12 Monkeys Ending Explained: The Inmates Are Running The Asylum
With his 1995 film "12 Monkeys," director Terry Gilliam found a Hollywood-scale Trojan horse through which he could launder bleak, dystopian visions into a major science-fiction hit. The filmmaker had clashed with Hollywood before, struggling to bring his provocative, idiosyncratic work to life in an industry that prioritized homogeneity. His chaotic approach to filmmaking had led not just to issues in the industry — it also terrified Sarah Polley, the child star of his 1988 film "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen."
But "12 Monkeys" would suggest, for a minute, an attempt of Gilliam's to walk the line between art and commercial Hollywood. That Gilliam was able to use major movie stars like Brad Pitt and Bruce Willis, each at peaks in their careers, and have them totally sacrifice any sense of celebrity vanity, spoke volumes to his confidence in the material. How many sci-fi blockbusters were based on experimental French New Wave short films? How many sci-fi blockbusters used the idea of time travel not as an excuse for nostalgia but as a serious exploration of mental illness, environmental devastation, and the evils of mankind?
"12 Monkeys" begins in 2035, but it fractures soon after to 1990, 1996, the days of World War I, and back again. James Cole (Bruce Willis) is a prisoner locked underground in a post-apocalyptic Philadelphia. His dreams are haunted by a childhood memory of the before times: a man shot in an airport and a woman chasing after him. In time, he's selected to go to the past, to help find a cure for the virus that has plagued humanity, a virus that was allegedly unleashed by animal rights-focused eco-terrorists (the so-called "Army of the Twelve Monkeys") in 1996. He can't change the past, he can only observe it.
No more monkey business
Cole was supposed to go straight to 1996 to learn more about the Army of the Twelve Monkeys. Instead, he accidentally ends up in 1990 and finds himself in a mental hospital. His case is not helped by how straightforward he is about his mission — everybody he meets is convinced he's unwell, and all he can do is talk about how he was sent from the future and ended up in the wrong year. Nobody is convinced, not even the fairly sympathetic Dr. Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe) or fellow inmate Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt) who has his own in-depth theories about sanity and germs.
During one memorable freakout, Goines compares the inmates to monkeys in a cage. He also seems smitten with Cole's line about the human race "deserving to be wiped out." Pitt's work as Goines revealed his willingness to go beyond the roles on which he'd made his name, performances that played up his looks like "Interview With The Vampire" or "Thelma and Louise." He lends the movie an unabashed, wild madness, and the rest of the time travel screwball plotline follows suit, even when Cole is extracted back to 2035.
While there was no Twelve Monkeys group in 1990, Goines would go on to be instrumental to the group, as Cole learns when he returns to the future. He is sent back in time again, informed this time that it will be extremely accurate. Of course, he ends up in the trenches of World War I. The fact that Cole's superiors keep sending him to the wrong time period feels like an echo of the Kafkaesque satire of Terry Gilliam's 1985 film "Brazil," an earlier production that destroyed his relationship with Hollywood that "12 Monkeys" sought to repair.
The Cassandra Complex
Cole does soon make it to 1996, and he reconnects with Railly, who at this point has written extensively about the Cassandra complex. It's a reference to the character in Greek myth who was given the gift of prophecy and the curse that nobody would believe her. Cole is the Cassandra character here, whose knowledge of what comes next marks him as an insane man. Having only known a life underground, he has sentimental affection for the culture of the 20th century, and the freedom that comes with it. Even Railly sparks Cole's affection. But his days are numbered.
Now, the Twelve Monkeys are inescapable. Their insignia, a ring of red plastic monkeys, is graffitied on walls. Cole learns that Goines created the Army of the Twelve Monkeys, with plans for violent guerrilla action, and then he allegedly sold them out to be invited into his virologist father's privileged inner circle. At a black tie event, Cole learns that he gave Goines the idea about mankind needing to be wiped out in the first place.
By the time Cole goes back to the future and then back to 1996, he has realized that Twelve Monkeys had nothing to do with the virus in the first place. Cole and Railly, knowing they can do nothing to avert the spread of the virus, decide to hit the Florida Keys in advance of it. At the airport everything comes together — a sinister assistant of Goines's father has the virus on hand, and when Cole chases after him he ends up getting shot in the airport, a sight that ultimately becomes a traumatic memory for the young James Cole, who was at the airport that day with his parents. It's a brilliant time loop ending that makes the movie one of the best time travel movies ever.
