That the film was prescient goes without saying. Updating the nuclear holocaust of its source, Chris Marker’s 1962 slideshow film La Jetée, for its own seemingly post-historical era, not only does 12 Monkeys depict humans forced underground by a global pandemic (sweeping the globe in 1997, it turns out to have been developed by, what else, a rogue virologist keen on reducing human overpopulation), it also anticipates the simultaneous emergence of predictive AI. Questioned by his fellow eco-terrorists as to why their plans seem to have been anticipated by his psychiatrist, Brad Pitt’s Jeffrey Goines lets loose with a string of surmises about the use of what we would now call his “personal data” while he was under psychiatric supervision. “When I was institutionalised,” he tells his followers,
my brain was studied exhaustively in the guise of mental health. I was interrogated, I was X-rayed, I was examined thoroughly. Then, they took everything about me and put it into a computer where they created this model of my mind. Yes! Using that model they managed to generate every thought I could possibly have in the next, say, ten years. Which they then filtered through a probability matrix of some kind to – to determine everything I was gonna do in that period. So you see, she knew I was gonna lead the Army of the 12 Monkeys into the pages of history before it ever even occurred to me. She knows everything I’m ever gonna do before I know it myself.
Prescience is, evidently, not just a quality of 12 Monkeys, but one of its themes. Hence the “Cassandra Complex”, posited by the film’s fictional psychiatrist Dr Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe), whose sufferers believe themselves afflicted with knowledge of impending catastrophes that they are powerless to change. Dr Railly’s theory is a refinement of the impression she formed six years earlier, in the film’s “April, 1990.” Early in the film, we see her summoned to the local jail, where she finds James Cole (Bruce Willis) beaten, sedated and restrained, and claiming to come from the future. After Cole is transferred to the county mental institution, a decaying structure swathed in mothy light, where she is a resident clinician, she continues working with him as her patient – until he vanishes from the locked room where he is being held in restraints. (Unbeknownst to Dr Railly and her colleagues, Cole truly is a time-traveller; his miraculous escape is the result of having been whisked back to the future by his handlers, who mistakenly sent him to the wrong year.) When we meet her again, in 1996, it is clear that this shocking event, and Cole’s assertions (“How can I save you?” he irritably told one of her colleagues, “This already happened. I can’t save you, nobody can. I am simply trying to gather information”) have lodged themselves in her as an irritant. Already on their first meeting, however, something in him speaks to something in her. Not least of which is her sense that she has met him before.
Whatever the film touched in me was similarly subterranean. Must I confess that at its centre stood Dr Railly? What obscure feelings were working in me, I wonder, in my first watching of the film, or in its return upon me now? (My mother, too, is a researcher, though never with brown hair so long or so lustrous as Stowe’s.) From our first glimpse of her, when she answers her beeper and exits the talk at the art gallery, to her arrival directly from there at the jail, when the camera catches her semi-involuntarily smoothing down her skirt, we sense both her poise and her separateness. That separateness is partly that of a woman working mainly among men, partly that of the clinician whose work alongside police officers and hospital orderlies brings her into proximity with the more forcible means of social control, on which she at times must rely but from which she withholds her full assent; later, we will recognise in her the self-separation (both social and epistemic) of the scholar. About the rest of her life, we learn little. She is apparently single; she has some friends, a professional couple, a white man and a black woman, with whom, years later, she will stay after returning from what the news report calls her “ordeal". She has certain inchoate interests, the kind that will result in her research in metapsychology, and which must have been what drew her to the talk at the art gallery, where a lecturer drones on about “the infra-red messages, the gigabytes of ones and zeroes” and recites Omar Khayyam:
Yesterday This Day’s Madness did prepare;To-morrow’s Silence, Triumph, or Despair:Drink! for you know not whence you came, nor why:Drink! for you know not why you go, nor where.
But if 12 Monkeys might be the best cinematic depiction of the female academic, it is also, I think, the best filmic representation of the researcher tout court. No other movie I know so persuasively shows how our thinking and our lives are woven together, how our curiosities are linked to our deepest rememberings, how our experiences are irritants in us, inciting us to go in search of them, externalising (and thereby failing to recognise) our private pains and fears in the ostensibly objective subjects of our research, only to find ourselves confronted, just when we think we have mastered them, by the return of the repressed – as Dr Railly is, when Cole carjacks her after her book talk at the museum in Baltimore. (Bursting out of the shadows, growling “I have a gun,” he commands her to drive him to Philadelphia – the very city, strangely enough, where this scene was filmed. In this sense too, you could say, he commands her to take him where she already is.)
