As the coronavirus rages on its world tour without signs of slowing down (despite the lies China is likely telling about no more reported cases), the “essential pandemic viewing” material that some find themselves inevitably falling prey to while in lockdown must eventually turn to Terry Gilliam’s 1995 masterpiece, 12 Monkeys. Based on Chris Marker’s 1962 short film, La Jetée, and adapted for feature length by David and Janet Peoples, the time-bending narrative follows the repeated to be doomed fate of James Cole (Bruce Willis), a prisoner living underground (specifically beneath the ruins of Philadelphia) in the year 2035 (not too far off from now, as it were). Given the assignment to go back in time and gather information about the virus that wiped out five million people starting at the end of 1996 and running its course through 1997, Cole shruggingly “volunteers” (without any choice). After all, he’s one of the few survivors with the mental sharpness to withstand the psychological taxation of time travel. Plus, it might get some of his sentence pardoned. In truth, he’s too fatalistic to care much either way. A life underground is a life underground no matter where you spend it.
Which is precisely why when he’s initially sent back to the wrong year–1990–and place–Baltimore (always kind of the wrong place, to be honest)–to try to figure out who unleashed the virus and to what end, even being confined to a mental institution on “original” Earth feels more liberating. Somehow…fresher. Or maybe that’s just the sight of his new psychiatrist, Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe), who is assigned to him while he’s in police custody for assaulting five officers. Although there’s something about him that’s unplaceably familiar, it’s more than this factor alone that makes Railly want to believe his claims to the retinue of doctors in front of him. The avowals that insist he knows he can’t really change what’s already happened to humanity, but that he just needs to “gather information” so that the scientists of the future can potentially develop a cure by tracing the path of the virus.
As a running theme throughout, we have the pall of Cassandra’s own curse cast over the storyline. For example, in promotion of her new book, The Doomsday Syndrome: Apocalyptic Visions of the Mentally Ill, Dr. Railly, while delivering a speech on her specialty, the Cassandra complex (naturally), delivers the line, “Cassandra, in Greek legend you will recall, was condemned to know the future but to be disbelieved when she foretold it. Hence, the agony of foreknowledge combined with impotence to do anything about it.” A classic case of dramatic irony, Railly herself will soon suffer from the same issue when she at last believes James is telling the truth about the virus. But not before she’s kidnapped by him in the parking lot upon finishing her lecture, allowing time for a seemingly anonymous member of the crowd, Dr. Peters (David Morse), to “Cassandra” her himself with the warning, “I think, Dr. Railly, you have given your alarmists a bad name. Surely there is very real and very convincing data that the planet cannot survive the excesses of the human race: proliferation of atomic devices, uncontrolled breeding habits, the rape of the environment, the pollution of land, sea and air. In this context, isn’t it obvious that Chicken Little represents the sane vision and that Homo sapiens’ motto, ‘Let’s go shopping!’ is the cry of the true lunatic?”
Railly brushes him off, soon to be taken hostage in her car by James, whom she hasn’t seen since he literally disappeared while in restraints behind a locked door in 1990. Six years later, she hasn’t gotten any better at believing him when he tells her that humanity is fucked. And not just in its present state of so-called “functioning,” something Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt)–James’ once fellow loony bin endurer (the Angelina Jolie to his Winona Ryder in Girl, Interrupted, if you will)–sums up as follows: “There’s the TV. It’s all right there. Commercials. We are not productive anymore, they don’t need us to make things anymore, it’s all automated. What are we for then? We’re consumers. Okay, buy a lot of stuff, you’re a good citizen. But if you don’t buy a lot of stuff, you know what? You’re mentally ill! That’s a fact! If you don’t buy things…toilet paper, new cars, computerized blenders, electrically operated sexual devices…” Jeffrey is shushed by one of the nurses in that moment–and yeah, that toilet paper mention is all too real. Incidentally, the fact that very few people will be able to buy much of anything in the presumed wake of all this speaks to why the depression is going to hang so heavy particularly above capitalist America, where the worth of a person has consistently been defined by their own purchasing power, indoctrinated into citizens while they’re still in the womb thanks to the propaganda of advertising. And if a person can’t buy in a capitalist society, then what, indeed, is their value? This is a question that the U.S. will have to reckon with above all else (other than its completely useless health care system).
In a recent news item that discusses the U.S. government’s attempt to run a simulation–called, ominously, Crimson Contagion–of what it would be like to handle the fallout of a pandemic in that country, it was patent that the nation, which still deems itself as the center of the universe, would be incapable of dealing with a catastrophic event of this nature. To boot, the many run-throughs showing the levels of inefficacy in communication between state and federal governments, as well as the lack of resources to manage such a crisis, did not result in freaking the fuck out so much as essentially abandoning any attempts to improve preparedness. For an added infusion of eerie foresight into the matter, the “simulation” posited that the virus would originate from China and spread globally after tourists were infected and returned to spread the infection in their natural habitat. The aperçu took place from January through August of 2019, just months before the actuality of it would hit. But why believe anything so cataclysmic could happen when you could simply put a rosy spin on everything and hope for the best instead?
To compound the propagation of coronavirus, it’s not as though denizens have genuinely been doing their part to “flatten the curve,” as it’s called, choosing to shrug off warnings until the ramifications were seen in their own city or town. Because, as Lady Gaga once put it, “‘Til it happens to you, you don’t know how it feels/’Til it happens to you, you won’t know, it won’t be real.” But goddammit, there were so many Cassandras at play in all this trying to warn the people just how fucking real it would become, and is. Like, most obviously, Li Wenliang, the first Chinese whistleblower on the matter who died in early February of the virus. He was not an old person, but a 34-year-old–once again debunking the myth that this is something that only affects the elderly.
Based on all the warnings, all the head starts given to nip this in the bud as much as possible, it has to be said that it would have always come to this. Like it was for James Cole, going back in time to try to prevent the infection would be impossible. For you cannot tell the public something they don’t want to hear, least of all something that goes against their myopic vision of “reason.” Thus, we would be damned to repeat the same mistakes again and again in our handling of this (the way Cole is damned to repeat seeing the same scenes unfold again and again in his time traveling existence). Mistakes that are still being made by so many Americans persistently in denial about the virus’ lust for carnage (here’s looking at you, NYC, who has yet to go in full lockdown, and you, Miami, as you get high by the beach). So yes, perhaps there was some merit to James musing, “Maybe the human race deserves to be wiped out.”
Because, clearly, any sane person living in this world would automatically be driven crazy after enough time spent here. As Jeffrey simplifies it, “You know what ‘crazy’ is? ‘Crazy’ is ‘majority rules.’ Take germs, for example.” “Germs?!” Cole chimes in to briefly break up Jeffrey’s dialogue. Jeffrey then continues, “In the eighteenth century there was no such thing! Nobody’d ever imagined such a thing–no sane person anyway. Along comes this doctor…Semmelweis, I think. He tries to convince people, other doctors mostly, that there are these teeny tiny invisible ‘bad things’ called germs that get into your body and make you…sick! He’s trying to get doctors to wash their hands. What is this guy…crazy? Teeny tiny invisible whaddayou call ’em?… ‘germs’!” And yes, Semmelweis was the very doctor who tried to warn them all about their uncleanliness, and then ended up being committed to a mental institution. Which is what the virus-pocked Earth itself is. One giant loony bin.
