that mysterious, and I can sense the fact that they are talking about a machine that might possible produce more energy than it consumes, one that would violate the basic laws of thermodynamics, a seeming physical impossibility.)

But there is more to it than this. They may be outclassed when it comes to explaining the scientific foundation of what they have invented, but what is utterly clear is their obsession with corporate appropriation. And this obsession becomes all the more dangerous when they realize that they have accidentally invented a time machine. We have a dark fable, then, of scientists or, in this case, engineers, operating without moral or social restraint, situating themselves thus in a dark terrain that opens up all possibilities for danger.

Of course, it is only a matter of time before they upscale their prototype invention and experiment on themselves. Are inventors always so foolhardy? What is the nature of the obsession of these inventors? Do we have another parable of the mad scientists who transgress against nature and God, if we consider their names, those of two biblical patriarchs, Abraham and Aaron? The symbolic dimension is all too clear, of course, and we have entered into the realm of parables, another Tower of Babel, so to speak, where they will supposedly be inevitably punished, smote down from above. The nature of the problem is that which revolves around their faith in each other, and of course, it is expected that trust will break down between them, with somber results.

Both Abe and Aaron quickly hatch plans for get-rich schemes, positing being able to return to the past with winning lottery numbers, making the necessary purchases then returning to the present, to find themselves lucky winners but not having a memory of a time stream in which they had not been winners. This brings to mind all manner of fascinating problems, for when one thinks about it, they are slowly but surely risking detaching themselves from reality, that reality which is a mixture of chance and accident mixed with the institutional movement of social processes, those that have their own movement. This brings into question the supposed stability of their existences because, as noted above, once the changes are made, they lose any awareness of how things were before their actual interventions in the past. They lose it, that is, unless they take to wearing recording devices, and tape their conversations, preserving a thin connection with a supposedly previous reality.

They are penned in, so to speak, and everything is open to question, everything will be questioned, every mystery will include the possibility of having been instigated by their intervention, for as long as they have access to this time machine, it will remain a possibility that both (or perhaps one or the other, or maybe, they aren’t exclusive inventors of the machine, and someone else might have access to one) has stepped back in time and changed circumstances in their lives. And this worrying possibility becomes all the more evident when one of the friends confesses to the other that he did, indeed, build a secondary unit, so that he himself could undertake trips, unbeknown to his companion. Has trust broken down completely between them?

There is a refreshing lack of reliance on special effects in this movie. Had the director and writer had access to a much bigger budget, rather than the $7,000 used to film this project, then if might have been spent on aspects that detracted from philosophical speculations evident in the film. The dialogue is fascinating if at times a little too stiff, and the actors do seem a little too poised, not capturing the full nuances of the breakdown that occurs between them. We never have a sense of their lives outside of their own personal interactions, and this is in keeping with the way in which they become progressively isolated and insular, keeping secrets so to speak, and penned in by the moral conundrums dramatized by the suffocating boxes that represent, so to speak, their isolation chambers (these are the time machines).

There are not explosions, no car chases, no scenes of industrial accidents, no need for splashy special effects that would be a stable of big Hollywood films that deal with science fiction motifs, but that detract all too often from the personal drama. Instead, the drama is all internal, and the degree of paranoia and unease gradually ratchets up so that it quickly becomes evident that these two time travellers have detached themselves from reality, as they have from their social ambiance and their family members.  The unsettling aspects gradually increase, involving phone calls, and the sense of being followed, and even minor details such as the comment made by the wife of one of the friends that they need to call exterminators because there are odd sounds coming from the attic above the house. Are they sabotaging each other, and will they ultimately turn against each other? The situation quickly devolves at a fever pitch with two friends who look more and more exhausted, more and more strained, lacking in judgment as they proceed with their obsessive quest that involves, perhaps, a test of dominance between the two.

In the end it isn’t clear how it is resolved. What we have is an impassioned plea by the more sensible of the two friends to put an end to an untenable situation, to walk away and go and pursue their lives. The other one, of course, refuses. This is unsettling because, if we reflect on it, because it ushers in the possibility that, in such a circumstance, human judgment is not to be trusted, and humans are incapable of restraining themselves when given means of such power, a view that is very old, and that was captured not only in biblical narratives but also in the fable of Gyges, the man who becomes a monster because he discovers a magic ring that renders him invisible, as told in the fable by Plato in his The Republic. No one is safe in such a circumstance, and an individual were to come into possession of an invention of such unimaginable power. It is, then, a parable of overreach, and one that terminates in an unsettling fashion, with a seemingly mad protagonist who, like a modern day Faust, can’t renounce the power he has gained. Or, better yet, a new Dr. Frankenstein, pursued by his own demons, the monster he has created.

 

 

Eternal Observer -- ORomero (c) 2013
Copyrights ORomero 2013