0472113844-ch11

Tom Tykwers Run Lola Run and theUsual Suspects: The Avant-Garde,Popular Culture, and History

Barbara Kosta

Tom Tykwers 1998 lm Run Lola Run has surprised even the mosthardened critics of German cinema. As many have noted with unin-hibited astonishment, it is rare that a German lm is so clever whilebeing an absolute pleasure to watch. The lm has swept box ofcesand, with a budget of 3 million marks, has managed to run in overforty countries as well as win numerous lm prizes.1 The lm haslaunched its director into the international limelight and has fullledmost every contemporary German lmmakers dream.

Why has Lola been such a box-ofce success? An important factor,no doubt, is Franka Potentes performance as the aming redheadedLola, who participates in an all-out race against time to save herboyfriend, Manni. She is a hipster, a young tearaway Lola, asRobert Falcon writes.2 In a lm review in the fashion magazineBazaar, Richard Rayner describes Potente as a performer of poten-tially mythic charisma. In addition to her magnetic quality, he attrib-utes the lms success to its accomplished deployment of the nest ofEuropean avant-garde traditions combined with Hollywoods pacing;to use his words, the lm brings Hollywood pizzazz to the Europeanart movie.3 Other critics, equally enthusiastic, zoom in on the lmsGermanness and applaud its profound philosophical musings onchance and time (Tykwer studied philosophy) and its hermeneutic andcinematographic depth. Tom Whalen is fascinated by the lms ludicspirit willing to see life and art as a game. Its as tightly wound andplayful as a Tinguely machine and constructed with care. He is quickto note that the lm leaps lightly over the typical Teutonic metaphys-ical mountains.4 There seems to be something in this lm for every-

165

oneromantics, rave enthusiasts, chaos theorists, adrenaline freaks,lm critics, and scholarseveryone except lmmaker/actor DetlevBuck, a one-time hopeful for a new German cinema. In his estimation,the lm leaps far beyond the national boundaries of German issues:Run Lola Run doesnt have anything [shit] to say about Germany. Itis pure entertainment.5 In other words, to cite Niklas Luhmannsunderstanding of entertainment, which seems to complement Bucks, itis one component of modern leisure culture, charged with the func-tion of destroying superuous time.6

Luhmanns and Bucks statements reveal a deeply ingrained beliefin an unbridgeable divide between entertainment and having some-thing to say about Germany. Their statements echo a modernist dis-trust of mass culture, a fear of selling out, and express a troubled rela-tionship between German national identity and Americanization orcommercialization that seems to be a German issue. When Buck usesthe term einen Dreck (smut/shit), he seems to be referring to mass cul-ture as the abject, as kitsch, and to be seeing the lm as a version of anold-fashioned love song disguised in techno beats. Is Buck lamentingthe end of the New German Cinema and/or of a cinema invested inproducing an oppositional public sphere and a general turn to Holly-wood? For critics who still work within the mass culture paradigm,popular culture, as opposed to high art, still has the reputation ofbeing formulaic, as lacking critical insight and complexity. It is made inthe United States and produced solely for mass consumption, that is,prot. As John Storey notes: The claim that popular culture is massAmerican culture has a long history within the theoretical mapping ofpopular culture.7

Tykwer belongs to a generation of Germans that embraces popularculture rather than criticizes it as a colonization of the mind and a formof cultural imperialism, as Wenders and his generation of lmmakersmaintained during the 1970s and 1980s. Yet Tykwers postmodernmerging of diverse art forms and genres and his incorporation of U.S.popular culture (comics, Westerns, slapstick, editing techniques) func-tion as boundary breaking and liberating in their potential to launchviewers into the realm of fantasy. Tykwer traverses national bound-aries in his choice of aesthetic practices and seems to relish his role as abricoleur of the cultural offerings that this German-American mergeraffords. Thus, while Run Lola Run is entertaining, it does say quite abit about the new Germany, about its cinematic aspirations and theturn it has taken, and about the image that the new nation wants toproject for its own consumption as well as for its international audi-

166 German Pop Culture

ences. In addition, the fast-paced editing that dees memory and thatlocks the spectator into the present may be saying even more aboutcontemporary Germany than Buck is loath to admit. It reects on con-temporary Germanys relationship to history, which I will discusslater. Rather than just killing superuous time, it seems that time aswell as placein its specicity as well as its indistinctnessare of theessence in Run Lola Run. First, Lola only has twenty minutes to comeup with one hundred thousand marks in order to save her petty-crimi-nal boyfriend, Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu), from the hands of the racke-teer Ronnie, whose money Manni accidentally left in the subway trainwhen he tried to escape a policeman checking tickets. A street person(Joachim Krl) consequently becomes the lucky recipient of the bag.

The story that ensues gets replayed three times with slight variationsthat affect different outcomes. Besides the obsessive attention totimeclocks are everywherethe lm itself is largely a product of itsown time. Instead of shying away from popular culture, it subscribes toa pop culture wave that has come to dene the literary scene in con-temporary Germany. Pop is the key to the present, as ThomasAssheuer woefully notes.8 The indulgent meshing of art and commer-cialism, sensation and surfaces, music and images belongs to pop cul-tures allure and success. The lm incorporates the elements of popularculture that are nonconformist, rebellious (Lolas scream), and subver-sive and that test mainstream forms of representation. And, as far asplace is concerned, Tykwer insists that the lm is a Berlin lma citythat is as much in progress as it is a product of the new millennium andglobalization. The fast-paced editing that lends vitality to the urbansetting and its resilient and determined protagonist Lola suggest a newcultural identity in a postwall era that is local as much as it is global inits multicultural setting. Tykwer develops a new formal language torepresent the New Berlin and a new direction in German lmmakingthat goes with it. Out of the union of Hollywood pizzazz and theEuropean art lm emerges a complex visual commentary on fantasy,narrative, and history.

Run Lola Run represents a new Germany unhinged from its all toofamiliar narratives. It is a highly self-conscious collage of lmic stylesand genres that are brought into tension with one another, exploited,reinforced, undercut, and challenged simultaneously. Ironically, theexplosion that is said to signal Lolas and Mannis love for each other,which Thomas D sings about in Komm zu mir (Come to me),expressed as we shattered every framework [Rahmen] when we cametogether; it was like an explosion. I still feel the jolt, reveals a seismic

Tom Tykwers Run Lola Run and the Usual Suspects 167

disintegration of classical narrative forms.9 Tykwer brazenly dips intothe grab bag of cinematic genres and trends and samples and exploitstheir potential while breaking with them. The lms visual playfulnessand its copious allusions to game (roulette and video games) and risktaking emphasize a wild and reckless pleasure in experimenting withcinemas recently discovered possibilities. Lolas hybridity is reectedin the run-together title of an interview with Tykwer by Michael Tte-berg that accompanies the lm script. Tteberg calls it A romantic-philosophical actionloveexperimentalthriller.10 Tykwer merges genresand styles only to dismiss their limitations. The emerging visual/narra-tive arrangement reveals a fundamental suspicion of narrative thatallies his aesthetic project with early avant-garde cinema. He reveals: Idid not want one moment in the lm that was motivated by dra-maturgy, but rather directness and spontaneity (130). The plot thatserves as a mere skeleton is condensed into the rst few minutes of thelm. It offers just enough glue to hold together the visual kaleido-scopewhile it unglues its protagonists, Lola and Manni, from therealm of realism.

Tykwer resorts to a variety of avant-garde aesthetic practices and indoing so acknowledges contemporary cinemas debt to itscinematic/phantasmatic precursors. Particularly, the suggestive saluteto repetition through the lms thrice-told structure alludes to a returnto the forms of visual experimentation associated with the invention ofcinema. The possibilities inherent in a liberal exploration of a panoplyof styles, and use of intertextuality in order to produce new experiencesand perspectives are anticipated in the quote taken from the modernisticon T. S. Eliots Little Gidding that introduces the lm: We shallnot cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be toarrive where we started and know the place for the rst time. The useof the spirals (movement) throughout the lm, for example, is a visualreference to Fritz Langs M; the painting of the womans head frombehind in the casino is a tribute to Hitchcocks Vertigo, which Tykwerincludes among his favorite lms. The lm also returns to the variousavant-garde styles in its use of montage, split screen, and slantedangles. Let us for a moment consider the suggestive detail of the avant-gardes inuence beginning with the Man Ray photograph entitledGlass Tears in Lolas apartment or the glorication of speed andmomentum that could be ascribed to the futurists. Tykwer actuallyclaims that if the title had not been Run Lola Run it may have beenSpeed.11 The fascination with movement and time at the end of thetwentieth century resonates with the futurist manifesto that Filippo


