The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Terry Gilliam · a film · 1995 · directed by Terry Gilliam · the film as released, about 129 minutes
Mode
Time-travel thriller on the closed loop; a psychiatric drama, a love story and a tragedy of foreknowledge in one
Mythos
Cassandra, who sees the end and is shut up as mad; the oracle that cannot be escaped, every step from it a step toward it; the underworld turned over, the dead below and the beasts on the sunlit surface
Phase
From a child’s dream of an airport to the airport, by way of 1990, a few seconds of 1917 and the weeks of 1996 before the plague
Presentation
Feature film, colour, in English; the film as released, 1995, about 129 minutes; Roger Pratt’s wide lenses and tilted frames, Jeffrey Beecroft’s design, Paul Buckmaster’s score built on Astor Piazzolla
Register
From Jeffrey’s comic tour of the asylum to a boy’s face in an airport crowd; dread and wonder on a frozen surface, joy at an open car window
Scale
One man, four times, a species near its end
Governing Proposition
A prisoner from 2035, where the survivors of a plague live underground, is sent back to find where the virus began, is locked up as mad, and is believed by one psychiatrist only when he has begun to believe he is mad himself. The wager of the film is that a truth known to one man alone is madness by every standard he can reach, and that knowing the future gives no power over it, only grief: the dream that has haunted him since childhood is his own death, watched by the boy he was.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins with a dream. A boy in an airport, a crowd, a man running, a woman. The fragment is short and nothing in it is explained. It will come back four or five times, each time a little fuller, and the film will end when it is complete.
The dreamer is James Cole, a prisoner in 2035. A plague has killed most of mankind, and the survivors live underground, beneath a surface left to animals. Scientists choose prisoners as “volunteers” for the surface, and Cole goes up in a sealed suit into the empty streets of Philadelphia under snow, where a bear stands on a balcony and a lion roars from a rooftop. Then he is chosen for something more: to be sent back in time, to find where the virus began, so that the future can recover a sample and be saved.
Terry Gilliam directed the film, from a screenplay by David Webb Peoples and Janet Peoples inspired by Chris Marker’s La Jetée of 1962. Roger Pratt photographed it, Mick Audsley edited it, Jeffrey Beecroft designed it, and Paul Buckmaster built the score on Astor Piazzolla’s Suite Punta del Este. Bruce Willis plays Cole, Madeleine Stowe Kathryn Railly, Brad Pitt Jeffrey Goines, Christopher Plummer his father, David Morse Dr. Peters. Universal released it at the end of December 1995, and widely in January 1996. The unit judged here is the film as released, about 129 minutes.
Movement II
Cole arrives in Baltimore in 1990, and talks of the end of the world, and he is taken to the county hospital as a madman. Railly, a psychiatrist, examines him. The institution receives him as it receives everyone: drugs, restraints, a hearing at which a committee decides what he believes. In the future his interrogators sit above him in the same manner, a chair raised on a wall, a hanging sphere of screens; the film cuts between them until the two powers deciding his sanity look like one.
In the ward he meets Jeffrey Goines, a patient who conducts him round the asylum and its television with theories of germs and consumers, and who will lead an Army of the Twelve Monkeys. The comedy is loud and grotesque. It is also a parody of Cole’s warning: one madman’s theory of the plague set beside another’s knowledge of it. Then the scientists take him back to 2035.
Railly, meanwhile, gives a lecture on the Cassandra complex: the prophet who foresees disaster and is not believed. The film names its myth here, before the hero is believed, and then enacts it.
Movement III
The scientists send Cole back again. He lands in a trench in France in 1917, for a few seconds, wounded, and is photographed there; then he is carried on to 1996, the weeks before the plague. He takes Railly by force and drives her toward Philadelphia to find the Army. The road section, with its hotel, its pimp and its rescue, runs long and plays as routine thriller; the dinner at the Goines house, where Jeffrey sits with his father, Dr. Goines, repeats what the asylum has already shown.
In the car the film rises another way. Cole hears music of the 1950s on the radio and hangs his head out of the window into cold air he has never breathed. The surface of the world, which in 2035 belongs to the beasts, is still here, and he loves it. To escape the scientists’ tracking he pulls out a tooth; they find him anyway.
Then the two cross. Cole begins to doubt his mission and begs to be mad: he would rather the world be saved than be right. Railly finds the evidence that he is not, the photograph of a soldier wounded in 1917 who is Cole, and a bullet. The psychiatrist comes to believe as the patient comes to disbelieve, and the film’s disclosure lies in that crossing: a truth held by one alone is madness by every standard he can reach.
Movement IV
The Army of the Twelve Monkeys turns out to be Jeffrey’s, and its great act is to set the animals of the zoo loose in the city: a prank, not a plague. The film has led its viewer into the wrong conspiracy, as it led Cole, and the red herring is required. The right answer is quieter, one assistant with vials, and when it is found it falls like fate. A message Railly leaves on a voicemail is what the future will mishear as the source.
