Post modernism: Before you can understand this term you need to know about

Modernism. In the first 15 years of the 20th century, the landmarks of this cultural
movement include artists like Klimt, Matisse, Picasso, Kandinsky and Surrealism.
Modernisms cutting edge has been the exploration of subjective experience
and the clarification and simplification of structure. Some further definitions
that relate to art, music, theology and architecture include:
genre of art and literature that makes a self-conscious break with
previous genres
modernity: the quality of being current or of the present; "a shopping
mall would instill a spirit of modernity into this village"
practices typical of contemporary life or thought
wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
Modernism in music is characterized by a desire for or belief in
progress and science, surrealism, anti-romanticism, political advocacy,
general intellectualism, and/or a breaking with the past or common
practice Ezra Pound's modernist slogan, "Make it new," as applied
to music. ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernism_(music)
Modernism refers to theological opinions expressed during the late
19th and early 20th centuries, but with influence reaching into the 21st
century, which are characterized by a break with the past. Catholic
modernists form an amorphous group. ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernism_(Roman_Catholicism)
Modern architecture is art with similar characteristics, primarily the
simplification of form and creation of ornament from the structure and
theme of the building. The first variants were conceived early in the
20th century.
In film the traditional model, the model that is most common in
mainstream Hollywood texts demands narrative closure. Films
conventionally, have a beginning, middle and end. Orientation,
complication and resolution. There are alternate narratives for film text,
which in the case of RLR offers no single way to tell the story, as there
are three alternative narratives. The same story is told in contrasting
ways and Tykwer is able to retell this same story numerous times and
to make each rendering more compelling by making subtle changes.
Modernist Film
The distinguishing characteristic of the modernist film is a focus on intended
ambiguity. Productions are meant to leave the audience with some sense of
confusion and lack of realism or horizontal development. Most of these films were
developed outside of the United States between the 1950s and 1960s by such
producers as Bergman, Antonioni, Melville, and Godard.

Postmodernism:
The term came into popular currency in the 1970s. Postmodernism is
characterised by irony, appropriation and self-reference. In particular, the
movement has uncovered the presence of source ideas, information and
influences. It has therefore challenged the idea of originality. It has also made
artworks resistant to straightforward assumptions about the place of the author and
the interpreter.
Themes such as disjointedness, self-referentialism (something that refers to
self), the breaking down of distinctions between high and low culture(Kitsch,
slapstick, camp, toilet humor, yellow journalism, reality television, escapist fiction,
popular music (especially its abbreviation pop) and exploitation films are often cited
examples of low culture.), and the embracement of pop culture are all generally
agreed on as the major themes of postmodernism. It is upon further examination
of these points that the film Run Lola Run can be seen as a postmodern piece of
work. This film succeeds very well at visually exemplifying postmodernism.

Postmodern themes
This major movement in popular culture uses comic-book and computer-game
characters as heroes and heroines of mainstream Hollywood movies,
along with the creation of whole movies with computer software, and
represents a trend toward virtual reality that fits into a number of the
elements of postmodern culture. Notably, they reflect the following
postmodern trends:
1. The coming of a hyperreal media culture where images precede reality,
not copying anything in the real world. This can be seen where mediated
images and narratives precede real things and events. This is especially
true of films either using computer-generated graphics for special effects,
like George Lucas's Star Wars Episodes I and II, or films made entirely of
computer graphics, like Final Fantasy. These films create hyperreal worlds
without real human actors or geographical locations, worlds dreamed up by
art designers and computer programmers. Another example would be
Avatar.
2. The breakdown of high art and its mixture with pop culture. Where once
there was a fairly clear division between fine art, music and serious literature
on the one side, and folk art, street ballads and pulp fiction on the other, in
the postmodern age pictoral art and mass media like film and television
often embrace other popular cultural forms wholeheartedly, abandoning

links to their foundations in theatre and literature. The use of comic book
characters in Hollywood blockbusters can be compared to Andy Warhol's
use of pop cultural icons like Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley in his
paintings. We can also see video and comic book culture (including music
videos) as a return to childhood, a rejection of depth for the nostalgia of
youth.
3. An aesthetic where style triumphs over substance. The use of what
could be argued to be superficial characters and stories from the comics
and video games instead of from novels and plays, as was more common in
the cinema from its birth to at least the 1970s, can be seen as such a
triumph. Added to this is the use of spectacular special effects in films that
deal with comic-book heroes and villains, in effect replacing the more
detailed character development of classical literature and theatre.

4. The use of pastiche and recycling, especially recycling of characters

and stories from one medium - comic books or video games - to another.
Critics of postmodern culture might point to the use of such stories as an
exhaustion of originality, a giving up on the modernist project of "making it
new," to borrow a phrase from Ezra Pound. Film makers have run out of
ideas for characters and stories, or are drawn deliberately to what some
might see as "trash" culture for their narratives.

5. In a less significant way, the decline of meta-narratives. Postmodern

popular culture doesn't retell the epic struggles for human rights, sexual or
racial equality, religious freedom, or any of the other great historical metanarratives, but lays these aside and either attacks all targets equally with its
ironic barbs (witness The Simpsons), or just plays for play's sake.