No other movie I know so persuasively shows how our thinking and our lives are woven together
Six years have passed for her, but – thanks to his quick detour back to the future – none for him. (There is, classically, no time in the unconscious.) Whatever she found in researching and writing her book, it evidently did not reach the deepest source. Cole – the thing she seeks, the thing she is bound to remember – is bound to reappear, to take her with him into the “present” as it is most vividly lived in the film: the dying present whose terminus is where his mind has begun, the gleaming white terminal, where a man will be gunned down, a woman will run to him, and the world will fail to be saved.
Seeing the movie again, I am surprised by how fast it all happens, but also by how indistinct the place is where it arrives. This is not the least of 12 Monkeys’ discoveries: to have invented a deepening, ramifying arc of relation between a man and a woman that does not have sex as its endpoint, nor would resolve itself if it did. The almost exception, the brief, half-abashed kiss when they are in disguise at the fatal airport terminal seems to proceed from an uncertainty at what is now between them. If theirs is no longer a relation of doctor and patient, what is it? Their costumes provide a script, but no key to decipher the link between this make-believe and whatever might be taking shape beneath it. The echoes of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which Railly and Cole catch at the movie theatre where they duck in to put on their disguises shine at best a partial light on the film’s central dynamic, which is not about a woman exploiting a man’s propensity toward guilty erotic fantasy, but rather about a woman – a psychiatrist – charged with dispelling fantasies who finds herself, ultimately against the resistance of her subject, drawn to believe in and enact them.
There are no words for what they become to each other: not therapist and patient, not lovers, not friends. What then of those ragged moments at the end, bodies slipping and spilling while the metal detector buzzes as though at a chart of flagging vital signs?
I do not wish to overstate the power of 12 Monkeys from a purely cinematic standpoint. Nevertheless, the sequence of shots of Dr Railly as she kneels, bloodied, over the dying James Cole are surely some of the greatest moments in this film and, I am tempted to say, in Stowe’s career as a performer. The moment is held just long enough, and just briefly enough, to lodge itself in the mind as something indelible and unparsable. Shoulder-length blonde hair, newly dyed, sweeps in slow-motion around a woman’s face in which are struggling horror, anguish, tenderness, recognition. Then these give way, once an impulse makes her search the crowd and she locks eyes with the boy James, to something else, strong and steadying, that she wishes to impart. Call it love. Love and, I think, also forgiveness – for having tried and failed.
Might this be the delayed import of that architectural study in Albertine perspective that we glimpse in extreme close-up in the scene that introduces Dr Railly at the art gallery in 1990 – not that its stony square, all but void of people (a premonition of the post-virus ruin-scape) is what the film aims to exemplify but what it means to contest? Like the manipulation of perspective that lets Michelangelo display a girl-like Mary holding her adult son in her lap, it is the film’s time-travel plot that lets us see Dr Railly kneeling over the dying body of James Cole and, at the same time, locking eyes with the boy who will become him.
But this, we might say, is time-paradox in its humanistic form. “The finding of an object,” Freud observed in the third of his Essays on Sexuality, “is in fact a refinding of it.” What is true of erotic desire is, the film suggests, equally true of the objects of humanistic research. Hence Railly’s sense – otherwise inexplicable within the film’s logic – that she has met Cole before, the sense that prompts her to ask, on their first meeting in the jail cell: “Have you ever been a patient at county? Have I seen you some place?” Not only is Cole’s mind filled with fragmentary recollections, returning to him in dreams, of what he does not yet recognize as his own death; it is as if his memory, still more submerged and impalpable, were somehow also hers.
Knowledge, according to this model is, fundamentally, self-knowledge: the recovery and appropriation of my mysterious past. Its object is something latently known but hidden from my consciousness. And yet, the film also envisions a different kind of knowledge, one that it already apprehends as powerful and forbidding. Embodied in the “probability matrix” hypothesised – mistakenly, it turns out – by Jeffrey Goines, this second model also clearly stands in some relation to the technology by which Cole and his companions are kept under surveillance by their handlers in the future. While the latter, a sensor embedded in the tooth, is real in the movie’s world but clearly fanciful, Goines’s supposition that unseen observers “took everything about me and put it into a computer where they created this model of my mind” is a delusion in the film’s world but essentially true in ours. According to this second model, instead of being the bearer of a mysterious past that I can appropriate, I produce traces that are recovered and presented back to me by others as the objective truth about me. The most important such truth is what can be predicted. And this fact gives a new meaning to the film’s time-travel plot.