Marinetti, founder of the futurist movement in 1909, expressed asSpeed is our God, the new canon of beauty; a roaring motorcar,which runs like a machine gun.12

The fast-paced editing, the innovative thrice-told story, the transna-tional techno beat that energizes the visuals, and the variety of mediaanimation, video, and 35 mm stock, as well as time-lapse effects, ash-forwards and various editing techniques, and photography(stop-motion photography pioneered by Mlis, chief in the develop-ment of trick effects in the emergent cinema)is the arsenal needed toproduce the fantasy that is bound by the convention of ninety minutes.Run Lola Run cashes in on the postmodern mantra of everythinggoes and entertains the multiple options implicit in constructing astory, a notion that a number of lmmakers have tested (RamissGroundhog Day [1993], Tarantinos Pulp Fiction [1994], and HowitttsSliding Doors [1998]). Most importantly, it builds on cinemas essentialpremise of fantasy or make-believe that is the juice of popular culture.Cinema is the site of desirea dream machine.

Tykwers description of the image that inspired the lm is one thatconates movement, emotion, and the female body:

There was the image of a woman running, who for me representedthe primal image [Urbild ] of cinema because it connects dynamismand emotion. You conceptualize a dynamic series of events that maybe viewed as only mechanical and that you simultaneously infusewith emotion. I imagined a woman with red hair and her hair had toblow and she had to project desperation and passion.13

The lm thus explores the cinematic medium and uses Lola as its vehi-cle. She literally embodies the animated image and the essence of cin-ema. Intrinsic to Tykwers understanding of cinema is the idea that themoving image is magical, which means that it is not bound to a time-space continuum. Lola is the fantasy, the specularized body thatarouses pleasure; she is the source of visual pleasure that is erotic in itspotential to seduce. At the same time, Lola is the new woman: athletic,determined, and powerful.

The lm begins with a cartoon of a female gure who enters a timetunnel and smashes all of the obstacles in her pathdemons, spiderwebs, and clocksuntil she is swept into the spiraling time tunnel. Asa cartoon gure, Lola is aggressive and tenacious, a new tough girl anda national hero. Her metamorphosis into a real image emphasizesthe invention of the character, and her transformation from cartoon to


real image places her rmly in the realm of the imaginary. Her redhair and the other vibrant high-gloss colors of the mise-en-scne (theyellow subway, the phone booth) resemble the primary colors used incomics. They stand in contrast to the muted colors in the video footageused to set Lola off from other minor characters who are locked in con-ventional narratives. Interestingly, Lola bears a striking resemblanceto Leeloo, the female character in French lmmaker Luc Bessons 1997lm The Fifth Element. The renowned comic book artists Moebius andJean-Claude Mezieres provided his visual designs. Like most cartooncharacters, Lola overcomes obstacles; her greatest power is her deter-mination, her ability to change the course of the narrative and to resistdeath. When she is shot in the rst round, or when Manni gets run overby an ambulance in the second round, Lola wills away their death andbegins her quest anew. She also can mend a broken heart or, rather,rescue the guard who has suffered a heart attack by the touch of herhand. More importantly, she does get the money to save Manni withinthe allotted twenty minutesa preposterous and insurmountable taskthat she is able to fulll. And she certainly can run.

Besides endowing Lola with supernatural powers, the cartoon self-consciously represents the animated image (Lola running) and placesthe lm at the juncture between avant-garde and popular culture. Bysetting up the lm as a cartoon, Tykwer plays with the unlimitedpotential of animated lms, which, as Roger Cordinal suggests, sup-press the categories of normal perception; indeed its logic might evenbe to suppress all differential categories, and annihilate the very condi-tions of rationality.14 The cartoon launches the viewer into a fantasyworld in which anything is possible, any game can be won, any obsta-cles overcome, any evil destroyed. As William Marston, the creator ofWonder Woman, wrote in 1943, comics defy the limits of acceptedfact and convention, thus amortizing to apoplexy the ossied arteriesof routine thought.15 The cartoon enables Lola; it lends her the powerto perform the impossible, anchors her in the world of fantasy, leadsher audience into a collective dream world.

