12 Monkeys + 1 Groundhog = Crap Essay

Compare the treatment of time travel in 12 Monkeys & Groundhog Day.

Time travel is not a concept which should be relegated purely to the realm of science fiction or fantasy. Time travel is inevitable. We are always moving through time and space (if indeed a difference between time and space exists at all, an argument too demanding to attempt to explain here). With this in mind it can be seen that all films, and in fact on an even greater scale, the experience of life as a whole, are essentially examples of time travel, it is just as humans in our current society we have come to accept this time travel as a constant linear movement forward in time, and as such no longer acknowledge it as time travel. Kawin uses a filmic metaphor to explain our everyday experience of time travel: “the projector runs only forward and is outside of our control” [1982:17]. Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys (1995) and Harold Ramis’ Groundhog Day (1992) are examples of films presenting very different experiences of time travel, and how people deal with the subject, both the traveller and those they visit. 12 Monkeys employs a physical man made time machine to throw the main protagonist into the past, and in Groundhog Day “like a space traveller in a time warp, [the protagonist] wakes each morning to Groundhog Day” [Hesley,1998:202] where, inconsequential to the protagonist’s actions from the day before, everything is reset exactly as it was.


“Gradually cinema taught us to accept the manipulation of time and space,” [Manovich,1996] and helps us understand the subjective nature of time. As we see in 12 Monkeys past, present, or future is determined by your relation to it, this is best established best through the James Cole (Bruce Willis) and psychiatrist Kathryn Railly’s (Madeleine Stowe) initial exchange.
James: What year is it?
Railly: What year do you think it is?
James:1995?
Railly: You think it's July of 1995? That's the future, James. Do you think you're living in the future?
James: No, 1995 is the past.
Railly: 1995 is the future, James. This is 1989.
Despite using time travel as the driving force of 12 Monkeys and Groundhog Day, the films choose not to focus on the ‘how’ (of the time travel which occurs), or even on the ‘why’ (it is happening to the characters at the specific point in their lives), rather, they focus on the ‘what’ of the situation (the reaction of the protagonists, and the reactions of those around them in response to the time travel.) Both films “share a specific form of time travel that makes possible a kind of redemption for the protagonists,” [Gilmore,2003:95] but the nature of the redemption differs vastly. “A man travels back in time in order to save the human race, meets and falls in love with a woman in the past, and dies in the past,” [Gilmore,2003:95] in 12 Monkeys, while “Groundhog Day constructs its fable around the Nietzchean conceit of the eternal return,” [Kupfer,1999:40] (“not a theory of the world, but a view of the self” [Gilmore,2003:103]). For James in 12 Monkeys, redemption is only achieved when, in his efforts to save the future of man kind, his own life is sacrificed, while for Phil Connors (Bill Murray) in Groundhog Day, “virtuous living and genuine regard for other people and himself, free Phil from his despair and, as providence would have it, from the eternal return of Groundhog Day” [Kupfer,1999:42] allowing him to become finite again. When you place both time travel ‘assignments’ next to each other it seems Phil has been delegated the easier of the two missions, but as we are well aware as humans, sometimes the hardest thing to change is yourself. Initially it appears Phil’s transformation only serves a selfish purpose, but when you think of all the lives, just in Punxsutawney, in just ‘one’ day that Phil has positively impacts upon, it is easier to see how, in his own way, he is also helping to save mankind.


The physical manifestation of the time machine utilised in 12 Monkeys to travel into the past, is something akin to a CAT scan or similar medical procedure. The “volunteer” or “patient” lies strapped on a gurney and is then wheeled into a giant steel tube, the atmosphere inside is very mechanical and dark, and creates something of a paradox in the way it concurrently appears sterile and yet sullied. A humming noise builds to a crescendo and then suddenly the character is thrown back in time. Just as nothing is explained pertaining to the technology behind the time machine’s operation or development, nothing is explained as to how James returns to his ‘future’, he just tends to disappear from the past, leaving behind incredulity towards the impossibility of the nature of his disappearance; “Are you trying to tell me that a fully sedated, fully restrained patient somehow slipped out that vent, replaced the grill behind him and that he's wriggling through the ventilation system right now?


Alternatively the time travel ‘device’ in Groundhog Day is never explained, undertaken voluntarily, or indeed one in which there appears to be any time travel at all. Phil seemingly doesn’t move anywhere, stuck in a time warp, time continues for him, and at the same time doesn’t, as he ‘marks time’, reliving the same day over and over. A paradox is created, as yesterday, today and tomorrow all do not exist, but at the same time all coexist in February 2nd. Ironically once Phil realises “only the present moment exists now, the past no longer exists, and the future does not yet exist,” [Inwood,1997:60] that his mission is completed, as he says to Rita (Andie MacDowell); “Whatever happens tomorrow, or for the rest of my life, I'm happy now.” The coldness of Punxsutawney’s weather, Punxsutawney Phil (the groundhog’s) prediction of “6 more weeks of winter,” and the ice sculptures Phil passes signify “not only the freezing of time for Phil, but that Phil is frozen as a person,” [Kupfer,1999:48] which, as Inwood suggests, implementing the ideas of Heidegger, “a life endured in total immobility is, though conceivable, wholly unsatisfactory.” [Inwood,1997:59] The clock radio which ticks over everyday from 5:59 to 6:00, accompanied by Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe,” can be seen as functioning as the time travel machine of the film. It can also be viewed as a malfunctioning device due to the fact everyday at 6am it simply resets itself, and indeed the world, to February 2nd. The weight of time and the way it looms over Phil’s life is illustrated blatantly in the scene featuring the extreme close up of the clock ticking over. The numbers fill the screen and turn over at an agonisingly slow pace, accompanied by a “loud, ominous, industrial turning sound,” [Kupfer,1999:48] it heralds a change in Phil’s mood to utter depression.


