12 Monkeys (1995)

It's taken me fifteen years, but I'm ready to make a case for 12 Monkeys being a Christmas movie. That's fifteen years of blog time - like most nerds of my generation I caught this in theaters 30 years ago. It left an impression, too - this is on the short list of my favorite movies of the 90s, as well as my favorite of Terry Gilliam's films (though in the interest of full disclosure, there are several I'm overdue for a rewatch and even a couple I've never seen, so that could conceivably change). If I'm remembering right, I last saw this about ten years ago when I wrote an article about the intersection of science fiction and the holidays, at which time I claimed (incorrectly) it couldn't reasonably be considered a Christmas movie. In the same article, I argued (correctly) that Prometheus could. What I hadn't pieced together at the time is that these are using the holidays for similar purposes, and further that 12 Monkeys is essentially a forerunner for Prometheus, The Green Knight, and the 2024 Nosferatu remake.

I'll circle back to that. First, the movie: 12 Monkeys is a sci-fi time-travel movie based very loosely on the 1962 French experimental film, La Jetée. And before you ask, I'm a nerd who studied philosophy at a liberal arts college, so the answer is yes, I've seen La Jetée - several times, in fact. 12 Monkeys was written by David and Janet Peoples (David also co-wrote Blade Runner, so he's got some genre cred), and it stars Bruce Willis, Brad Pitt, and Madeleine Stowe, all of whom are fantastic here (with apologies to anyone tired of reading the word "favorite" in this review, this is easily my favorite Pitt performance to date). This also introduced me to the music of Astor Piazzolla, whose music I've loved ever since.

The movie's themes swirl around fate and recursion, perception and reality, communication and control, and probably a bunch of other stuff I missed. This is a complex movie in that regard. The story, depending on how you look at it, is either equally complex or surprisingly simple. I'll do my best to keep this brief.

Actually, let's start with a presumably unnecessary spoiler warning, just in case anyone under the age of "old" stumbled across this review somehow. If you haven't seen 12 Monkeys and enjoy any of the genres this resembles (including horror - while this certainly wouldn't be classified under that heading, its tone is dark enough to have a great deal of overlap), you owe it to yourself to give it a watch before reading on.

Following some brief exposition, the movie opens with a flashback to a moment in the protagonist's childhood when he witnessed a man gunned down in an airport as a woman ran to him. We get only bits and pieces this time, but we'll see this sequence again and again throughout the film, each time fleshing out details of this traumatic event.

Cut back to the present (or future, relative to the audience). Cole (Willis) is a prisoner in the underground dystopian civilization that formed after a super-virus all but wiped out the human race in the year 1997. He's selected to gather specimens from the surface, where he sees - among other things - animals (including at least one lion and bear) populating the city of Philadelphia. More relevant to this site, he also sees Christmas decorations in the remnants of a department store. When he returns underground, his superiors are impressed, and he's selected for an experimental mission: they've invented time-travel and want to send him back to 1996 to identify the origin of the virus so it can be collected and studied. The only real clue the scientists have is a reconstructed message from an answering machine pointing them towards the "Army of the 12 Monkeys," whose posters also appear in the city above.

Things go haywire off the bat. The time machine malfunctions, and Cole ends up in 1990, where he meets Dr. Railly (a psychologist played by Stowe) and Jeffery Goines (Pitt), a patient at a institute Cole is committed to. Eventually, Cole winds up back in the future, then in 1996 (following a brief stopover in World War I). In 1996, he kidnaps Railly and forces her to take him to Philadelphia to investigate the Army of the 12 Monkeys. When he tracks them down, he discovers Goines is their leader, and when he finds Goines, he's told that in Goines's mind the whole "release a deadly virus to wipe out humanity" was Cole's idea. Further, Goines's father owns a medical research company.

Cole is briefly whisked back to the future, where he's hailed as a hero for identifying the source of the  outbreak. He convinces the scientists to send him back one more time, under the guise of being the most qualified to complete the mission. In reality, he's fallen in love with Railly and the 20th Century and wants to exist in that reality. He's also come around to her way of thinking: that he's mentally unbalanced and in need of help. It's simply easier than accepting the possibility he's responsible for a plague that wiped out billions.

The problem is that in the meantime, Railly has concluded Cole has been right about everything. The two of them go on the run, with the police close behind. They buy disguises and plane tickets, but on the way to the airport learn the Army of the 12 Monkeys has carried out their direct action... and it had nothing to do with a virus. Instead, they broke a bunch of animals out of a zoo. Railly is elated, concluding this means the world is safe, but Cole sees echoes from the future: Christmas decorations from the beginning being put up, messages being written, and of course the origin of the animals he saw roaming the city. By now he's removed the tracking device they put in his teeth, but he risks a phone call to the answering machine, warning them the Army of the 12 Monkeys wasn't behind the virus.