To be sure, the cartoon also anticipates Lolas boundary-breakingmovement through the metropolis that captivates her audience. In RunLola Run, the female body commands the urban space and breaks withthe spatial connes that dene traditional femininity. Lolas image issharply juxtaposed with that of her mother, who is dressed in a pinknegligee and who functions as an ornament in the private sphere.Lolas stride carries her through the eastern and western parts ofBerlin. She thus dees spatial logic in terms of the ground she covers in


Berlin, as Margit Sinka precisely observes: Tykwer forcibly mergesareas scattered throughout Berlin, thereby articially creating spatialunity where none exists.16 But Lola also dees spatial logic in terms ofthe clearly gendered messages that spaces transmit. Lola takes over thespace of the metropolis and appropriates it in a way that her moresedentary namesake, Lola Lola in von Sternbergs 1930 lm The BlueAngel, could never dream of, even though they both seem to be madefor love/consumption. In sharp contrast to Lola, Manni is stationary,limited to the phone booth where he must remain while Lola attemptsto restore equilibrium. He is trapped and infantilized through hisdependence on Lola (the phone cord is like an umbilical cord) and theblind woman (played by Moritz Bleibtreus mother, Monica Bleib-treu). The space that encloses him is claustrophobic and undermineshis manliness (Manniness). And, more unusually, he must wait forLola and consequently must subscribe to a trope that traditionally isreserved for the female character. He challenges her to perform hergendered role so that Lola must prove her love and return events totheir status quo. You see, he charges,

I knew that you wouldnt have any bright ideas either. I told youthat somethingll happen one day and that you wont know how toget out of it either. Not if you die sooner! So much for love beingable to do everything, except for conjuring up 100,000 marks in 20minutes.17

Manni invokes the love conquers all myth, which gets played outtime and again in popular renditions of romance. It is one that RunLola Run falls back on because, as Tykwer admits, he needed to fuelthe image with emotion. The question is whether the lm features loveas its primary interest or exhausts the conventional narrative of love.

Do visual innovation and eclectic structure and, more importantly,animation, which should complicate the issue of realism, only deceivethe viewer into believing/fantasizing that something new is taking placeand that traditional sensibilities are being tested and its narrativesundone? Do the fast-paced editing and the lms pseudo-philosophicalbent actually mask the emotional economy that sparks the narrativeand that sets Lola running, or does that economy get left in the wakeof the run? What is at the heart of the very sparse narrative? Is it theromance between Lola and Manni? Or does the lm exploit the powerof cartoons, which Sherrie Inness places at the cutting edge of explor-ing new denitions of gender because of their marginalization.18 The


juxtaposition of genre, avant-garde aesthetics, and the spectacle of thefemale body racing through the metropolis, energized by techno music,guarantees for the lms rapture. But what are the fantasies that thelm produces, and do they allow for a new image of gender? Do gen-der coordinates get recoded?

Romance

The lm irts with the compulsions of the past, as in the narrative ofromantic love. Manni and Lolas relationship is visually underscoredby the shot of Mattels Barbie and Ken dolls that the camera sights inLolas room after Mannis phone call. The brief shot of the dolls (a cre-ation of the 1950s) ironically comments on the repertoire of love fan-tasies that girls rehearse and perform and establishes these culturalicons as xtures of the popular imagination. It also launches the repre-sentation of Lola and Mannis relationship into the realm of play andfantasy, where gender gets negotiated. The lm constantly employs,undercuts, and edges along the narrative conventions of romance with-out getting itself caught in its clichs. It can hardly be disputed thatLola runs to save Manni, but it is signicant that the primacy of Lolasimage racing through Berlin, her hyper-presence, eclipses the actualreason for her running and undermines the lms interest in romance.The crosscuts of Lola and Manni and the split-screen image functionto remind the viewer, who is engrossed in her exuberant sprint throughthe metropolis, of Lolas goal. The techno music functions similarly.19

In fact, when Lola dashes into her fathers ofce to ask him for themoney, the fathers befuddled responseWho is Manni?chipsaway at Mannis signicance.