The ticking over of the clock to signal the start of both a new day, and the same day, is an apt metaphor for our own lives and our relation to time. Phil’s question to drunken Gus (Rick Ducommun) and Ralph (Rick Overton), at the bowling alley, initially seems insignificant and nothing more than a comic exchange.
Phil: What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?
Ralph: That about sums it up for me.
While the audience laughs at Ralph’s reply, there is also a hidden feeling of empathy for him, and possibly a fear of our own lives becoming a meaningless existence, if they’re not that way already.


A female saviour in both films is the only one to be truly convinced of the actuality of the time travelling being done by their male counterparts. Both female characters hold positions of authority over their male character; Rita is Phil’s producer and Kathryn is James’ psychiatrist. The way the male protagonists prove themselves is through an accurate prediction of the future, which for them is the past, or at least a past, they have experienced. In Groundhog Day it is Phil’s detailed knowledge of everyone in the Tip Top Diner, and his hastily written foresight to what Larry (Chris Elliott) will say, “We better get going if we want to stay ahead of the weather,” which convinces Rita of Phil’s experience. The only problem is, when the day resets, at 6am, not midnight as Rita assumed, she does not recall anything of the day before, and Phil is once more left in his solitude to deal with his infinite day. Kathryn however recalls all her encounters with James, and even from the beginning of their association with one another she keeps insisting: ”Have I seen you someplace?” and “I have the…strangest feeling I’ve met you before…a long time ago, perhaps.” As we learn, she has met him before, when he was a child witnessing the moment of his own death, but this event is in her future, his past, and at the time she feels this, it is something she has not yet experienced for herself, creating a feeling of what Heidegger calls the ‘uncanny,’ meaning “a sense of ‘not-being-at-home’, (that is [Kathryn is] confronted with the lack of intrinsic meaning in [her life]” [Gilmore,2003:100]). As a psychiatrist, with a book titled, ‘The Doomsday Syndrome, Apocalyptic Visions of the Mentally Ill,’ and knowledge of the Cassandra syndrome, explained in the film as someone “condemned to know the future but to be disbelieved when she foretold it,” Kathryn seems the most likely, and unlikely, person to believe James’ story of time travel. She first finds the photograph of him taken during World War One, and then, when he turns out to be correct about the boy in the well really who is just hiding in a barn, her belief in his story is cemented. Ironically when she is finally convinced he is telling the truth he suddenly decides he is simply mentally ill and imagining everything. In a switching of roles Kathryn becomes the ‘insane’ one as she tries desperately to convince him his truth is the truth. James’ behaviour is what Heidegger would label ‘inauthentic’, this inauthenticity “has a lot to do with a loss of one’s sense of one’s true self and derives from an attempt to escape from anxiety into ‘theyness’” [Gilmore,2003:101]. James tries giving up and simply accepting society’s judgement of his mental state, but Kathryn refuses to let this inauthenticity last.


¬While neither film delves into the complexities and paradoxes created by time travel, they both provide a range of ways people deal with the notion of time travel, both the traveller and those they visit. Initially it is explained away simply as déjà vu, or an extreme case of déjà vu, such as Kathryn’s certainty she’d met James before, as discussed above. Rita experiences something similar, during their almost perfect evening together, when she says to Phil, “There is something so familiar about this, have you ever had déjà vu?” On Phil’s 2nd February 2nd, after experiencing the exact same morning as the day before he asks “Do you ever have déjà vu Mrs. Lancaster?” A phenomenon she is clearly unfamiliar with judging from her reply: “I don't think so, but I could check with the kitchen!” A reaction in 12 Monkeys to stories of time travel is to immediately label it insane, and institutionalise the alleged traveller. As the audience knows James is telling the truth they do not wish to write off his fellow inmates and their supposed “condition of ‘mental divergence’” as easily as the doctors. Throughout Groundhog Day it is evident Phil approaches his situation from a number of perspectives, linked to the 5 stages of grieving; denial, anger, depression, bargaining, and acceptance.


12 Monkeys and Groundhog Day presented the 1990s cinema audience with two contrary tales of time travel. One was comedy, the other a post-apocalyptic action-sci-fi-drama, one included a hedonistic human spirit, the other evoked a selfless but violent human spirit, but, by the end of both films, each protagonist redeemed himself through their unconventional use of time travel, voluntarily or not.



REFERENCES:

Books:
• Gilmore R, 2003, ‘Ch.5: Oedipus Techs: Time Travel as Redemption in The Terminator and 12 Monkeys’ in Doing Philosophy at the Movies, New York, State University of New York Press.
• Hesley J, 1998, Rent Two Films & Let’s Talk in the Morning, New York, John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
• Inwood M, 1997, ‘Ch.7: Time, Death and Conscience’ in Heidegger, Oxford. Oxford University Press.
• Kawin B, 1982, ‘Time & Stasis in La Jetee’ in Film Quarterly, XXXVI, No.1.
• Kupfer J, 1999, Visions of Virtue in Popular Film, Colorado, Westview Press.

Online sources:
• Manovich L, 1996, Cinema and Digital Media, http://jupiter.ucsd.edu/~manovich/text/digital-cinema-zkm.html.


FILMOGRAPHY:
• Groundhog Day, 1993, Harold RAMIS, USA, Columbia Pictures.
• 12 Monkeys, 1995, Terry GILLIAM, USA, Universal Pictures.