With its time limit and "multiple lives" concept, the film owes a clear debt to Polish
director Krzysztof Kielowski, who explored the theme in films such as Blind
Chance, The Double Life of Vronique, and Three Colors: Red. Tykwer would go
on to direct Heaven, which Kielowski (who died in 1996) had planned as his next
film.[1]
The film features two allusions to Alfred Hitchcock's film Vertigo. Like that film, it
features recurring images of spirals, such as the 'Spirale' Cafe behind Manni's
phone box and the spiral staircase down which Lola runs. In addition, the painting
on the back wall of the casino of a woman's head seen from behind is based on a
shot in Vertigo: Tykwer disliked the empty space on the wall behind the roulette

table and commissioned production designer Alexander Manasse to paint a picture

of Kim Novak as she appeared in Vertigo. Manasse could not remember what she
looked like in the film and so decided to paint the famous shot of the back of her
head. The painting took fifteen minutes to complete. [2]
There are also several references to German culture in the film. The most notable
is the use of Hans Paetsch as a narrator. Paetsch is a famous voice of children's
stories in Germany, recognized by millions. Many of the small parts are cameo
roles by famous German actors (for example the bank teller). Also, two quotes by
German football legend Sepp Herberger appear: "The ball is round, the game lasts
90 minutes, everything else is pure theory," and, "After the game is before the
game."
On several occasions the theme of free will vs. determinism is integrated into the
film. The opening narration states the futility of asking questions, as one leads to
another and we only travel in circles. Lola's interactions with other people are
similar in that a small conversation or interaction with the people on the streets lead
to other interactions. For example, the man on the bike can become a happy,
married man or a bum. The concept of free will is also presented because she has
three different realities to choose from.
In his review of the film, Roger Ebert noted how the film's structure was very
similar to that of a video game. Ebert mentioned the kinetic style of the film and
commented that the "heroine is like the avatar in a video game -- Lara Croft
made flesh."[3] The narrative itself evokes the typical video game. Just like a
character in a video game, Lola dies once and sees Manni die once before figuring
out how to "beat the level." The opening of the film sets the film up as a game,
albeit a soccer game, however the point remains. Just like somebody who
must replay a level in a video game and learn from their mistakes, Lola is
given several more chances to successfully complete her mission.
Connections between the runs
Throughout the film, Lola bumps into people, talks to them, or simply passes them
by, and the sound of a camera flash warming up can be heard. Their resulting
futures are then conveyed in a series of still frames. The futures are widely
divergent from encounter to encounter. In one scenario, a woman whom Lola
accidentally bumps into remains poor and kidnaps an unattended baby after her
child was taken away by social workers. In another scenario the woman wins the
lottery and becomes rich. In the third scenario, the woman experiences a religious
conversion. The sound of the camera flash warming up is repeated a final time at
the end of the film, when Lola smiles at Manni's question about what's in her bag.

Soundtrack
The soundtrack of the film, by Tykwer, Johnny Klimek and Reinhold Heil, includes
numerous musical quotations of the sustained string chords of The Unanswered
Question, an early 20th-century chamber ensemble work by American composer
Charles Ives. In the original work, the chords are meant to represent the "the
Silences of the Druidswho Know, See and Hear Nothing."

Run Lola Run is a cinematic tour de force, with a very structured screenplay that
shows that the director left nothing to chance (chance or fate is one of the main
themes of the film by the way). There are no wasted shots in this 81-minute film.
Its style is fast and kinetic, driven except in one short scene by a pounding techno
soundtrack giving it a real energy, surging mercilessly forward toward two
tentative and one final resolution. Commentators have linked its structure and
style to films by Wim Wenders and Krzysztof Kieslowski, though it stands on its
own two aesthetic legs, requiring no inter-textual cinematic propping up.
The two main characters are Lola, played by Franka Potente, and her boyfriend
Manni, played by Moritz Bleibtreu. Even their real names are unintentional puns Lola is indeed "potent" (from the Italian), while Manni tries to "stay true" to his
woman.
The film is divided into three main segments divided by two red-filtered
scenes of Lola and Manni in bed, fronted by a prologue that clearly defines the
postmodern intentions of the film's author Tykwer. In each of the segments Lola
has twenty minutes to find 100,000 marks to replace an equivalent amount of
money that Manni has foolishly left sitting in a plastic bag in a subway car. He
needs the money to pay off vicious gangsters he works for to avoid being "rubbed
out" by them. The twenty-minute deadline is imposed by the promise Manni
makes from a phone booth at the start of the film to rob a Bolle supermarket at
gunpoint to get the money himself if Lola can't figure out how to raise it. In the first
two segments, Lola and Manni fail catastrophically, causing one of them to die.
But each time the dying character hits the reset button and plays the game again.
Thus the film self-consciously echoes the structure of a video game - if Lara Croft
or Aki Ross die, just hit "replay" to bring them back to life for another attempt to
achieve their quest.