The lm features assorted genres that stage romantic lovefairytale, melodrama, and soap opera. They appear as signposts alongLolas route, which the lm encounters and undoes. When Lola burstsin on her father, she nds him entangled in a bourgeois melodrama.Shot in close-ups to lend the scenes an atmosphere of intimacy, and inextreme close-ups that create a sense of claustrophobia, the tempestu-ous drama between her father (Herbert Knaup) and his lover unfoldswith each episode. The viewer learns that the overworked breadwinneris estranged from his home. His lover and colleague, Jutta Hansen(Nina Petri), needs to know whether he is prepared to leave his wife forher. The plot thickens as we learn that she is pregnant, but it is not hisbiological child. Ironically, his story gets repeated because, as Lolands out, she is ein Kuckucksei (not his biological child). The repeti-


tion reects the inherent circular thematic structure of melodrama orsoap operas. The subplot of the fathers adulterous liaison is shot witha more coarsely grained lm stock than the shots of Lolas run. Themuted colors in these scenes lend a television-like quality to the image.Signicantly, the melodramatic romance retards the ecstatic pace thatLolas goal demands. In effect, it presents an obstacle to Lolas run-ning and delays the visual pleasure it provides. The same holds true forthe shots of Lola and Manni in bed, which are staged twice betweenruns. Tykwer refers to these scenes as the lms heart. With Manni andLola lying on spiral-print pillows, the intimate close-ups, shot with redgel on the lamps, show them talking about love and death. The hesaysshe says dialogue after the rst run reveals the intangibility oflove and Lolas uncertainty; after the second run Manni asks Lolawhat she would do if he died (producing a hypothetical script) and con-cludes that life goes on. The scenes are static and tedious relative to theexciting kaleidoscope of images that display Lolas dart throughBerlin.

The tale of romantic love gets spun differently in relation to theguard, Schuster (Armin Rohde), who literally kicks off the game, thelm, and the odyssey with the soccer ball. Tykwer threads a fairytalelike relationship to Lola into each encounter with him. Each timeLola arrives at the bank, the guard promotes her. At rst he sarcasti-cally calls her the princess of the house (Holla, holla, Lolalola, dieHausprinzessin, welch seltenes Glck); the second time around he lec-tures her on the virtues of a queen; the third time around he proclaims,youre nally here darling. Lola runs on. Schuster stands still, andthe soundtrack is mixed with the loud pounding of his heart. WhenLola revives him in the ambulance, which she hops into when it crossesher path, she assures the paramedic: I belong to him.

Is three times a charm, as we learn from fairy tales? Will love con-quer all? The mistrust of narrative convention peaks in the third andnal performance of Lolas run. At rst she seems to negotiate betterthe obstacles she encounters and to gain strength. At the outset of thethird run, she leaps over the dog and growls back, yet when she ndsthat she has missed her father at the bank her powers wane. As a lastresort, Lola surrenders agency and appeals to a higher being: Comeon. Help me. Please. Just this one time. Im just going to continue run-ning, OK. Im waiting. She closes her eyes and runs into the street.Trafc screeches to a halt, and a truck driver who has just missed heryells: Whats wrong, are you sick of life? But Lola trusts in fantasy.She has put her life on the line in order to save Manni. Her reward is


the discovery of a casino, where, despite all odds, Lola wins one hun-dred thousand marks. The camera that anticipated the roulette gameat the beginning of the lm with the image of Lola turning has comefull circle. The black ball falls twice on the number 20. Twenty has nowbecome her lucky number instead of leading to Mannis demise. Yet,when Lola arrives with the cash, she sees Manni exiting Ronnies car ingood spirits. With the help of the blind womana reference to theblind man in Langs M who leads the police to the serial killerMannidiscovers the street person bicycling past the phone booth and recoversthe bag of money. His brief sprint, much shorter than Lolas, ends upbeing as fruitful.

