Be sure to read this article from The New York Times by Friday in order to become well-prepared for the Socratic Seminar: “Free Will: Now You Have It, Now You Don’t.”
I have also included links concerning the movie Primer itself. First and foremost is the movie’s website, Primermovie.com. Please heed my advice and avoid the forum until we finish the film in class. Below are two interviews that I enjoyed reading. Again, it is best to wait unit we have finished viewing the movie to read these:
A Primer Primer–An interview with Shane Carruth for The Village Voice
The Creator of Primer Discusses His First Film–Rebecca Murray interviews Shane Carruth for About.com (there is even an insightful Gatsby reference in this one)
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Those articles helped to clear up a lot until he says in that second one: “I definitely didn’t set up this narrative to be open to interpretation. I mean, except for a few things.” So whatever I had “figured out” all sort of went to pieces after that because now certain things have concrete answers and other things don’t which makes everything even more confusing as I try and figure THAT out among the movie itself…
But he also says, “The thing is, I don’t have any way of knowing whether people are getting what’s thematically going on, that we’re watching basically the deconstruction of a relationship because of the introduction of this power. Or whether they are talking about they get how many Aaron’s there are at the end of it and what the bird noise is in the attic. I felt like my job was to make sure that the information is in this story. That if people are interested in summing up the details, it is definitely my job to make sure that they are gettable. But as far as summing it all up as far as the plot goes, that seems to be working against the whole idea of what was happening thematically.”
Well yeah, that’s true; I mean, I think the thematic elements of the film aren’t any less valid than the technical things and vice versa, but I still think that figuring out some of the technical details helps to explain them (the thematic elements), like how Granger found out about the time machine (even though that’s intentionally vague and all) or how Aaron and Abe’s relationship could have turned out and how it did turn out with all the changes made by each of them.