Closed loops

Rating: Null/10 (18 November 2012)

Below, I am going to provide a small list of films that explore karmic cycles in what I think is a powerful way.
This first. It has a few parts that intrigue. The parting wisdom is that you control your course through life, cause your own unhappiness, but you won't know that (deeply, clearly) until you 'meet' (see) your own self as it plots and machinates some destructive pattern.
This is presented in the garbled, always messy context of sci-fi time travel and the noise and furore of an action film, but by all likelihood meant in the Buddhist sense of karma and meditation, which is in its purest form -far from cloudy 'spiritual' fashions- the daily practice of purging yourself of your self.
Karma (from sanskrit, meaning 'action') is probably not what you think it is - it is not fate, but rather a description of the mechanism that produces what you perceive as fate. You do so, thread events around a self-centered narrative, because your self wants control of this life, we all do, it comes from the natural instinct for survival, this is in fact what happens each time you remember or plan ahead, you are trying to assert control of the narrative.
A few pointers here. You have here memory as traveling to the past, and as a loop, as wormholes in the fabric of normative reality. (frequently addressed in life as someone being 'lost in thought', phasing out his environment)
The Bruce Willis self caught in the memory-loop of trying to rewrite the story to serve the memory of a loved one. The Gordon-Levitt self who awakens to the destructive course of action by killing the self.
The damage this causes exemplified in the inner child with telekinetic powers (we all in a way have them, we know them as intuition, it's how films, abstract air on a screen can move us), in his blind , violent reaction to stimuli.
The film is throwaway, I'm sorry to say. As said before, the generic context adds close to nothing, it's just a load of stuff the filmmakers have to explain. The problem arises when simultaneously trying to move forward different parts of a profoundly inane story while ironing out kinks in those few metaphors, which forbids an agile vision of what it wants to do. Complexity is not intelligence, folks.
More sophisticated films on the subject? Chaos recommends:
The Soviet silent By the Law. (about misdeed tearing up the very fabric of the earth)
The Postman Always Rings Twice, Out of the Past, Detour, in fact most good film noir is a deep inspection of hallucinative fates and possible authors behind the world.
Rear Window > Blowup > Cache. (on mental images ambivalently shaping the narrative)
Most anything by Resnais, but definitely Je t'aime, Je t'aime. (on memory and endless returns, copied into Eternal Sunshine)
The American Friend. Solyaris. The Hourglass Sanatorium.