Noticing Lolas fatigue, he asks whether she ran. Lolas race againsttime turns out to be superuous. In other words, the convention of thehappy ending necessitates a restoration of equilibrium and of a tradi-tional gender arrangement and, last but not least, a casino. It is happy,at least, within the logic of the overarching narrative but is ultimatelydisappointing because it undermines Lolas success. Manni hasregained his mobility, restored his masculinity, and taken control of hiscircumstance. Yet this perfunctory ending falls short of the complexvisual spectacle that has dominated the lm. The ending, spurious atbest, is a self-conscious reenactment of a Hollywood convention. Whatis more, the happy ending is unsettled by the nal image of Lola, whoremains detached and reserved and does not arouse condence in thisunion of the heart as suggested in the song Komm zu mir. Loladoes not respond to Mannis question concerning the contents of herbag. She has a mysterious and mischievous Mona Lisalike smile thatremains open-ended and uncompromised by the convention of thehappy ending. The spectator and Lola share the knowledge of her abil-ities, while Manni remains clueless. After approximately eighty-oneminutes, the lm is over. Lola has one hundred thousand marks in thebag and has won the game on her own terms. She remains an image offantasy that is not reabsorbed into the convention of the happy hetero-sexual couple. Lola retains a transcendent quality that is captured in thenon-diegetic lyrics sung by Franka Potente at various times throughoutthe lm in which she enumerates all of the things she wishes she were.She shouts: I wish I were. Her wish list includes wanting to be ahunter, a starship, a princess, a ruler, a writer, a prayerall powerfulimages that energize the visual representation of Lola. She has brokenboundaries just like the lm. The excitement ceases but identities havebeen transformed, and another female image can be added to the reper-toire of representations that feeds popular culture.


History

For all of Tykwers technical innovation, his recourse to avant-gardetraditions and to popular culture, and his challenge to conventionalnarrative forms, the question that remains is whether this game allowsfor a transition into another way of living. In other words, to return toDetlev Bucks assertion, what else does the lm have to say about Ger-many other than to call for a new type of German cinema (that dis-misses history)? The relationship of the lm to Germanys history isambivalent indeed. With the exception of the traditional narratives(melodrama, romance, and so forth) that she encounters, Lola is barelyimpeded. Unlike the New German Cinema or the German heritagelms, which Lutz Koepnick discusses in the present volume, it issignicant that Run Lola Run hardly concerns itself with history,except when it trips Lola up. She is late in meeting Manni not onlybecause her moped was stolen but also because a taxi driver mistakenlytook her to the Grunewald Street in the eastern part of Berlin ratherthan the one in the western part. The mix-up reects a postunicationconfusion owing to the divide that still exists between the eastern andwestern parts of Berlin. Besides this one explicit reference to history,history, for the most part, is only visually insinuated. For instance,Lola sails past the Garnison Cemetery (in the east) at the beginning ofeach segment. At the end of the third segment, she barrels across theGendarmenmarkt (in the east). Her race against time (and thus his-tory) then takes her over the Oberbaumbrckea border crossing forGermans during the time of the walland past the Friederichsstrasseand Kochstrasse (in the west) that bordered Checkpoint Charliethecrossing points between East and West Berlin before the fall of the wallfor citizens of allied nations. These sites and spaces are traversed, andit may be argued that the past and present are visually connected. Yetwhile Lolas twenty-minute sprint (a tribute to the end of the twentiethcentury) takes her past these sites, she never takes them in or reects onthem. Unlike Walter Benjamins angel of history, who looks back inshock at the pile of debris that history has left and desires to return tox it but cannot, Lola is oriented toward the future.20 Her stride is res-olute and unwavering; she never gazes back. The piles of bricks andopen ditches, the construction sites that she passes, represent renewal.Berlin, Germanys new capital, stands for the future of a new Ger-many. Berlin is a city under construction that must reinvent itself, andLola becomes its agenta superhero of the contemporary Germancultural scene.


The rst cut on the CD soundtrack, which is not included in the lmbut accompanies it, is entitled Believe. It begins with an inventory of the things in which the female protagonist does not believe. She doesnot believe in trouble, silence, panic, fear, history, truth, chance,prophecy, or destiny. She does, however, believe in fantasy, the stuff ofpopular culture. It is a type of fantasy that has the power to overcomethe spatial divide of a newly unied Berlin, which Lola navigates withexceptional skill. Indeed, Run Lola Run is, as Sinka argues, the featurelm that best portrays the spirit of a New Berlin generation. Thisgeneration, she writes, does not shun confrontations with Germanysfractured tortured past, this past no longer has a hold on them.21 Per-haps it is not only the New Berlin generation that is celebrated but alsomore signicantly a new Germany that is less invested in rememberingand more invested in looking ahead. Is it by chance that Lola emergesat a time when Germany is struggling to redene itself as a nation andthat the lm has become synonymous with the new direction that Ger-many is taking?

