An Examination of "Run Lola Run"

1410 Words6 Pages
Lola as a Female Flaneur Anke Gleber describes the flaneur as both defining and defined by their perception of the outside (Gleber 67). Being a flaneur is about being a spectator, observing the city by moving freely through it, experiencing the sounds and sudden movements of urbanity. Traditionally, the flaneur has been seen as a male figure; thus, acquiring these characteristics can be a problem for the aspiring female flaneur. The public may feel it’s not appropriate for a woman to be a flaneur and dismiss her attempts to be one, even failing to acknowledge it at all. I posit that in “Run Lola Run” Lola retains some attributes of flanerie, but that her movement through Berlin and the attitudes of fellow city dwellers don’t allow her to fully reach flaneur status. One of the most important aspects of being a flaneur seems to be the ability to move through the city with ease, unencumbered. Lola inhabits this trait quite literally in the movie from the audience’s point of view. As she runs to try to get the money to save her boyfriend, Manni, she overtakes the usual cues of the city that control our movements. She ignores traffic lights and lines on the road that tell her when and where she is supposed to move around as a pedestrian, sometimes running across streets in front of moving cars or on the street itself. The large amount of footage of Lola running through the city often shows her running mostly alone; few people are out despite it being a well-populated city. To me this is a metaphor for Lola’s potential flanerie, created specifically for the movie audience. The flaneur can freely roam the city, and Lola embodies this by literally being virtually alone as she moves through the city. We in the audience are watching all of her movements and we see her taking control of the city when few others do in the movie itself. However, the only reason we observe
Open Document