Question 1.3
Narrative, interactivity and play – how does Run Lola Run reflect these concerns? How does this relate to Manovich’s concept of transcoding?
If I'm not wrong, the the basis of the module is to understand, basically, how Cultural layers (Narrative) are interpreted by Computer layers (Play) in Interactive media, how their relationship is intrically related and both elements influencing the each other. Our reality is affected (sometimes distorted!) by the visual media we encounter daily in adverts, TV, blog whoring, and when we create our own media, video taping or taking photos, our personal beliefs and what we experienced in viewing media is manifested in that video/photo.
The movie is one story retold in many different pathways and endings, as in a game where you have the reset and load buttons available if the outcome is undesirable. What is problematic is in reality there is no second chance for us: if we die, we cannot reload to the crucial bits in past and expect things to change for the better. It is a narrative told in the game-play interactive form (as exemplified in the deliberate badly-animated scene deliberately to inform us of the presence of interactive media – as a movie-goer you are reminded over and over again of how unreal the movie you are watching is. Most movies are linear in its story-telling and aim to draw you into their world for 1/ ½ hours). Like Lola and Alice in Wonderland, are we caught in the never-ending journey down the Staircase and Rabbit hole, mere characters caught up in something bigger than ourselves, our actions part of a absurd human belief that we can control our lives?
What is useful are the beginning lines: what if every question is the same and every answer therefore the same? What if our lives are immovable as much as we think they would be different if I had left a split second earlier, if the person I met on the road didn’t curse at me? What if either way (as in first and second ending) I will never get to live Happily Ever After with my lover? The question of fate and chance is deeply addressed in the movie. Another example: what if as in an RPG whatever choice you make when face with a troop of bandits
(A) offering them money or
(B) threatening them to back off
is useless and still provokes the bandits to attack? Our pseudo virtual selves are under the mercy of the game master/creator to follow a certain storyline... as if an external audience is watching on and he needs an exciting plotline. What if we are all puppets in a masquerade, duped into believing the reality of choice when there is actually little choice, and little meaning to that choice? (personal note: what if I was meant to end up with my husband, no matter how different I chose to be it was programmed right from the start, at my birth to marry him?) In the movie, this is seen as the father’s friend was fated to crash his car in ALL 3 scenarios and this always involved the burly muscled men.
On the other hand, every choice elicits a response. The fundamental principles of physics: an action is followed by a reaction, and any small decision, action, speech can make a decisive impact on the future of our lives, controllable and uncontrollable. If for example, Lola hadn’t been tripped by the boy the second scenario, she wouldn’t been limping and that single event shifted time and changed everything else. Watching the movie made me remember "The Butterfly Effect" (absolutely gorgeous portrayal of how little things affect big events, but even then the outcome is unexpected and might turn out worse!) and the analogy of the butterfly flapping in one part of the world contributing to the formation of a tornado in another part.
Loved the bedroom scenes where the lovers are conversing, suspended in a trance-like, surreal haze after sex. The stuff dreams are made of, when you’re lying to your partner whilst lying together, one party is testing the other with questions, and you reply in a light, teasing fashion, and neither person expects any seriousness to come out of the conversation. The notion of not knowing what you have till it’s gone (scenes appear after their deaths) and the effect is chilling. Like it doesn’t matter what your answer is, the banality of the conversations (the irony of the situation when they talk about death). I ask “do you love me?” though I know you will always give me a "yes". Yet despite the futility of asking you I cling onto the importance to that question, choosing to ask anyway. Love is after all, a game, one which I play within the boundaries of faithfulness, and occasionally daring to push beyond those restrictions and still hope to win.
Narrative, interactivity and play – how does Run Lola Run reflect these concerns? How does this relate to Manovich’s concept of transcoding?
If I'm not wrong, the the basis of the module is to understand, basically, how Cultural layers (Narrative) are interpreted by Computer layers (Play) in Interactive media, how their relationship is intrically related and both elements influencing the each other. Our reality is affected (sometimes distorted!) by the visual media we encounter daily in adverts, TV, blog whoring, and when we create our own media, video taping or taking photos, our personal beliefs and what we experienced in viewing media is manifested in that video/photo.