One obviously postmodern

technique (given my definition of
the elements of postmodern
culture) is Tom Tykwer's mixing
of conventional colour film,
short black and white
segments, and video tape
filmed with a hand-held
camera. This is an appeal to
pastiche. The jarring contrast
between the film and video tape segments highlights a shift in the emotional
mood of the film: when Lola runs in present time, she's always on colour film; but
when we see her father arguing with his illicit lover Jutta Hansen, it shifts to
grainier, more subdued (at least in terms of colour) video tape. In fact, video tape
is used whenever we see just the secondary characters, and neither Lola nor
Manni are on screen. The short black-and-white segments always picture events
remembered or recounted by Lola or Manni, the past pictured in the medium of
the early cinema.
Tykwer plays with colour throughout the film. Red is the dominant colour, perhaps
suggesting blood, death or fate. Lola's dyed hair is an extravagantly bright red;
the telephone she gets Manni's plea for help at the start of the film is red; there is
also a red ambulance containing a paramedic in a red coverall, a red bag full of
money stolen from a grocery store, a bicycle thief wearing a red soccer shirt with
"Gott" written in Gothic letters on the front, along with assorted red signs (notably
the Bolle market sign), cars, and other objects. Red is the colour of decision and
fate, of the gods of the film, of life and death.
In addition, black and white are constantly contrasted in the film, in the clothes of
a group of nuns, in a pair of cars that crash into each other in each segment, in
the dress of the employees at Lola father's bank, and even in the row of parked
cars in the final scenes of each of the three games. The gangster's car at the end
of the film is black, as their white car (the only one clearly seen in the film) has
been smashed up in an accident. Perhaps Tykwer is playing with the old
distinction between good and evil as symbolized by a chromatic dialectic between
white and black. Yet it is far more likely that he is neutral on the moral content of
this dialectic. The many contrasts of black and white are more likely to symbolize
the clash of obstacles to Lola's progress in each of the three games, as seen
most strikingly in each of the three car crashes in the film. These are always black
on white - even the moped driver who piles into the back of the crashed cars in
Game 3 is wearing a black helmet and a white coverall. This distinction is more
like black and white in a game of chess, serving merely to distinguish
adversaries.

Despite her red hair, Lola's home colours are green and white. She wears
checked green pants, a sleeveless aqua shirt (just like Lara Croft), and we can
see her white undergarments showing constantly. Green is the colour of nature,
the body, and growth. We see lots of green trees, green vegetables in the Bolle
market, green-covered walls, a clock in Lola's room with green numbers glued on
it, a green garbage bag full of money Lola steals from her father's bank in Game
2, a large white tanker truck with the green letters "L" and "E" on the fender that
Lola is almost run over by before entering the casino in Game 3 (perhaps her
initials?), green velvet on the roulette wheel table, a pile of green and white
casino chips that Lola cashes in after her victories in roulette, and a green and
white ring with "GO" written on it on Lola's finger (Lola's fistful of rings makes one
think of Tolkien). In the scene in Game 1 when Manni starts to rob the Bolle
market and Lola arrives too late to dissuade him, Tykwer's camera frames Lola
against the background of a green and white building, while Manni is framed by
gold and red structures and objects behind him in the market. Lola is a force of
nature and growth, with her churning green legs, whereas Manni is trapped in the
worlds of a dire fate and an unhealthy need for Geld, gold, cold cash.
Gold is the fifth colour Tykwer applies liberally from his stylistic pallette. It
symbolizes wealth, and perhaps blind materialism. Manni's telephone booth, from
which he pleads for money from friends, is gold; the Spirale sign behind him and
the door frames and checkout stalls of the Bolle market, a potential source of illgotten gain, are also gold; the sign over the door and many of the metal fittings in
the bank are also gold. The workmen carrying a large pane of glass across the
street, a precious cargo, wear gold jumpers; the rail cars Lola runs past are gold
(remember: at the beginning of the film Manni left his bag of money on a subway
car); the handles and main plate of the roulette wheel in Game 3 are a
shimmering gold, as are the numbers on the casino betting table and the bag full
of legally won money Lola carries away at the end, a treasure for her future.
Tykwer's playing with colour illustrates both the film's complicated stylistic
structure, but also the melding of high and popular art: we know the role of things
through the way they are colour coded, just like objects and characters in a
computer game.
Tykwer also emphasizes the role of time and fate in our lives. The first sound we
hear other than music is the sound of a ticking clock. The opening of the film
shows a gothic-looking clock ticking away its demonic second hand, another
demon on its main face. The film opens when the camera plunges into the mouth
of the demon on the face of the clock, warning us that the characters within it will
be swallowed up by time.
We see many clocks in the film: an old clock with green
numbers stuck on it in Lola's house at the start of the movie

