PAUL FERGUSON, Lancaster University
‘The Future is History’
This somewhat 'hard-boiled' subtitle to Terry Gilliam's arguably flawed 1995 film Twelve Monkeys appears on the PolyGram video edition. The film's genre is indicated as being 'Sci-Fi Thriller'. In a sense this might appear as being all well and good, an entirely unproblematic genre distinction. The temporal disruption of the subtitle, the unsettling of linearity, indicated by the grammatical presence of the future in what we normally conceive of as being the past sets up what at first sight appears to be a double-bind perfectly in keeping with much of that which may be considered 'Science Fiction'. [1]
After all by 1995 most people in the 'west', if not having seen, would almost certainly have heard at the very least of Robert Zemeckis' 1985 film Back to The Future [2] whose title appears to propose a similar conundrum. It is the 'conundrum' of the subtitle and the 'post-modern' blurring of distinctions between genres which provides me with a route into the following discussion which will range from a general review of historical aspects and linking features of noir and 'science fiction', all the way up (or down) to particular examinations of Twelve Monkeys and William Gibson's Virtual Light in respect of both the past and the present, but also, in conclusion, the future.~It seems that 'time-travel' and 'science fiction' over the course of the last century have become virtually synonymous in both literature and film. H.G Wells' seminal 1895 novel The Time Machine, [3] made (remade? or as Tim Burton might have it - 're-imagined' [4] ) for film in 1960 by George Pal [5] , marks only the vaguest of beginnings to a trend which has continued right through to the present day via authors and directors too numerous to mention. And yet this trend, this structure of fiction, which arches across rather than through time, over and against rather than in and with, can be seen as a device and even perhaps a prerequisite of all fiction; one only needs recall the ghost of Hamlet's father whose cry 'Adieu, adieu, remember me' [6] demands, in a sense, that the future become history to be aware of this.Obviously I wouldn't want to make a claim that Shakespeare created a work of science fiction when he wrote Hamlet, despite the existence of many interesting and somewhat bizarre latter-day cross-fertilisations between 'genres' ('The Klingon Hamlet' being the most incredible [7] ). What I really want to make explicit - for the moment - is the temporal subversion made possible by both narrative and fiction, in effect 'time-travel' without the 'science'.This effect, or structure, in works of fiction and/or narratives, has been famously identified and documented with the Russian Formalist's distinction between Fabula and Sjuzhet by which is meant:
[O]n the one hand the story in its most neutral, objective, chronological form - the story as it might have been enacted in real time and space [...] and on the other hand the actual text in which this story is imitated...David Lodge, 'Analysis and Interpretation of the Realist Text' in Modern Literary Theory: A Reader, ed., by Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh (London: Arnold, 1996).It is the extreme disjunction between Fabula and Sjuzhet introduced by the fictional possibility of actual time-travel, a disjunction which finds these concepts rendered hopelessly relative and entirely dependant upon point of view - in effect collapsing all distinction - that makes for such interesting, and generally paradoxical, narratives in the genre of corporeal, embodied, two-way time-travel.However, despite the tempting fascinations exerted by narrative possibilities in an age of imagined time-travel, turning aside it seems to me that there is something distinctly deterministic in the concept of the future 'being' rather than 'becoming' history. In this light and on another reading of the Twelve Monkeys' subtitle we can see that here the future has been closed down, the sense of 'becoming' is lost; in 'being' history it has already happened, closure - Derrida's elusive 'holy grail' [8] - has been realised. On this reading Marx's optimistic premise that 'men and women make their own history but not in conditions of their own choosing' [9] is well and truly undone; fate, the old pre-enlightenment, pre-rational bugbear has returned and from it there appears to be offered no hope of escape - the past is history. [10]This sense of fatalism, and indeed the concept of the future being overtaken - determined even - by history, is no stranger in the noir genre. Jacques Tourneur's 1947 noir classic Out of the Past deals explicitly with this same theme - the ghosts of the past returning in embodied form - using the narrative device of extreme disjunction between fibula and sjuzhet to follow an ex private investigator Jeff Bailey who, despite having made every effort to alter the conditions of his own life to those of 'his own choosing', finds that nevertheless