Subject: REVIEW: 12 MONKEYS

From: [email-masked] (Jim Potter)
Date: 31 Jan 1996 21:38:42 GMT

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.