(probably a postmodern clock!), a streamlined modern clock with a minimum of

ornamentation in her father's office that Lola shatters with her trademark scream,
a tiny watch with Roman numerals on an old lady Lola asks for the time as she
passes her in the street, while a huge clock, again with Roman numerals, in the
casino in the third segment announces that Lola is quickly running out of time
once again. But the mother of all clocks is the nondescript one without numbers
on the wall of the Bolle market across the street from Manni - this is the game
clock, the official timepiece. It counts down the twenty minutes in each round, just
as a digital clock counts time in computer games, determining either the player's
success or failure, or their score in the game. This clock is black and white with a
fateful-looking red second hand.
Not only is time always ticking for Lola, just as it is for any hero of a role-playing
video game, but her actions at one time affect the future fate of those she
interacts with, not to mention her success at later stages of the same game. So
it's very much a movie about causality, a point driven home at the start of the first
segment when we see on Lola's mother's television a long row of dominoes
striking each other, causing a seemingly endless series of tumbles.
On a deeper level,
the movie is about
karma. As Lola runs
into each of her
human obstacles,
she changes their
future, usually
without having any
such intention. Even
her own decisions
are crucial. In the
first interlude Lola
tells Manni that she
must make a decision about the future of their relationship, echoing the general
power of our decisions not only to change our lives, but those of others too. In
each replay of Lola's run, she encounters a standard series of obstacles, but
handles them in different ways. There are an even dozen major obstacles along
Lola's path: after leaving her boozy astrology-fixated mother sitting in their living
room, Lola encounters (1) a snarling dog and a smart-assed kid on the stairway
outside their apartment, (2) then a hot-tempered, down-and-out mother named
Doris pushing a baby carriage, (3) a black car driven by her father's associate
Herr Meyer, (4) a crowd of nuns, (5) Mike the bicycle thief, (6) the bum who took
Manni's bag, (7) the bank guard Schuster, (8) Lola's father and his secret lover
Jutta, (9) Frau Jger, a dark-haired woman at the bank, (10) an old woman

outside the bank of whom Lola asks the time, (11) a red ambulance speeding
away with its siren blaring, and finally (12) workmen crossing the street with a
large pane of glass, just before meeting Manni at the fateful intersection. As she
encounters each of these human obstacles/potential helpers in each game her
actions affect them in some way, and vice versa. Tykwer makes clear the effect
that Lola has on the lives of three of these characters with a fast series of
snapshots, accompanied by the sound of a camera shutter clicking, into that
character's possible future following their encounter. Doris, Mike and Frau Jger
are given this treatment, an odd choice given the very limited verbal interaction
Lola has with them. But perhaps not so odd at all: Tykwer may be suggesting that
karmic forces are always at work. Almost trivial interventions into the lives of
others can have monumental consequences. I'll return to these "possible futures"
in my synopsis of the film.
The relevance of these encounters is twofold as I see it: Tykwer is appealing to
the high cultural theme of causality or karma as driving the events of the film
forward, yet at the same time recycling popular culture by making Lola into a
computer game character like Lara Croft. As we play each round of a role-playing
game like Tomb Raider, we encounter the same obstacles at the same places: a
savage warrior behind a given rock, a snarling dog around a specific corner, a
hungry shark in the same pool of water. As we hit the replay button each time, we
begin to learn when and where each obstacle will appear, and how best to deal
with it. Our character may die in Game 1, but in Games 2 and 3 and so on we
begin the slow arc toward the goal or center of the game, moving on a spiral
learning curve. Tykwer symbolizes this learning process by planting several visual
references to spirals in the film: Manni's phone booth is across the street from
Spirale bar, with its spinning black and white spiral sign; in the two red interludes
we see small spiral patterns on the pillows in Lola and Manni's bed; in several
scenes (notably when Lola and Manni are cornered by the police in Game 1), the
camera itself spirals into a closeup on the main characters; and finally, the ball on
the roulette wheel in Game 3 spirals into the winning number. Again, the spiral
symbolizes both a high cultural theme, how we learn to control our fate, while at
the same time recycling a pop cultural structure, that of computer games.
Tykwer mixes high and popular culture in his overall aesthetic: his film is
structured not only by philosophical motifs like time, causality and fate, but also
by colour, by shapes, and by the way the film's soundtrack resonates with the
action. It recycles other pop cultural forms both in its overall structure and in its
specific images and the way the characters interact with each other, most
strongly the computer game and the music video. Let's have a look at the
specifics of Tykwer's postmodern pop cultural strategy by means of a synopsis of
the film, broken down into the short but important prologue and the three rounds
of Lola's karmic game.

