Audient Outliers: Primer

This is the final in my 2024 bi-monthly series Audient Outliers, in which I've rewatched a film I didn't like by a director whose work I otherwise love.

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. 

Too sleepy to figure out time travel

The creators of the movie Synchronicity clearly set out to make a layman's version of Shane Carruth's Primer -- one whose logic can actually be followed.

Whether they succeeded or not is unknown to me, since I was too sleepy when I watched it.

If you lose ten to 20 percent of most films by watching them too late at night, you probably lose 30 to 40 percent of films about time travel conundrums.

I started watching Jacob Gentry's film at about 10:30, and after I'd already watched the trippy Return to Oz -- which I will tell you about tomorrow. But I watched more than an hour before succumbing to sleep, though even then I paused it for one of my trademark "late-night naps," resuming at sometime around 12:30. I was a bit groggier after that, obviously, but I then watched it through to its conclusion without yielding to any more of sleep's seductions.

It wasn't the plot I had a difficult time following -- I know Gentry et al were more successful on that front than Carruth. It was determining whether the inner logic of multiple planes of existence and versions of reality held water. It was determining whether the movie has cleverly reached the point where two versions of one character have arrived in the same timeline and are therefore able to influence each other's "future" actions, or gotten there through gaps in the narrative.

In other words, I understood what was happening, but I didn't understand whether it was particularly cool or not.

It occurred to me that what you want out of a time travel movie is a Keanu Reeves "Whoa" moment. You want that moment when a shrewd imagining of the various causalities manifests itself in a moment of noodle-frying surprise. You want to get a chill at the realization that if X happens, then Y happens, and Y is something you hadn't quite considered as an outcome of X. But it makes perfect sense within the inner logic of the world.

I didn't quite get that with Synchronicity. And it does become complicated enough -- not unlike Primer -- that eventually I was required to take it for granted that the things would happen/are happening the way they say they would/are.

I did get chills during the climax, but not for the reasons I would have expected. It was because even if they hadn't gotten the time travel right -- something I'm still not sure about -- they got the emotion right. Those chills were due to an emotional denouement between two of the characters. And when I'm watching a movie, I always find it more important to get the emotion right than the science/philosophy.

And that's definitely an area where the film succeeds more than Primer.

(You can probably tell I'm not a huge fan of Primer, a movie I've ranted about before, but apparently never in any detail on this blog. I owe it a rewatch, especially in the wake of really digging Carruth's follow-up, Upstream Color.)

I probably won't go back to watch Synchronicity again, to give the science a second chance. Although the movie does a lot with its low budget, it's still the type of movie that needs to bring in someone like Michael Ironside for some perfunctory star wattage. But the probability of successful science combined with the certainty of successful emotion was enough for me to award it three stars -- and a recommendation to anyone reading this.

What information to reveal, when?

In watching Christopher Smith's movie Triangle on Saturday, there were (appropriately) three instances when I was inspired to reveal information about the film that maybe I shouldn't have. One was before the film and two were during. Two also (not the same two) were instances where I actually revealed the info, and in one instance I kept my mouth shut.

But let me start by telling you a thing or two about this film, which worked very well for me despite the fact that a close scrutiny of its narrative structure might uncover all sorts of logical flaws.

A group of six friends (three men, three women) leave a Florida harbor on a beautiful morning for a day of sailing. Included in these friends is a woman (Melissa George) who seems a bit shell-shocked, like she can't exactly remember the events leading up to this moment in time. As they get out on the water, some unusual changes in the weather -- which seem localized to exactly where they are on the water -- portend ominous things to come.

Which is all I really want to say about it until I've given you a spoiler warning. Here it is: Mild spoilers to follow, but only about the kind of movie it is, not about actual things that happen in the plot. So in other words, you won't be too disappointed if you keep reading, and it shouldn't affect your enjoyment -- especially if you realize that the triangle of the title is the Bermuda Triangle, where weird things are always afoot.

1.

Triangle had come up for discussion in the Flickchart group on Facebook sometime in the past year. The larger theme of the discussion was: mind-bender movies you may not have seen, which may or may not have to do with time travel. Also discussed were Timecrimes and Primer, the former of which I love and the latter of which I most certainly do not love.

It's rare enough these days that my wife and I watch movies together -- two a week at most -- that I feel like I need to sell each suggestion to her in order for her to agree to it. I probably don't; in fact, she loves not knowing anything about a particular film before she sees it. But when I've got a movie I want to watch, I immediately start planning out the sales pitch, to make the movie seem more enticing to her. So in this case I explained that the movie had come up in a discussion of Timecrimes and Primer.

My wife didn't balk at the information, or tell me she wished I hadn't revealed it. But as we started watching, I wished I hadn't revealed it. Knowing that other people had compared this movie to two time travel movies, I was immediately second guessing everything I saw on screen, instead of being lulled into a false sense of the movie's straightforwardness by what seemed like an ordinary boating trip on a beautiful Florida day. In fact, before the movie started, I hadn't even known that Triangle referred to the Bermuda Triangle. So if I hadn't known there was going to be a supernatural element at play, I mightn't have suspected anything from this innocent beginning.

Of course, I had to know something was up because I knew it was a thriller/horror. Clearly this was not going to be a movie about people taking a pleasant sail and then returning home unscathed.

