HTM In Review: "Run Lola Run"

OK, so "Run Lola Run" is a 10-year-old movie. Let it be duly noted that HTM in Review has nothing to do with timeliness.

I felt the need to watch this movie again because years ago it tripped me out. Basically, what happens is that Lola has to get 100,000 marks (yes, in the pre-Euro days) to her boyfriend, Manni, in 20 minutes or he will hold up a store at gunpoint. The same 20-minute scene plays three times, with slight variations, and in the end of each one things turn out differently for everybody. Set in Germany in 1998, there is, of course, techno music. And there's running.

The trippiest part of the movie, I think, is that it shows snapshots of the futures of the people Lola runs past. In one scene a guy tries to sell Lola his bike and she declines. You see snapshots of the guy eventually falling off his bike, meeting a woman in the hospital and eventually marrying her. In the second version, Lola declines again, saying the bike is stolen. The guy ends up getting arrested and put in jail.

It's nuts how, a la "The Butterfly Effect" on a smaller scale, every teeny tiny decision you make has the chance to affect everything else around it. Which reminds me of an argument the teacher made (er, adapted from some other philosopher whose name escapes me) in my 10th-grade religion class on the validity of creationism — though as far as I was concerned, it was a perfectly logical argument AGAINST God in the way most Christians believe.

He gave us each an oatmeal cookie, insisting that because the cookie was made up of so many complex ingredients, combined in just the right way, that the cookie couldn't possibly have occurred in nature — it had to have a designer.

Change the cookie to something complex that occurs in nature (like, um, rocks, the food chain, the anatomy of any living organism ...) and it's clear that it's not really an argument for creation at all if you don't believe in creation in the first place. Just because something is complicated doesn't have to mean it didn't evolve that way, as opposed to being created. Similarly, just because life is a mind-blowingly complicated web of interactions and decisions that all affect each other doesn't mean they're all orchestrated by some dude in the sky with nothing better to do than micromanaging the fates of 6 billion people.

But back to Lola. There's one part of the movie that I didn't really think about the first time: in the last scene, she screams at the ball on a betting wheel until it lands on the number that she needs. Maybe God does work in more direct ways sometimes. Or maybe the freakishly red-haired Lola has some divine powers of her own.