The movie is one story retold in many different pathways and endings, as in a game where you have the reset and load buttons available if the outcome is undesirable. What is problematic is in reality there is no second chance for us: if we die, we cannot reload to the crucial bits in past and expect things to change for the better. It is a narrative told in the game-play interactive form (as exemplified in the deliberate badly-animated scene deliberately to inform us of the presence of interactive media – as a movie-goer you are reminded over and over again of how unreal the movie you are watching is. Most movies are linear in its story-telling and aim to draw you into their world for 1/ ½ hours). Like Lola and Alice in Wonderland, are we caught in the never-ending journey down the Staircase and Rabbit hole, mere characters caught up in something bigger than ourselves, our actions part of a absurd human belief that we can control our lives?
What is useful are the beginning lines: what if every question is the same and every answer therefore the same? What if our lives are immovable as much as we think they would be different if I had left a split second earlier, if the person I met on the road didn’t curse at me? What if either way (as in first and second ending) I will never get to live Happily Ever After with my lover? The question of fate and chance is deeply addressed in the movie. Another example: what if as in an RPG whatever choice you make when face with a troop of bandits
(A) offering them money or
(B) threatening them to back off
is useless and still provokes the bandits to attack? Our pseudo virtual selves are under the mercy of the game master/creator to follow a certain storyline... as if an external audience is watching on and he needs an exciting plotline. What if we are all puppets in a masquerade, duped into believing the reality of choice when there is actually little choice, and little meaning to that choice? (personal note: what if I was meant to end up with my husband, no matter how different I chose to be it was programmed right from the start, at my birth to marry him?) In the movie, this is seen as the father’s friend was fated to crash his car in ALL 3 scenarios and this always involved the burly muscled men.
On the other hand, every choice elicits a response. The fundamental principles of physics: an action is followed by a reaction, and any small decision, action, speech can make a decisive impact on the future of our lives, controllable and uncontrollable. If for example, Lola hadn’t been tripped by the boy the second scenario, she wouldn’t been limping and that single event shifted time and changed everything else. Watching the movie made me remember "The Butterfly Effect" (absolutely gorgeous portrayal of how little things affect big events, but even then the outcome is unexpected and might turn out worse!) and the analogy of the butterfly flapping in one part of the world contributing to the formation of a tornado in another part.
Loved the bedroom scenes where the lovers are conversing, suspended in a trance-like, surreal haze after sex. The stuff dreams are made of, when you’re lying to your partner whilst lying together, one party is testing the other with questions, and you reply in a light, teasing fashion, and neither person expects any seriousness to come out of the conversation. The notion of not knowing what you have till it’s gone (scenes appear after their deaths) and the effect is chilling. Like it doesn’t matter what your answer is, the banality of the conversations (the irony of the situation when they talk about death). I ask “do you love me?” though I know you will always give me a "yes". Yet despite the futility of asking you I cling onto the importance to that question, choosing to ask anyway. Love is after all, a game, one which I play within the boundaries of faithfulness, and occasionally daring to push beyond those restrictions and still hope to win.
posted by aileen @ 9:45 PM
2 Comments:
At 11:54 AM,
shamanthayan said…
Hello!
I thought your posting was rather interesting. And i do agree that our reality is affected by the visual media which we encounter everyday. In fact, i think that it does not just influence our perspective of things but also our responses and attitudes. For example, when a person consistently plays computer games in which he or she can react at once and where everything is fast paced, the return to the real world where the individual inevitably has a lack of control over situations and where events may occur really slowly may drain him or her dry of patience. We then see the effects of such interactive media on our personal lives and in the way we respond the our surroundings. Just a thought, can that be considered as transcoding?
SOme times i wonder, "if life was just a game, would we really replay it again?" But then that will give rise to certain unpredictabilities and changes. What if we don't want certain things to change? FOr example in Run Lola Run, in the third running of it, Lola actually missed her dad by a few minutes. And also, the life chances of the other three people she ran by in the process changed too.
If our lives can be a narrative with a structure to it(and therefore predestined), then i suppose the events and existents we encounter will be somewhat similar? But then because life is like a game over which we have some control, it is like play, where we have choices and control. On the other hand.. it is also arguable to contest that and say that perhaps we are deceived into thinking we have that control and choice. Are we then all living in a matrix? :P
At 9:55 PM,
aileen said…
Thanks for the comment! Wow people actually read my blog :P
I agree wholly with your view. If we think of life as a game as Run Lola Run the movie implies, then perhaps what choices we have in life are actually predestined - all other events would eventually lead us to facing choice after choice and choosing one discrete path over another. Maybe we are allowed a sense of control when we don't have, constrained in embryonic pods during real-time as in the Matrix
Of course, that would be very scary now, wouldn't it? Brr...
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