his history, [11] and consequently his future, is inescapable.The twist in Gilliam's film [12] is that whereas previously it may have been considered that the past determined to a lesser or greater extent the present and the future, in this imagining it is the future and its ghosts that determine the present. In a sense Twelve Monkeys entirely reverses Marx and Engels' thesis that '[T]he history of all hitherto existing society is the history of the class struggle' [13] in returning a twisted concept of the teleological 'ideal' Hegelian 'world spirit' to the dialectic; the twist being, of course, that the 'spirit' isn't an ideal drive to progress, nor less a ghostly Marxian 'spectre', it is 'simply' humankind's own future. [14] Before continuing with a closer analysis of Twelve Monkeys I think it's worth sketching in a few 'historical' details regarding noir legacies in what has come to be known as the 'Science Fiction Genre' - in particular the way in which, within this 'genre', the future has always been history.It is undoubtedly a cliche to remark that science fiction's imagined futures always reflect something of the era of their imagining. This 'reflection' is especially prevalent in the 'look' of science fiction films, an aspect which challenges and limits, technologically and ideologically, the imagination. Hence during the 50s, 60s and 70s the future was often both optimistically and pessimistically envisioned - with obvious political ramifications - as technologically advanced and yet at the same time curiously sterile. Science fiction sets resembled nothing as much as they resembled hospitals. People wore white coats in the future and it didn't look as though anyone really lived there.But in 1979 a British director, Ridley Scott, unveiled the celebrated film Alien which, rather than envisioning a sterile labour free future, presented a future that was dirty and where things were used, broken or damaged. It is this 'seedy' realism, the focus on the future as being a place where 'real' people live in often less than ideal circumstances, where things are actually used and where, despite the techno-gloss of the surface, there is a darker 'superstructure' mirrored in the 'base', that seems to me implicitly noir.Scott went on to direct another 'classic', Blade Runner (scripted by Twelve Monkeys' co-writer David Peoples), in 1982 in which a noiresque future-cop tracks down constructed 'humanoids' (replicants) who appear to be making their 'own history'. That the city in which Dekkard works is multi-layered (reminiscent of the German Expressionist Director Fritz Lang's 1926 film Metropolis) - easily described in Nicholas Christopher's words regarding the noir metropolis as, 'a surface city, orderly and functional, imbued with customs and routine, and its shadow, the nether-city, rife with darker impulses and forbidden currents, a world of violence and chaos' [15] - places the film explicitly in debt to the legacy of noir, in particular the continuing influence of German Expressionism, and ought therefore to be noted.By 1984 Michael Radford's film version of George Orwell's dark, historically reflective, and in some respects deeply noir novel 1984 [16] took up the baton laid down by Scott and imagined a rundown future (by then the 'present') from the perspective of the past. Terry Gilliam followed suit in 1985 with his Romantic, Orwellian, Kafkaesque, Noiresque, Science Fiction film Brazil and it should be clear from this very brief - for it could be extended - generic taxonomy that Gilliam resists single genres with a passion akin to anyone resisting the relentless pressure of determinist history. As Gilliam himself says, 'I have this German-Expressionistic-Destructivist-Russian-Constructivist view of the future". [17] This resistance to genre is no less the case in Twelve Monkeys and hopefully my short excursion around the film's subtitle will have suggested the same.
'He descends downward, into an underworld, on a spiral'
Nicholas Christopher advances a formula for the film noir genre and it's worth quoting an extract from it as a foundation for what follows in this discussion:He descends downward, into an underworld, on a spiral. The object of his quest is elusive, often an illusion. Usually he is destroyed in one of the labyrinth's innermost cells, by agents of a larger design of which he is only dimly aware.(Somewhere in the Night, p.8)We first find Twelve Monkeys' central 'protagonist' [18] James Cole, in a reversal of the first section of this formula, in a prison below ground incarcerated, for a crime never made explicit, by a future society that has fled the ravage of disease by descending into a literal 'underworld'. We learn very little of this future society, in fact what little we are permitted to know is mediated by the twin institutions of the prison and the hospital (of which more later); for the moment though we shall concentrate on the motif of the quest and the correspondent, and implicit, motif of the grail.
