I was glad to see that Mark Pizzato (of Univ. of St. Thomas) initiated a discussion of *12 Monkeys*. As another fan of the director, I found it enormously satisfying, but I've also encountered people who found it awful--which I can't at all understand. It's an interesting film on a number of counts. First, and probably foremost, there's its relationship to other film texts. As a 'remake' of or hommage to Chris Marker's *La Jetee*, it's both part of the trend of the last ten years to make big budget American films from much smaller budget French films. Usually, though, the French films are popular gentle comedies. As a 30-some minute black-and-white experimental film with very few actual moving images, it's an odd candidate for the remake syndrome, to say the least. In another way, it's a remake of *Brazil*--the director is back at Universal on *12 Monkeys*, the studio on which he had such well-publicized problems with *Brazil*. In this sense, *12 Monkeys* is a remake of *Brazil*--another dystopic future composed of broken-down gimcracks run amok. 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. The narrative structure of looking back to the present from a future time has been mobilized before (notably in the novel *Looking Backward*), but recent uses of it--since *Planet of the Apes* (?) and including *Terminator*--use an apocalyptic historical scenario in order to position the present as an ideal past. The strategy is interesting inasmuch as one can infer that the present must be particularly horrible to be in need of such drastic contrasts to make it appear (comparatively) pleasant. *12 Monkeys* does something similar, while also refusing such nostalgic sentiment by presenting a notably ugly and unhappy present. Edward R. O'Neill UCLA ---- To signoff SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]