Cole and Railly hide in a cinema showing Hitchcock. Vertigo plays on the screen, a film about a woman remade, and Railly enters in a blonde wig to disguise herself. The doubled love story becomes visible to the lovers inside it. From there they go to the airport.
The scenes of the 1996 city rhyme with those of 2035. Animals loose in Philadelphia answer the animals in its empty streets; the scientists, with their chorus of overlapping voices, answer the asylum’s doctors. The comedy and the tragedy obey one law: what is true is decided by who believes it.
Movement V
At the airport the dream is completed. Peters, the assistant with the vials, passes the security check; Cole runs, and dies in front of the crowd. In slow motion, to Piazzolla’s bandoneon, Railly turns and finds a boy in the crowd and meets his eyes. The camera holds on the child, who has just seen what will make him the man sent back to die there. The loop is closed and has no first cause.
In a coda on the aeroplane, one of the scientists of 2035 is aboard, and says “I’m in insurance”. The film does not say what her presence means: whether the future will recover a sample and be saved, whether it has already failed, whether it is the cause. Knowing the future has changed nothing in the past; it may yet change something in the future, and the film leaves that open.
La Jetée closed its loop on its hero’s death. A studio picture with the top star of its moment kept the same ending: nothing is changed, and the hero dies. Brad Pitt was nominated for an Academy Award for his part. Thirty years on, the questions the last scenes leave have stayed open, and the film is watched in every format, in repertory and in the study of time-travel cinema, and was carried into a television series from 2015 to 2018.
Act III · The Twelve
The loop is the argument for necessity. The dream of the airport, shown first as a child’s fragment, is the event the whole plot walks toward, and when it comes it is complete, with the boy watching. The planted things are paid: Railly’s voicemail, which the future mishears as the source; the photograph of a wounded soldier in 1917 who is Cole; the Cassandra lecture, which names the hero’s condition before he is believed; the tooth he pulls to escape the scientists’ tracking, answered when they find him anyway. The red herring is required, since the Army of the Twelve Monkeys must be the wrong answer for one quiet assistant with vials to fall like fate. What gives is the middle: Jeffrey’s dinner scene and the road section run long.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. A sane account of the world is held in common, so a man who knows the truth alone is mad by every standard available to him, and comes to believe it himself; and knowing the future gives no power over it, only grief. The film discloses it in reversal: in 1996 Cole begs to be insane, since he would rather the world be saved than be right, while Railly, the psychiatrist, crosses the other way on evidence, the photograph and the bullet. It uncovers the institution as well: drugs, restraints, belief decided by committee, one regime with the future’s interrogators. Held below the top because the plague carries little social meaning and the sorrow is felt as much as argued.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The rises are frequent and of more than one kind. Dread and wonder together on the frozen surface of 2035: Cole in a sealed suit in empty Philadelphia streets, a bear on a balcony, a lion roaring on a rooftop in snow. Joy in the car, where Cole hears music on the radio and hangs his head out of the window into air he has never breathed. The Hitchcock theatre, where Vertigo plays and Railly enters in a blonde wig, and the doubled love story becomes visible to the lovers inside it. The summit is the airport, in slow motion to Piazzolla’s bandoneon, with Railly turning to find the boy’s eyes in the crowd. What holds the figure: the middle passages run long without a rise.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The myth is built, and it bears the plot. Cassandra is named in Railly’s lecture and then enacted: the man who sees the end cannot be believed, and is shut up as mad. Beneath it lies the older shape of the oracle that cannot be escaped: each step Cole takes to prevent the catastrophe draws him to the place of his own death, and the boy who witnesses that death becomes the man sent to die there, a closed loop of fate with no first cause, load-bearing from the first frame to the last. The descent to the underworld is turned over: the dead live below, and the surface belongs to animals. The particular stays particular. The limit stands: the loop is Marker’s, named in the film’s own credit.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The inheritance is twofold: Chris Marker’s La Jetée (8.3), a photo-roman of twenty-eight minutes about a man sent back into the memory of his own death, and the Hollywood time-travel thriller of its decade, in which the future can be changed. The turns are real. A costly Universal picture with the top star of its moment keeps Marker’s closed loop, in which nothing is changed and the hero dies; it makes the hero doubt his mission and want to be mad; it sets a psychiatrist’s conversion at the centre; and it gives the action star a frightened, weeping part. The stake was real, a downbeat end on studio money after Gilliam’s own recent failures. Held by precedent: the loop and the airport are Marker’s.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is that the end is already in the beginning. The recurring dream is the instrument: the airport death is seen before it is known to be a death, and each return fills it a little, so that the viewer’s knowledge grows in the shape of Cole’s and arrives where his life ends. The cross-cutting of times makes the asylum and the future rhyme, so the film argues by form that the two powers deciding his sanity are one. The red herring is formal too: the viewer follows Cole into the wrong conspiracy, as Cole does. Held below the top because the kidnapping, the road and the hotel are thriller sequences filled rather than shaped by the loop.