Run Lola Run script

Hi, everyone. Hard at work juggling the new episode on The Dark Knight Trilogy with moving to my new home. What a week. For the time being, here is the script from the previous episode on Run Lola Run. 

 AUDIO 1
 [1:50] Run Lola Run is a 1998 German film directed by Tom Tykwer. [4:52] Manni, a minor criminal, has lost 100,000 marks. His boss, Ronnie, will be furious and may kill Manni for his this. [13:27] Lola, Manni's girlfriend, endeavors to find Manni another 100,000 marks to satisfy Ronnie. [29:02] Lola runs all over the town but fails, and when she finally finds Manni, she helps him rob a grocery store – [30:23] with disastrous results. [34:48] Suddenly, time moves backwards, and Lola's day begins again. [52:27] This time, she gets closer to a happy ending, but this time, Manni dies.
 [1:05:33] Once again, time moves backwards, Lola runs to the casino, wins big, but Manni has somehow gotten himself out of trouble with Ronnie. [1:11:24] During each of her three parallel runs, Lola interacts with many of the same people but with differing results. [1:13:42] The film never explicitly tells us that we are witnessing alternate realities or Lola imagining the outcomes. We simply exist in this world of her choices and watch the results. [0:45] Early on, we see the pendulum of a clock, swinging back and forth. [1:25] The camera enters the clock. We, the audience, enter this strange-looking clock, suggesting that we are entering a place in which time is different from our own, setting the lens in which we are to view the film.
 AUDIO 2
 [1:55] Before any of that happens, an unseen narrator asks the audience several philosophical questions about the nature of existence, of knowledge – epistomological ponderings about who we are and how much agency we have in a chaotic universe. [12:40] What we are experiencing in this film is a narrative experiment in free will, [overlay] the ability to choose among a variety of options. [15:52] The opposite of this, [overlay] determinism, every action is caused by previous action. In Run Lola Run, the audience is given a lot of data and essentially provoked to sort it out.
 [12:34] Determinism should not be confused with pre-determinism, a term more commonly focused on the supernatural. Pre-determinism states that all events are decided in advance and possibly known to [15:40] someone, in most cases, a God or other supernatural force. Run Lola Run contains some supernatural elements, although they exist implicitly and not explicitly. [1:01:53] For example, characters sometimes interact with this blind woman who seems to have foreknowledge of future events. [overlay] This appears to be a reference to the blind Oracle from Oedipus Rex, who foretells that the titular character will kill his father and marry his mother. [1:02:02] Supernatural pre-determinism is closely associated with fate.
 AUDIO 3
 [15:52] Other unexplained elements in the film include Lola somehow learning from her past mistakes and acquiring knowledge from the other potential timelines. [28:37] For example, in the first run, she does not know how to use a gun properly and is quickly taught by Manni. In a later run, she knows how instantly. [1:01:24] During her third run, the guard – who played a role in her previous runs – seems to recognize her, in spite of the fact that in this run, in this timeline, this is the first time they have met. [1:04:16] If these three runs are three distinct possibilities that occur simultaneously and independently of the others, she would not be able to gain the knowledge of the gun and the guard would have no knowledge of her, [1:13:28] but if these three runs are happening in succession, then her ability to use a gun and the guard's memories make sense. Maybe the universe or God or the blind woman is giving her a series of chances to save Manni.   
 [1:05:38] Fate, somehow, intervenes and allows Lola to perform the improbable task of turning a very small amount of money into the amount she needs by twice guessing the result of a game of roulette. [1:06:29] If one were to subscribe to supernatural predeterminism, one would say that she was destined to win the game. This happens in the third run. However, if one were to believe in supernatural [1:14:10] predeterminism as the force that allowed her to win due to her great need to save Manni, why didn't fate know that Manni was already saved? It could not have been God or fate that let her win [1:15:03] because God or fate would have known. The film presents a situation that looks like divine intervention to save Manni only to have Manni emerge unscathed and with the money completely unnecessary.
 AUDIO 4
 [15:44] The existence of God or some other divine power is often said to remove the concept of free will, but writer G.K. Chesterton countered that, saying [overlay] “According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it.” [17:14] So, it's possible that supernatural forces in Run Lola Run were working towards Lola finding the money she needed to save Manni, even if she did not need it in the end.  