Prologue
The brief prologue to the film is absolutely crucial heuristically. In it Tykwer lays
his philosophical cards on the table, wasting no time showing us pleasant
landscapes or some trivial details of urban life to pass the time as the credits roll.
We start with two quotes. The first, from T. S. Eliot's "Little Gidding", tells us that
despite all our ceaseless exploring, we'll wind up back where we started, and
"know the place for the first time." This evocation of life as a great cycle
represents the world-weary modernist version of the game (or perhaps even the
ancient Vedic idea of the cycle of birth, death and reincarnation), where all action
is a futile exploration of a wasteland that never ends. The second quote, by the
German soccer coach S. Herberger, simply says "After the game is before the
game." This is clearly the postmodern angst-free reading of life, an invocation to
put the ball into play without further adieu even if the game will be repeated time
and time again.
The gargoyle clock then ticks away some time, and the scene shifts to a hazy
crowd of strangers milling about. The camera picks out the film's secondary
characters one by one - they briefly become clear, going from a greyish haze to
living colour. Over these images we hear the sonorous voice of the narrator Hans
Paetsch describe man as a mysterious species looking for answers to questions
like "who are we?", "Where do we come from?", "Where are we going?", "Why do
we believe anything at all?" These are all questions driven by modernist angst.
The narrator, clearly a postmodernist, says that even if we could answer one of
these questions it will just lead to a new one. It all comes down to a simple
conclusion, one that dispenses with all those annoying meta-narratives. As the
referee/bank guard announces when his form is made clear to the camera:
The ball is round. The game lasts 90 minutes. That's a fact. Everything else is
theory... Here we go! [He kicks a soccer ball into the air]
No need for big stories here - let's just get the game going, let's play out our own
little story. The crowd of strangers, now seen from overhead, then forms the title
of the film: "Lola Rennt."
A cartoon version of a running Lola introduces the people who worked on the film.
As each name appears, the cartoon Lola smashes it like a fragile crystal. She
also encounters a snarling dog, three clocks, and a spiral. Then comes an entirely
different sequence introducing the characters and actors: we hear a camera
clicking and see mug shots of the actors from multiple angles flip around with
their real and film names listed below, clearly echoing the title screen of a
computer game introducing the main characters in a role-playing game. Then we
zoom into a satellite photo of Berlin then into Lola's apartment. The game is on.

Game 1 - The Store Robbery

In the first game, Lola takes a phone call from Manni
about his dilemma. He's a courier for drug runners, who
have given him 100,000 marks to deliver to Ronnie, their
leader. Lola is late to pick him up because her moped
has been stolen, so he takes the subway back. But
when he sees some police, he flees the subway car,
leaving the bag aboard. A bum steals it and escapes;
Manni imagines him vacationing in such exotic locales
as Bermuda, Hong Kong and Canada, the screen showing snapshots of
postcard-like photos of these places.
Lola and Manni argue on the phone. Manni sees a Bolle grocery market across
the road: he'll rob it in 20 minutes unless Lola somehow gets the money to save
him. So the game's rules are clear: twenty minutes to find 100,000 marks. As Lola
screams in frustration and shatters several bottles, we see a series of visual jokes
in her room: a Polaroid of her and Manni embracing, a row of daintily dressed
Barbie dolls at odds with Lola's rough-and-tumble physical presence, and a turtle
slowly walking across the room, perhaps referring to Zeno's paradox of Achilles
and the tortoise.(8)
The camera pans around Lola's head as she asks herself, "Wer? Wer? Wer?"
(Who? Who? Who?), trying to figure out from whom she can raise the cash.
Again, the camera work echoes video game kinetics. Her musings are ended
when a cartoon version of the casino croupier we meet in Game 3 pops up from
the bottom of the screen and says "rien ne va plus," no more bets, forcing Lola to
put the ball into play.(9) Papa! Is her first answer. Off she goes down the stairs, by
the barking dog and smart-assed kid, her first obstacle. She hits Doris the downand-out mother, who swears at her. This brings us the first of Tykwer's fast
collage of snapshots of a minor character's possible future: Doris argues with her
husband, becomes an alcoholic, has her baby taken away by social workers,
steals a baby from a stroller in the park, and is last seen running away from her
pursuers.
At Papa's office, Lola's father is speaking with his mistress Jutta, who wants him
to decide between her and his wife. Lola runs through a crowd of nuns, then
rejects Mike the bicycle thief's offer of his newly stolen bike for 50 marks. We see
one of his possible futures: he's beaten by thugs, winds up in a hospital, and
marries a cafeteria cashier he meets there. Mike's role may be yet another
cinematic joke, perhaps an ironic reference to Vittorio De Sica's The Bicycle Thief
(1948), a central foundation stone in the edifice of post-war Italian neo-realist

