Primer

        At the risk of sounding like a simpleton, it didn’t hit me until watching “Primer” for a second time on Netflix after class that the bewildering “boomerang” sequence of events in the film was likely intended to mimic the experiences of Abe and Aaron as they adjust to reliving the same 24-hour time loop. The problematic creation of character “doubles,” which we have encountered in previous works such as Fuentes’ Aura and “The Father-Thing” also engage the audience with the characters’ growing disorientation. With so many circuits of the same events being made and a new set of “Abes and Aarons” emerging from each subsequent circuit, we, and the authentic Abe and Aaron (whoever they are) begin to question which “set” is at the heart of the narrative.

                On a bit of a different note, I could see this film as a whole being used as a criticism of the exaltation of laboratory research. While Abe and Aaron have somehow stumbled upon a way to successfully manipulate time under very specific conditions and within a closely monitored environment (“the Box”), their attempts to alter even minute details of their current lives (investing in stocks, etc) are complicated by unexpected consequences (Aaron telling his wife about the invention and Mr. Granger discovering and using the Box). Ethical and/or philosophical grievances aside, the failure of the protagonists to account for factors like Granger’s intrusion could be compared to the potential dangers of certain real-world scientific experiments that, while successful in contained environments and thus theoretically viable processes/solutions/etc., cannot or should not be “toyed with” in a world outside the lab, where conditions are never ideal and in which innumerable external variables exist that “theory” has no ability to regulate.