 [23:33] Determinism, not predeterminism or fate, is the insistence that human beings are made of parts and rules and physics just like anything else, a flower, a toaster, a wind-up toy – simply more complex [25:16] with more moving parts. If that is true, then our actions are determined by the natural world, by external stimuli, internal machinations of the body, and everything in the universe that interacts with [26:16] other other things in said universe. This is sometimes explained through a thought experiment called Laplace's Demon, invented by French scholar Pierre-Simon Laplace. Though, he never used the word demon.
 AUDIO 5
 [27:14] [overlay] He said “We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom...”  
  [29:20] What he meant by this is that we, as humans, are not brilliant enough to understand the cause and effect of everything in the universe, but if there were someone brilliant enough, he would be able to [34:47] explain the universe in cause and effect as a formula with predictive powers. Lola seems like she is making these decisions independently of everyone and anything else. She has resolved to save [36:54] Manni no matter what the cost. She somehow even seems more intense about this after each run that may or may not exist. We, as human beings, believe we are making decisions – that some [38:24] abstract form of our minds or our souls are choosing, but through the lens of reductive physicalism of the mind and determinism of action, everything that we are doing is actually influenced by everything that has come before.  
  AUDIO 6  
  [2:00] If we have free will in some abstract sense, where would these free decisions come from, if not from step-by-step casualty? [16:00] Lola encounters a variety of people during her three runs, sometimes the same people in one run and seen in the next. We see flashes forward in time when she interacts with them, [19:00] suggesting that the slightest alteration of one's life can have profound effect. This is a brief snapshot of chaos theory, of the butterfly effect, but what we are also witnessing it determinism. [36:33] If we have complete free will, then this man would have chosen the same or similar actions regardless of a short, unimportant encounter with Lola, but instead, the slightest deviation radically altered his life. [37:45] The briefest of delays, the tiniest sway of atoms.  
  [24:00] Arguments for complete free will generally amount to the simple feeling that we seem free to act. Lola seems like she is making decisions to propel her towards her goal of making enough money to save Manni. [26:16] We, ourselves, feel like we are making countless decisions every day, and though we should not discount our own experiences, it never adds up to a proof. [27:23] It's the philosophical equivalent of saying “Just because” to win an argument. As scientific thinkers, assuming greater [28:43] powers within ourselves than other systems and other objects does not entirely add up, just because we “feel” it. [1:06:10] We can see the ball in the roulette wheel and conclude that is operating on physics, but we are not as comfortable saying the same of ourselves because we are not looking at [1:07:23] the invisible operations of the brain.  
  AUDIO 7  
  And yet, society generally operates under the assumption of free will, simply by necessity. Determinism may be correct, but it is not applicable to human interaction and human responsibility. When Lola and Manni rob the grocery store, the law makes no distinction between determinism and free will. It does not matter that everything in the universe thus far has, through some chain of physics and biology, been leading up to this moment. Determinism probably has some accuracy, but it cannot be used as a basis for interaction or a basis for morality because it makes no moral assumptions. Philosophy is not always a judgment in morality or how we must behave. Sometimes it's just a search for facts. If I say Lola is running, that's just a fact, it's not a moral judgment.  
  Our world, Lola's world and indeed the film itself seems to operate under the idea of Compatibalism, which is the recognition of determinism but the assumption of responsibility of the person. In the film, we might do well to assign the blind woman less supernatural power than she appears to have. Within the narrative, she may be able to see future events, but she may be more like a thematic representation of Compatibalism. Her words to Manni are determinism, the influence of the outside world, but Manni making a decision based on this stimuli at least resembles free will, even if such a thing does exist.  
  AUDIO 8  
 In the beginning of the film, we see two quotes. One is from a soccer player, setting up the film much like a game, and another from poet T.S. Eliot, stating “At the end of our exploring we shall not cease from exploration . . . and the end of all of our exploring will be to arrive where we started. . . and know the place for the first time.” A simpler way to put this is that our questions lead to answers which only lead to more questions. A voicover narration in the beginning asks the big questions of life: What do we know? Who are we? But the film purposefully does not answer them, instead only giving us this narrative as a thought experiment.    
 Those who believe in free will shall find evidence to their way of thinking, and those who believe in determinism will as well. The final scene has Manni ask Lola what is in her bag. We never learn if she reveals that she now legally owns 100,000 franks, whether or not she will remain with Manni as suggested earlier in the film, whether or not she will try to live a life of luxury or at least go straight with her criminal boyfriend. The film simply sounds the alarm of the sound effect we always heard before the flash-forward scenes of supporting characters, then we see Lola's expression, and then nothing. Lola's future...uncertain.