Gilliam is no stranger to Grail Quests; perhaps his most famous film Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1974), co-directed with Terry Jones, lampoons the subject, whilst his later film The Fisher King (1991) - considered by many to be his best - gives the same subject a rather more serious treatment. This continuing theme, the motif of the Grail Quest, throughout much of Gilliam's work is also apparent in Twelve Monkeys, albeit less explicit and often metaphorical. Of course there's a strong pedigree in the work of Raymond Chandler (also, perhaps more obviously, that of the high-priest of high-modernism, T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land [19] ) for this motif, firstly with the metaphor of the quest but secondly with the quest for the metaphorical 'grail'. Chandler places Philip Marlowe, a 'crusader/knight', [20] on a quest, which may or may not ultimately be for love, in his 1940 novel Farewell, My Lovely [21] - the grail aspect made explicit (as indeed might the 'love' aspect) by the appearance of Mrs Lewin Lockridge Grayle on page 83.Cole is 'volunteered' for a quest by 'scientists' [22] according to which he undertakes to travel to the past in order to locate the 'Army of the Twelve Monkeys' whom, it is believed, released the virus responsible for the death of 99% of the world's population. Cole's metaphorical 'grail' is the virus in its pure form from which the scientists of the future will be able create a vaccine thereby freeing humanity from its underground 'prison'. In return for this service Cole is promised a pardon from his life sentence - effectively his life will be returned to him.The trope of Cole as grail seeker is given weight - perhaps a rather heavy-handed weight - when, whilst stumbling around the 'mean streets' of Philadelphia, a man dressed as a crusader hails Cole, 'You! You! You're one of us aren't you?' [23] This is complicated slightly by the question of 'madness' as the viewer is also supposed to question what this apparent crusader is recognising in Cole; but for the moment we must leave this aside.If we take the trope of the quest and its concomitant noir descent into an 'underworld on a spiral', which according to Christopher is frequently a central motif in the noir genre we find a similar figure to that of Cole, (and numerous other noir figures) Berry Rydell, in William Gibson's Virtual Light. After loosing his job with the ironically collocated private police force IntenSecure Rydell finds himself in a situation in which his former boss Hernandez suggests he'll be forced to seek employment that will result in '[getting his] ass killed' (VL, p.65). As a 'favour' Henandez secures Rydell 'employment' under rather vague terms working as a driver for a freelance 'skip-tracer' who's investigating a 'situation' in San Francisco. In 'volunteering', on a materially determined ticket, to take up this post, thereby escaping the 'death' suggested by his ex boss, Rydell is drawn inexorably into a murky underworld on a quest for a pair of fancy sunglasses. [24]In a long and confused mythology the Holy Grail is supposed to grant eternal life to whoever drinks from it. Apparently the grail resides - on occasion - in the castle of The Fisher King (hence the title for Gilliam's film), a mysterious figure who may or may not have wounds upon various limbs - most frequently the thighs [25] (might it be suggested from this that Cole's wounding in the thigh provides equally a symbolic link as it does a narrative device?). [26] Although according to these same confused legends the grail is always elusive both Rydell and Cole, I suggest, discover their respective holy grails. Rydell, in a deceptively upbeat denouement, retrieves the glasses and gets the girl - Chevette. In this instance the 'girl' is no longer the poisoned chalice represented by both Mrs Grayle in Farewell, My Lovely and Kathie Moffett in Out of the Past, and, unlike Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, Rydell isn't condemned to repeat the lines which echo throughout many noir narratives, 'I won't play the sap for you'. [27] Instead Berry Rydell is condemned to salvation via a 'reality' television programme, Cops in Trouble, ironically a programme he suggests initially influenced him to become a cop (VL, p.166). At least he gets the girl.As for Cole, his unwitting discovery of the location of the virus/grail and simultaneous coercion into entering the precise location of his death leads him to one of the 'labyrinth's innermost cells' where he is 'destroyed', as I shall explain a little later, by 'agents of a larger design of which he is only dimly aware'. The paradox here, the double-bind, is that as Cole's Fabula and Sjuzhet collapse, in the manner of a snake eating its own tail, he is unconsciously (although there is more than a suggestion that he is 'dimly aware' of his fate in the final scenes) condemned to experience eternal life as a result of witnessing his own death. The 'spiral descent' prefigured by the swirl of 'Army of the Twelve Monkeys' logo, leads Cole to his grail, a story without end. The eyes of the boy Cole gaze out of the screen at both the beginning and the end of the film and it is clear that they will now never close; Cole's individual destiny becomes an eternal cycle rather than a finite line.
