12 Monkeys (1995) | Sci-Fi Saturdays

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You can ape the ape. Darling, don’t you monkey with the monkey!

You’ve seen 12 Monkeys. Have you forgotten? Thirteen years from now you check out this Terry Gilliam film that deals with time travel, mental illness, and that other thing you can’t remember; memory. Also, wash your hands! There’s germs everywhere!

First Impressions

Bruce Willis plays a man who is having trouble telling the past from the present. But there’s also a voice over asking someone to help to return the human race to the surface of the Earth. He thinks he can help stop a virus. Obviously some people don’t think he’s playing with a full deck and commit him to an insane asylum where Brad Pitt plays another inmate. It’s a paranoid thriller, and the trailer definitely raises more questions than it answers. And just what are the 12 Monkeys?

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

The Fiction of The Film

At some point in the future (approximately the year 2035, inferred by dialogue later in the film), humanity lives below the surface of the Earth due to a global virus that erupted in 1996, killing 99% of all people. James Cole (Bruce Willis), incarcerated for an unknown crime, is “volunteered” to take a trip to the surface to collect specimens for a cadre of scientists. James is a violent criminal that often has flashes of a vision of a man getting shot in an airport and a blonde woman running after him. The only female on the council (Carol Florence) asks James if he would like to volunteer again to reduce his sentence.

Baltimore, April 1990–Dr Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe) arrives at the police station to evaluate a prisoner who put two officers in the hospital, and answers to the name of James Cole. He has been drugged by the officers, is incoherently ranting about needing to observe a virus, and believes it’s October 1996. He is admitted to a psychiatric hospital, sedated, and prevented from making any calls. He tries to explain to the staff of doctors, including Dr. Railly and Dr. Fletcher (Frank Gorshin), that he was sent back to track a virus launched by The Army of the 12 Monkeys which killed 5 million people in 1996 and 1997.

No one seems to believe him except another patient, Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt), the son of a famous virologist (Christopher Plummer). Jeffrey tries to help James escape, but due to his heavy medication he is easily caught, put in a solitary room and strapped down. When he is checked on by the orderlies a short time later, he is nowhere to be found. James is back in the future, questioned by the Council to see if he really is dependable. They promise to send him back closer to the October 1996 date this time. He awakens during a battle of World War I and is shot in the leg.

Baltimore, November 1996–Dr. Railly, now a published author, is giving a talk about her new book, “Madness and Apocalyptic Visions.” A man (David Morse) approaches her during the book signing spouting rhetoric that the apocalyptic alarmists may not have the wrong view. As she leaves, James kidnaps her and forces her to drive him to Philadelphia. He is confused when a news story comes on the radio about a boy trapped in a well, whom he says is only pulling a prank and hiding in a barn. She now believes him fully delusional.

James confronts Jeffrey, believing him the leader of the Army of the 12 Monkeys who is working out of an animal activist office in the city. The police come for James for the kidnapping of Kathryn, but when they arrive he has disappeared again, right from under Kathryn’s nose. While recuperating Kathryn sees on the news that the young boy in the well was found hiding in a barn, and gets a police report that the bullet she removed from James’s leg was a WWI-era antique. She finds a picture of him from a WWI-era photo used for her book, now finally believing his stories of time travel and an imminent plague.

Kathryn purchases airline tickets for them to Key West to take James to see the ocean before the plague hits. At the airport, the frequent visions he has of a man getting shot come more into focus realizing that it’s a true memory to him. It happens that his younger self is in the airport observing older James being shot by officers. Older James tries to shoot the man from Kathryn’s book signing–Dr Peters, an assistant to Jeffrey’s father Dr. Goines. James realizes that Jeffrey and the Army of the 12 Monkeys did not release the virus. Dr. Peters did. The information the future scientists have is from clues in the timeline left by James and Kathryn, which are wrong. But James was able to communicate one last time before he dies, having Jones (the female council member) meet Peters on the flight to get a sample of the virus. The young James Cole sees his older self die, eventually making eye contact with Dr. Railly, who understands everything now.

