In a series that has already involved a lot of cheating on the rules -- out of only six films, mind you -- I'm finishing with perhaps the biggest cheat yet.
Nevertheless, the fact remains that Shane Carruth's Primer (2004) was one of the films I had in mind when I first considered this series, only I couldn't find it streaming anywhere all year, until it finally popped up on Kanopy a couple months ago.
Why such a cheat for Primer?
Well, Shane Carruth has one film I like a lot, one film I don't particularly care for ... and no more films.
How can a single film you don't like possibly be an outlier from the majority of films you do like, when there is only one other film?
Answer: It cannot.
However, here's an interesting counterargument: When I think up these series, the underlying goal is to give myself a reason to watch particular films, whether that's for the first time or a revisit. And ever since loving Carruth's Upstream Colour, I have wondered whether I needed to give Primer another chance.
And if I didn't understand it a second time, at least this time I'd have a Wikipedia plot synopsis there to help me -- something that probably was not yet part of my regular routine with movies I didn't quite grok back when I saw this the first time in 2006.
And at least it's incredibly short, lasting only 77 minutes, which is great for this time of year. In fact, I watched this as the third consecutive night of knocking out my "obligations" -- two films I had to watch for series on this blog, and one for a series external to this blog -- before setting my sights on 2024 films from now until the end of January.
Let's start with the history.
My then girlfriend, now wife and I watched Primer together in September of 2006, back in the days when she used to watch a couple movies a week with me. Now it's more like a couple movies a year. That's okay and irrelevant to this.
But it's movies like Primer that might have steadily eroded her support of movies in general, short though it was. We were both befuddled by this movie, me angrily so. Although I did give it 2 stars -- a bad rating, to be sure, but not the kind of rating I give a movie I hated -- it has still become a go-to rant movie for me, one that easily comes to mind as an example of a film that received a lot of hype but that I thought was pretty unsuccessful.
The reason Primer was/is so unsuccessful is something I can expound on better now that I've freshly watched it again. It's a time travel movie whose details are described in such shorthand that it's like you are watching two people who know their own technology inside and out and so do not need to give even a whiff of expository dialogue about it. They discuss it with such a melding of their two minds that they are almost completing each other's sentences, and therefore, no explaining is required. It's as though you were a fly on the wall for two people discussing something like, I don't know, cold fusion, or a microchip. They know what they're talking about, but you don't. And while that is an incredible case of "realism," it is not an incredible case of filmmaking, since (most) films require the audience to follow what's going on. I'd say especially films about time travel.
It is easy to have a surface-level appreciation of what Carruth is doing here as an exercise in asking a lot from an audience in pursuit of that so-called "realism." Almost every time travel movie you've ever seen has laboriously laid out everything you need to know about it, preferring to err on the side of dialogue that is purely for the audience, even if it would be entirely superfluous for the experts involved in the conversation. This sort of spoon-feeding is an essential component of most cinema. We need to understand the world these characters are in, even if they already understand it.
Primer makes absolutely zero concessions to audience understanding. On this viewing I'd say I had a marginally better idea of what was going on in the plot in this movie, up to a point, at which point I felt my mind giving up again. The part I understood better was how the characters discover that the other technology they are trying to develop in order to get venture capital funding -- which I wasn't totally sure about either -- had a strange offshoot that allowed them to accidentally build a time machine. What I still didn't understand was the part of the story where they start to use the time machine, how it works, how and where the second versions of their characters are supposed to be, and the actual plot that involves an angry ex-boyfriend (who we never see) bringing a shotgun to a party and threatening his ex. There's one point where Carruth's character says "I'm hungry, I haven't eaten since later this afternoon." While that's a great line of dialogue, it comes out of left field in terms of my own subjective experience of what's going on, because I'm already too confused to know if it makes sense in context.
I believe that Carruth understands what's going on in his movie, and if we could understand it, it probably holds together great and might have the sort of "Whoa" Keanu Reeves mind-blowing that I discuss in this post, the last time I talked about Primer on this blog. The thing is, he lacks either the skill or the desire to explain it coherently, and that is the film's fatal flaw.
Now, I should tell you that Upstream Colour is far from a coherent film. However, I believe that film is designed to be incoherent, and it's all about colors and moods and character relationships. If we don't understand the science in that film -- something about pig genes and mind control -- it doesn't matter because that stuff is really secondary to the film's vibe, which I love.
Time travel films should be held to a much higher standard for coherence. As I said in the post linked above, we need to understand if something that's supposed to blow our minds is actually cool, or if instead it makes absolutely zero sense within the context of the world they're presenting.
It is impossible to determine this in Primer. It might be amazing. It might be total nonsense. And the fact that we don't know the difference is a problem.
I secretly think that the people who loved Primer did so because they were impressed by the balls of Carruth to make something so incomprehensible, yet with a clear sense of intention that is admirable. They probably thought that if they didn't get it, that was on them. And therefore, they awarded the effort more than the result. Apparently, I cannot do the same thing.
I said I would use the Wikipedia plot synopsis to try to understand Primer a little bit better this time. And so now, already at this point of the writing, I will read that synopsis and tell you if it changes my opinion at all on what Carruth is doing here.
Okay I'm back. That was a good plot synopsis. Whoever wrote it is either very smart, or watched the film about 20 times. Maybe I should have read the synopsis before I watched it, considering that I had already seen it before so I would not, technically, be spoiling anything.
As I've said a couple times, I think this script is probably watertight, which is why some cinephiles really ate up this movie. They either watched it in slow motion or with the patience to sort it out. Two times now I have not done that, and there may not be another.
In that same post above, I said I'd like to give Primer another shot after loving Upstream Colour. I have now done that, and I'm not mad I did it. Sometimes it's good to know that the version of you 18 years ago was not crazy.
I do find myself bemoaning the fact that Carruth has not made/has not gotten to make another movie after Upstream Colour. One thing I'll say for sure is that he has a singular vision, and it's a shame when the cinematic landscape is deprived of that, largely for economic reasons. Though at least we do see his spirit live on in people like his contemporary Darren Aronofsky, and in the works of Something in the Dirt directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead.
And twice in two days I am wrapping one of my 2024 series, the last one. I'll be back with another bi-monthly series in 2025, probably returning to finishing off the final six films of a renowned director, if I can find one who fits perfectly for that project.
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