cinema. Certainly Tykwer is no realist, preferring the hyperreality of the video

game to a retelling of dreary tales of unemployment of poverty.
Meanwhile, Lola runs in front of the black car, which then crashes into the white
car containing Ronnie and his gangster colleagues. Every action brings forth
some sort of reaction - Lola's decisions spin a karmic web that ensnares all those
she encounters. She also passes by the bum who took Manni's bag on the
subway, oblivious to his role in the drama. In the office, Jutta reveals that she's
pregnant. The gatekeeper to her father's office at the bank is the bank guard, also
the game's referee. In the first two segments he offers sarcastic remarks upon
Lola's arrival, referring to her as "our little princess," while in Game 2 he rebukes
her haste by noting that "courtesy and composure are the queen's jewels,"
ironically comparing Lola's plight with fairy tales of troubled princes and
princesses.
Once by the gatekeeper, she runs down the office corridor, encountering a tall
woman with dark hair, Ms. Jger. We see one of her possible futures: a car
accident which cripples her, an arduous recuperation, then her suicide by the
slitting of her wrist. Lola arrives at her Papa's office and pleads with him for the
100,000 marks. Her father thinks she's crazy: he reveals that he's leaving their
family, and that Lola is a "cuckoo's egg," not his natural child. He throws her out.
The guard remarks "Well, we all have our bad days," a prescient comment on the
fact that Game 1 will fail.
Interspersed with the preceding and following events, we catch glimpses of Manni
in a phone booth begging for money from friends, and then preparing to rob the
grocery store. Lola runs towards their rendez-vous, passing a red ambulance
which slams on the breaks just in front of workmen carrying a large sheet of glass
across the street, perhaps symbolic of the fragile nature of life. The glass episode
might also be a reference to cartoons: in each segment, we wonder whether the
van will hit the glass, shattering it (it happens once, by the way), like the Coyote
splattered on the wall of a phoney painted tunnel entrance in a Roadrunner
cartoon. Yet whether or not the ambulance hits the glass is clearly connected to
previous events in Lola's game, specifically, with Lola's interaction with the driver.
Lola passes a red
and white wall
sign that looks a
bit like a roulette
wheel, asking
under her breath
for Manni to wait
for her, to have

faith in her. But he pulls out his pistol and starts the
robbery. "Where were you?" he asks as she arrives too
late. At this point we see Lola framed by green and white,
Manni by gold and red. Lola shows her commitment to
Manni by clobbering a security guard (who has pulled a
gun) with a bag full of bottles. They collect the money from the cash registers in a
red bag, a dangerous colour, and escape to the slow jazzy tune "What a
Difference a Day Makes," the only song which is out of step with the largely
techno-rock soundtrack. But they're cornered by the police in the street. Manni
throws the bag in the air, and we see it flip over and over in slow motion, perhaps
a reference to the monkey man's bone club in the opening scene of Kubrick's
2001: A Space Odyssey. An inattentive cop shoots Lola by accident in the chest,
bringing forth a splattering of blood and killing her (or so we think).
In the first of two "red interludes", we see Lola and Manni in bed, filmed though
through a red filter lense. Lola wants to know if he loves her. He tells her that he
does because she's the best woman in the world. How does he know that? He
just feels it, in his heart. Does she want to leave him? She's not sure: she has to
decide. This first interlude is about knowledge, faith, and emotional commitment.
How do we know we are committed to someone? Does faith have any basis in
the world, or just in our feelings, our heart? The question stands unresolved.
Game 2 - The Bank Job
But the game isn't over yet. Lola doesn't want to leave - she says "stop", and
returns to the scene when she tosses her red telephone away. We see her
running down the stairs as a cartoon once again, and being tripped by the smartassed kid. Then we see her in the flesh on her belly at the bottom of the stairs,
her cartoon pain having become real. She limps out to a techno song with the
lyric "wanna do the right thing," hitting Doris, causing an entirely different future
for her - she buys a winning lottery ticket, which brings her a fabulous big white
house and happiness: we see her in the final snapshot relaxing in her front yard
with her husband and child, a drink in her hand.
Lola's sprained ankle slows her down this time. She passes the nuns, who part
into two columns to allow her passage. To add to the oddity of the scene, one of
them is wearing sunglasses. Then comes the bicycle thief. Lola rejects his offer
with the prescient remark that it's stolen. How does she know? Tykwer might be
suggesting that Lola and other characters can somehow learn from past playings
of the game. Mike's second possible future sees him going through a slow
decline, winding up as a drug addict lying comatose on a washroom floor. Lola
runs over the front hood of Meyer's black car, which once again hits the white

gangsters' car, this time broadside. Lola then slams into the bum carrying Manni's
bag of money, who flees.
In the office, the discussion between Lola's father and his lover Jutta is less
pleasant than in Game 1. Jutta confesses that the unborn child may not be his, so
they argue over her infidelity. Lola brushes the bank guard aside, entering her
father's office at this inconvenient moment. Papa and Jutta resent Lola's
interruption: her father tells her to get a job if she wants money, but doesn't
mention that she's illegitimate. Lola cries, insults Jutta, then trashes the office,
storming out. The guard once again informs her that it's just not her day, perhaps
hinting that her karma in Game 2 is on the wane.
This game she tries a new strategy: she grabs the guard's gun and returns to her
father's office, taking him hostage (after firing a warning shot). She drags him out
of the office to a teller's cage in the front of the bank to demand the 100,000
marks, passing Frau Jger again in the corridor. We see her second possible
future: dinner with the bank teller, some sado-masochistic sex with leathers and a
whip, then the two of them as a happy couple walking through a park.
Even though her father warns her that the cops will come soon, Lola perseveres.
She waits for the teller to go downstairs to pick up enough cash to make the
100,000. He carefully places the money in a green garbage bag with a gold tiestring. Out the front door she goes, tossing the gun aside - but the police are lined
up behind a defensive wall of cars across the street! Surprisingly, they assume
she's not the robber and wave her away, a SWAT team cop dressed in black
dragging her to safety. Her renunciation of violence and punkish appearance
have perhaps saved her.
Lola runs to the intersection where she is to meet Manni while he waits near the
phone booth once again. She asks for a ride from the ambulance driver, which
distracts him long enough so that he hits the pane of glass being carried across
the road by the golden workmen, shattering it dramatically. Manni starts to cross
the street, his pistol tucked in his belt, just as a fateful red car passes by him. Lola
runs by a wall with a large red arrow on an aqua background (which match her
hair and shirt) pointing her way, begging in her mind for Manni to wait for her. Yet
in this game she gets there on time - Manni smiles and waves in relief when he
sees her. But just then the ambulance arrives, running him over. He lies in the
street bleeding, dying. Lola drops the green bag full of the bank's money,
shocked.
The second red interlude in bed focuses appropriately on Manni's fear of death.
What would Lola do if he were fatally ill? She jokes she'd throw him in the ocean
as shock therapy. But seriously? Manni fears she would mourn for a few weeks,
then a nice sensitive guy with green eyes (Lola's special colour) would come

