However, at the end of the film, when he found the real murderer who spread the virus, he forgot that history cannot be changed; If he can really kill the virus disseminator, wouldn't it change history? So he is doomed not to be a hero to save mankind, because mankind has been destroyed and cannot be saved. Cole wanted to change history, but unconsciously embarked on the road of fate set for him by history-and his death was actually a part of this history. In Greek mythology, theseus was tried by the Oracle, and he would kill his father. His father fled to a remote island in fear, only to be killed by theseus. He accidentally threw a discus while watching the local game. King Oedipus left his hometown because of the Oracle of killing his father and marrying his mother in his early years, and finally returned to his hometown under the traction of fate, and completed the Oracle without knowing anything. Cole's death has a strong color of ancient Greek tragedy: whether the protagonist in the tragedy is active (such as Cole), passive (such as theseus's father) or unconscious (such as Oedipus), the wheel of fate will always crush them.
Coincidentally, Dr. Riley mentioned the prophetess Cassandra in Greek mythology in the film. She can predict the future, but she can't change it, because people ignore her prediction as madness. Cole is really a combination of Cassandra and Oedipus. He can predict the future, but he is regarded as a madman like Cassandra. He wants to change the future, but like Oedipus, he becomes a doll of fate. For Cole, "history" is the fate in Greek mythology, and he can't get rid of it. History is history, which has been written in black and white; As the poet at the beginning of the film said, "all your piety or wisdom can't tempt it to cancel half a line, and all your tears can't wash away a word of it." Devotion, wisdom and Li Lei's sad tears can't change all this. Because of this, 12 monkeys is the real tragedy, while Terminator 2 is just a shallow fairy tale. In Terminator 2, the prototype of supercomputer was destroyed by robots from the future, and the future was completely changed. What about the dark future? The sun shines in an instant, or does it disappear altogether?
Director terry gilliam's mythical complex is related to his personal experience. In his early years, he was the animation director of a sensational comedy series "Monty Python Troupe". The representative work of Monty Python Troupe is to deconstruct familiar fairy tales with modern consciousness. For example, Monty Python and the Holy Grail mocked the myth of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. The Life of Brian, the Python, imitates the story of Jesus in the Bible. As a result, it was banned in Britain because of the boycott of religious organizations. Take gilliam himself as an example. After he became a director, his famous works "The Time Thief" and "The Adventures of Baron Mon Qiao Sen" were pure mythological themes. However, in "The King of Fishing", fairy tales have been incorporated into the plot without trace, and the isomorphism between myth and real life has been discussed. Twelve Monkeys goes further than the above films, so it's nothing. Romantic: Although Cassandra is mentioned only once in the whole film through Li Lei's mouth, it seems to have nothing to do with Greek mythology, but it is like a classic Greek tragedy, like Sophocles' masterpiece, regardless of the plot, characters or atmosphere. I didn't notice it the first time, but I often thought of Oedipus and Medea the second time and the third time. I'm afraid only Angelopoulos's The Gaze of Ulysses can match it. Giorian can express the most classical aesthetic realm of "tragedy" with the most modern time travel, which makes people admire.
However, the mystery of time travel does not stop there. "The future is history" can be understood in another way. If we arbitrarily intercept a cross-section of time before Cole was killed, then, for Cole at this time, is the incident of his murder future or historical? The answer is that it is both the future and history! On the one hand, Cole has not been killed yet, so this is undoubtedly his future; On the other hand, when he was 6 years old, he witnessed the incident with his own eyes. What happened at the age of 6 should be history. Now that our future has become history, we can't help asking whether there is so-called free will. I am afraid this is also a paradox that time travel has to face: Are all time travelers puppets who have lost their free will? So when Cole said in despair, "I hope the future is unknown", I could almost smell the bitterness.
