Thinking You're Paranoid or Knowing You Should Be: The Mystifying Oeuvre of Shane Carruth

"Huh? What?" (source)

One of my favorite directors is a guy named Shane Carruth. You shouldn't be faulted if you haven't heard of him—he has so far only produced two films, Primer (2004) and Upstream Color (2013), begun work on one more (The Modern Ocean), and abandoned one (A Topiary). That being said, his films are the intellectual equivalent of Pringles, in that once you pop, you just can't stop. (Trying to make sense of them, that is.) So this post is an overview of the directorial portfolio of this former engineer.

There's spoilers downstream, and not the kind that Jeremy and the boys used to decry so often on Top Gear. Content warning for violence.

Primer (2004)

From a meta standpoint, Primer is all the more impressive for its journey from thought to screen. Shot on a budget of just $7,000—no zeroes have been omitted there, that's seven kilodollars—Carruth ended up doing a lot of the grunt work on this himself. Sound editing, music, actual direction (a lot of which was made sotto voce and some of which can be caught in the film if you pay close attention)…oh, and playing the lead role. This was actually not born so much out of egotism as it was the fact that Carruth was an indie filmmaker who had rehearsed scenes so many times while casting other characters that he figured it'd simplify things if he took on the part.

Special mention should go to the sound design. In the commentary, it is related how about half of the original recorded dialogue was unusable for technical reasons and had to be dubbed. This is not obvious, even when it's been pointed out. There's one scene in particular where the actor on the screen is not the voice you hear—that belongs to Carruth's brother. It says something pathetic about the entertainment industry at large when a guy with a $7,000 budget and a MacBook can do a better job syncing up dialogue to lip flaps than corporations worth billions of dollars.

A story of time travel and how the ego is the enemy of small business (source).

But enough about the real-life underpinnings of the film. There's a quote, rightly or wrongly ascribed to Isaac Asimov, that goes, "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny…'". The story of Primer is basically this quote injected with interpersonal drama and character development.

Aaron (Shane Carruth) and Abe (David Sullivan, whom you may know as Chet from Deidra & Laney Rob a Train) are half of a small business, Emiba Technologies, based in Texas, and they have a problem. They've been making JTAG cards in Aaron's garage, but it's not making them the dollars they desire; they need something new. So their little company's latest idea is magnetic levitation using superconductors.

How about we plug it in and then try turning it on? (source)

However, there is a method to their madness, and this method ends up having an unintended side effect. Put a watch in the box, run it for a minute, take it out. It gives you the wrong time. Put in a kid's toy, it comes out covered in slime from a common household mold. Abe realizes what's up. He interrupts Aaron's March Madness session on a bench outside their workplace, runs him on a bunch of seemingly useless errands, and then reveals that he's built a time machine out of it by showing Aaron his past self in real time. Naturally, Abe and Aaron figure that the best way to use this device is what amounts to undetectable insider trading. Then things go haywire.

Aaron can't sleep, there's some bothersome pest up in his attic, and his ear starts bleeding. Abe starts running the box outside of their planned hours. The guys "can't write like normal people". Abe's ex-girlfriend's dad shows up with zero warning and almost dies whenever Abe gets close to him. Eventually, Abe decides to take the nuclear option and undo everything using his "fail-safe machine".

Still neater than a lot of "normal people" (source).

The narrative device throughout the film is Aaron making a phone call, the implication being that Aaron is narrating everything he knows and how it all fits together. He can do this because the conversations he's had have been recorded. Abe realizes this when Aaron starts saying everything he said the first time, unprompted, even when Abe tries to derail the conversation and avoid this whole mess.

To keep the boxes safe during excursions, Abe rented a storage unit. He actually rented two, the second for the fail-safe, and Aaron realized this when going over the manifest, so he went back in the box and was consistently one cycle ahead of Abe the entire time. Aaron wants to edit time; there's an upcoming party where Abe's ex's ex comes into the party "waving a shotgun", and he gets to be the hero and save everybody. Abe doesn't much like this, but there isn't a whole lot he can do to stop them.

Except turn this thing off (that is not a typo), get inside it, wait a few days, and try to avoid static electricity on the way out (source).

It's a short film, clocking in at less than an hour and a half…but what an hour and a half that is. Repeated viewings turn up new observations, double meanings in what felt like meaningless things. True, you may need to make a chart—or several, if you don't use pencils—in order to figure everything out, but in my opinion this is the single best time-travel movie ever made.

Upstream Color (2013)

If Primer was a question, a riddle, then Upstream Color is more of a declarative statement. That doesn't make it any less of a piece of cerebral cud for the chewing, it just tastes a little different.

One of the main characters, the Sampler, who is so ready for Burning Man (source).