'The haunting ''Memory of Contagions''' [28]
As Marx declared that '[T]he philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it', [29] one might be inclined to ask at this median juncture, 'So what?' Well, firstly, if we accept Marx's premise that the 'point is to change [the world]' - and I'm sure some wouldn't - we need to consider what, if anything, both Gilliam and Gibson are trying to tell us in Twelve Monkeys and Virtual Light beyond their exploitation of 'nifty' storylines, 'flashy' technology and 'fancy' sunglasses. Secondly, if we accept the earlier suggestion that Science Fiction (equally all and any fiction/narrative) is always deeply historicized and always inflected by what, in ideological terms, might be referred to as 'possible consciousness', [30] we need to consider what we can 'see', or at least what we might be able to apprehend, of our own world in these works.Michel Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish the measures of surveillance employed by European society following the advent of plague (Foucault, p.466). In his account Foucault asserts, convincingly, that 'the plague gave rise to disciplinary projects' (Foucault, p.468), projects he shows that were to later develop into the great Victorian Utilitarian Jeremy Bentham's (1748-1842) all-seeing Panopticon prisons. The 'project' of surveillance operated as a force of order, 'its function [...] to sort out every possible confusion [...] which is transmitted when bodies are mixed together; that of the evil which is increased when fear and death overcome prohibitions' (Foucault, p.467). The agent of this 'order', Foucault asserts, an agency that realises its most 'visible' form in the Panopticon, is that of 'visuality' whereby each individual subject is rendered visible. The rub of the Panopticon is that it is not necessary for the subject to be under constant surveillance, since the knowledge of the subject that they are in a state of total visibility at all times is enough to ensure the constant operation of the disciplinary function. Virtual Light's Loveless gives a brief account of this somewhat paranoiac effect at work on an individual level when he describes his experiences of tailing someone:
They assume you're there. But they don't know who you are. Sometimes you catch them looking at someone, in the lobby of a hotel, say, and you know they think it's you, the one who's watching. But it never is.(VL, p.226)It is the operation of surveillance, the motif of visibility and the close association of both with ideas of agency that most clearly links Twelve Monkeys and Virtual Light; furthermore, it might be suggested that the primary objective of the classic hard-boiled private investigator is to investigate the dark places, the shadow-lands, invisible to the panoptic eye and in so doing to render them visible. And after all, we must recall that both Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe work for 'Agencies'.
Enhanced vision, particularly the leitmotif of glasses, is similarly a recurrent symbol. Sherlock Holmes' magnifying glass as a simple scientific tool for observation and investigation has transmuted by 1962 in Chris Marker's La Jetee, becoming sinister optical devices worn by future 'scientists' dedicated to an observation, investigation and ultimately a subjection of history (which premise I shall presently explain). The 'strangeness' of these devices is reflected in Gilliam's remake where peculiar glasses [31] worn by scientists are situated alongside probing cameras and a deluge of televisual images. At the same time Gibson's 'virtual light' glasses, which in true cyberpunk fashion 'work your optic nerves direct' (VL, p.113) fusing the human with the machine, operate to enhance not only what can be seen, but also what can be known. The glasses Chevette steals even go as far as rendering visible potential futures. In these cases it is clear Foucault's assertion that seeing and knowledge both equate with power holds true.Cole is chosen for his quest because of his powers of observation, his task to observe and record the past. According to Foucault in time of plague:
[Segmented space is] observed at every point, in which the individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded...(Foucault, p.467)This seems to me a perfectly accurate account of Cole's task and situation. He is both observer and observed - 'inserted in a fixed place', his 'slightest movements supervised'. His first visit to the past, to the wrong year of 1990, is considered as a mistake: 'You sent me to the wrong year,' he complains. But if this is so how then to explain the presence of one of the future-prison guards in the panoptic asylum from which Cole attempts to escape? 'Two's not working, use one', he says as Cole tries to board a lift. Later, when Cole attempts to acquire the virus from Jeffrey in the Goines' house, after having been introduced as Arnold Pettibone two security men restrain Cole, whispering in his ear, ''Okay - take it easy. We know who you are Mr Cole.'' Cole has to follow the path of his historical destiny and he is under constant surveillance to ensure that he does so; this surveillance extends even as far as the scientists who are themselves unaware of the circumstances of Cole's 'volunteering' - and we must be sure that Cole had to 'volunteer'. What is less sure is who is doing the 'volunteering'.
In effect Cole finds himself subject to an omniscient power of which both he and the viewer - in a noiresque, quasi-expressionistic, empathetic relationship - are only 'dimly aware', a power that '[ultimately determines] what characterises him, what belongs to him, what happens to him' (Foucault, p.467). On this view we have to return to the optimism of the earlier Marx quotation that 'men and women make their own history' and realise that in Twelve Monkeys this is without doubt no longer the case; Cole's future, Cole's past, Cole's present, it's all determined, even to the extent that his very desires are inflected by a revealing disembodied voice:
COLE. [...] What do I want? VOICE. You don't know what you want? Sure you do, Bob. You know what you want. COLE. Tell me. Tell me what I want. VOICE. To see the sky - and the ocean - to be topside - breathe the air - to be with her...Isn't that right? Isn't that what you want? (Twelve Monkeys)
The final lines seem especially suggestive, particularly the conflation of Railly with the natural and open world of the past. Is it really Railly that he wants? And if so why is she left to the end of the list? This is open to speculation, but on my viewing I didn't see much, prior to this dialogue, to suggest that Cole was 'falling' for Railly. Isn't it most likely that Cole has to 'fall' for Railly in order to arrive at the airport in her company and in so doing provide the crucial lever which will enable the 'agents' of the future to coerce him into accepting his fate? And much as Railly provides the crucial lever, becoming an unwitting 'femme-fatal', crucially Cole must accept his fate in order to ensure the stability of the future as any deviation from his course will result in a transformation of the future from whence he came, rendering his return to the past impossible. We cannot know what kind of a man the boy Cole would become should he fail to experience the apparently formative shooting at the airport. All that is certain is that his becoming anything 'other' than the prescribed historical character he represents is impossible. Hence the Astrophysicist's ironic parting comment; 'I'm in insurance'. She isn't simply insuring the future, as some people might believe; what she is really doing is ensuring the past. [32] In every sense of the word Twelve Monkeys is a profoundly pessimistic film and, despite all efforts to 'make their own [histories]', despite each act of subversion and each act of resistance, it isn't hard to recall Stephen Greenblatt's words: '[T]here is subversion, no end of subversion, only not for us'. [33] The nominal 'protagonists' can alter nothing.