Run Lola Run does not reect the Germany that the New Germanlmmaker Fassbinder envisioned. After all, Fassbinder fatalisticallyreturned to the past to identify the moment in postwar Germany his-tory in which the game was won and thus lost simultaneously. I amreferring here to Fassbinders 1979 lm The Marriage of Maria Braun,which ends with Germanys victory in the soccer match against Hun-gary in 1954. For Fassbinder, this victory marks a turning point in thedirection the Federal Republic took in establishing its democracy anda failed opportunity to reect on Germanys fascist past. In the lastscene Marias house explodes and with it her dreams of love and a newbeginning. Tykwers open admiration for the New German Cinemamay have inuenced his rst feature, Die tdliche Maria (The DeadlyMaria, 1994), but with Lola Tykwer steps outside of the politicallymotivated framework of the New German Cinema and its compulsivepreoccupation with national identity and the past. The question ofwho we are at the beginning of the lm is posed tellingly by the well-known voice of Hans Paetsch, a storyteller of fairy tales, that is, popu-lar culture. Ironically, Tykwer picks up where Fassbinder left off butchanges the course. In the last scene of Maria Braun, the radio broad-caster exclaims that Germany has won the soccer match against Hun-gary. At the beginning of Run Lola Run, the questions of who we areand why we believe are answered in a quotation by Sepp Herberger,the same legendary soccer coach who took Germany to victory in the1954 World Cup: The ball is round, the game lasts 90 minutes. Every-


thing else is theory. Yet the lm only lasts eighty-one minutes, whichmeans that Tykwer again did not stick to the rules. With Run Lola Run,he let his imagination run, placed his bets (Rien ne va plus), andbecame the king of a new wave in German cinema.

A subjective engagement in the lms fantasy may open up a spacefor a new type of German cinema and lend a new cultural identity toGermany that is focused more on the future. The premise on which thelm operates, as Tykwer admits, is that you have no chance, there-fore, use it.22 And he did. The lm is celebrated as signaling a newbeginning for German cinema that is bold, dynamic, and indulgent andthat overcomes self-doubt and artistic cowardliness, according toHelmut Krausser, who compares the lm to opera and applauds Tyk-wers courage to produce visual pathos.23 Considering its internationalsuccess and Hollywoods interest in engaging Lolas lmmaker for itsown productions, it comes as no surprise that the German Film Prizethat is awarded annually now fondly is called Lola.24 With Lola Tyk-wer has struck a new chord that serves Germany well.

Notes

I would like to thank my colleagues Irene dAlmeida, Mary Beth Haralovich,Susan White, and Linda Zwinger for our lively discussions of the lm that helpedto shape this essay.

1. Michael Tteberg, ber die Karriere eines Films, in Szenenwechsel:Momentaufnahmen des jungen deutschen Films, ed. Michael Tteberg (Reinbeckand Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1999), 4549.

2. Robert Falcon, Run Lola Run/Lola rennt, Sight and Sound 9, no. 11(1999): 52.

3. Richard Rayner, Franka Potente: This German Actress Makes Her U.S.Film Debut in Run Lola Run, Harpers Bazaar 3451 (June 1999): 85.

4. Tom Whalen, Run Lola Run, Film Quarterly 53, no. 3 (2000): 22.5. Cited in Margit Sinka, Tom Tykwers Lola rennt: A Blueprint of Millen-

nial Berlin, Glossen 11 (2000): n 14: Lola rennt erzhlt von Deutschland einenDreck. Das ist reines Entertainment. All translations in this essay are my own.