In the interim between Primer and this film, Carruth was in negotiations to create another motion picture, more massive in scale; this was A Topiary, and the talks fell through. The main character can be seen running test footage from the intended VFX on her screen at one point, though, so in some small way at least a part of that vision made it to film.

Our story begins with your average scumbag lowlife rifling through a potted plant to get at some insect larvae. He then puts it in a capsule, abducts a successful young adult woman, and forces her to swallow it. The parasite has some sort of extreme effect on its host that makes him or her almost totally susceptible to suggestion. Our thief, whose face is, for some reason, obscured by an auto mechanic's trouble light the sun, basically commands poor Kris (Amy Seimetz) into willingly giving him everything of value that she has.

Also, the dude has zero idea of how to throw a decent party (source).

He then sets her free, whereupon she goes on a massive food binge. Subsequently she is drawn to a rural farm where a guy is playing the world's worst minimal EDM into the ground. This helps to draw out the parasite from Kris' body; the worms are then transferred to the pigs the guy raises.

"That'll do, Pig. That'll do." (source)

Kris' nightmare doesn't end here. Her life has been utterly ruined, at her own choice by all appearances. Destitute, she is approached on the bus by Jeff (Carruth again), a smooth-talking…something-or-other businessman who had a similar experience happen to him—worms, pigs, and all. Kris and Jeff fall for each other so hard they start remembering each other's memories as their own.

You may think that this is fizzling out into a cliché romance story at this point. I can understand how you'd come to that conclusion. The important detail, however, is that the pigs on the pig farm have also bonded. They have even mated and are expecting a litter soon. Kris, too, finds herself pregnant.

Except that's impossible, as she is physically unable to have children.

If you've only ever heard about this movie tangentially, this is probably the picture you've seen (source).

The pigs give birth, and our farmer is none too pleased, so he, shall we say, disposes of the piglets. This sends the pigs into a rage. Kris and Jeff also completely flip out because it feels like someone has seized and murdered their children. It doesn't matter that the children don't exist, at least not their children. It's their pigs' children. This makes so much more sense and is so much less ridiculous if you actually watch the movie.

Anyway, Scumbag Steve from earlier kept his marks in line by having them write out Walden longhand. Turns out, Kris and Jeff are no dummies, and realizing that Walden is a thing sends them on a hunt for clues. They find a number of other victims and get led to a musician who lives a simple life out in the country: He records ambient and experimental music, farms pigs, and has a habit of dropping the bass hard enough to annoy worms. Kris commits what must be, at the least, second-degree murder on the guy, and the Walden-torture brigade takes over the farms and raise pigs.

So, uh, how are we going to get the deed to the property transferred? You kind of killed the owner (source).

Remember the piglets from earlier? When they died, the parasite flukes that were in them were released into a stream. The river in turn waters a stand of rare plants that a certain parasite from earlier likes to prey on, and a local horticulturalist likes to find and sell these plants. The plant-seller has a certain regular customer. See how this all ties in? It's not quite as subtle about it as Primer was, but again, once you hit the third act, everything before it starts making more sense, and it still has the gravitas of a film that gets better if you let it marinate in your head for a while.

OK, he snooped on your memories and used them as a basis for his new mixtape, but Kris, isn't this a bit harsh? (source)

Coda: One of the things that intrigues me the most about this movie is that the wrong guy gets punished. All the farmer guy ever did was make some really crappy dubstep and de-worm people. Sure, he could probably be charged with animal cruelty for the whole piglet situation, but it's not like he was aware that Kris and Jeff had such a connection to them. For all Kris knew, however, he was the guy who had ruined everything for her—and for all we know, he wasn't.

Do you like bizarro films like these, or is this article a defense of terrible practice in cinema? Let us know in the comments!

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Back Fo(u)r the Future: the Four Rationales of Time Travel

Great Scott! If my calculations are correct, it's Back to the Future Day! And you know what that means: when we get this baby up to eighty-eight miles per hour, you're going to see some serious … discussion about the different types of time travel?!

That line isn't in the script … (source)

More to the point, depictions of time travel in fiction can be classified into four types. These classifications are based on the purpose and volition of the traveler and/or their associates. More broadly, instances of time travel could be classified into "intentional" vs. "unintentional," but what's the fun in that? (Also, you run the risk of painting with too broad a brush—there is some utility in digging one layer deeper.) The four categories are as follows:

1. Influence
2. Surveillance
3. Concomitance
4. Coincidence

It's important to note that these four types aren't necessarily mutually exclusive within the same work, or even the same time-traveler's motives—for example, in Superhero Black Hole, the main character at one point travels to the ancient Roman era in an attempt to save his skin (Concomitance) so he can survive long enough to stop the antagonist in the future (Influence).