“The movie never changes, it can’t change, but every time you see it, it seems different because you’re different.” – James Cole

History in the Making

12 Monkeys was director Terry Gilliam’s eighth feature film, and second sci-fi film after 1985s Brazil. Some might consider Time Bandits to also be a sci-fi film (it deals with time travel naturally) but it is more of a fantasy film, which is a discussion for another day. For this film, Gilliam took “inspiration” from Chris Marker’s French short film La Jetée. Though calling it an inspiration is a tad disingenuous, since 12 Monkeys takes the plot from the 1962 film (as it was) and expands the narrative, characters, and themes presented there. It’s as much a remake as a new Planet of the Apes or Total Recall film would be.

Gilliam presents the film the same way as many of his films: with a grungy and distressed design, creating an almost dreamlike narrative. The costumes are all dirty and look like they’ve come from the nearby homeless encampment. The set design is accomplished with garbage, spray paint and a sledgehammer. And his shots are often accompanied by the use of wide angle lenses to distort the features, as well as including as much of the detritus as possible. His approach to the film allows the actors an ability to explore deeper meanings in their characters as well as immerse themselves in the environment.

Unlike a number of other recent time travel films, 12 Monkeys does not have the positive outlook on traveling to the past. Unlike Timecop, Freejack or the Back to the Future films, this film does not have a happy ending. Unless you think that Cole, completing the cycle of his life–his destiny–is a positive outcome. Overall, James’ life is tragic especially given the fact that he is destined to be an observer in the past and eventually die there.

Genre-fication

Here, time travel is not a fun thing to do. It is portrayed as a disorienting, possibly painful process that is fraught with error. James is often off his mark by years, and in one case goes the entirely wrong direction and ends up in World War I, getting shot. He is constantly told that he is an observer, repeating that he cannot change the timeline. In fact, his existence in the past seems to dictate the events that lead to the events that send him back in the first place. It is Cole’s mentioning of the Army of the 12 Monkeys in 1990 gives Jeffrey the idea in the first place. Then later, Kathryn spray paints a message on the FAA headquarters and leaves a voice mail at the carpet cleaners that were both elements shown to James in the future as proof of the release of the virus. It becomes a closed loop paradox for his character, destined to observe his own death as a child and then grow up to travel into the past to die in front of his young eyes.

But is it a paradox? The film ends with Jones, the council member from the future, having received the word from James that they had the wrong people. That it was Dr. Goines assistant who was the one who released the virus. She shows up on the airplane, mentioning that she’s in “insurance,” certainly a veiled message that she is the future’s insurance. She shakes hands with Dr. Peters, presumably getting what she needs to trace the virus. From this point, she had the information needed to help repair the future. But she was probably not making any changes to the past. Peters had released the virus in the airport security line, so it was already going to kill a number of people. But Cole, doing his job, provided the future that final clue they needed to track the origin. Even though Cole’s life was a doomed circle, his paradox potentially allows the human race to regain the surface of the planet–just as he was contracted to do.

12 Monkeys also uses clips from film and television to allow a meta approach to its time travel themes, as well as other homages. Besides various references to monkeys, a television in the motel room that Cole and Kathryn stay in is shown playing the Woody Woodpecker short “Prehistoric Super Salesman,” which features Woody getting sent to the Stone Age by a Time Tunnel.  An obvious nod and wink to the events of the film. Furthermore, Cole and Kathryn hide out in a theater that is showing an Alfred Hitchcock retrospective which features footage from Vertigo. Besides the allusions to that film with Kathryn wearing a blonde wig (which is why James doesn’t recognize her in his memories), the sequence where Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak investigate the rings of a tree is shown. It’s a scene where the characters look at the rings as moments in time, indicating which rings stand for their birth or death. This was a scene that was recreated for La Jetée, highlighting another connection between the various films.

Societal Commentary

The film also correlates the time travel elements with the properties of memory. Cole has repetitive flashes of what are later revealed to be his memories from his youth, witnessing the climax of the film. But prior to that, the imagery is unclear. In fact, the imagery of the events change as they are “remembered” throughout the film. The way that time travel works in this film, with its various inexactitudes, also seems to introduce a component of confusion into the user. James is often disoriented, and continues to become worse the more times he travels into the past. Eventually he believes that he is crazy, and mentally divergent, just as Kathryn has been telling him throughout his travels, since he’s unsure what is going on any longer–as well as hearing the strange voices in his head, which may or may not be other time travelers. This leads into the other major theme of the film.

