I find it a pity that we never really get to talk about the film “Run Lola Run” in the Locative Media class, since I am really interested in how everything related to “locative media” works in the narrative development and the film analysis for “Run Lola Run.” In the film, under the creative script writing of the story, we got to see Lola run three times, with the same stressful goal of gathering 100,000 marks to save her boyfriend’s life within the next 20 minutes. With the slight various elements in the space, time and chance, the plotline or the life of Lola and her boyfriend is totally changed. I would like to share some thoughts about how the elements of space, time and chance interact with each other to resonate with the physical and psychological world of the running Lola. In all these “20 minutes” of Lola’s running, it is hard for either Lola or me to have any heart to map the city. However, interestingly, Lola’s running and halts on the same routines along the streets create a psychological mapping for the part of the neighborhood she ran through. Mapping here for me is a way of interpreting the space with direction and description.
Two kinds of space have strong influence on me, when I watched “Run Lola Run”: the fast-passing space during Lola’s running and the intensive momentary space that Lola encountered and stopped in on her way. Lola’s boyfriend called for help to save his life. As soon as Lola put down her phone, she wasted no time and started to run. The stairs started spinning under her running foot steps; the walls of the street buildings was flying against the heated movement of Lola’s body; the city trains kept running above her on the high way disregard of her problem. The intensity of the moving space with Lola running works to create the anxiety that audiences expect or expected to feel. At the same time, there are not just moving space, but also spotted locations positioned in the film with duration, in order to let the plot spread out. When Lora run into different people, our eyes got to stop on the turning corners of the street or some intersected parts between buildings and the streets. Lola aimed to run and stopped by her father’s office to ask for money. Lola’s boyfriend felt stuck in the phone booth and kept wandering around the super marker, which he might or might not rob for money. With the fast-passing space of the street, these special locations become the specific spots on the physical and psychological mapping for the Lola’s running route. What I mean by “physical mapping” here is a map that I can try to roughly draw to figure out, where Lola turned and ran on different streets in the film. But at the same time, what is more important to me is the psychological mapping of her anxiety in moving, her absent-mindedness in encountering people along the street, and the imagination she carried with her about her father in the office or her boyfriend in the phone booth.
Time is indispensable in mapping the spatial experience of the running Lola. Like when we go to Yahoo Map to look up a direction for our driving trip to somewhere, it tells you how long it will take you to get there in the estimated speed, regardless of the traffics or some unexpected life stories that may happen to reduce your speed on the way. Thus, it is hard to tell how much time you really need to spend on your trip. Time becomes tricky and makes the trip sometimes interesting or frustrating. In the film “Run Lola Run,” time seems strict—by 12pm, within 20 minutes, Lola and her boyfriend have to gather 100,000 marks. The clock often appeared in the film as a fictionalized element to manipulate the feeling of the lack of time rather than telling the real time. Furthermore, the filmmaker makes great advantage of the specific timing to make his narrative blossom towards different directions. If Lola runs into the car or a person a few seconds earlier or later, the life is sometimes changed for the characters in the film. In the first 20 minute played, Lola ran past the car of her father’s friend and failed to stop him running into a gangster’s car when he drove out. But in another plotted 20 minutes, Lola ran into his car, so he got to stop and have a really brief conversation with Lola and avoided the ill-fated accident with the gangsters’ car. In the third plotted 20 minutes, Lola didn’t run fast enough to run into the guy’s car, he drove her father away from the spot, which made Lola didn’t get to meet her father and ask for money. From another perspective, no matter what happened, with the timing and duration designed in the narrative of the film, Lola stopped at the intersected place between this drive way and the street. In this way, we get to be more aware of the existence of this location on that street. Then, Lola continues to run again. As Lola was running on the street, we also get to see the experience of time for her boyfriend's side. The paralelling space for this couple at the same time motivates Lola to run as fast as possible.
The interplay between time and space makes “chance” stand out in the story of the running Lola and her desperate boyfriend. What does “chance” mean? I look it up in the dictionary service provided by my apple power book laptop. Functioning as a noun, chance could mean “a possibility of something happening” or “the unplanned and unpredictable course of event regarded as a power.” How does chance play its role in Lola’s experience of running on the street? Who determines whether it is a chance or not in Lola’s running encounter with her surroundings in those 20 minutes? Is it Lola, the filmmaker or the audiences? Since the filmmaker created the film, he decided Lola’s view of “chance;” but the “chance” for Lola is freed from its scripted route, when it is presented in audiences’ mind. I think that the different ways, I, as an audience reading time and space will influence my idea of what “chance” could mean to Lola in her story. I have not talked to other people about what they think of what chance Lola has in the film. I am interested in exploring this aspect of chance in mapping time and space in Lola’s running.
Sitting in the still table of Center for Arts, my efforts of mapping time, space and chance in “Run Lola Run” created this expended imaginational space for my brain to go out of my current surrounding space. But my heart feels more peace and life, because of the interesting inspiration rather than the anxiety that Lola’s running has given me. Perhaps it is time for lunch or a walk.
