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This paper analyzes Shane Carruth's Primer and Upstream Color, focusing on themes of language, haptics, affect, and the virtual end of late capitalism. This article's underlying claim is that Carruth's films are unique in their imaginative scale and narrative outcome, offering novel interventions in what he terms 'film language,' film-philosophy, and non-individualized modes of subjective articulation. Where the aesthetic dimensions of Carruth's films overlap with its socio-economic realities, Carruth mobilizes film as a mode of philosophical thinking, representing subjects who attempt to transcend the limits of capital, individualized subjectivity, and individualized concepts of the body.
In a 2013 New York Times interview with Dennis Lim, writer, director, and actor Shane Carruth refuses to give a synopsis of his films: "I hate even the idea of a synopsis . . . When stories are really working, when you're providing subtextual exploration and things that are deeply layered, you're obligated to not say things out loud."1 Both of Carruth's films, Primer and Upstream Color, respectively, are guided by this imperative-the experience of film should be meditative, innovative, and multisensory. Carruth's films are difficult to absorb all at once. They provoke reflection, rely on non-visual association, but also derive meaning from obscure visual cues. Yet, his films do not exist somewhere beyond the ability to comment on or speak their scope and significance. Time travel accidentally discovered in a garage at an engineering startup and financial ruin that results from infection via complex parasite are the simplest summaries of Carruth's films. The narrative structures of both Primer and Upstream Color are complex, non-linear, and easily meld realism with science fiction and fantasy. There is a concern for naturalism in Carruth's films as well. The scientific and fantastic elements that guide each film either appear in nature or tap into natural phenomena, suggesting that what is most complex and enchanting about the world are the natural laws revealed to us by technological innovation.
More plainly stated, Primer and Upstream Color bring their characters to the edge of what they can imagine and say about a life free of profitability and exploitation in order to glimpse a yet unrealized epistemological position: knowledge of a life beyond capitalism. At a critical level, Primer and Upstream Color are unique in...