The original apocalyptic time travel movie
For as much as the closing moments of "12 Monkeys" tie all the movie's threads together, it's also a little bleak. You may get to see how Cole's dreams and the progression of the virus intersect, but viewers are denied the satisfaction of seeing Cole personally break out of the destiny with which he's been saddled. The movie never offered respite from its vision of the future, and Cole's actions in the past were always going to happen. His being personally responsible for so much of the dystopian future makes it even more tragic.
The movie's various time loops feed into the fatalistic destiny of its protagonist. They're also beholden to the primary inspiration for the movie, Chris Marker's 1962 film "La Jetée," which addressed the environmental issues of its time with an unconventional filmmaking style born out of necessity. While "12 Monkeys" had a low (for a sci-fi action movie) budget of under $30 million, which frustrated both director Terry Gilliam and production designer Jeffrey Beecroft according to the New York Times, it at least had moving images. "La Jetée" on the other hand used entirely still images, using voiceover and additional audio to tell the story.
Marker's film followed a man sent from post-apocalyptic France to multiple periods in time. His own traumatic childhood memory involved seeing a woman chasing after a dying man at an airport. Through the man's trips to the past, he falls in love with the woman from his memories. Even after his successful trip to the future, wherein he gets the power source needed to fix his present-day society, he ultimately makes the decision to return to the past to be with the woman he loves. There, he dies, becoming the man of his memories.
Another allusion
It's not hard to see how "La Jetée" inspired "12 Monkeys." The rough structure of the earlier short film lent itself very naturally to a film with more of a thriller edge, that found both suspense and action in the concept. And while "La Jetée" has an eerie mood bolstered by its still images, which suggest a certain hopelessness to humanity, "12 Monkeys" isn't entirely without hope. The only problem with the hope presented in "12 Monkeys" is how it's snatched away in the movie's final moments, replaced instead with the satisfaction of seeing a time loop be completed.
"La Jetée" wasn't the only influence on Terry Gilliam's film. Given Cole and Railly's date to watch Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 film "Vertigo" in the final act, it's easy to read some similarities with that movie's strange and tragic sensibilities. "Vertigo" was also implicitly referenced in Chris Marker's film. While "Vertigo" concerned itself with fearful detective Scottie (James Stewart) becoming obsessive over a mysterious woman named Madeleine (Kim Novak) he's been hired to investigate, it is also a dangerous and frightening movie about the nature of love itself.
Scottie's obsessions mutate into an all-encompassing desire to bring the woman he loves back from the dead (or so he thinks). While there's no actual time travel in "Vertigo," there are allusions to it in the storyline about the character of Madeleine being possessed by an ancestor — and Scottie's attempts to rebuild the past out of what he's been given suggest some of Cole's surprisingly touching sense of nostalgia.
Hollywood ending
"12 Monkeys" is a tough fusion of the bitter self-interrogation of "Vertigo" and the regretful longing of "La Jetée." Bruce Willis' James Cole is nowhere near the shocking creep that James Stewart's Scottie ends up being, but his attachment to Railly is real and strong. It's perhaps the truest love story of Gilliam's filmography, and a surprising one given how much of "12 Monkeys" is given over to Brad Pitt's anguished howling and Cole struggling to make sense of the past he's been launched to.
Because of that, it's hard not to hope that the two characters will be able to make it. Once they're in the costumes of the characters that Cole has seen die at the airport, you know what will happen. But you hope it won't.
Gilliam had actually faced some pressure to make the romance between Cole and Railly more explicit than it was. Cole's elliptical arrivals in Railly's life see her gradually become more enamored with him. In a way, her love is shown by her belief in him, her acknowledgment of his status as a 20th (or 21st) century Cassandra. To clarify some of the more ambiguous moments between them would have cheapened the movie, as Gilliam told the New York Times in 1995. "At one point there was a certain pressure to make the romance more explicit," he said. "I felt that it wasn't right."
Gilliam's ability to fight for "12 Monkeys" rested on his movie star cast. That kept it uncompromising, a difficult and depressing image of the future where the characters' sole chance at a happy ending is robbed from them by fate. And that's what makes it great.