Fixing the Future by Returning to the Past
Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run
By Charlie Bertsch
Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run resonates differently today.
It became the most successful German film of 1998 by breaking with mainstream conventions without forgetting that even adventurous moviegoers want to be entertained.
Over a quarter century later, the novelty has waned. Although Run Lola Run remains a compelling tale, it can be hard to understand why the film made such a big impression.
Recovering the sense of discovery that Run Lola Run (the German title is just “Lola Runs”) inspired during its theatrical release demands a kind of time travel, taking us back to a world before the Internet was flooded with an infinite supply of motion pictures.
Perceiving a passage back through time, whatever the instrument, is always meaningful. But when it happens in conjunction with a story that is self-reflexive about returning to the beginning of something, the experience is particularly profound.
And Run Lola Run is, first and foremost, a story about recursion, the feedback loops that make progress possible by repeating a procedure until failure becomes success.
The story begins with a phone call, during which Lola (Franka Potente), in a stunning performance, learns that her boyfriend, Manni, a low-level operative in the criminal underworld, has lost a plastic bag containing 100,000 Deutschmarks that he must deliver to his boss, Ronnie.
Manni is disconsolate. He berates himself for having made a terrible mistake, yet also blames Lola for it. She was supposed to pick him up with their moped, but did not show up at their scheduled rendezvous because someone had stolen it while she was purchasing cigarettes en route.
Left to his own devices, Manni decided to walk to an underground station. Once on the train, however, he panicked at the sight of transit police and rushed out onto the platform. Only once the doors closed did he realise that he had left the bag on the train. A keen-eyed “bum”—Manni’s term—spirited the bag away before it could be retrieved.
Making matters even more dire, Manni is due to hand off the bag in only twenty minutes. Unless he somehow produces the money, he tells her, Ronnie will murder him.
The rest of Run Lola Run is devoted to Lola’s valiant effort to save her boyfriend’s life. In contrast to a conventional telling of this story, however, we get to see it unfold three times instead of one.
After Lola fails the first time, dying herself, and the second time, witnessing Manni’s death, the famous saying “Third time’s the charm” proves true.
Although all three segments contain the same basic elements, slight differences in the timing of Lola’s arrival at locations on her route lead to different outcomes, not only for her and Manni but also for some of the film’s minor characters.
One of Run Lola Run’s most noteworthy innovations is the use of a rapid-fire series of still photographs to project the future of different people Lola encounters. In some cases, we witness more than one of these flash-forwards for the same individual, implying that even a tiny change in the protagonist’s behaviour can have a massive “butterfly effect” on others.
While a one-time viewer of the film might conclude that the three segments are mutually exclusive, closer inspection demonstrates that they are cumulative. For example, in the first segment, Manni has to explain to Lola how to remove the safety from the gun she is holding, whereas in the second segment, she already knows how to do it herself.
We get the sense, amplified by animated sequences depicting a stylised Lola, that she is acting like a character in a video game who fails to meet a challenge in one playthrough, only to figure out a way to overcome it during her next attempt.
Although Run Lola Run facilitates conventional cinematic identification, its nod to this process of trial and error makes our investment feel more active, as if we could steer its eponymous protagonist in the right direction.
The iterative nature of Lola’s story mirrors that of Run Lola Run’s audience. For most people, watching the film once will result in a partial understanding at best.
It’s only through repetitive consumption, gradually assembling more concrete evidence from the film, that moviegoers are likely to connect enough dots to grasp the film’s true significance.
Perhaps the most important realisation that emerges after several careful viewings is that Run Lola Run is actually a tale of time travel.
Tykwer makes it relatively easy for audiences to perceive a connection between Run Lola Run and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, providing a series of clues that culminate in the third segment with a painting that features the same spiral hairstyle that Madeline fixates on in the 1958 film.
Run Lola Run in a chain of association running from French director Chris Marker’s almost motion-free short film La Jetée through David Lynch’s television series Twin Peaks, Terry Gilliam’s 1995 picture 12 Monkeys and numerous other tales that revolve around an attempt to fix the future by returning to the past.
Indeed, Run Lola Run is such a satisfyingly visceral experience that it seems to resist the mode of consumption required to notice these connections, much less ponder their significance.
First of all, the plot of the film turns on a role reversal that defies the expectations imposed by moviegoers’ knowledge of cinematic conventions.
Manni functions as the stereotypical damsel in distress, seemingly doomed unless Lola finds a way to save him. During their phone conversation, he is the one who is hysterical. She does her best to calm him down, reminding him that she is a problem-solver.
Two other women in the film exhibit this take-charge behaviour.
The woman Lola’s wealthy father is having an affair with is the head of his bank’s board of directors. In the first segment, she confronts him about his refusal to choose her over his unhappy marriage, informing him that she is pregnant with his child.
More importantly, from the standpoint of Lola’s quest, the blind woman who lends Manni her phone card so that he can make calls offers him crucial guidance in the third and final segment, helping him to notice that the man who took his bag on the train is passing by on a bicycle.
Broadly speaking, the men in Run Lola Run are depicted as less capable than the women, prone to making rash decisions. Their behaviour exemplifies masculinity in crisis. But the film makes this point more effectively by not making a big deal out of it. The energy released by this break with convention makes us more invested in the narrative without mobilising our defences.
Many Germans also found Run Lola Run invigorating because it is set in Berlin without being about Berlin. After decades of Cold War narratives that turned on the city’s divided status, the film takes Germany’s biggest city for granted.
Following nearly a decade as the capital-in-waiting, while Bonn continued to serve as the base for most national government functions, Berlin was poised to reclaim its traditional role by the end of the 1990s.
Yet nothing in Run Lola Run indicates an interest in the city’s functional rebirth. On the contrary, we are presented with a continuation of pre-reunification West Berlin, a rather dated-looking and sometimes downright dirty Großstadt gone small.
For a nation accustomed to heavy-handed allegory, the tale of a privileged but determined rebel, the hapless hoodlum she loves, and the seemingly apolitical people they confront signalled the dawn of a new age for Germany, pointed once again towards the future instead of the past, putting an end to the penitent navel-gazing of the postwar years.
Tykwer’s inventive approach to filmmaking, his willingness to embrace new ideas, certainly reinforces this notion. If Run Lola Run evokes any past Berlin, it is the city’s years as a locus of postwar cultural ferment in the late 1970s and early 1980s, after the presence of the Wall had become naturalised and before the first indications that it might not last forever started shimmering on the horizon.
While Run Lola Run’s depiction of Berlin may not seem connected to its treatment of gender, the fact that it also involves a role reversal looms large. Even if the city is about to reclaim its prewar status on paper, its power has been decoupled from patriarchy.
This makes the film’s rejection of the allegories Germans had come to expect feel allegorical, anticipating both the rise of politicians like Angela Merkel and the backlash against their cool-headed leadership that would eventually result in a resurgent far-right movement.
The conclusion of Run Lola Run’s third and final segment is remarkably prescient.
Lola somehow manages to raise the money she needs to save Manni’s life and arrive in time for him to deliver it to Ronnie. But when she meets him, he tells her that there is nothing to worry about. He has recovered the original plastic bag without her help.
As we watch the impact of this knowledge play across Lola’s face, we can see her wondering whether to tell him about her windfall.
Maybe Lola would be better off leaving the drama Manni represents behind. Maybe it would be better to keep running.
Screenshot courtesy of X Filme Creative Pool. All rights reserved.