~On the face of it this appears to be less the case in Virtual Light. Despite being manoeuvred into numerous seemingly hopeless situations both Rydell and Chevette manage to skip clear. In a world where even euphemistically named 'freelance' agents (who in reality either wittingly or unwittingly work for large corporations such as IntenSecure or Dat-America which appear to be parts of one large conglomerate) are 'tailed' by apparently innocent old ladies (VL, p.216) and the omnipresent referentially post-modern panoptical 'Death Star' (VL, p.11) which 'they said' (my italics) can 'read the headlines on a newspaper, or what brand and size of shoes you wore form a decent footprint' (VL, p.244), people such as Codes still manage to obtain phones and 'tumble them' (VL, pp.206-207) rendering them invisible to organisations such as 'cel-net' (VL, p.254).In this world there appears to be a space for a whole alternative society to exist on the literal no-man's-land of 'the Bridge', a society which evolves organically: '[T]his place had just grown, it looked like, one thing patched on to the next' (VL, 163) (a society mirrored by the 'simulacra' of the novel's technological 'organics' and nano-technology which literally grows cities) and in it ostensibly 'free' people such as Skinner and Fontaine (surely a derivative of Robert DeNiro's Tuttle/Buttle figure in Gilliam's Brazil) are able to go about the business of 'making their own history'. [34] According, again, to Foucault once the scourge of leprosy had waned what persisted were the 'values and images attached to the figure of the leper [...] the social importance of that insistent and fearful figure', [35] and it is this 'fearful figure' which is not a million miles away from the socially constructed image Freddie attempts to uphold with regard to the Bridge, '[T]hat's one evil motherfucking place. Those people anarchists, antichrists, cannibal motherfuckers out there...' (VL, p.138). [36] What Foucault maintains is that the exclusion of the leper fulfilled a function whereby, paradoxically, [37] both the anger and the grace of God were simultaneously made manifest (Madness, p.6). He further relates how this function is later fulfilled by the 'madman', or the bearer of 'unreason', by which their exclusion is also paradoxically a symbol of their inclusion; 'he is put in the interior of the exterior, and inversely' (Madness, p.11). In this case the 'Sanity/Reason/God' the Bridge residents might 'appear' to be 'resisting' with their 'unreason' is the 'cry of the true lunatic [...] 'Let's go shopping'' (Dr Peters, Twelve Monkeys).In considering these theses with regard to the Bridge it's relatively clear that although its inhabitants appear to have 'opted out' it can also be suggested that they, as undesirable citizens living in exclusive 'cardboard towns in the park' (VL, p.87) - a park which in this account has since been ironically privatised - could not be included by the dominant society in any way other than by exclusion.Furthermore, Foucault, in Discipline and Punish, says that:
Behind the disciplinary mechanisms can be read a haunting memory of 'contagions,' of the plague, of rebellions, crimes, vagabondage, desertions, people who appear and disappear, live and die in disorder.(Foucault, 468)As Skinner points out the past, prior to the AIDS epidemic, '[was] a funny little pocket of time when a lot of people got to feel like a piece of ass wasn't going to kill anybody' (VL, p.238) - effectively it was an era when a sexually transmitted plague just wasn't a 'possible consciousness'. It's worth suggesting that in the case of Virtual Light it is the 'haunting memory' of the AIDS epidemic, caused some might say, by a permissive 'mixing of bodies' (Foucault, p.468), fuelled by the advent of the female contraceptive pill in the late 50s and the concomitant rise of the 'free-love' generation, which has, in part, led to the inclusive 'exclusion' of the Bridge's inhabitants as well as their all pervasive surveillance - Orlovsky, for example, has little trouble locating Chevette and Rydell in the 'Cognitive Dissidents' bar despite their being 'inside the outside'.
