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January 1996, Week 3

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Subject:
From:
Donald Larsson <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Film and TV Studies Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Fri, 12 Jan 1996 09:16:22 -0600
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Edward O'Neill comments:
" But in a way most importantly, *12 Monkeys* seems to be an important
reflection in cinema.  It's not so much a film about *particular* films (the
texts it cites--*La Jetee*, *Vertigo*, *The Simpsons*, old cartoons, etc.),
as much as it's about film itself.  The film's use of Hitchcock's *Vertigo*
points in this direction, especially in the sense in which the fatalistic
repetition of both films is quite explicitly compared in *12 Monkeys* to the
experience of watching a film.
        As for the other counts on which the film's interesting, I will only
mention its social commentary (which is really more dystopic, the future or
the present composed of homeless people and crowded and violent prisons and
hospitals?) and its remarkable narrative complexity:  it's really a case
study in the hermeneutic code or repetition-and-difference or
*nachtraglichkeit* working overtime.
        Also quite importantly, the film both participates in and criticizes
our contemporary "nostalgia for the present."  That is:  in our millennial
state of mind, we seem to be nostalgic not only for an invented past (the
1970's when everything was so "simple"--except for a huge recession which no
one remembers) but also nostalgic for the present as something under
threat--and our relationship to the environment would be a central example."
 
 
These are very good observations on the film.  In reference to that "nostalgia
for the present," there's also the way in which our other extreme tendency--
to downplay the present as the nadir of time (not a new thought, by any
 means)--is undercut by the simple joy that Willis takes in breathing fresh air
 (polluted
as it may be).
 
Another level to the film is the question of madness and sanity.  If one comes
from another time, is it even possible to be sane, let alone perceived as such
by others?  When Stowe is finally won over to Willis's message, she becomes
almost too enthusiastic.  On the other hand, what do we make of the department
store that seems to contain everything that Willis thought he saw in his
 present/our past?
 
Finally, there are "strange loops" in the play of time that leave one trying
to fill in the hermeneutic blanks.  For example, why does Stowe find Willis
familiar when she has not even seen him as a child until close to the end of
the film?
 
 
Don Larsson, Mankato State U (MN)
 
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