12 MONKEYS
The Rags of Time
After the destruction of Terminator II's (l99l) robot menace and the computer chip on which its virulent future is based, the film's heroine and her son are last seen driving into presumably rosier times. But this child was conceived during a one night love affair in The Terminator (l984) with a soldier from the same future she has just helped to erase. Rather than share his mother's triumph, the boy more properly should wink out of existence, and the heroine be whisked to a new present which never suffered the mechanical predators.
Such convolutions don't make for a tale plainly told towards an uncomplicated happy ending. So it's no surprise that with the possible exception of the Back To The Future series (notably Back To The Future II [l99O)]), the plotting of mainstream time travel movies from The Time Machine (l96O) to Timecop (l995) has been kept as linear as the subgenre would allow, which by its very nature threatens to contravene the rules of standard cinematic narrativity. Most Hollywood voyages to the past or future have therefore been guided by the implicit assumption that audiences were either too limited, or simply uninterested in wrestling with the knotty scientific and existential dilemmas regularly addressed by literary speculative fiction.
To whit: Is time fundamentally resistive or receptive to intervention? Can a time traveler return to an unchanged future if care is taken not to tinker overmuch with the past? Or do even the most minute intrusions create new timelines, different futures? Could time and its infinite branching comprise one vast continuum in which every possible event is already always happening, in which our sense of tense is but an illusion fostered by limited perception? What may the psychological impact be of living in successive temporalities?
Chris Marker's exemplar of experimental cinema, La Jetee (l96l), evoked the paradoxes and the fractures of consciousness attendant upon time travel with mysterious economy. Sparely narrated over thirty minutes of hieratic black-and-white photographs, the film takes place several years after a nuclear holocaust. The anonymous hero is a prisoner of war, haunted by a childhood memory of witnessing a man shot down at Orly airport and the alluring woman he glimpsed at the scene. Time travel experiments conducted by prison camp scientists are somehow enhanced by the intensity of his obsession. He's sent back through shifting moments of the past; repeatedly encounters and eventually falls in love with the woman from the airport.
The research ends when the traveler succeeds in visiting the future and bringing back its technology to resurrect his dying world. Knowing death looms, he escapes back in time, attempts to rejoin his lost love at Orly, only to be executed by a guard from his future prison while the boy he was looks on.
Produced amidst pervasive cold war angst, La Jetee captured the helplessness of unaccomodated man before the violations of history and the relentless toll of time itself. Sontag's assertion that the photographic enterprise is articulated sui generis with the struggle against mortality (l) -- the photo a fragment shored against our inevitable ruin -- is particularly apposite to Marker's project. The director's use of stills, inflected by Bergsonian notions about the subjective experience of time, adroitly illuminates the psyche's struggle to redeem the native hurtfulness of existence through images rescued from the archive of memory. These effigies are inextricably wedded both to life and loss, evidence of and flawed antidote to our pitiful fragility.
I have previously addressed the formidable competitiveness an original film may incite in its remaker. Ideally, the first picture should be taken as "a point of useful, relatively unconflicted departure"(2) for further thematic and aesthetic exploration. One is unfortunately more likely to encounter uninspired cloning, dreary idealization, malicious effacement, or a contested homage in which the remaker is driven to both honor and out-do the original. Rare in contemporary remaking practise, 12 Monkeys undertakes a thoughtful meditation upon the means and meaning of its source. Screenwriters David and Janet Peoples have unpacked La Jetee for a pre-millenial age fraught with apocalyptic potential undreamed in the Sixties. From the Peoples' elegantly labyrinthine script, Terry Gilliam has crafted a black comedy which evolves into elegiac tragedy: the director embues the derisive nihilism of Brazil (l985) with La Jetee's compassion, sans the bathos of The Fisher King (l99l).