This 'alternative' society of Bakhtinian 'carnival' (VL, p.162) seems to exist in an uneasy parasitic symbiosis with the 'city' [38] - living off its dregs and refuse and absorbing its jetsam, of which Chevette is herself an example. On the 'farthest suspension tower' of the Bridge a 'plink', 'something that talk[ed] to satellites' is installed (VL, p.72) reflecting something of a connection to the exterior, whether by way of subversive 'hacking' or for people like the aging retro-hippie Skinner to watch TV is unclear. Additionally Sammy Sal and Chevette, who admittedly are not full residents of the Bridge, both fetishise commodities and brand names; 'Sugawara frame, Sugawara rings 'n' railers, Zuni hydraulics. Clean' Sammy Sal informs an admiring Chevette (VL, p.130) as she is initiated into the 'Order of Cool Consumers'.While ostensibly resisting the 'cry 'Let's go shopping'' the 'voluntary' exclusion of Gibson's alternative society can be seen to illustrate nothing as much as an exclusive inclusion, an internalisation of consumerism and its co-habitees of desire and sex (note the italicisation of the adjective clean and its connotation of both sex and disease), and this is a central criticism levelled at the genre of cyberpunk - a genre of which Virtual Light is a self proclaimed member - itself. As Darko Suvin asks:
Is cyberpunk, then, despite all trendy mimicry of rebelliousness, complicitous with the owners and managers of the culture industry [...] and merely trying to get some crumbs off their table by flaunting its own newness as a marketable commodity? (Darko Suvin, 'On Gibson and Cyberpunk SF', p.364) [39]In reply, my answer would have to be a qualified yes; qualified, for, despite all the pandering to, and glorifying of, what may seem 'cool' in the present day the 'hackers' come out of it pretty badly - particularly Lowell - and Gibson does highlight, on occasion subtly and others forcibly, likely prognoses regarding our futures on the present trajectory; it is these prognoses which are the most pressing and important subjects of our age. Personally I liked the book; critically and theoretically I remain unconvinced, despite its being an entertaining and unabashed example of a post-modern inter-referential romp across genres. I do, however, believe that it usefully demonstrates that 'today one need not 'be a Marxist' to realise that aesthetics, politics, economics, technology, and social relations are interdependent cultural phenomena'. [40] Whether or not this is important, or simply a matter of 'taste', and whether or not this represents a 'descent' into an 'underworld' of 'vulgar Marxism' must be questions which, for the moment, are left open.
'A (concluding) Monologue of Reason about Madness'. [41]'You know what 'crazy' is? 'Crazy' is 'majority rules'', shouts Jeffrey in one of the most interesting dialogues of Twelve Monkeys. He then continues to relate an anecdote outlining the historical specificity of madness, in particular the seeming arbitrary situation - the 'possible consciousness' - as either mad or sane of our understanding of the world. Earlier, in reply to Cole's request to make a phone-call, he had answered:Telephone call? That's communication with the outside world! Doctor's discretion. Hey, if alla these nuts could just make phone calls, it could spread. Insanity oozing through the telephone cables, oozing into the ears of all those poor sane people, infecting them! Whackos everywhere! A plague of madness. (Twelve Monkeys)
The fear of 'contagion' and the imperative for order demanded by 'organised' capitalist society justifies, as Foucault has demonstrated, the disciplinary function of panoptical surveillance. Jeffrey ironically articulates this argument and simultaneously introduces a very contemporary concern.On the 13th of February 2002 John M. Poindexter was appointed Director of the Pentagon's Information Awareness Office whose mission is to achieve 'total information awareness, useful for pre-emption'. [42] On April 7th 1990 this same man was convicted on five counts of deceiving the U.S. Congress and sentenced to six months in prison. He never served these six months. [43] Subsequently Poindexter, re-emerging from this 'murky underworld', worked as Vice President of Syntec [44] Technologies which developed 'Genoa, [45] a surveillance device that's a combination cutting-edge search engine, sophisticated information 'harvesting program', and a 'peer-to-peer' file sharing system.' [46] Effectively this seems to me to be a method whereby the 'insanity oozing through the telephone cables' and into the ears (now become the eyes thanks to the internet) of the 'sane people' becomes that same 'enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point [...] in which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded... (Foucault, Discipline, p.467).Perhaps here it is worth recalling the lines from 'The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam of Naishapœr' which echo across Twelve Monkeys' opening in the 'present day':YESTERDAY This Day's Madness did prepare;TOMORROW'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.(Edward Fitzgerald, trans.) [47]And in our recollection we ought to consider what madness is presently being prepared, then perhaps, and only then, we might begin to prevent tomorrow's becoming yesterday. Today might not be such a good time for a 'drink'.Let us finish here with some words uttered by the 'seriously crazy' Jeffrey:
While I was institutionalized, my brain was studied exhaustively in the guise of mental health, I was interrogated, x-rayed, studied thoroughly. Then, everything about me was entered into a computer where they created a model of my mind. Then, using the computer model, they generated every thought I could possibly have in the next, say ten years, which they then filtered through a probability matrix to determine everything I was going to do in that period. So you see, she knew I was going to lead the 'Army of the Twelve Monkeys' into the pages of history before it ever even occurred to me. She knows everything I'm ever going to do before I know it myself. How about that?(Twelve Monkeys)
Who's crazy now?
