By Lauren Perera

Duncan Jones’s Source Code (2011) combines a high concept sci-fi thriller plot with a form that feels distinctly post-cinematic. The film follows Captain Colter Stevens, a U.S. Army pilot who wakes up inside the body of a stranger on a commuter train just minutes before a bomb is set to explode. He soon learns that he is part of a secret government program called “Source Code” which allows him to enter a simulated version of the final eight minutes of a victim’s life. his mission is to identify the bomber and prevent a second, larger attack. 

Rather than moving in a smooth, linear way, the film is built around repetition. Stevens is sent back into the same eight minute window again and again, each time restarting after the explosion. This looping structure gives the film a post-continuity rhythm. As Shaviro notes, films today act as “machines for generating affect” that operate before the viewer fully registers their meaning. In Source Code, the story advances through resets and small variations. The glitches, abrupt cuts and moments of visual and temporal instability make the train feel unstable and like a system that is constantly being reloaded, creating anxiety, urgency and tension. 

David Rodowick’s The Virtual Life of Film helps frame what is at stake in this virtual world. Rodowick argues that “there is no ontological difference between the information captured by charge-coupled devices and information constructed on a computer”. Digital images no longer guarantee a real-world origin, they only guarantee that the image has been processed and displayed by a system. 

Source Code makes this idea concrete. the train feels like a real, physical place, but it isn’t a recording of the past, its a constructed virtual environment. But it still carries emotional weight. Stevens is able to form relationships, feels fear, and makes choices inside the simulated world. The glitches and resets remind us that this reality is being generated by software, not memory or history. 

At the same time, Source Code complicates the idea that this world is purely generated by softwarew rather than memeory. If the train is only a virtual construction, then why is Stevens able to remember what happened in previous resets? How does he know that the coffee will spill, that the train conductor will ask for a ticket, or that certain passengers will move in predictable ways? 

The film suggests that what Stevens carries across loops is not the world itself, but his affective and cognitive memeory of previous iteration. the simulation resets ,  but his subjectivity does not. This creates a split between a world that is computationally regenerated and a consciousness that accumulates experience. In Rodowick’s terms, the train is a virtual space produced as data, but Stevens’s memory introduces a different temporal logic, one based on repetition with difference. The same scene is replayed, but it is never experienced in exactly the same way, because Stevens brings new knowledge, expectations, and affect into each loop.

This is also where the film becomes strongly post-cinematic in Shaviro’s sense. The repetition works less like a narrative flashback and more like a video game where the level reloads but the player retains skill, knowledge, and strategy. The glitches and resets foreground the system logic, while Stevens’s memory gives the illusion of continuity. 

This tension is central to the film’s meaning. Source Code is not simply about simulation replacing memory, but about how contemporary subjectivity is shaped by systems that endlessly regenerate environments while leaving individuals to carry the emotional and cognitive residue. Reality becomes something that can be replayed, but experience cannot. This is precisely the kind of post-cinematic condition Shaviro describes: a media environment where experience is shaped by repetition, modulation, and system logic rather than by continuity, memory, and classical narrative development.

References

Steven Shaviro, ‘Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales’, Film Philosophy 14.1, 2010.

Rodowick, D. (2007). The Virtual Life of Film . [online] Available at: https://www-fulcrum-org.gold.idm.oclc.org/epubs/bg257h53j?locale=en#page=137.

Source Code (2011), Dir. Duncan Jones, USA.