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 ---- To signoff SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]