Twelve Monkeys

Twelve Monkeys is a 1995 science fiction film written by David and Janet Peoples and directed by Terry Gilliam. The movie deals with time travel and memory and is inspired by the French short film La Jetée. The film stars Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe, and Brad Pitt.

Synopsis

Bruce Willis stars as James Cole, a criminal in 2035 plagued by dreams of a man being shot in an airport. Humans are forced to live underground, sealed from a surface contaminated with a virus that killed most of the human species in 1996–1997. The disease is believed to have arisen as an act of bioterrorism by a mysterious group calling itself "The Army of the Twelve Monkeys."

As a convict, Cole is forced to "volunteer" for dangerous missions to the surface in a biohazard suit, exploring a deserted Philadelphia for biological specimens. The abandoned city is now inhabited by wild animals. Cole proves to be a careful observer with excellent memory and is "volunteered" to participate in a more ambitious branch of the program.

The movie has an unusual narrative style. Stowe plays a psychiatrist and Pitt, in an Oscar-nominated performance, plays Jeffrey Goines, a man who crosses paths with Cole on several occasions.

The scientists of the future have invented a crude method of time travel. Travellers cannot be sure of the exact time and place to which they are sent, and they are badly disoriented after arriving at the past and upon return, facilitated by such means of a phone call to an answering machine monitored by future scientists. Cole and others are sent back in time to find the origin of the disease so that a scientist can be sent back to study the virus before it ever mutated.

The scientists try to send Cole back to October 1996 on his first trip, a few weeks before the outbreak of the disease. He lands in April 1990 instead. He is arrested after a violent encounter that convinces the authorities that he is insane — not least because he claims to be a time traveller from an apocalyptic future. He is institutionalized and placed under the care of Dr. Kathryn Railly (Stowe).

While there, Cole meets Jeffrey Goines (Pitt), a seriously deranged animal rights and anti-consumerism activist. The extended encounter between Cole and Goines weaves Goines's beliefs into the fabric of the film's treatment of disease and time travel.

Goines helps Cole escape the ward by creating a major disturbance, but he is quickly recaptured and placed in metal restraints in an isolation cell with seemingly no possibility of an escape. Cole returns to the future nevertheless, baffling the authorities.

In a second attempt to send Cole back to 1996, he arrives briefly in the middle of a battle during World War I. While he's still trying to orient himself he encounters Jose, another inmate, who has been sent back to retrieve him from this mistaken arrival and has been wounded in the head during the attempt. Jose and Cole are photographed after Cole is shot in the leg, and later it is revealed that Jose has earned a small footnote in history when French doctors decide that he has forgotten French and retained English with an unrecognized dialect as a result of shell shock.

Cole manages to arrive at the target date, about six weeks before the disease broke out during the Christmas season, in the course of this second attempt. Between 1990 and 1996, Dr. Railly has taken an interest in prophets of doom who claim to be time travellers warning of a disease that would destroy the world. She publishes a book on the topic, citing examples dating back to the 14th century. Cole finds a poster announcing one of her talks, and kidnaps her after a book-signing session to aid his mission. She believes he is delusional, but begins to help him after he passes on opportunities to harm her.

Cole is gradually convinced by Railly that he is merely delusional, but she begins to take him seriously when she removes a World War I bullet from his leg and finds a photograph, taken during that conflict, in which Cole is shown wounded in a trench. She also learns that his assertion that a boy supposedly trapped in a well is actually playing a prank is true. Others, however, believe that she is a victim of the Stockholm Syndrome.

The pair manage to track down the Army of the Twelve Monkeys and find Goines, the leader. Cole, now in love with Railly and the open air of a music-filled world, decides that he has served his duty and gouges out a tracking device in his teeth. Railly reports their findings to the scientists of the future by leaving a message on an answering machine. Cole then realizes that a deteriorated copy of the message she leaves is the very cause of his mission, and they realize that what he has been claiming all along is true.

Still intent on an escape to Key West, the pair disguise themselves and travel to the airport, where Cole leaves another voicemail which asserts that the scientists are on the wrong track following the Army of the Twelve Monkeys and that he's not coming back. Meanwhile Railly realizes that Dr. Peters, played by David Morse, is about to carry the original virus onto an airplane, and in the course of their trying to stop Peters, Cole is fatally shot by law enforcement. As he dies in Railly's arms, she looks into the eyes of a small boy — the young James Cole. The scene is a hauntingly simple, expanded version of the dream that opens the film. However, it should be noted that throughout the movie the dream changes. Early in the film, the so called Mr. Ponytail who is running in the terminal is Goines. Later Mr. Ponytail becomes a different man which suggests that Cole has changed the course of what he remembers.

The movie then ends as the lead scientist, played by Carol Florence, takes the seat next to Dr. Peters, introducing herself as "in insurance". Cole's mission seems to have succeeded after all. Then again, "in insurance" may mean that the scientist is there to ensure the disease's spread, or to obtain a strain of the original virus in order to assist the people of the future in developing a cure. Such an open ending is consistent with Terry Gilliam's storytelling style.

