ABSTRACT
One puzzle about puzzle films is their longevity over the last quarter of a century. Are they mostly escapist in their hermetic (and hermeneutic) satisfactions? Do they exhaust all interest in their internal working out, or are they sometimes more telling than their stories? Self-consuming artifacts, or paranoid symptoms of an increasingly unstable sense of grounding in the global present? Answers can only come provisionally—and by example—since the films keep coming. With two of the latest in this cycle of “mind-game films” (Elsaesser 2009), and these in the increasingly scifimode of the “instrumental marvelous” (Todorov 1975), the presence of topical anxieties—however they may get folded under in the unraveling of the trick plots—is hard to miss. 1 In this sense Source Code (Duncan Jones, 2011) is Déjà Vu (Tony Scott, 2006) all over again: recycling both its computer supernaturalism and its global subtext of terrorist vulnerability and surveillance overkill. Puzzle films may solve nothing beyond themselves, but as modes of the fantastic, it is important to notice what they are fantasies of. In these sci-fi cases, both markedly post-9/11, their fictional science of time travel is aimed, via wish-fulfillment, not just at a preternaturally empowered search and seizure but at the wholesale magic of retroactive prevention. Yet as soon as the force of epistemology in each film (the surveillance thriller plot) turns ontological (the alternate reality fable), they tip over from forensics into equipmental fantasies of a new computer sublime, whether positive or most often negative.
