Page - 29 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 06/01

vokes in the audience. Carruth has stated that the film is about risk and trust, about how two colleagues’ morals and identities are pushed to their limits via an impos- sible situation becoming possible. As Aaron and Abe confront the endless cycle of selves they have created via the time loops, the film ends on an ambiguous note, with Abe choosing to watch over his past selves like a guardian angel while Aaron seeks to expand the experiment to global proportions. Moreover, Primer has unique resonance with the Ricoeurian stage of refigura- tion in the narrative, where the “real” of history and the “unreal” of fictional narra- tives are able to be bridged. In the third volume of Time and Narrative, Ricoeur sug- gests that through the act of reading, an imaginative text (such as a film) serves as a mediator for the audience to move between the fictional film world and the prac- tical and affective realm of existence, a “transcendence in immanence”.37 Thus, as we “read” Primer, the diegetic untethering of time in the narrative makes us keenly aware of the non-diegetic experience of time itself in our real existence, even as we resist breaching our suspension of disbelief. In other words, the back-and-forth movement from the parable-world of Primer into the life-world of the audience has the revelatory effect of a fresh awareness of the experience of time even as the film is unfolding. It prompts lingering questions about time’s very nature that are remi- niscent of Augustine’s wonderment in his Confessions: “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to a questioner, I do not know.”38 Ultimately, Primer suggests that our human existence tethered to time is not a limitation but a freedom. As Ricoeur puts it in Oneself as Another, our identity is anchored in time and narrative, a self-sameness throughout changes in history, a selfhood as becoming.39 In real time, I am and I am not the same person I was six hours (or six years) ago; in Primer, emancipated from time, I am both persons at once, which means I am also neither. When I am time-less, I am thus narrative- and self-less, making all observed reality and history seem inane as my very self disin- tegrates (as they continue to use the box, the engineers begin to bleed from their ears and lose the ability to write). Simple statements about reality stop making sense. Or as Aaron puts it, “Man, are you hungry? I haven’t eaten since later this afternoon.” 37 Ricoeur 1988, 101. 38 Augustine 2006, 242. 39 Ricoeur 1992. 28 | Joel Mayward www.jrfm.eu 2020, 6/1, 17–36