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AUTEUR AND GENRE: Every Terry Gilliam film offers a meditation on the meaning of madness. With Twelve Monkeys, the filmmaker strikingly presented his highly personal vision within the audience’s expectations for an action-oriented sci-fi film. Courtesy: Atlas Entertainment/Classico/Universal.
CREDITS
Universal Pictures/Atlas Entertainment; Terry Gilliam, dir.; David Webb Peoples, Janet Peoples, scr.; Charles Roven, pro.; Paul Buckmaster, mus.; Roger Pratt, cin.; Mick Audsley, ed.; Jeffrey Beecroft, prod. design; William Ladd Skinner, art dir.; Julie Weiss, costumes; Shirley Montefusco, Vincent Montefusco, Anthony Simonaitis, F/X; Richard Bain, Martin Body, Susi Roper, Kent Houston, digital effects; 129 min.; Color; 1.85:1.
CAST
Bruce Willis (James Cole); Madeleine Stowe (Kathryn Railly); Brad Pitt (Jeffrey Goines); Christopher Plummer (Dr. Goines); David Morse (Dr. Peters); Frank Gorshin (Dr. Fletcher); Joey Perillo (Det. Franki); Jon Seda (Jose); Michael Chance (Scarface); Christopher Meloni (Lt. Halperin); Joseph Melito (Young Cole).
MOST MEMORABLE LINE
Wouldn’t it be great if I was crazy? Then the world would be okay.
COLE TO KATHRYN
BACKGROUND
Before the French New Wave introduced greater freedom as to what could and, in the future, would be portrayed onscreen, an earlier coterie of cineastes paved the way with experimental filmmaking. Collectively known as the Left Bank Cinema movement, their company included Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, and Chris Marker (born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve, 1921–2012). Marker’s unique projects, often featuring sci-fi plots, pushed film ever closer to the surreal.
Creating visual essays, rather than conventional stories, Marker is best known today for his 1962 La jetée (airline portal). The film reveals his intellectual background as a student of philosophy and his workaday experience as a journalist. The latter helped him grasp how essential photographs are to the reception of any article. La jetée relates its fantasy in the manner of a documentary, with a succession of still photographs (aka “photo montage”) accompanied by a somber voice-over. A boy witnesses the murder of a man at Orly airport in Paris. The memory (or was it but a dream?) haunts him throughout his life—until, in due time, all becomes clear. The man whose death he saw was himself, adult and child incarnations of a person in one place at the same second owing to a trick of fate and the concept of time travel. Though only twenty-eight minutes long (thus not eligible for inclusion here), the film altered everything, its groundbreaking style proving that sci-fi/fantasy could be rescued from abject commerciality and returned to the avant-garde. A serious approach had been restored to the genre.
In a dystopian future, humans are forced to live underground owing to the poisonous surface. Scientists, having mastered the art of time travel, wonder if it might it be possible to send someone back to 1996, shortly before a deadly virus was released into the atmosphere; locate the about-to-be perpetrator; and obtain a sample of the “super-bug,” which might be used to create an antidote. Criminal James Cole agrees to the mission in exchange for a pardon if he is successful. The only real clue is an underground political, apparently terrorist, movement called the “Twelve Monkeys.” But as time travel remains imprecise, Cole arrives six years early. Erratic behavior causes him to be institutionalized, alongside Jeffrey Goines, leader of an animal rights movement. Cole’s psychiatrist, the gifted and sensitive Kathryn Railly, intuits that there may indeed be something special about this patient, who gives her a sense of déjà vu that they’ve already met.
THE FILM
The only American-born member of the otherwise all-British comedy ensemble Monty Python, Terry Gilliam (1940–) grew up in Minnesota and Los Angeles. His favorite reading was Mad magazine, which guided him toward the off-the-wall humor that would in time characterize his body of work. Moving to England in hopes of avoiding the increasingly threatening social upheaval of the 1960s, Gilliam found work in advertising, which then led to experiments with strip cartooning and animation. As a result of the latter, he began collaborating with Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin. Ever more intrigued with the idea of directing, Gilliam helmed the uneven but appealing sci-fi/fantasy Time Bandits (1981), then moved on to dystopian fiction with an Orwellian orientation with Brazil (1985).
Gilliam’s interest in both these genres was combined in Twelve Monkeys, which also provided the filmmaker with an opportunity to create a feature-length homage to his beloved Alfred Hitchcock. At one point in the film, hero and heroine hide in a theater where North by Northwest, The Birds, and Vertigo are playing on a triple bill. The plot of Twelve Monkeys, which has a seemingly mismatched couple traveling cross-country, recalls the narrative line in North by Northwest. When Bruce Willis and Madeline Stowe stand alone in an abandoned cathedral-like construction, birds fly up and out a broken window in a scene reminiscent of The Birds. When Stowe changes from brunette to blonde, she repeats in a ritualistic manner the action in which Judy, played by Kim Novak, transforms into Madeleine in Vertigo, Bernard Hermann’s score from the classic used here to emphasize the parallel.
THEME
Like many of Hitchcock’s greatest films, Twelve Monkeys deals with madness. Cole is considered “crazy” because he perceives reality differently than the majority who constitute the norm. His screams for attention appear identical to those of other would-be prophets, standing on virtually every street corner and being ignored by the public passing by such seeming nutcases. But what if that person who is thrown into a madhouse for claiming to be sent back in time is correct—and the only hope for our planet’s survival? As in so much sci-fi and imaginative fiction (dating back at least to Edgar Allan Poe, with many Twilight Zones included), madness is posited as a subjective, rather than objective, state. People are neither mad nor sane, but rather considered one or the other according to contexts.
The film’s connection to the long heritage of what we now call sci-fi is expressed openly by Dr. Goines: the great responsibility we assume when we experiment can be traced back through the Cold War era of Dr. Strangelove to Prometheus’s stealing fire from the gods. Never, though, have the threats of the improper use of the technology we develop been as serious as in our time.
TRIVIA
Asian filmmaker Mamoru Oshii admits to having unofficially remade La jetée at least twice in his best-known non-anime works: The Red Spectacles (1987) and Avalon (2001). Director Mira Nair has also said that moments in her The Namesake (2006) are “references” to indelible images from the featurette.