12 Monkeys posits that mankind was driven below ground shortly after the New Year of l997 when a killer virus destroyed all but a fraction of the world's population, leaving animals untouched on the surface. By 2O36 the survivors are living in a subterranean Orwellian dystopia. With the development of rudimentary time travel, imprisoned "volunteers" are dispatched to locate the organism in its l996 unmutated state. Scientists will then supposedly retrieve in their efforts to make an antiserum to restore mankind's rightful place "topside". However, most of the travelers have died or gone insane from temporal dislocation excacerbated by the crudeness of their captors' machinery. Some may have found themselves permnanently stranded in past eras, and become mad Jeremiahs raving about the End of Days.
James Cole, a convict serving long, hard time for unspecified antisocial acts, is chosen as a subject because of unique powers of observation. As in La Jetee, his gifts are energized by the potency of a recurring memory. Uncannily both post- and pre-traumatic, it evokes The White Hotel heroine's eeries psychoanalytic recuperation of her future death at Baba Yar(3):
Through a slow-motion white haze, in an airport lounge, a man aims a pistol at a fleeing red-haired figure, while a lovely woman runs towards the gunman, her arms outstretched as in supplication. The protagonists' faces are unseen.
This central recollection will make visible Freud's nachtraglichkeit. Remembrance of it generates, and is generated by the narrative; it will be altered and elaborated as Cole gropes his way towards its fateful meaning.
Cast against his standard omnipotent macho types, the much underappreciated Bruce Willis plays Cole with exceptional range and pathos as an inarticulate 2lst century Woyzeck. His shaven head, bar coded with his crimes, is bowed submissively before ruthless guards and the icy interrogation of sadistic scientists. Subliminally prompted by recall of the defiant working-class heroes of Willis' cinematic past, the viewer marks the spark of rebellion still smoldering within him.
Cole is sent back to Phildadelphia during the Christmas season of l996 to track down a mysterious terrorist group -- the "Army of l2 Monkeys" -- which the future's research has implicated in the virus' release. Inserted by error into Baltimore of l99O, he's violently disoriented when arrested and confined to a decaying county asylum. The madhouse is a panopticon nearly as oppressive as his original prison (the film's Foucauldish equation between institutional psychiatry and political despotism is questionable as well as hardly new, but Gilliam works this worn vein well).
Cole is treated by Dr. Kathryn Railly: typical of most feminine cine-therapists, she's obsessively neat, addicted to rationality, thinks every nameless fear can be named, and is too caught up in her work for romance until a male patient kindles her fire. (Madeline Stowe's fiercely intelligent interpretation redeems the stereotype). Railly predictably diagnoses Cole's prediction of impending plague as an extravagant paranoid delusion. But, finding him unaccaountably familiar, she's drawn into his plight beyond her professional concerns.
The heavily tranquilized Cole is befriended by a fellow patient, Jeffrey Goines (an over-the-top Brad Pitt, likewise cast against his to-die-for romantic types). The son of reknowned virologist Leland Goines, Jeffrey babbles manic Marxist riffs against the establishment. From the first, it's insinuated that he's not only mad, but that he may be mad in craft. During a grim TV expose of animal experimentation, Jeffrey notes Cole's mumbled assertion that "maybe people deserve to be wiped out..." with edgy attentiveness, then arranges Cole's abortive escape.
Cole vanishes from a hospital seclusion room, wrenched back into the future. Still another devastating screw-up plunges him, mother-naked, into a hellish World War I battle, only to be hurled forward into the Baltimore of l996. By now Railly has become a skeptical expert on apocalyptic delusions through the ages. Cole kidnaps her after a lecture on her specialty: the agony of impotent foreknowledge she calls the "Cassandra complex". Cole already is a sufferer, and Railly herself will soon become another victim.
Coles forces her to drive him to Philadelphia and describes his chronic airport flashback, in which she has now begun to appear. She asserts he's incorporating her into his psychotic system. He ignores her jejune theorizing; gets off on the untainted air, the car radio's wonderful Fats Domino music, and eventually on the entire messy, marvelous panoply of "topside" life.
In skid row, Cole rescues Railly from rape and worse by slaughtering two derelicts. He ferrets out the offices of a ragtag animal rights group which Jeffrey Goines briefly joined, then left with other militant activists to form the "l2 Monkeys" strike force. Jeffrey abruptly renounced this group to make common cause with his father's "responsible" research. Cole infiltrates a party at the Goines' mansion. The obviously still lunatic Jeffrey asserts that during their confinement Cole had pushed a plan to destroy civilization by stealing and releasing one of his father's dangerous viruses.
Cole flees back to the woods where he has left Railly locked in her car trunk. He's now truly verging upon derangement, thinks he may have unwittingly prompted Goines to undertake the very catastrophe he's been sent to observe. By turns furious and moved, Railly pleads with him to surrender to the police who have hunted them down. Cole cries out his fondness for a world he knows is doomed, then is plucked out of her life once again and flung back to his fascist future.
The scientist-elites gleefully grant him full pardon for his work. But, ridden with intolerable guilt, hammered by his scarifying experiences, Cole has come to believe defensively that Railly has been right all along: he is mad, the technocrats and their blasted world are manifestations of his insanity, he must persuade these figments to send him back to the time where he has always existed. The shaken Railly undergoes a parallel volte-face, follows a trail of evidence which culminates in a photograph of World War I trench combat from her archive of crazed prophets. It unmistakably exhibits a naked Cole.
When the two are united again in l996, it's now Railly's ironic task to convince Cole he's been sane all along, and that cataclysm indeed awaits the world. They embrace the love which has always been awaiting them across the reaches of time, and employ whatever means they can to avert the calamity. Sought as dangerous fugitives, they alter their appearances and are transformed into the dramatis personae of Cole's memory.
Driving to a flight which is supposed to take them to the ocean Cole has always yearned to see, they encounter an unlikely beastiary roaming the streets. Jeffrey's "army" has kidnapped his father and released the creatures from Philadelphia's zoo. Railly and Cole are overjoyed: they reason that the animals' liberation has been Jeffrey's sole aim all along and that the plague must have been caused by other means -- hence no longer is their burden.
But the airport is thick with police and agents from the future. In a coup of purest cinema, Cole's traumatic memory commences to play itself out. Dr. Goines' redheaded laboratory assistant, a person from Porlock barely registered at the margins of awareness on several earlier occasions, purchases tickets to locales Cole's future mentors had told him were the plague's sites of outbreak after Philadelphia. At the bidding of a security guard, the assistant unlatches a case filled with test tubes, carefully opens one and passes it under the guard's nose with a tiny satisfied smile, before passing through the gate. Apocalypse has been set loose.
A gun is suddenly pressed into Cole's hand. He's told by a fellow time traveler that he must shoot the thief (presumably in aid of recovering the already released organism), or Railly will be killed. The child Cole enters the scene with his parents. Past, present, and future are now inextricably sutured together. Cole, taking aim, is shot down by the police, and the plaguemaster escapes to his waiting plane. Railly cradles Cole in her arms; he dies, a beatific expression of yearning and recognition flooding his countenance. Railly turns a luminous smile upon the boy destined to become her lover, and the child's eyes brim with tears.
My precis barely traces 12 Monkeys' narrative intricacies, which precipitated an infinite regress of heated speculation by the public and film scholars alike. An aura of indeterminacy pervades Gilliam's enterprise. Whether deliberately or unintentionally the screenplay leaves many points obscure. At least several of its reiterated givens are in fact highly debatable. A supremely open text mimics the nemesis it constructs: nuances and possibilities mutate under one's gaze like the deadly virus, arguably even escaping the conscious intentions of its creators. Space permits only a consideration of the film's most crucial contested issues:
The uncertain nature of the hero's psychiatric status is central to 12 Monkeys' ambiguity. To what extent is Cole hallucinating events? A gravelly satiric voice offering him instruction is threaded throughout the story. It first speaks -- questioning its own reality -- in a prison isolation cell after Cole is wrenched back to the future from his hospitalization. Later, the voice is clearly assigned to a Philadelphia bum who may or may not be another emissary. Still later, in the airport mensroom, it just as clearly speaks to him solely from within his mind.