So how much is too much? You need some information to get you in the door. Without movie websites telling you things like "People who liked this also liked this," you might not even know a particular movie existed. In fact, that may have been how those who recommended Triangle to me learned about it in the first place. Maybe they saw Timecrimes, and then Triangle was recommended as a similar movie. (Note: If you are worried that I have spoiled Triangle for you in some way, worry not -- calling it similar to Timecrimes and Primer is in many ways a red herring, and the very specific thing it has in common with Timecrimes is not what you would expect at all.)

My wife, who didn't like the movie as much as I did, didn't scold me one bit for telling her that it was similar to these other movies. She didn't say it affected her expectations, or anything like that; in fact, she didn't mention this advanced knowledge whatsoever. She did, however, scold me about yet again taking her out of a movie by identifying one of the actors as someone who once appeared in something else.

2.

See, one of the compulsive things I do that pisses my wife off the most is to point out actors on screen as the movie is going. "Hey, it's so-and-so." Or "Hey, that's the guy who was in such-and-such."

Objectively, it's an annoying habit. I will own that. But certain viewing companions -- my wife not being one of them -- would actually benefit from something like this. If they are like me, they get something out of recognizing that this actor appeared in that other movie, and they want to know about it at the time so they can appreciate it. If they are like me, they like figuring out the way the cinematic universe fits together like a jigsaw puzzle, how many degrees people are removed from each other, and the twists and turns in people's careers.

My wife, however, represents the much more sizable majority of viewers who want to get lost in the movie, and see that person only as a character. The nerve.

I may be slow on the uptake, but believe me, by now I know that my wife doesn't countenance such interruptions. Especially since she gave me a pretty definitive tongue-lashing (with a half smile, of course) on the subject recently. However, Triangle represented what I considered to be an exception to the rule -- and I want to see if you agree with me.

One of the three men aboard the sailboat in Triangle is an actor named Henry Nixon. There is nothing exceptional about Mr. Nixon -- his is the smallest of the three male roles, and though he performs more than capably in the movie, no one is specifically going to remember him from his work in this film.

Except, there is one thing exceptional about him to us: We've met him.

Nixon is an Australian, like both Triangle's lead (Melissa George) and my wife. And not just any Australian, but an Australian who appeared in the movie Noise, which was directed by my wife's good friend Matthew Saville. Noise appeared at Sundance in 2007, and as such, so did Henry Nixon and my wife and me. Considering the despicable character he plays in Noise, we were glad to see that Henry (I think we can call him that) is a really affable guy without an ounce of ego about him. We spent the better part of an evening with him while we were there.

Because of this connection, I thought my wife would want to know the very moment I identified who he was, which came probably 30 minutes into the film. I figured she would want to know that this was a person we had met and liked, as that would allow her to see his performance through a slightly different lens. It was time sensitive, and even though she warned me as I was doing it, I overrode her warnings for what I thought was her own good.

Turns out, she still didn't want to know. When we discussed it afterward, she told me I could have just waited until the movie was over. But according to my thinking, she would have by then missed her opportunity to watch this guy as he was doing his thing. If she hadn't known she needed to pay special attention to him, she might have had a hard time going back and considering his performance in retrospect.

Okay, well, now I know for the next time we see a movie featuring someone we know.

3.

The third thing is kind of a silly thing, and this is the thing I did not mention to my wife.

At some point in the second act of the movie, I noticed that there had been an inordinate number of shots of Melissa George turning dramatically toward the camera. I think you can imagine what I'm talking about: You start on the back of her head, then she turns around and faces the camera, either to display a look of horror or to deliver a weighty line of dialogue.

I started to notice it so much that I almost thought it was worth pointing out. That way, if this shot then happened a half-dozen more times, we could laugh about it.

There were two main reasons I didn't: 1) I had already been scolded about the Henry Nixon incident; 2) I was enjoying this movie, and didn't want it to become the subject of ridicule.

However, let's say I did want it to become the subject of ridicule. Wouldn't I want to get everybody on the same page, so we could all have a fun time ridiculing it? That might turn the experience from a dull one to one we might remember years from now.

I think of when my wife and I watched Crazy Heart with another couple. Unbeknownst to each other for the first half of the movie, we were all suffering through the viewing, finding falsehood upon falsehood, one unintentionally hilarious moment after another. Then, fortuitously, someone ventured a snide remark, and everyone else chimed in with an equal passion for how little they were enjoying the film. This opened the flood gates, and allowed us to openly crack wise about the movie. I remember laughing and laughing and ultimately having a very fun time -- which doesn't make me feel any more fondly about the movie, only the experience of watching it.

But it can be a risk to take the movie into the MST3K realm. First off, you have to read the room. You have to pick up on the shifting bodies, the sighs, the mild scoffs, to be sure that others are in agreement. Then you've got to pick just the right moment to point out something absurd in the film, and see if your vocal interruption is welcomed or rebuffed.

With Triangle, I didn't want to take it to the level of ridicule, because I was really enjoying the movie. My wife might have actually taken it and ran with it, since she didn't get as much out of the movie as I did. But I didn't want the numerous shots of Melissa George doing a 180 to be our defining memory of the film.

So I did something that I can, surprisingly, do when I want to:

I kept my trap shut.