6. Niklas Luhmann, The Reality of the Mass Media (Palo Alto: Stanford Uni-versity Press, 2000), 51.

7. John Storey, An Introduction to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 11.

8. Thomas Assheuer, Im Reich des Scheins, Die Zeit, April 11, 2001, 16.9. The original reads: wir sprengten jeden Rahmen, als wir zusammenka-

men. Es war wie eine Explosion. Ich spr die Erschtterung immer noch (mytranslation). It is interesting to note the tension in the blending of the songs Wish


(a female vocalist) and Komm zu mir (a male vocalist). While the female vocal-ist fantasizes about all of the things that she wishes to become, the male vocalist isintent on drawing her back to him.

10. Michael Tteberg, Ein romantisch-philosophischer ActionLiebesExperi-mentalThriller (interview with Tom Tykwer), in Lola rennt (Reinbeck and Ham-burg: Rowohlt, 1998), 12942.

11. Tteberg, Ein romantisch-philosophischer ActionLiebesExperimen-talThriller, 129.

12. Cited in Giovanni Lista, Futurism, trans. Charles Lynn Clark (New York:Universe Books, 1986), 5. There is a resonance with futurism also in the fragmentedrepresentation of Lola in some advertisements for the lm. Also, the New Yorkerlm advertisement includes a quote from Peter Rainer, of the New York Magazine.He writes: Lolas like a human stun gun.

13. Tom Tykwer, Generalschlssel furs Kino, in Szenenwechsel: Momentauf-nahmen des jungen deutschen Films, ed. Michael Tteberg (Reinbeck and Ham-burg: Rowohlt, 1999), 32: Bei Lola rennt war es das Bild dieser rennenden Frau,fr mich so ein Urbild von Kino, weil es Dynamik und Emotion verbindet. In derWahrnehmung fasst du einen dynamischen Ablauf zusammen, der einfach mecha-nisch sein knnte, den du aber gleichzeitig emotional audst. Ich hatte vor Augeneine Frau mit roten Haaren, und die Haare muten auch so wehen, und sie muteVerzweiung und Leidenschaft ausdrcken. Das ist ein Bild, das hab ich immer-mal wieder gehabt.

14. Cited in Paul Wells, Understanding Animation (London and New York:Routledge, 1988), 26.

15. Cited in Les Daniels, Wonder Woman: The Complete History. The Life andTimes of the Amazon Princess (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2000), 11.

16. Sinka, Tom Tykwers Lola rennt.17. Siehste, ich wusste, dass dir da auch nix mehr einfllt, ich habs dir ja

gesagt, eines Tages passiert was, da weisst auch du keinen Ausweg mehr, und nichterst, wen du stirbst, das kommt viel frher. Du wolltest mir ja nicht glauben, undjetzt stehste da. Von wegen die Liebe kann alles, aber nicht in zwanzig Minutenhunderttausend Mark herzaubern.

18. Sherrie A. Inness, Tough Girls: Women Warriors and Wonder Women inPopular Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 141.

19. My special thanks to Caryl Flynn, who gave me her unpublished paper onthe music in Run Lola Run entitled That Music That Lola Ran To.

20. Flash-forwards of the nameless passersby that Lola encounters in each run,the guy on the bike or the woman pushing a baby carriage, suggest that shechanges the course of their personal histories. Some critics have pursued a chaostheory reading of Lola and talked about the ripple effect that the smallest alter-ation to the narrative produces. I think that Tykwer plays with the endless possi-bilities and combinations that storytelling provides and, much like a constructivist,believes in the alterability of reality.

21. Sinka, Tom Tykwers Lola rennt. Sinka offers an incisive analysis of theimpact of the lm on the political landscape in Berlin. Both the conservative andsocial democratic parties appropriated the image of Lolas vitality and determina-


tion to inject their campaigns with a message for the future. Each candidate (Diep-gen and Naumann) donned the Lola look.

22. Cited in Sinka, Tom Tykwers Lola rennt.23. Helmut Krausser, Lola: Ein Nachwort, viel zu frh, in Szenenwechsel:

Momentaufnahmen des jungen deutschen Films, ed. Michael Tteberg (Reinbek beiHamburg: Rowohlt, 1999), 35.

24. Der Kanzler und die Kaiserin: In Berlin wird der Deutsche Filmpreis 2001zelebriert, SZdigital- Sddeutsche Zeitung (June 22, 2001) A012.502.877.


0472113844-ch11

Documents