along and sweep her off her feet with sympathetic words, obliterating any feelings
she ever had for Manni. Lola replies "Manni, you haven't died yet," resetting the
game once again.
Game 3 - The Casino
The third game
begins more or less
the same way: the
money bag and
phone fall down in
slow motion, Lola
runs out the door (in
each segment her
mother asks her to
buy some shampoo),
but this time she
leaps over the dog
and avoids the kid, barking back at them. We hear a techno song playing with the
lyric "I wish I were a hunter." Lola seems more self-assured and confident this
time, perhaps having learned from her mistakes.
She avoids disgruntled Doris and her baby carriage totally this time, helping to
establish an improved karmic atmosphere. In her third possible future, Doris gets
religion and becomes a born-again Christian, selling Awake! on the street corner one might note that the Buddha too wants us to awake, to become enlightened.
She runs around the nuns, but hits Mike the bicycle thief, who in his third possible
future (seen on videotape) goes to a open-air restaurant, buys some food, and
meets the bum with the money bag. "Life's crazy" says the now-wealthy bum,
who buys the stolen bike from Mike. Lola flips onto the hood of Meyer's car,
pausing there - Meyer recognizes her in this strange encounter, asking her "Is
everything OK?" This delay creates a set of domino tumbles distinct from those in
Games 1 and 2: it prevents the initial car accident of the previous two games,
allows Meyer to arrive at the bank on time for his rendez-vous with Papa, who
leave together before Lola gets there, forcing her to rethink her game strategy.
Once again, an iron law of causality governs events.
At her father's office, things are also going swimmingly for Papa and Jutta they're in love, and he agrees to have a baby with her. Yet just before Jutta is
going to announce her infidelity, Papa receives a phone call that Meyer has
arrived, an arrival made possible by the whole series of events that has
happened in Game 3 so far. He leaves the bank jauntily to meet his colleague
Meyer, missing Lola entirely. When she finally arrives, the bank guard Schuster

says cryptically "You've come at last" in one of the truly uncanny moments in the
film. They stare at each other meaningfully, Lola glaring, seeming to exercise
something like a magical "wammy"power akin to that given to fantasy game
wizards by computer game creators. Schuster's heart starts to pound, hinting at
the heart attack to come.
Karmic forces are working better for Lola and Manni this time. As Manni exits the
phone booth, he returns a borrowed phone card to a blind woman outside the
booth (she was seen in the previous two games, but didn't seem to have any
effect on events). This selfless act seems to improve Manni's karma. This time
she asks Manni to wait a few seconds, which allows him to catch sight of the bum
on his newly bought bike, riding away with Manni's sack of money. It also
prevents his being hit by the ambulance, which we see pass by Manni later on.
He chases the bum, causing Meyer's black car to swerve away and crash into
Ronnie's white car, with Meyer and Papa injured or killed. Right behind them a
man on Lola's stolen red moped wearing a white coverall and a black helmet hits
the back of the white car, his body flipping over it onto Meyer's car. Once again,
the film gives us some good old fashioned Newtonian cause-and-effect collisions,
appropriately colour coded according to a dialectic opposition of black and white,
with some red death mixed in. One might add that the moped thief is paid back,
karmically speaking, for his thievery.
As Lola runs, she asks "What can I do? Help me! I'm waiting," appealing to some
sort of inner voice, the gods, or the universe. She's stopped in her tracks by a
huge white tanker truck with a green license plate and letters on the fender
(Lola's colours). Lola glances across the street to see her salvation: a casino,
whose sign consists of huge white letters. She runs inside up a red carpet to a
booth where chips can be bought for use in the casino. She only has 99 marks
and change, but needs a 100-mark chip - the teller gives it to her, another
indicator of positive karma. Once in the main hall of the casino, Lola bets on 20
Black in a roll of the roulette wheel, an obvious reference to the 20-minute time
limit of each of the three games. She wins 3,500 marks. In one brief shot we see
all the main colours on Tykwer's cinematic palette: the red and black of the
wheel's numbers, its gold handles, the green velvet betting table, and green and
white chips.
The roulette wheel is no doubt a metaphor for the wheel of fortune, which can
bring great success or dismal failure. Its ball spirals into the center of the game,
into victory or defeat for the player. Lola lets her money ride on 20 Black again. A
well dressed security man tries to evict her, but she asks for "just one more
game," another multi-level remark on her fate in the film as a whole. She uses the
same "wammy" power she used with the bank guard to cow him into awestruck
submission. Lola emits her trademark ear-piercing scream that causes the

