Story Train

"Source Code" seems as though it should be smarter than it is, not least because it's from director Duncan Jones, of the prior sophisticated sci-fi piece of reflexive cinema, "Moon" (2009). Perhaps, that's because the cribbing of other motion pictures here occupies multiple train cars and time-loop universes that keep chugging along. I probably didn't do it any favors, either, by revisiting Tony Scott's superior post-9/11 allegorical cinema "Déjà Vu" (2006) shortly before it. Lot of the same time-traveling resurrection whistle stops here without much of the multi-layered subtext. Ditto "Minority Report" (2002) for the pre-crime prevention.

So, once again, we're invited to identify with and to co-solve the puzzle beside the detective protagonist (here played by Jake Gyllenhaal), who, like us, is watching images on screens--in his case, of Vera Farmiga and Jeffrey Wright sending him into parallel universes, although they think it's just a video game (live, die, repeat), as brought to them by some nonsense about a posthumous afterimage that they "Quantum Leap" Gyllenhaal into (by the way, nice voice cameo here by Scott Bakula--at least these filmmakers know from whence they imitate) over and over again "Groundhog Day" (1993) style.

Not to digress too much, but this afterimage explanation reminds me of an erroneous understanding of how we see movies. This used to be and may very well still be the most widely (mis)understood such decoding, that is of so-called "persistence of vision," which supposes we see a series of still images as a moving picture because they imprint the retina with afterimages. Of course, that makes absolutely no sense; how would our eyes turn a bunch of overlapping afterimages into the illusion of motion. And, that's because viewing motion pictures is actually a mental perception. This is an error that has led to generations of film history texts paying special mention to the Thaumatrope as if its afterimage effect with no actual resulting motion to the still images has anything to do with motion pictures, which it doesn't.

What intrigues me about reflexive cinema is what it's able to decipher about the art form itself by looking in the mirror, but I'm afraid "Source Code" is the Thaumatrope of self-referential art, the "persistence of vision" of revelations. It turns out that Gyllenhaal's avatar isn't even in a movie-within-a-movie, after all. The picture's mirror, too, isn't so much a cinematic analogy, either, as it is a mathematical one--the parabola of the Chicago Bean, or "Cloud Gate," and the no-fate "dumb luck kind of gal." "God does not play dice," as some other guy good at mathematical time manipulation is said to have once quipped. If I were him, I might blame it on fate, too, though, because another implication of these multiple dimensions is that he assaulted a bunch of people in the other ones before failing to prevent escalating catastrophes, and, y'know, what about the guy whose body he's inhabiting.

With all the mirroring of prior stories, they didn't even make the obvious reference to the dreamworlds of the Alice books, which were written by a mathematician, Charles Dodgson, who was also a teacher and also known by a pseudonym, Lewis Carroll. Looking-glasses everywhere and playing-cards recall, but the queen isn't even a heart. Instead, that whole recitation business is a nod to "The Manchurian Candidate" (1962, 2004), which doesn't even make much sense to me given that was a McCarthyism satire. Was "Source Code" supposed to be implying that there are no terrorists, then? Obviously not, so what's the point? Maybe merely to imply an aura of dark organizational duplicity as represented by Wright's stereotypically-crippled (because he's both morally and physically deformed being the implication) mad scientist. Bah.

Perhaps, worse still, the love interest here (as played by Liv Tyler double Michelle Monaghan) is utterly underdeveloped. Why are we supposed to be invested in their relationship? They hardly know each other. Upon the first of their repeated meet-cutes, he calls her a simulated distraction, and, indeed, she's never quite developed beyond that. Gyllenhaal and Farmiga's characters establish a far more meaningful bond. At least, it looks cool.