Let's take a look at each one, with examples from media you may (or may not) be familiar with. For the purposes of this article, "time travel" encompasses only those instances where someone or something is actually displaced from its origin in time. Simply flinging a message into the future or past doesn't count unless it's on a physical medium.

Also, beware of unmarked spoilers.

Influence

This is probably the most common motive in fiction, and it even has some near-examples in reality—preventing his father's death was the impetus sparking Ron Mallett's research into the physics of time travel. "Influence" here refers to time travel intentionally undertaken by the traveler with the goal of affecting or effecting history. This can include anything from making sure history unfolds as it should to desiring to live out one's life in peace in another century to bringing about world domination.

Back to the Future

Judging by the green graph behind him, that DeLorean either has one tricked-out subwoofer or one seriously leaky plutonium reservoir (source).

It qualifies, but not how you might think: the Influence factor isn't in Marty ending up in 1955—that's Concomitance—but in him getting back to 1985. Marty wants to return the flow of events to how it was, in the sense that he belongs in the '80s. (For why he ended up thirty years in the past, see below.)

Star Trek

Your greenhouse gas emissions are without honor! (source)

Oh, boy. So, so much time travel happens in Star Trek. The crew of the original series went back to the '70s in Star Trek IV: the Voyage Home to teach us, in a roundabout way, proper wildlife conservation practices. The Next Generation had "Firstborn" (S7E21), where future!Alexander basically tries to turn past!Alexander into John McClane. Deep Space Nine had "Trials and Tribble-ations" (S5E6), in which a Klingon with a bat'leth to grind hijacks the Orb of Time and tries to blow up Captain Kirk. Voyager had "Relativity" (S5E23), in which Temporal Investigations tries to stop someone from blowing up Voyager (interestingly, the culprit had also traveled through time in order to plant the thing, and basically manages to stop himself).

The Terminator

He isn't Todd the T-1000, but he still scares me (source).

We see both the "affect" and "effect" senses in James Cameron's franchise-igniting sci-fi flick. John CENA!!!! Connor is the leader of the Resistance, fighting against Skynet and its robotic army. Skynet has managed to figure out how to make a time machine work and has hit upon the simple idea of killing Connor's mother and preventing his birth in the first place. (Who cares about the Butterfly Effect, anyway? Not Skynet, apparently.) That's how Ahnold finds himself in '80s-era Los Angeles. Kyle Reese, meanwhile, is sent back to stop the T-800 and keep the timeline intact—in more ways than one.

Continuum

Liber8 aw8s their f8 (source).

The plot of this Canadian sci-fi series is set in motion when a terrorist cell, "Liber8," escapes a legal sentence to go back in time sixty-five years or so. Their plans involve blowing up a building and radicalizing a newborn. Not only do they succeed, but interestingly enough, they also end up killing off one major character's ancestor. Despite the fact that he's from the future, he still apparently survives.

Surveillance

"Surveillance" refers to an agent instigating time travel for purposes of observation. The agent can intend either to document events at the desired point in time as they happen, or they can simply test whether their methods for time travel actually work in the first place. Like Influence, the agent intends to make the trip; unlike it, they don't want to disturb. It's like window-shopping through the ages.

Back to the Future

One less minute to wait for the season premiere of Game of Thrones (source).

Doc Brown had to test the DeLorean somehow, after all. Einstein, being a dog, can't himself choose to run the DeLorean, but he's under the auspices of the good Doctor, and that counts for our purposes.

The Time Machine (2002)

No Whammies, no Whammies… (source)

In a nice example of the mutual compatibility of time travel types, Dr. Hartdegen's initial reasons for traveling into the future are to conduct research—he wants to see if humanity ever learned if changing the past is even possible, but can't wait like everybody else. He wasn't intending to actually alter the course of the future because of his travels there. All he wanted to do was learn if he could save his fiancée's life. (That would be Influence, but would have involved travel to the past to actively prevent her death.)

A Sound of Thunder

The description text for this image in Google Images read "An error occurred." This is an accurate summation of just about everything about this movie (source).

I almost don't want to dignify this film with discussion, but it was one of the first examples that came to mind. The upshot is that there's a company that basically offers prehistoric safaris. You're not supposed to do anything except watch—there's even a pathway that gets generated so that you don't step on anything. Naturally, some idiot messes this up it doesn't go according to plan.

Primer

Randall Munroe comes about as close as anybody ever has to accurately summarizing the plot (source).

Oh, boy. Shane Carruth's Primer is a real rat king of a movie, and some hold it to be the best time-travel movie of all time. The film ends up as a multi-car pileup of gambits and agendas, but the core reason for Abe and Aaron traveling through time in the first place is Surveillance—they want to see if the box actually works. The two Abes at the self-storage place pretty much confirmed that for Aaron … the first time around.