Wells, Herbert George, The Time Machine, an Invention and Other Stories (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1946)
.....................................
[1] See Vivian Sobchack's 'The Limits of the Genre', in Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987), pp.17-20 for an interesting and entertaining discussion regarding various wrangles over the years as to the definition of Science Fiction.[2] The top grossing film of the same year. See 'Top Grossing Films of the Eighties' http://www.inthe80s.com/movgross.shtml (16 Dec. 02).[3] H.G. Wells, The Time Machine, an Invention and Other Stories (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1946).[4] Burton's actual phrase was 're-imagining' which he used to describe the process of making his time-travel 'turkey', Planet of the Apes; see, Philip French, 'Planet of the Apes' http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Critic_Review/Observer_Film_of_the_week/0,4267,539036,00.html (19 Dec. 02).[7] The Klingon Hamlet, http://www.kli.org/stuff/Hamlet.html (16 Dec. 02).[8] See, Jacques Derrida, 'Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences', in Modern Literary Theory: A Reader, p.177.[9] See Jonathan Dollimore 'Shakespeare, Cultural Materialism and the new historicism', in Political Shakespeare, ed., by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), p.3)[10] One can't help calling to mind here Francis Fukuyama's unpleasant, and presumably now disproved, 'end of history' thesis. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1993).[11] It is arguable that Bailey makes/made his own history, although this isn't an argument I'd particularly want to advance.[12] It really needs to be pointed out here that Gilliam owes a creative debt to both David and Janet Peoples who wrote the script but also, more importantly, to Chris Marker whose 1964 short film La Jetee provided the basic plot structure as well as several motifs - of which more later[13] See Karl Marx and Frederick Engels 'The Communist Manifesto' http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html#Bourgoise (18 Dec. 02).[14] A similar theme is pursued by D.H. Thomas in his novel The White Hotel (London: Gollancz, 1981) in which a fictional Sigmund Freud, who alongside Marx and Darwin represents the other great historical 'materialist', is defeated by a case of hysteria which he believes is caused by repressed memories from the patient's past. The post-modern challenge to grand narratives comes when we discover that the patient is repressing memories from her own future.[15] Nicholas Christopher, Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City (New York: The Free Press, 1997), p.36.[17] See; David Morgan, 'Filming Twelve Monkeys', originally published in Sight and Sound magazine, Jan. 1996, http://members.aol.com/morgands1/closeup/text/sandsart.htm (18 Dec, 02).[18] In this film, as we shall see, the idea of a 'protagonist' is chronically destabilised - again a somewhat noir attribute.[19] T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1963). I'm sure much could be made of this connection - modernism to post-modernism, etc.[20] Lee Horsley, 'Hard Boiled Investigators' from The Noir Thriller (Hampshire and New York: Palgrave, 2001) see, http://www.crimeculture.com/Contents/Hard-BoiledInvest.htm (17 Dec. 02).[22] It is worth noting that in this future the collective noun 'scientists' appears to have accumulated much additional connotation - as has the verb 'to volunteer'.[23] Hereafter all quotes from Twelve Monkeys are taken from 'Twelve Monkeys an Original Screenplay' by David Webb Peoples and Janet Peoples; see; http://members.tripod.com/Lenninthezanybee/twelve-monkeys.htm (19 Dec. 02).I would also suggest a rather more 'subtle' though distinctly 'low-brow' contemporary link with another cinematic grail seeker, the father of Indiana Jones. When Cole reveals his bulging notebook to Kathryn Railly she askes, 'What's that?'. 'My notes, observations, clues', he replies. The notebook, a mass of writing and sketches, bears more than a passing resemblance to that of Indiana Jones' father, who is himself seeking the grail, in the 1989 Stephen Spielberg film Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade.[24] 'Fancy' may appear to be a rather flippant adjective, but although the glasses do allow the wearer to see into a virtual future I still feel that they are a somewhat 'flippant' plot device.[25] Roger Sherman Loomis, The Grail: From Celtic Myth to Christian Symbol (London: Constable, 1992), p.36.