Twelve Monkeys: Encyclopedia - Twelve Monkeys

Twelve Monkeys

Twelve Monkeys is a 1995 time travel movie co-written by David Webb Peoples and directed by Terry Gilliam. The film deals with problems of time and memory, inspired by the short film La Jetée.

The film stars Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe, and Brad Pitt. It also features Jon Seda, Simon Jones, Carol Florence, Frank Gorshin, David Morse, and Joseph Melito.

Twelve Monkeys - Synopsis

Bruce Willis stars as James Cole, a convicted petty criminal of about a generation in the future, when a remnant of the human race lives in a sealed underground environment due to contamination of the surface world with a disease that killed off most of the human race in 1996-7. The movie takes its title from the fact that 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 occasionally coerced into "volunteering" for dangerous missions to the surface in a biohazard suit, where he explores a now-uninhabited Philadelphia for biological specimens, presumably as a source of information about the disease. Cole proves himself to be a careful observer with an excellent memory, and is therefore "volunteered" to participate in a more ambitious branch of the program.

Stowe plays Cole's psychiatrist and Pitt, in an Oscar-nominated performance, plays a man who crosses paths with Cole on several occasions.

For the special program, the scientists of the future have developed a system for sending individuals on round trips to the past. Cole and others are sent back in time to track down the origin of the disease so that a scientist can be sent back to study it directly. After some unspecified amount of time in the past the time travellers simply disappear out of the past and re-appear in their own present, sick and badly disoriented.

The time travel mechanism is not very reliable with respect to hitting the target date. The scientists try to send Cole back to October 1996, a few weeks before the outbreak of the disease, but on his first trip he lands in April of 1990 instead. He is arrested after a violent resistance that leaves the authorities believing that he is insane — not least because he claims to be a time traveller from a near future where the world has been transformed by disease. He is therefore institutionalized, placed under the care of psychiatrist Dr. Kathryn Railly (played by Stowe), and meets Jeffrey Goines (played by Pitt).

Goines, in addition to being seriously deranged, is an animal rights and anti-capitalist activist. The movie's extended portrayal of the 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 where they are held, but he is quickly recaptured and placed in restraints in an isolation cell. While there he "disappears" back into the future, leaving the authorities baffled about his disappearance.

In a second, briefly portrayed trip, Cole and one of his associates are sent all the way back to World War I, where Cole is shot in the leg. He and his friend are caught in a photograph, and his friend merits a minor footnote in history because of the French doctors' conclusion that he forgot French and retained English with an unrecognized dialect as the result of shell shock.

On his third trip he arrives at the target date, about six weeks before the disease broke out during the Christmas season of 1996. Between 1990 and 1996, Dr. Railly takes an interest in prophets of doom who claim to be from the future and predict the destruction of the world by disease. She publishes a book on the topic, citing examples that date back to the 14th century. Cole finds a poster announcing one of Railly's talks and book-signing sessions, and meets her there, kidnapping her to enlist her aid in his mission. She believes him to be delusional, but feels sympathy for him and begins to help him a little after he passes on some obvious opportunities to harm her.

As the story unfolds, Cole is gradually convinced by Railly's arguments that he is merely delusional, but various events and evidence of the World War I episode cause her to begin to take him seriously.

Ultimately they track down the Army of the Twelve Monkeys (and the key role that Goines played within it). They report this information to the scientists of the future via a voice mail message, which is recovered in the future and has the recurrent effect of causing Cole's mission to begin with.

Cole, now in love with Railly and the open air of the pre-disease world, decides that he has done his duty and will stay in what he perceives as "the past" to enjoy it. At the last moment he puts together the actual cause of the disease, reports it in another voice mail message, and in the climax of the film gets himself killed in an attempt to stop a man (Dr. Peters, played by David Morse) from carrying samples of the original virus onto an airplane. The scene is an expanded and clear version of the previously-cryptic scene that opens the film; it features a young Cole, seeing his future but disguised self shot dead at an airport.

In a coda to the climax, one of the scientists (played by Carol Florence) is shown taking a seat on an airplane next to Dr. Peters, and introducing herself as "in insurance". We are left to conclude that Cole's mission was a success, and provided some hope of salvation for the humanity of his era.

There is also a strong suggestion 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 perhaps by the "laws" of time travel.

The movie operates on the premise of a "fixed timeline": the past cannot be changed; it has already happened, a viewpoint known as the Novikov self-consistency principle.

Twelve Monkeys - 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.

Twelve Monkeys - Coincidences with Fight Club

The Jeffrey Goines character is in some ways similar to Tyler Durden, a character that was also played by Brad Pitt in the 1999 film Fight Club. Jeffrey creates the Army of the 12 Monkeys just as Tyler Durden creates his own army of "Space Monkeys". Both strongly criticize the consumerist society they live in and want to destabilize the system and flip it upside down. Two particular scenes in the movies, in which Jeffrey kidnaps his own father in 12 Monkeys and in which Tyler kidnaps the police chief in Fight Club, are also both quite similar. In the common interpretation of the novel of Fight Club the narrator ends up in a mental institution, a place in which Jeffrey first appears in 12 Monkeys. A hint to the intentionality of this fact is a line that Tyler says in Fight Club: "What are we then? We're consumers!" - almost exactly echoing Jeffrey in the mental institution.

Twelve Monkeys - Trivia

• Towards the end of the film there is a scene set in a movie theater. The film seen 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 Valdez ("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.

• An additional irony can be seen in the scene in the movie theatre lobby, where Madeleine Stowe and Bruce Willis embrace. The irony in this is that, in the scene that was just shown from the movie Vertigo, an actor named James embraces a character named Madeleine, whereas here, a character named James embraces an actress named Madeleine.

• Simon Jones plays one of the scientists who sends the Willis character back to the 1990s. Jones also played the time-travelling Arthur Dent in the venerable BBC production of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the final installment of which likewise concludes with the song What a Wonderful World as performed by Louis Armstrong. Jones has appeared in other Gilliam films.

• 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 story told by self-proclaimed time traveller John Titor has strong parallels with the story line of The Twelve Monkeys.

• 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 the animated short film World Record (from The Animatrix) the runner's coach acts and talks like Goines.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Twelve Monkeys", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki