Chris Amirault's comments about race in *12 Monkeys* are very
similar to my own feelings about the film.  I also felt that these brief
images were significant for their stereotyped quality, as well as for their
brevity.  The black asylum guard is perhaps the only character who gets a
little bit of screen time which could alleviate the bluntness of the
portrayal.  On the one hand, I wonder what kind of criticisms one can make
of such very minor characters, although the fact that they are so very minor
is certaintly significant.  (I don't recall seeing *any* black characters in
the film's depiction of the future; we get only the Latino prisoner next to
Willis's cell.  Certainly a prison filled with white prisoners is
significant in this context.)
        I agree with Amirault's comments that the depictions of race are
part of the film's dystopic look at the present.  About the "wrong number"
whom Willis dials, I thought it was significant that the camera stayed with
the mother and her children, instead of cutting back repeatedly to Willis.
Certainly if we cut back to Willis, we'd see the kind of wounded expressions
he gives throughout the film, including after the phone call.  I wasn't sure
how much an audience would take the depiction of this woman as a "welfare
mother" and how much as simply an overburdened woman trying to control her
children.  The distance between Willis's reality/hallucination of the
future, and the woman's day-to-day life is a bit comical.  I found that the
longer the camera stayed on this woman, the less I was inclined to laugh at
the image and the more I felt sympathetic towards the image presented.  No
doubt different audiences react differently to this scene, as well as to the
scenes with the tough asylum guard.
        The film does seem to give us a way of interpreting its images of
the present:  the doctors keep telling Willis *his* present (i.e. our
future) is only a fantasy, and thus we're cued in a certain way to see the
present the film gives us as a bit  fantasmatic as well.  I agree with
Amirault's suggestion that the dystopic urban modernity is figured in part
through race.  But the treatment of the homeless mentally ill is just as
significant (and is also a Gilliam theme).  I enjoyed the suggestion that
those people who've been consigned to wandering our streets are actually
outcasts from the future, and that they know something we don't  know,
although it does come close to the sentimentalization of the mentally ill
which is familiar from some sides of the anti-psychiatric movement (Laing et
al.).
        On the theme of animality and/or nature that  Amirault underlines, I
think this is very astute.  In the film the planet is purged of the human
animal as the most destructive and manipulative of animals, thus being  left
to bears, lions, insects, etc.  Thus it doesn't seem to be animality or
"nature" that is the problem, but a kind of white technological
will-to-mastery emblematized by the pallid and incompetent scientists of the
future.
 
        I think Pip Chodorov's comments were also very astute in questioning
the degree to which Gilliam's "ignorance" of *La Jetee* can be trusted--or
rather, in showing the way *12 Monkeys* responds to an analysis in relation
to *La Jeteee*, which is certainly more convincing than arguing about what
the director did or didn't know or intend.  Here I think the use of
black-and-white photographs within *12 Monkeys* is certainly a significant
relation to Marker's text, as is the fact that the flashbacks through out
the film to Willis's childhood (flashforwards to the film's end?) are in
slow motion, thus creating a quasi-still-photographic effect.
 
        I'm pleased to see the film (which I considered very interesting)
has provoked some discussion.
 
Sincerely,
Edward R. O'Neill
UCLA
 
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