Who has not felt, living and – perhaps especially – writing today, something of the strange temporality the film depicts? “I don’t think the human mind is meant to exist in two different, whatever you called it… dimensions,” Cole explains to his handlers after they upbraid him for misbehaviour: “It’s very confusing, you don’t know what’s real and what’s not.” Just as vivid today, however, is something like the implied counter-intuition: that one is simultaneously living at all times. The feeling is not just one of present and future collapsing upon each other. More specifically, one is apt to feel caught in a perpetual future-perfect, as if one’s present were already the past of a future one had failed to prevent, or, more insidiously, were oneself bringing about, even against one’s will or without one’s awareness.
Who has not felt, living and – perhaps especially – writing today, something of the strange temporality the film depicts?
This newly alienated sense of simultaneity, this experiencing of the present as the past of the future, is, I think, more than anything, what the film’s time-travel plot makes vivid for us – and what links together its motifs of plague and of artificial intelligence. We have become familiar with this temporality’s most overt manifestations: the cataclysm (climate change) is already upon us, at once past (in its causes), future (in its full expression), and present (in its increasingly felt effects). And yet, the film also captures a change that is subtler, more insidious. For it is not just the scale but the intimacy of surveillance that, together with the new predictive capabilities, has changed its fundamental character – forcing upon us now, as never before, the question of whether it were better to remain silent. Never before has what is most intimately one’s own been so readily available as the object of others’ knowledge. Not just one’s secrets, but, in a sense, one’s entire self, now lies bare before the future, as matter for its expropriation. To make oneself, in words or otherwise, is increasingly to furnish the tools for a fundamental deprival.
From this perspective, the most heartbreaking moment in the film – the moment of present and future collapsing most catastrophically upon each other – might not be the fatal shooting in the airport terminal, but another, slightly earlier moment: when Dr Railly tells Cole about the message she just left from a payphone on the answering machine of a carpet cleaner’s. The number she called is the one that Cole’s handlers gave him to ring in case of emergency. When Cole tried it in 1990, under the sceptical eyes of Dr Railly and the other hospital staff, he got a wrong number. Now, at the tail end of 1996 it should work – assuming of course that he is not delusional, that his return from the future is real. Imagine, therefore, Railly’s relief when she tries the number and gets, on the other end, not a scientist from the future, but the answering machine of a carpet cleaning company. “James! It’s OK!” she blurts out. “We’re crazy!” Never before could the thought have brought her such happiness. If they are crazy, the future remains open; the plague that in a month’s time will kill five billion people is but a figment of a deranged man’s fantasy, in which, for a time, she inexplicably came to believe. But then, while she is still gleeful from her lark – “Wait’ll they hear this nutball telling them they better watch out for the Army of the 12 Monkeys…” – he completes her sentence for her.
“They got your message,” he tells her. He has heard it countless times. In the future, his present, her message, distorted, has been recovered and pieced together. He has heard and studied it, but never grasped its true import – which lies not in the message itself (the Army of the 12 Monkeys turns out to be a red herring) but in the fact that he was able to hear it. Its meaning, unintended but unmistakable, is that the future is closed.
The future is closed: this prospect – the logical extension of a world, thankfully not yet realised, governed entirely by predictive algorithms – is one that 12 Monkeys apprehends as a catastrophe. Not the least of the film’s insights is its subtle displacement of focus, away from the plague (a stand-in, as the revision of La Jetée makes clear, for any large-scale catastrophe, and one that is in any case unrepresentable) and toward a more intimate horizon: the reconfiguration of our most basic sense of the relation between moments in time, and how these go toward making a self. Its vision of a man’s life looping upon itself, so that his death is his primal memory, remains in one sense restorative: closing a circle, it returns him to himself, giving clarity and meaning to what was hitherto glimpsed only in mutilated fragments. Against this backdrop, however, the film sets a darker vision. What does it see? That all words are stored. That all data is mined. That both are lesions on future time, and will be traced back to their source. More than the end of the world, it is this, the most intimate closure of possibility, that the film makes terrifying. For James Cole, who from the first has regarded the plague as in the past, its reinstalment as his future is a mutilation. “I want the future to be unknown,” he says, “I want to become a whole person.”
Show me which tooth, and I’ll cut it out. ◉