The voice may be a localized chunk of psychopathology periodically surfacing during the "true" story of Cole's voyages under the pressure of temporal dislocation, the after effects of heavy tranquilization, and sundry other exceptional stresses he's undergone. But it can alternately be read as a symptom of a flagrant delusional disorder occurring within the "true" present of l99O or l996 (take your pick). Under this rubric, the eye in the film's first establishing shot may not -- as has generally been supposed -- belong to Cole the child, watching the events of his memory, but to the adult Cole who floats between delusion and reality in his hospital ward, incorporating Railly into his bizarre world destruction fantasy as psychotic patients are prone to do with their caretakers. Such of course, is the doctor's misperception, until events teach her otherwise...
Can a deadly connection be inferred between Jeffrey Goines and the red-headed laboratory assistant? Does Jeffrey's abduction of his father provide the means which enable the assistant, actually a pivotal member of the "l2 Monkeys" conspiracy, to steal the virus and carry out Jeffrey's world-destruction fantasy, while the Philadelphia authorities are distracted by the mess at the zoo?
During one replay of Cole's traumatic memory, Jeffrey himself is substituted for the assistant, arguably indicating that Cole's unconscious has correctedly implicated him as the plague's prime mover. However, the substitution may be yet another of Cole's paranoid distortions, here involving a fellow patient. In any case, no connection between Jeffrey and the assistant need be argued for the latter to have been the sole perpetrator of humanity's virtual extinction. His trusted position and his mask of fussy harmlessness afford him ample means and opportunity to let loose the virus (his egotistical misanthropy may be inferred in retrospect from intrusive remarks made to Railly during the book signing after her lecture).
Railly's warning call about an impending theft leads Leland Goines to strengthen security by surrendering vital computer codes to his little known assistant, evidently so that the famous scientist cannot be forced to reveal them. Thus it is Railly, not Cole, who sets the stage for the catastrophe she's attempting to head off, a horrid irony which would seem to reflect La Jetee's hypothesis that time is essentially unalterable (an added irony: if Railly's warning did succeed, Cole himself would cease to be!). Throughout the film, Cole emphasizes that nothing can avert the plague, a certainty which inflames his guilt and grief.
But has this certainty in fact been planted by his masters? At the end, numerous emissaries from the future crowd the airport, signifying that formidable advances in time travel technology have occurred. Now sensible to the laboratory director's mission, the future's rulers theoretically ought to be able to use their newly advanced skills to have their minions stop him from releasing the virus at the security gate. For that matter, they could have him killed in his cradle! Are they restrained by some inextricable law of temporality? Or do the elites prefer the plague to erupt, rather than suffering themselves and the tormented world they command to be expunged? Once again, 12 Monkeys keeps mutually contradictory possibilities open, cleverly managing to come down on both sides of the debate over the unchangeability or malleability of time.
Terry Gilliam and his designers have brilliantly realized the script's byzantine overdetermination in an extravagantly excessive milieu, at once menacing and witty, replete with postmodern pastiche and caricature. Many of the future interiors were shot at retro-fitted antique or abandoned buildings in the Philadelphia/Baltimore area -- rusting power stations, rundown theaters, scabrous libraries.
The gizmos of the film's cluttered dystopia were largely crafted from greasy components of pre-l96Os mechanisms, so that high and low tech seem to rub elbows in an ambience of gimcrack decline where breakdown appears ever imminent. The l99O/l996 settings are analogously ruinous, from the dilapidated madhouse (an l82O's panoptical penitentiary) to the mean streets teeming with the crazed, dispirited homeless.
12 Monkeys obviously or subliminally recirculates images from its various time frames, augmenting the disquieting sense of temporal instability (e.g., the ravaged angel beheld by Cole in a cathedral-like demolished department store during his 2O36 trip topside is also seen in a pristine state, hoisted up behind him while he shops for a new identity in the same store three decades earlier). Diverse spaces and eras keep bleeding into each other, such that the flow of time is experienced by the viewer as a Moebius strip wherein one could easily conceive of encountering oneself around the next bend.
