12 MONKEYS
A film review by Jim Potter
Copyright 1996 Jim Potter
This motion picture is a synthesis of Dante's Inferno, "Blade Runner" and Diary of a Death Foretold. It begins with the dream of a prisoner, James Cole, played by Bruce Willis. In the dream James is a child at an airport who watches as the police gun down a man running through the terminal. The man then dies cradled in the arms of his lover, a young woman, played by Madeleine Stowe. The dream sequence, shot in slow motion has the eerie feel of deja vu and recurs throughout the picture. It becomes the leitmotif of inevitable disaster that underlies the film. The prisoner then awakens. He is in a cage deep in the bowels of the earth. Visually stunning, this prison consists of stacks of wire cubes, such as one would find in a laboratory, each inhabited by a single prisoner with only a hammock to sleep on. Prisoners are shuttled in and out of their cages by mechanical arms which transport them to their various "volunteer" assignments.
On its most basic level, 12 Monkeys is a riveting sci-fi action thriller. It recounts a future society's efforts to escape subterranean exile by intercepting a deadly virus that has conquered the earth's surface in an earlier era. Prisoners are drafted for specimen gathering topside and to travel in time back to the point of contamination. The scientist/jailers who send them out on their coerced quest have discovered that the surface contamination occurred in 1996. However, they have not yet learned the precise cause of the catastrophic viral release. Therefore, they enlist prisoners to make the perilous journey and force them to detect the original virus before it mutates out of control. This is a dangerous task because time travel is full of surprises. At one point James is arrested and placed in a mental institution where he meets the woman who appears in his dreams. She is a staff psychiatrist at the hospital with a special interest in the deranged Cassandras who have predicted world plague at various points in history. She is intrigued by James and ambivalent about his presumed insanity. At another juncture James finds himself naked, projected into the middle of a World War I battlefield. He is mistaken for a German infiltrator by French soldiers, and is shot and wounded. Survivors of such misbegotten time travels are sent out repeatedly if they are lucky enough to be retrieved. Some never return.
The 12 Monkeys of the film title refers to a motley guerilla band of animal lovers led by a scientist's deranged son, played by Brad Pitt, who gives an unforgettable performance. The 12 Monkeys are outraged by the inhumane treatment of laboratory animals subjected to grisly and painful experiments. Scientists of the future suspect that this group of romantics caused the release of the virus by freeing laboratory monkeys. Willis' assignment is to find this group and report back to his keepers. He faces many obstacles along the way and is finally assisted in this project by the female psychiatrist whom he kidnaps. They eventually fall in love and try to escape after Willis, in an act of self-mutilation, painfully removes his own teeth which contain the electronic leash that presumably allows his retrieval through time.
On another level, the film is about postmodern consciousness: the feeling that fascism is inevitable, our lack of a political compass to combat it, and our impotence in influencing the rapidly advancing course of events. Scenes of blood, water, encapsulated nakedness, and cyclical rebirth mark each journey on the time machine. Willis is merely a laboratory animal doomed to suffer repeated experiments and then be returned to his cage. Each trip to the past ends in frustration when the hero returns to his subterranean Hell where he faces his Judges and Interlocutors time and again. There is no way to change this cycle. His only hope is to escape.
Past, present and future are so interchangeable that they are conflated into a collage of the remembered present. But the remembered present is as fragmentary and disjointed as the image in a broken mirror. The real and the artificial become indistinguishable and the line between sanity and insanity is blurred. There is no coherent future, no linear past and every moment is on the edge of contingency. In short, the film aptly describes the present human condition throughout the advanced capitalist world. It is a world rocked by economic dislocation, rapidly shifting capital, wild swings in the market, and a sense of uncertainty and chaos. These insecurities translate into a consciousness in which humanity has lost its bearings and is rocketing down the rails to a destination that can only be disastrous. No one seems to have the answer anymore.
Science, once the hope of humanity, has become an instrument of oppression. In the past of 1996 it is used to subjugate and torture animals for crass commercial gain rather than for the good of humanity or to save the biosphere. In the futurist world, man has become the guinea pig. Fascism has triumphed.
This film explores the emptiness of the postmodern condition. The Enlightenment Project posits that history unfolds in a way that can be comprehended by human reason and which follows a progressive trajectory toward ever increasing freedom. The Enlightenment teaches that man can control his own destiny and change his world for the greater benefit of all. We can learn from history because it has meaning. Postmodernism on the other hand, has lost this faith in progress, abandoned the project, and become mired in impotence. It sees all change as superficial and cyclical and sees man as a victim rather than an agent of change. There is no longer cause and effect on a societal scale. The problems are too monumental. Our ability to make change occurs only on the most basic interpersonal levels. Therefore, concerted human political action has no consequence; it is futile.
12 Monkeys captures this mood of postmodernist despair. The future is devolution. Man has become animal. Human consciousness loses its higher order function and sinks into the primary consciousness of the animal world, the consciousness of the remembered fragmentary present. The animals may as well rule the world because Man has become incapable of doing so.
12 Monkeys is a serious warning about the nature of our time. Unless collective action led by an organized social movement is resurrected as a pole around which humanity can rally to build an alternative culture and society, the world may sink into the Fascist despair of late capitalist collapse.
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