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Evidence across thirty years. The questions have stayed open: whether the scientist on the aeroplane at the end means that the future will recover a sample and be saved, or has already failed, or is the cause; whether the voicemail and the photograph prove a fixed history or one that might have bent; whether Cole is ever sane in the sense the film proposes; how far Railly’s last look at the boy is recognition. The film rewards a second viewing more than most thrillers, since the opening dream, the voicemail and the lecture are read again by the end. It has drawn study as a film of time and of Marker’s legacy, and a television series. Held at the figure: much of the return is puzzle-solving, which exhausts once solved.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Released in 1995, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1990s. Intrinsic force: the film put the closed loop, a history that cannot be changed and a hero who knows it and dies inside it, at the centre of a Hollywood star picture, and showed that a mainstream audience would accept an unredeemed end and a psychiatric theme. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it made La Jetée widely known, it stands in the line of the loop films and series that followed, and it was itself carried into a television series from 2015 to 2018. Held below the gate: that line runs as much through Marker, Philip K. Dick and the genre at large, and in its decade Pulp Fiction (8.3) and The Matrix (8.2) moved the field more widely.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across thirty years and some months. Form: whole; the film survives as released, with restorations and high-definition transfers as repair. Presence: wide and continuous, on television, on every home format, in repertory and the streaming catalogues, in the study of time-travel cinema, and renewed by its television series. The survival step for these years gives the figure. The surface carries a small charge: the Philadelphia of the 1990s, the eco-terrorist subculture, Pitt’s mannered performance and some of the effects are fixed to their moment, though the 2035 sets, built of found industrial parts, have aged less than the effects work of their time. It sits at the foot of its band rather than the top.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The making bears weight in central places. The airport sequence cuts between Cole running, Peters at the security check, the boy and Railly, with the slow motion held to the bandoneon; the dream is completed by degrees across the film; in the 2035 interrogation Cole sits strapped to a chair raised on a wall before a hanging sphere of screens, his helplessness made a matter of the frame. Pratt’s wide lenses and tilted frames give the asylum and the future one vertigo. Willis plays against his screen character with fear and tenderness, Stowe carries the film’s turn, Plummer is exact. The charges: Pitt’s tics push the asylum and the dinner toward a louder film, the kidnap and road sections are routine, and the manner sometimes decorates.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Jeffrey’s comic tour of the asylum, with its television and its theories of germs and consumers, and the boy at the airport watching a man die. One law governs both: what is true is decided by who believes it, and knowledge that cannot be shared looks like madness. Jeffrey’s rant is a parody of Cole’s warning, his germ theory and his Army a parody of the plague, so the comedy sits under the tragedy’s law rather than beside it. The scientists of 2035, with their chorus of overlapping voices, are the asylum’s doctors made grotesque, and the animals loose in 1996 rhyme with those of the empty city. The range is wide. What gives: the family dinner and the zoo release play nearer farce.
Score: 8.3 / 10
This is the lowest axis, and what holds it is named. A film of about 129 minutes holds Cole’s consciousness fully and Railly’s in her conversion; psychiatry and its hearings, the police, the government of the survivors, science and the laboratory; history, in the species near its end, a First World War trench glimpsed, a city decaying. The natural order is present as a theme, not decoration: the animals inherit the earth. Love is held in the couple, and the cinema itself through Vertigo. What is missing: family appears only in Jeffrey and his father, sketched, and in a boy whose parents are not seen; labour and religion are absent; the social order is seen through an asylum and an airport crowd; and a plague with one madman for its cause narrows what the apocalypse can hold.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form and The Imperishable at 8.5, then The Archetypal Deep at 8.4. A form in which the end is in the beginning, a dream completed by degrees until the viewer’s knowledge arrives where the hero’s life ends; a film that has lasted whole and widely seen for thirty years; and a myth of the oracle that cannot be escaped, built as the plot, in which the boy who watches the death becomes the man who dies.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.6: consciousness, institutions, history and the natural order are held, but family is sketched, labour and religion are absent, and a plague with one madman for its cause narrows what the apocalypse can hold. Above it, The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition at 7.9: the loop and the airport are Marker’s, and the line the film stands in runs through many sources.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.5, The Made at 8.3, The Inner Law at 8.3, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.5 meets the bar of 8.5 exactly, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.4, The Unconcealment at 8.1, The Swerve at 7.9 and Pressure on Tradition at 7.9 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 7.9, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. The summit is closed by four axes of the Epochal Gate and by the aggregate, 8.2 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of 12 Monkeys as released by Universal at the end of December 1995, about 129 minutes, in English, from the dream of the airport to the aeroplane: directed by Terry Gilliam, written by David Webb Peoples and Janet Peoples, inspired by Chris Marker’s La Jetée, photographed by Roger Pratt, edited by Mick Audsley, designed by Jeffrey Beecroft, with music by Paul Buckmaster on themes of Astor Piazzolla. Restorations and high-definition transfers bear on survival only. No print or screenplay was consulted, and one line of dialogue is quoted where its words are certain. Details that could not be verified, among them the exact order of some sequences, the scene count and shot lengths, the full list of animals loose in the city, the budget and the gross, and a documentary on the making of the film, are not given.