casino's patrons to cover their ears, their wine glasses smashing. Sure enough,
Lola wins again, leaving the casino with the loot she has won with the aid of her
fantastic powers, just as a character in a fantasy game uses a magic crystal or a
spell to overcome an obstacle. The amazed crowd looks on as she leaves, the
camera panning up to a huge clock which shows four minutes to high noon.

Meanwhile, Manni runs after the bum on the bike, threatening him with his gun to
stop him. He retrieves his money bag, giving the bum his gun. The ambulance
stops before hitting the glass, and Lola climbs in the back to see a medic
frantically pumping the heart of a man dying from a heart attack: it's the bank
guard. The heart monitor is a luminescent green. Lola holds his hand, giving him
hope and faith - his heartbeat becomes regular, amazing the medic. Her green
power of nature triumphs over the red of blood and death.
She gets out at the intersection across from the Bolle market, but Manni isn't
there. The cars parked along the street are all black and white, except for one red
one, another of Tywer's chromatic jokes. Up pulls Ronnie's car. Manni gets out,
seemingly once again in Ronnie's good books. He casually announces that
everything's OK, asking a surprised-looking Lola if she ran there. She carries a
gold bag with her winnings from the casino - a treasure for an uncertain future.
The last line in the film is a bemused Manni asking Lola, "what's in the bag?"

Then the white credits roll from the bottom of the black screen up as a large red
word "ENDE" snakes from right to left over the screen. (10)
Conclusion
Run Lola Run, as we've seen, is a fine
piece of postmodern film making. It uses
a fast-paced editing style, a techno
soundtrack, and a variety of cinematic
techniques such as the colour
associations mentioned above to place it
in a cultural no man's land between
computer games, music videos, and
traditional action films. On the more
superficial level, the film emphasizes
style over substance, even though the
screenplay gives us a highly structured
narrative. We get caught up in the hunt, mesmerized by the film's pace and
frenetic style. It also uses pastiche and cultural recycling of non-cinematic forms,
notably computer role-playing games like Tomb Raider and Final Fantasy.
Philosophically, the film rejects moral or metaphysical meta-narratives, as the
prologue makes clear. As a species, we don't know where we come from or
where we're going. Yet we do know one thing: the ball is round, and the game
lasts 90 minutes (81 minutes in the film's case). The rest is theory, as the referee
announces. In other words, we have a single life to live, and its up to us as
players to play the game as well as we can.
Yet the core of the film is its hyperreal or virtual aesthetic. Lola is able to replay
the fateful twenty minutes of her quest for the treasure that will save Manni's life
three times. She appears to learn from mistakes made in previous games, just as
a player of a role-playing video game learns where the various traps and
obstacles are located in a tomb or ruin they're exploring. This learning process
also involves her improving as a person, definitely behaving more altruistically in
the third game. Both she and Manni are resurrected once from the dead, not in
religious or supernatural terms, but like video game characters - by hitting the
reset button.
This idea of repetition can also be linked to not so postmodern ideas, the
Buddhist concepts of the great Wheel of Becoming and of karma. (11) The wheel
symbolizes how samsara, sense experience, is forever in flux, and how our
failure to escape from desire, ignorance, and grasping chains us to dukkha, or
suffering. Positive actions bring about good karma, while actions which increase
suffering pay us back with bad karma. Yet it's up to us how we spin the wheel of

becoming, how we choose a given set of actions that will have a specific effect on
others. And it's clear that Lola's more enlightened decisions in Game 3 help to
improve her karma and thereby allow her to escape from the cycle of death and
rebirth, of replaying the same game over and over again, seen in Games 1 and 2.
In the film Lola is caught up in a great wheel of fate, as symbolized by the roulette
wheel in Game 3. This is foreshadowed by the scenes in Game 1 when the
camera spins around her head as she runs through in her mind people she can
ask for the money, and later when she runs by a large red-and-white poster on a
wall that looks like either a circle of triangles on a roulette wheel or the Imperial
Japanese war ensign. Her actions change each time, influencing those she
encounters, even if it's only fleetingly. And sometimes the changes she brings
about are dramatic: Mike the bicycle thief goes from marriage to hopeless drug
addiction between Games 1 and 2, while Doris shifts from an alcoholic stupor to a
big lottery win in the same transition. Life's crazy, as Norbert von Au, the
comically named bum, tells us. In the end she wins her karmic video game,
carrying away her bag of gold in one hand, holding Manni's hand with the other.
Just as she fantastically beats the roulette game twice, in the end she earns a
double victory, gaining both wealth and love. Run Lola Run is thus the first
combination computer game/music video/karmic action film, surely something
worth taking note of.