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