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al imagination; Ricoeur calls this “engagement in action”26 or “moral decision”.27 Thus, within the application phase of mimesis 3, an existential and ethical response occurs as the audience shifts from the parable-world into their life-world with both a fresh understanding of reality and a propensity to enact this new understand- ing. With Ricoeur’s narrative-metaphors and limit-experiences as our hermeneuti- cal framework, we can now turn to Carruth’s sci-fi parables Primer and Upstream Color. Primer: “Did You Notice the Parabolic?” “They took from their surroundings what was needed and made of it something more.”28 This repeated statement in the voiceover narration from Carruth’s Aaron – or at least one iteration of Aaron – is an apt introduction to the world of Primer and its fractured elliptical narrative, a formal decision in harmony with its approach to time travel. As the main characters progress in their time-travel practices and experimentation, the film’s very plot structure appropriately collapses into a con- fusing cycle. Inspired by Feynman diagrams, Primer has an “extremely fractured syuzhet […] It pushes the act of piecing together the overall narrative (or fabula) to a radically obtuse degree.”29 In this, we the audience are prompted to take from the film-world’s surroundings and, like the ordinary engineers of this parable, make of it “something more”, to search for traces of meaning in the parabolic, to move back and forth in our own memories of the filmic events in order to construct a semi-co- herent whole in both time and narrative. Made on a meager shooting budget of $7,000 and a skeleton crew of Carruth’s family and friends, Primer ultimately won the 2004 Grand Jury Prize at the Sun- dance Film Festival. It opens with Aaron’s narration as heard through a phone re- cording in his attempt to explain to his past/future self (and the audience) what has/will transpire(d). From the inaugural shot of a garage door opening (a repeated motif), there follows a series of scenes of four engineers experimenting with en- trepreneurial ideas in Aaron’s garage. During one experiment involving the electro- magnetic reduction of an object’s weight via various elements and power sources, Abe and Aaron accidentally discover (or create?) an approximately 1,300-minute time loop, an enclosed field in which an object is somehow unanchored from linear time and placed into a state of parabolic time in a continuously repeating sequence, 26 Ricoeur 1981, 168. 27 Ricoeur 1978, 245. 28 Primer (Shane Carruth, US 2004), 00:01:15–00:01:21. 29 Bergstrom 2013. Parabolic Transcendence in Time and Narrative | 23www.jrfm.eu 2020, 6/1, 17–36