Mental illness is also an important thematic element in 12 Monkeys. When Cole arrives in the past for the first time, in 1990, he is immediately beaten by the police, drugged, and thrown into an antiquated (or Terry Gilliam-styled) mental hospital. It is a horrible place where attendants shirk their duties toward other inmates to provide orientation, or threaten drugging or abuse when patients don’t comply. Cole is repeatedly refused contact with the outside world, as he continues to refer to things in the doctor’s Present, as his Past. Kathryn speaks to Dr. Fletcher about how she feels like she’s losing “her faith” in psychiatry, which she characterizes as “the latest religion.” These doctors decide who is crazy and who is not. Jeffrey relates a similar story about Dr. Semmelweis, an 18th Century physician, who tried to convince other doctors that there are invisible things called germs, which make you sick. He too was thought of as crazy. It’s all about the perspective of the individual and their beliefs. Just because someone believes something that nobody else does, does that make them crazy? 12 Monkeys is saying that is not the case.

It’s also interesting to review the quote above when coupled with James’ belief that he can’t change the past, and the fact that this is a film. James is talking specifically about Vertigo, but the same is true for the film he’s in as well–12 Monkeys. The film never does change, but the audience can interpret the film differently each time they see it. Experiencing the events of the film subsequent times changes the audience’s expectations due to the foreknowledge of what is to come, as well as–as James says, because the audience is different.

The Science in The Fiction

But can the past be changed? While watching the film the first time, it might seem like the interactions of James with the people of the 90s changes the events, but repeated viewings do show that the changes he makes are the clues that the future uses to determine if he should return to the past. The grandfather paradox as discussed above. When he does provide the clue to the virus outbreak at the end of his loop, it does seem like that may be an “out” for the current iteration, but as soon becomes evident, he continues down the same path he saw as a child.

But other than the familiar rules of time travel, very little is mentioned about how the technology works. James is suspended on a clear tube which contracts like an accordion, forcing him into a purple light. He then just appears in the past. He disappears instantaneously without warning, as Kathryn discovers. One moment he’s splashing in a puddle, and the next he’s gone. No warning and no explanation. Gilliam uses a strobing shutter effect accompanied with a sound effect to indicate the travel, but never provides anything further. This is consistent with La Jetée where the traveler moves into the past via reflection or memory or meditation. No firm explanation was given there either.

The Final Frontier

12 Monkeys is unique for a movie from the 90s, as it got a television series but not until 2015. The show retold the story from the film, changing some of the characters (Kathryn became Cassandra, and Jeffrey became Jennifer), and creating a longer form story, as you might expect for a television show. It lasted four seasons, until 2018, running a total of 47 episodes.

The film also makes allusions to a number of other films all unintentionally (as these films, save one, would be created after the fact). The first is Outbreak, a Dustin Hoffman film which was released in March 1995, and shares minor similarities. It is about a viral outbreak transmitted by a monkey (Marcel from Friends fame). But these other films seem potentially inspired by the events or moments in 12 Monkeys. Looper has Bruce Willis going back in time to confront his younger self, which is sort of what happens here. Jeffrey, who is mentally imbalanced, finds other disenfranchised individuals to join his Army and pulls pranks, such as locking his father in the zoo and releasing a bunch of animals. Does this sound like elements of Fight Club? Also James Cole says at one point “all I see are dead people,” referring to the fact that everyone in the past is dead to him–but also an eerie similarity to The Sixth Sense.

There’s so much crammed into this film, it is impossible to cover everything. Terry Gilliam’s work is often downbeat and depressing, but 12 Monkeys seems to go further than his other films. It continues to change with each viewing even though the film is the same as it’s been for the last 25 years. The themes it depicts are timeless and show how much our species hasn’t evolved in the time since its release. Check it out again, for the first time.

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