Dennis Biba

In a totalitarian society, laughter is sometimes a liberating, even rebellious act. If the satirical exaggeration made the depressing setting of Terry Gilliam’s first dystopia Brazil bearable, 12 monkeys, the second film in the so-called Orwellian triptych, is surprisingly humourless for a director who grew up in the Monty Python comedy troupe. This may be due to the fact that David Webb Peoples rather than Gilliam was chosen to write the screenplay, and perhaps also to the fact that 12 monkeys is a Hollywood production and Hollywood humour is not exactly characterised by subversion. Has Terry Gilliam now arrived in the mainstream? The choice of actors – Bruce Willis in the lead role and Brad Pitt in a supporting role – would suggest so. But even if 12 monkeys is much more in tune with the viewing habits of Hollywood audiences than its source of inspiration, the French experimental film La jetée (1962) by Chris Marker, Gilliam’s film is still far from mainstream cinema.

At first glance, 12 monkeys is a time travel film, with all the narrative challenges that entails. In the year 2035, the human world is devastated after a virus has killed five billion people. Felon James Cole, played by Bruce Willis, is sent back in time by some scientists to either find the cause of the virus or at least smuggle a non-mutated virus sample into the present. However, a mistake leads him straight to a closed psychiatric ward, and Terry Gilliam sends his audience there too, because soon it is no longer clear who is actually crazy and who is not. Is 12 monkeys really a time travel film or is James Cole just imagining things? There is no shortage of clues and it is precisely this abundance of details that may distract from the loop, which is presented to the audience several times in the film, in slow motion and overexposure, but is only explained when it is already too late. The cause of the pandemic is obvious the whole time, but the audience is just as blinded as James Cole, who follows the wrong clues that he inadvertently laid himself in the past. The film thus picks up on a paradox that the Greek poet Sophocles already addressed in his play Oedipus: In his attempt to prevent the future prophesied to him, Oedipus brings it about in the first place, whereby the question of whether it could have been realised without his intervention remains unanswered. However, while the audience of the ancient drama was well aware of the tragedy of the situation, in 12 monkeys they know no more than James Cole.

Similar to Brazil, the musical leitmotif creates a strange contrast to the images shown. While the camera captures a gloomy and, in contrast to sterile space SF, unusually naturalistic backdrop in strange wide-angle shots, Argentinian tango sounds in the distance, like a promise of a distant, better world full of life. In contrast to this is the threat posed by the supposed or actual virus. Aesthetically, this reflects what is pushed into the background on the content level by the deliberate complication of the plot. Freedom is one of the central themes in dystopias, and it usually becomes noticeable through its absence. James Cole begins (or ends) as a prisoner of the scientists, continues his mission as a prisoner in a psychiatric ward, eventually becomes a victim of his selective perception (as does the audience) and realises that his entire life has followed a time loop. The fantastic idea of being able to effectively change the present by travelling back in time is transformed into a paradox in which cause and effect can no longer be separated.

While early utopian novels were often actually set in (almost) unreachable places (ancient Greek: Οὐ = ‘not’ + τόπος = ‘place, location’, → ‘non-place’ ), the scenarios have shifted more and more from the place to the time level with the increasing discovery of the world, so they are actually u-chronias or, in the negative case, dys-chronias. A dyschronia is therefore actually about ‘bad times’ and just as Orwell’s 1984, for example, works to continuously adapt the past to the present, the past, present and future in 12 monkeys coincide in an endless time loop. Gilliam’s dystopia thus proves to be a total dyschronia from which there is no way out. The time loop paradox at the end is also intended to distract the audience from the fact that 12 monkeys is not a time travel film in general understanding, but rather that Gilliam has succeeded in translating the spatial imprisonment of classic dystopias into a temporal one. However, instead of simply letting time stand still (an attempt that always ultimately leads to the downfall of empires), Gilliam folds the timeline into a Möbius strip – a successful use of the Science Fiction bag of tricks that Sophocles would probably be envious of.