[26] See 'The Holy Grail' http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/grlmenu.htm (17 Dec. 02)[27] Dashiell Hammet, The Maltese Falcon (London: Orion Books, 1930),. p.209.[28] Michel Foucault 'Discipline and Punish' in Literary Theory: An Anthology ed., by, Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), p. 468.[29] Karl Marx, Theses on Feurbach, 1845, see, http://www.marxist.com/classics/marxengels/thesesfeur.html (18 Dec. 02).[30] There's more than a glance here in the direction, yet again, of Marx whose statement, 'It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness' seems especially pertinent, Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy; see, http://csf.colorado.edu/psn/marx/Archive/1859-CPE/ (18 Dec. 02)..[31] Strange glasses also feature in both Brazil and Barron Munchausen (dir. Gilliam, 1988), and their strangeness bears such an uncanny resemblance to those used by Marker that one cannot help but doubt Gilliam's claim to have never seen La Jetee. The 'tree ring' scene, so prominent in La Jetee, also appears in Twelve Monkeys in a post-modern extra-referential moment as Railly and Cole watch Hitchcock's 1958 film Vertigo. Similarly I can't help feeling sceptical about Gibson's claim that he doesn't/didn't have either a computer or an email address.[32] There are many accounts regarding the paradoxes of time-travel, the possibilities and impossibilities of changing the past and thus altering the future - a particularly memorable example being Ray Bradbury's 'A Sound of Thunder' in The Golden Apple's of the Sun (New York: Bantam Books, 1954), p.88, in which a bungling time-tourist unwittingly kills a butterfly sixty million years in the past. This subtly alters the future so that on his return a recently elected liberal government has been replaced by a totalitarian regime. Also notable is Robert Silverberg's Up The Line (London: Sphere, 1975) in which 'Time-cops', reminiscent of Twelve Monkey's ''Agents', patrol the time lines guarding against paradox and people intent upon altering the past.[33] Stephen Greenblatt, 'Invisible Bullets' in Political Shakespeares, p.45.[34] Yamazaki deserves a mention here as a recorder, digitally, of Skinner's oral accounts in an attempt to understand the unfamiliar culture of the Bridge. Skinner, of course, expresses his own particular brand of disgust for the post-modern mediums of history when talking about the processes of data recovery - cleaning up sound recordings, colouring films, etc, 'And it was all bullshit , he said, because every other bit of it was an approximation, somebody's idea of how it might have looked, the result of a particular decision, a particular button being pushed' (VL, p.242).[35] Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), p.6).[36] I mustn't neglect to mention that in a slightly divergent manner (to the subjects of this discussion) Freddie, being a 'man' - and presumably a man under threat from a rival - just wants to 'scare the shit' out of Rydell. But these are gender politics and there isn't the space for them here.[37] It may be a truism, but sometimes, at least according to Zen Buddhist thinking/not thinking, in order to feel good one also needs to know the bad, in order for civilisation to exist there must have existed 'barbarism' etc, etc.[38] Although Carnival marks 'a suspension of all norms' (my italics) (Mikhail Bakhtin 'Rabelais and His World' in, Literary Theory: An Anthology), there must always be a return to normality in order for Carnival to itself return.[39] See, Storming the Reality Studio, ed., by, Larry McCaffrey (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991).[40] Sobchack, p.8.[41] Foucault, Madness and Civilisation, p. xi.[42] See; 'Information Awareness Office' http://www.darpa.mil/iao/ (20 Dec. 02).[43] See; 'Iran-Contra Affair' http://gi.grolier.com/presidents/aae/side/irancont.html (20 Dec. 02).[44] Ironic? Post-Ironic? Or just what is really happening?[45] Genoa? A particularly interesting choice of name.[46] See; 'Meet America's New Big Brother http://www.indybay.org/news/2002/11/1544352_comment.php (20 Dec. 02) for detailed and interesting, if scary, information.[47] Edward Fitzgerald, trans. 'The Rub‡iy‡t of Omar Khay‡m of Naish‡pœr', in The Norton Anthology of Poetry (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1996), ed., by Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, and Jon Stallworthy, stanza 74. pp. 874-875. The featured stanzas in Twelve Monkeys, 71, 73 and 74 are all particularly interesting in light of what has been here discussed