Almost immediately, other time travelers appear. This isn't the first time we've seen them (they've been in and out the whole time), but one gives Cole a gun and an ultimatum to kill the person responsible. Railly meanwhile learns who this is - she recognizes a scientist with an interest in apocalypses from Goines's father's lab traveling with a case of canisters. She points Cole in his direction and Cole runs through security. But before he can fire, a police officer shoots and kills him. Railly runs to him in tears as a young version of Cole looks on, completing the cycle.

There's a lot here worth exploring in much more depth than I'm going to be able to provide. Among other things, the movie spends a great deal of time building dual realities. We see locations and characters in the past mirror those in the future, causing both Cole and the viewer to question what is and is not real. Until the end, it seems entirely plausible "the future" is a construct in Cole's mind. Is the homeless man a time-traveler, or is Cole just assigning him that significance? Is the cylindrical machine a portal through time, or is it his mind making sense of medical devices?

Compounding this is the movie's use of media: Cole watches old cartoons about time travel, as well as two Hitchcock movies, Vertigo and The Birds. In Vertigo, we see the scene where a character looks at tree rings and speaks about a past life. The Birds, meanwhile, shows an apocalyptic world where animals rule, similar to the one Cole comes from. Cole reflects on these and movies in general, noting parallels between the cycle of rewatching films and repeating the past.

This of course also ties into what we're really here to discuss: Christmas. Or, arguably, the cycle in which one year ends and another begins, so perhaps "New Year's" would be more accurate. Roughly the last thirty minutes of the movie are set in mid-December, and we're informed that the infection was detected on December 27, 1996 (so between Christmas and New Year's, during a period once thought of as existing outside of either the old or new year). Granted, that's after the movie ends, but it's the point at which humanity's fall begins. The end of an era, and all that. I don't think it's just a joke that Railly finishes her message about the Army of the 12 Monkeys with an ironic, "Have a Merry Christmas."

But the narrative ends - and begins - a few weeks before the outbreak, when Cole's past and future selves share the same space, and his eternal cycle of life and death ends and begins. There are several ways we could view this, beginning with the one I assume longtime readers are the most tired of reading me mention. That's right, we're talking about James Frazer!

Well, maybe. At the very least Cole is depicted as a sacrifice to this cycle of time and renewal. He dies, in part, as a sacrifice to the system controlling him, the scientists in the future dictating the rules he is expected to live by, as well as the rules governing what is considered reality and madness. The movie is explicit that this is a cycle, one that's happened before and will go on happening eternally. Both Cole and Railly perceive this before the end. They are playing roles in a ritual, dressing in costumes to hide from the police. But Railly's costume, at least, means more: hers resembles outfits worn by Kim Novak in Vertigo, the movie that prompted Cole to reflect on the larger implications of what he's experiencing. Novak's character in Vertigo also seems to die twice in cyclical fashion (the explanation is ultimately mundane, but the psychological effect on the audience is similar).

Likewise, these movies - like Cole's temporally cyclical life - play out again and again. The classics, we assume, will be watched and reinterpreted forever. In this respect, the stars of those movie become eternal, not unlike gods. Is Railly dressing like Kim Novak a sign she is fulfilling the role of a divine being, whose union with Cole sanctifies his role as a sacrificial king?

I don't know. Maybe? That one feels like a bit of a stretch, but I think a case could be made. If it's too big a leap (or just too damn pretentious), you could always look at Cole reflecting the old and new year simultaneously. The past, after all, must always die to make room for the future, and Cole's predicament mirrors this dynamic. Either way, it's playing with symbolic connections to the season, which correspond with how Frazer's theories have been integrated into Christmas media for decades.

Circling back to the idea of Christmas existing outside of time, we see this visually here in a more literal sense than any other movie I can think of. When Cole and Railly are shopping for costumes, he finds himself in the same department store he wandered through in the future. The movie shows us decorations - including an angel - being put up that we've already seen in a state of deterioration. Cole even has a flashback, and we witness the times seemingly converge on screen.

On top of that, the holiday connection makes for an interesting connection to Gilliam's more explicitly Christmas sci-fi movie, Brazil (I'm overdue for a rewatch and most likely reappraisal). Both feature exaggerated stylistic elements and absurd characters (though 12 Monkeys is a bit more subdued than Brazil, as is virtually everything). But perhaps the setting was appealing to Gilliam as a nod to his earlier work.

I'm not going to pretend to know how much of the above was intentional (though, given how meticulously 12 Monkeys is constructed, I suspect it's quite a bit). Regardless, the film is dizzying, channeling the sense of vertigo from Hitchcock's classic into a science-fiction thriller. Pitt's hypnotically erratic performance alone make this worth watching. It's a weird, entrancing movie with an ending as disturbing as it is satisfying. I absolutely love it.