It has been suggested that Cole had to die due to his decision to remain in his past, which is "not allowed", perhaps by the rules of the society that sent him or by the laws of time travel. The movie operates on the premise of a "fixed timeline" — the past cannot be changed, a viewpoint known as the Novikov self-consistency principle.

Origins

Writers David and Janet Peoples were approached by producer Robert Kosberg to do an adaptation of a French New Wave film called La Jetée (1962) made by Chris Marker. The film was composed entirely of black and white photographs and set in Paris after World War III. It was an apocalyptic vision in reaction to the threat of nuclear annihilation that became prominent in the 1950s and 1960s. The screenwriting couple wasn't that keen on the idea, however.

Kosberg got the Peoples to watch La Jetee again and the couple began to see possibilities for a different, more detailed take on the material. They set out to write a challenging piece of fiction that not only manipulated conventional views of time but that also dealt with the notion of madness. Janet explained in an interview, "We were very interested in asking questions like 'Is this man mad? And how about the prophets of the past, were they mad? Were they true prophets? Were they coming from another time? What are all the different possibilities?'"

After showing the finished screenplay to Marker and getting his blessing, the Peoples were faced with the daunting task of finding someone who would not only click with the material but also have the visual flair that the story needed. The couple figured that the only director to handle such tricky subject matter was somebody like Ridley Scott or Terry Gilliam. The theme of madness that plays such a prominent role in the script fit right in with Gilliam's preoccupations and so he seemed the natural choice to direct. As luck would have it the filmmaker was between films and looking for work after several years of seeing potential projects fall through for various reasons.

Gilliam was also eager to take a lot of Hollywood money (a $30 million budget) and create a strange art film that would fly in the face of the traditional mainstream movie. "The idea that someone's writing a script like this in Hollywood and getting the studio to pay for it was pretty extraordinary. So I thought let's continue to see how much money we can get the studio to spend," Gilliam said in an interview.

Cast

Bruce Willis - James Cole
Madeleine Stowe - Kathryn Railly
Brad Pitt - Jeffrey Goines
Frank Gorshin - Dr. Fletcher
David Morse - Dr. Peters
Christopher Plummer - Dr. Goines
Michael Chance - Scarface
Jon Seda - Jose
Simon Jones - Zoologist
Joseph Melito - Young James Cole

Criticism of institutional psychiatry

In both future and present time periods, Cole copes with institutions of professional psychiatry. Though less apparent in the future period, a planned society with scientists in authority, control and manipulation of the population is asserted, presumably through the Permanent Emergency Code, by "diagnosing" inmates with "social diseases" such as "Violence", "Antisocial (Level) 6", "Defiance", "Insolence", and "Disregard of Authority", completely blurring the line between prison and mental institution. This thematic criticism of the role of psychiatric institutions in the shaping of popular expectations and behavior parallels the modern history evalution made by Adam Curtis in The Century of the Self. Simply put, these inquire whether psychiatric institutions have filled the secular role formerly occupied by the Church in historical religious societies.

Trivia

Towards the end of the film there is a scene set in a movie theater. The film shown playing in the background of these shots is Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, and the scene that appears is that of Scottie and Madeleine in Big Basin Redwoods State Park where Madeleine looks at the growth rings of a felled redwood and traces back events in her past life as Carlotta Valdes ("here I was born ... and here I died"). As well as obviously resonating with larger themes in Twelve Monkeys, this scene can also be considered Gilliam's tip of the hat to Chris Marker, whose La Jetée inspired Twelve Monkeys. La Jetée features images of tree rings in several museum scenes, and the connection between La Jetée and the scene from Vertigo is also observed explicitly by Marker in his 1982 documentary montage Sans Soleil.

A "making of" documentary about the film, The Hamster Factor and Other Tales of Twelve Monkeys, was made by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe.

The notion of a time machine that projects the traveller into the past in the nude (i.e., without any equipment) also appears in the Terminator movies and in David Drake's novel Birds of Prey.

The closed captioning for the home versions of the film provide clues about details of scenes not apparent upon viewing without the subtitles. For example, the identity of a female's voice in a voicemail message, and of a passenger on a plane are made explicit.

In one scene you can see Bruce Willis pass a wall with posters on it, saying "MUSE" and specifying "at the Vortex," presumably advertising the performance of a band. Curiously the poster seems to be typeset using the same font that the British band Muse uses. Rumour has it that Muse's frontman, Matthew Bellamy, once said that Twelve Monkeys is his favourite film. Certain facts counter this connection to Muse: for instance, the band's official tour archive webpage lists no plays at the "Vortex" club between 1995 and 1998 (Twelve Monkeys was made in 1995), and a thread on a Muse-related message board thread provides evidence of the existence of a second, earlier band named "Muse" (along with screencaptures from the film), as well as the fact that prior to 1998 Muse was actually named "Rocket Baby Dolls" (their Wikipedia article corroborates this).

Lebbeus Woods, an architect, sued the producers of the film, claiming they copied his work "Neomechanical Tower (Upper) Chamber." Woods won a "six figure sum," and allowed the film to continue to be screened.

Pitt took the role of Jeffrey in order to get rid of his "pretty boy" image. He purposely tried to make the character as unattractive as possible, to the point of cutting his own hair.

References

External links

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