Asking the Wrong Questions

It's been a week since I watched Shane Carruth's second film Upstream Color , and since then I've been trying to work out not what I want to say about it, but whether I wanted to say anything at all.  Which is not to say that I didn't like the film--I found it rich and moving, and incredibly exciting for the growth it shows in Carruth's abilities and interests as a filmmaker, and an SF filmmaker in particular.  But Upstream Color is also a film that seems to demand not a review, but a dissection.  To write about it, I would have to explain what the film means.  There have been some great reviews along these lines--in particular, I found much to think about in Caleb Crain's review in the New Yorker , and Nicholas Rombe's review in the Los Angeles Review of Books --but I don't really want to try to add to them (and I'm not sure that I could if I wanted to).  The meaning of Upstream Color feels bound up in the lovely and sometimes disquieting experi...

"How do cellphones work?" Abe, one of the protagonists in Shane Carruth's ultra-low budget 2004 SF film Primer , asks his friend Aaron, at a point near the film's midpoint. The line is delivered with some urgency, and with good reason--depending on the answer, Abe and Aaron may have just created a time-travel paradox. This is one of the standard landmarks of the SF or technological thriller film--the point at which a seemingly safe scientific discovery goes off the rails--and as he does throughout the entire film, Carruth chooses to present it in a non-standard manner. Whereas in another film, the characters' emotions would be at the forefront--they would swear, or go very silent, or take on a terrified expression--in Primer , Abe and Aaron's fear is expressed through an urgent quest for knowledge, the acquisition and application of which takes up the bulk of their waking hours. Since it gained significant acclaim at the Sundance film festival (where it won th...