Concomitance

As Baron Mordu said, "The bill comes due." A concomitant event occurs as a consequence of some other action. Here, the actual act of traveling through time is not usually considered a "consequence" for our purposes (otherwise every instance would qualify); instead, "concomitance" refers to the motivation behind the time travel. Someone who researches and participates in time travel because he wants to does not travel because of concomitance, but a criminal forced by his captors to serve as a guinea pig for a new time-travel method does. It's kind of surprising how rare this motive is.

Back to the Future

Am I the only one who doesn't think the future as presented in Back to the Future Part II was all that great aside from hoverboards and self-velcroing Nikes? (source)

A bit of an odd example because it takes place due to actions Marty McFly hasn't performed yet, but the reason that Doc Brown takes Marty to 2015 at the end of the film (and in the first part of Back to the Future, Part II) is ultimately because Marty stupidly gets involved in a street race, breaks his hand, can't play the guitar anymore, and turns into a worn-out, underachieving shell of a man who isn't there to help his kid stay out of trouble. Perhaps stretching it a bit, but hey, I've got to tie this into the franchise somehow.

Star Trek

Overall, the double-Picard shots in this episode were extremely well-done (source).

Probably the clearest example of Concomitance for the Trek franchise is The Next Generation S2E13, "Time Squared." The Enterprise runs across a shuttlecraft tumbling in space. It turns out to be one of theirs, and Captain Picard is in it. Except, Captain Picard is on the bridge, and the El-Baz is sitting right next to itself in the shuttle bay. It turns out that this is future!Picard, who tried to escape the Negative Space Wedgie of the week, only for it to destroy the future!Enterprise and fling him back six hours so he could try again. Present!Picard shoots him with a phaser, the dead body and shuttlecraft vanish, the Negative Space Wedgie is satisfied, and Picard is left to grapple with whether he just committed suicide or murder. (Incidentally, per Deep Space Nine, you could probably charge him with the latter.)

Samurai Jack

Aku's not staring so much in fear of Jack's attack as he is in awe of his hair (source).

From Jack's perspective, at least, the raison d'être for the series is due to Concomitance. His initial temporal displacement is a direct consequence of his challenging Aku. Jack himself didn't want to end up in the future. Note that, on the flipside, Aku's motivation was Influence—getting rid of Jack let him move forward with his plans.

Looper

"My name is ASAC Schrader, and—wait, wrong franchise" (source).

The gist of Looper is that really bad dudes from the future send people back in time for really bad dudes in the present to kill. (Hard to prove a murder if there's no body, right?) Why these victims are sent back in time isn't always known, but part of the contract with these hitmen involves having themselves sent back. Basically, past!guy kills future!guy in the past—a result of his prior actions.

Coincidence

Stuff happens in general. Sometimes, stuff happens to people. With respect to time travel, "coincidence" considers both accidents and happenstance, and is basically an umbrella term for any time travel where the traveler did not initiate the travel of his own volition and where said travel did not result directly from his actions. "Coincidence" may not be the best name, but it rhymes and doesn't imply that the traveler had anything to do with it.

Back to the Future

I'd be remiss if I didn't find a way to work this in (source).

Marty didn't ask for the Libyans. It's not his fault that he got shot at. When he was getting shot at, his only thought was getting out of dodge. Unfortunately, in order to get out of dodge, he had to get into a heavily-modded DMC, and he ended up stranded in the '50s.

The Twilight Zone

Peter valiantly tries to change history (source).

In "Back There" (S2E13), Peter Corrigan ends up in 1865 following a discussion about whether one can influence events via time travel. He doesn't intend to get transported to the past, and while he does try to change it—and sort of does, if only in a way that ends up with one guy getting rich—he didn't set out to do any of that initially.

Heroes

Up high! Down low! Too slow—what the heck?! (source)

"Dual" (S3E13—what is it with all the episode thirteens in this post?) provides an instance of Coincidence for Hiro Nakamura, of all people. Hiro has been stranded in the past following his forcible depowering (how he got there is irrelevant for now). His brother Ando and their teammate Daphne manage to save the day for him thanks to some quick thinking. Hiro is returned and the status quo more-or-less restored when Ando augments Daphne's super-speed abilities so that she can travel faster than light.

Continuum

In the future, legibility will be sacrificed in favor of looking stereotypically futuristic (source).

Liber8's voyage into the past was discussed above, but Kiera Cameron ends up in 2012 by accident. Liber8 was supposed to Influence history; Cameron joining them wasn't intended by anyone involved. She just happened to be in the right place at the wrong time.

Were my calculations correct? Is this too heavy? Let me know in the DeLoreans!

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