Page - 19 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 06/01

He heard a low and seemingly very distant sound, but singularly grand and im- pressive, unlike anything he had ever heard, gradually swelling and increasing as if it would have a universal and memorable ending. –Henry David Thoreau, Walden The extraordinary within the ordinary, such is the logic of meaning in the parables. –Paul Ricoeur Touching the Transcendent Closing my eyes, I remember emerging from the theater into the blue-and-grey evening in downtown Vancouver, BC, after experiencing Upstream Color (Shane Carruth, US 2013), my whole body transfixed and transfigured adjacent to my wife; we were hand in hand, both of us in silent wonder at what we had just witnessed. The film felt baptismal in its immersive soundscape and provocative images, as if we had dipped into the currents of an eternal river and emerged awakened and dripping with fresh perspectives. As we drove home, neither of us was entirely sure what we had just encountered, but we knew we had briefly touched the transcendent. Subjectivity, memory, and the invisible connections between individuals’ identi- ties are all conspicuous themes within Upstream Color’s narrative. These themes are also observable in Shane Carruth’s debut film, Primer (US 2004), a low-budget indie film which pushes the boundaries of narrative coherence via its convolut- ed-yet-cohesive consideration of time travel. The two engineers at the heart of this film wrestle with what it means to act with prescience as they play God, becoming eternal while ordinary humans in a blurring of physics and metaphysics. In this article, I contend that both Primer and Upstream Color are sci-fi cinematic parables per philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s description of parable as “the conjunction of a narrative form and a metaphorical process”.1 These films’ imaginative fictitious narratives incorporate extraordinary elements within realistic settings of mundane everyday life, re-orienting the audience by way of disorientation as the parabolic narrative-metaphor addresses the limits of human experience, ultimately offering a glimpse of the transcendent. Interpreting these two films through a Ricoeurian parabolic hermeneutic addresses their mutual transcendence in and through time and narrative via their striking visual and auditory aesthetics, the use of montage in their nonlinear narratives, and the depiction of invisible relational connections be- 1 Ricoeur 1975, 30. 18 | Joel Mayward www.jrfm.eu 2020, 6/1, 17–36