Meet me in Philadelphia
Meet me in Philadelphia
Oneiric and chthonic, part 2
This week I published an essay in the UK’s TANK magazine about Terry Gilliam’s 1995 time travel film 12 Monkeys, a film that has obsessed me since I first saw it—or rather since before I first saw it—in the 1990s. The essay meditates on that obsession, and also considers the film as prophetic: not just of the recent pandemic, but of the simultaneous and virulent emergece of predictive AI and ubiquitous surveillance. More than anything, I see the film as heralding the dominance of a new kind of knowledge of the self, one that is external to the subject, and which it juxtaposes to the psychoanalytic mode of self-knowledge represented by the fictional psychiatrist Dr Kathryn Railly (played by Madeleine Stowe).
At its core, the movie dramatizes a conflict between these two formsof knowledge. On the one hand, there is humanistic “research” as the recovery and reappropriation of that which is already latently known. Such research is, fundamentally, self-knowledge: the recovery and appropriation of my mysterious past. On the other hand is the data-analytics and “probability matrix” model described by Brad Pitt’s Jeffrey Goines, embodied in the technologies that keep the time-travelers under surveillance by their handlers in the future. (Each bears a sensor embedded in a tooth.) According to this model, instead of being the bearer of a mysterious past that I can appropriate, I produce traces that are recovered and presented back to me by others as the objective truth about me.
Clearly, we are increasingly living under the dominance of the second model. And hence we are now perhaps for the first time able to grasp the full import of the movie’s time-travel motif. Never before has the present been subject to documentation as it is now. Never before has the present lain so naked before the future. The more this fact is internalized, the more difficult it becomes to see one’s meagrest actions—stray thoughts, stray words, uttered into the internet where they are stored forever—without at the same time feeling them to be both past and future. Your present feels liable to being recovered in some future where it will be presented as evidence against you. The film’s time-travel plot can thus be more authentically grasped as a phenomenology of living in the present; that is, our present, the present the film foretold but was powerless to stop.
Read the whole thing here.
Readers interested in an earlier encounter with the mysterious “Philadelphia” of 12 Monkeys are encouraged to check out my earlier post, “Oneiric and Chthonic” (I should come up with a better title), which presents a record of a dream I had some months ago, and which I am certain is one of the disguised forms in which, as I put it in the opening of the 12 Monkeys essay, that film has been “haunting my thoughts and dreams, sometimes submerged and half-recognised, but there.”
Finally, I would be remiss if I did not spare a word for the other actors in the film. Though my essay focuses on the character played by Madeleine Stowe (in a superb performance, perhaps her best), Brad Pitt and Bruce Willis both turn in performances of great vulnerability. Given the latter’s recent dementia diagnosis, this memory piece should also be taken as an indirect tribute to an under-appreciated actor in one of his best roles.