Choices of design, lighting and photographic stock acutely illustrate Baudrillard's conception of the "hyper-real": even ordinary objects possess an uncanny sharpness of surface and edge that paradoxically subverts their tangibility. Similar choices are found in Brazil, but 12 Monkeys deploys them to thoughtful rather than merely decorative effect, emphasizing the insubtantiality of the world that's about to disappear as well as its succeeding future.
Through visual free association Gilliam also honorably appropriates images from other cinematic dystopias besides Brazil, notably from the defiled authoritarian futures of A Clockwork Orange (l971) and Blade Runner (l982), with their impotent anti-heroes and the Blade Runner's empty promise of escape to a non-existant paradise (which Brazil derisively deconstructs). Immensely resonant analogies are also drawn to Hitchcock's Vertigo (l958), some obvious, some occulted within the narrative's deep stucture. Cole and Railly don their disguises at a re-run theater while, onscreen, Kim Novak/Madeline Elstir eerily traces her fictitious previous lifeline in a redwood slab (a still in La Jetee refers to the same moment). Other citations emphasize the parallels between the fatal affiliation of the time-crossed couples in 12 Monkeys and Vertigo. The heroes of both films are manipulated by callous authority figures, who in turn embody the remoteness of an indifferent destiny that shapes our ends. Both narratives invoke the Orpheus myth, and are haunted by the ineluctability of Cocteau's "infernal machine" of tragedy, in their depiction of a beloved lost, found, then desolatingly lost forever through the inexorable grinding of fate and time upon their hapless subjects.
Hapless in Vertigo/Hitchcock's Jansenist vision, but not entirely so in 12 Monkeys. Apocalyptic cinema like Brazil has been faulted (4) for cynically seducing viewers from the contemplation of pressing social ills with bankrupt spectacle, the meaningless triumph of Mad Max cardboard heroes, or the heady frisson of hopelessness (civilization is beyond rescue, que le fete commence!). But in 12 Monkeys Gilliam has transcended the masochistic capitulation to Thatcherite authority and the passive despair, which Gilliam of Brazil perceived as inevitable, ubiquitous psychic deformations inflicted by the depradations of late Twentieth century corporate capitalism.
12 Monkeys holds out a slim, yet no less potent hope of redemptive authenticity, residing in the radical transformations of consciousness -- including political sensibility -- the lovers spur in each other. One acknowledges that critics on the stringent left are likely to reject this resolution as escapist, individualist twaddle, partaking of the disease for which it purports to be the cure. Tant pis.
Sustained by her love for a traumatized man from the brutalized time yet to come, probably on the brink of her own death from the disease, Railly rejects her withering rationality and the dehumanizing system which will spawn that time. Cole's revolt against his masters fails (they do not fail: the laboratory assistant is last seen in the departing plane, seated next to the Chief Scientist who sardonically introduces herself as "Jones -- I'm in insurance..."). But Cole has affirmed his maimed humanity in the obliterated past; has recuperated the sweetness of the generous earth he knew in childhood, and miraculously discovered a affection that defies his future's abominable tyranny.
His death is the coinage that must be paid for reclaiming his life. His victory -- and Railly's -- however fleeting, is irredeemably precious, existentially heroic. It lies beyond the carping of ideologues and outside the strictures of temporality. One recalls John Donne's words:
"Love, all alike, no season
knowes nor clyme,
Nor houres, dayes, moneths,
which are the rags of time."(5)
NOTES
l. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Doubleday, l99O.
2. Greenberg, Harvey. "Raiders of the Lost Text: Remaking as Contested Homage in Always", in Screen Memories: Hollywood Cinema on the Psychoanalytic Couch. New York: Columbia University Press, l993, p. 224.
3. Thomas, D.M. The White Hotel. New York: Viking, l98l.
4. Crisis Cinema: The Apocalyptic Idea in Post-Modern Narrative Film., Christopher Sharrett, ed. Washington, Maissonneuve Press, l993. See, in particular, Tony Williams, "Thatcher's Orwell: The Spectacle of Excess in Brazil", pp. 2O3- 22l.
5. Donne, John. "The Sonne Rising". English Seventeenth Century Verse, ed. Louis L. Martz. New York: Norton, l963, pp. 45-6.