Of course, these questions have not been answered satisfactorily; In fact, it just asks questions and refuses to answer any questions at all. As we will talk about, the seemingly complicated time travel is just the tip of the iceberg, and everything on the seabed will appear one by one with the repeated watching of the film.
(3) What genealogy really does is to meet the requirements of local, discontinuous, unqualified and illegal knowledge, and oppose the requirements of a single theoretical system for filtering, grading and ranking them in the name of some real knowledge and some arbitrary idea about what constitutes science and its objects.
-michel foucault's Two Lectures
If "12 monkeys" only stays in the sadness of personal fate, it is undoubtedly a beautiful and moving film, but it must not make me so crazy about it. Compared with previous films with similar themes, such as Terminator series and Back to the Future series, 12 monkeys's directors undoubtedly have a sharper sense of philosophy.
Since Saussure, structuralists tend to pay more attention to "synchronicity" than "diachronic". For them, any system is a function of time. Only by fixing the time can we discuss the internal structure of the system and the significance of "difference" safely. Once the time variable is released, the whole system will fail. In technical terms, it is the so-called "anachrony", and the timing is not right. In the view of structuralists, the so-called "meaning" and "truth" are only the values issued by a system located in a certain period of time. Because of this, Saussure's structuralist linguistics fundamentally shook the enlightenment thought of believing in scientific truth and social progress. Derrida, a post-structuralist, deconstructs the meaning from within the system along Saussure's train of thought. But if we change our thinking and put together the system elements of different eras through anachrony's method, we can also achieve the purpose of deconstruction. Time travel is such a sharp knife that can cut the curtain of truth. It makes us realize that there is no eternal truth. Once divorced from the current social system, many "truths" will seem ridiculous. In fact, this is the selling point of the Monty Python comedy series: let a group of modern people put on ancient costumes to interpret ancient stories, and then the solemn and sacred words will disappear in their mixed London swear words. The director of 12 monkeys is obviously aware of the deconstruction of truth by the time dimension. Listen to Brad Pitt's Jeffrey: "Take the Germans as an example. /kloc-there is no such thing in the 0/8th century! No one has ever imagined such a thing-there are no rational people anyway. " Is the director implying bacteria, or does the objective truth not exist? It's not that simple. On the one hand, Jeffrey just pointed out that bacteria did not exist for people in the18th century; For us in the 20th century, there is no doubt that bacteria exist again. So who has the truth? We have mastered our truth, and they have mastered their truth, because there is no truth that is out of touch with the times. As Foucault said, what we can master is only some current, loose and non-universal knowledge. On the other hand, we should notice that Jeffrey appeared as a madman in the film. How credible is his words? This is the director's cunning. But if we go further, we will find that the concept of "madness" is also ruthlessly deconstructed in the film (see the next section).
Speaking of this, I have to mention Foucault's doctoral thesis tutor and the historian of science, Kangilheim, whose pioneering ideas have a great influence on Foucault. From the perspective of structuralism, Gunquillam believes that the boundary between "truth" and "falsehood" in the history of science is constantly changing, because people always write history from the current scientific understanding. Once the present knowledge changes, the history of science will have to be rewritten. In other words, "all history is contemporary history"; If history is understood within the framework of history itself, why did bacteria once exist in18th century? The scientific truth that seemed rock-solid a hundred years ago now seems to be full of loopholes; By the same token, if we look at the current scientific knowledge from a hundred years later, isn't it full of loopholes? Although we can only look back from now on, fortunately, the wings of fantasy take us off the ground, allowing us to overlook all kinds of landforms that we can't see because we are only in this mountain. Time travel is undoubtedly the wing of Daedalus, which liberates people through fantasy.
Gaston Bachelard is a philosopher of science with artistic temperament. He once distinguished pure fantasy from artistic representation from his life experience. The transcendental charm of fantasy is incomparable to ordinary works that reproduce reality. Just like the hot air balloon that appears repeatedly in Takovski's Andrei Rublev and the Mirror, the art with fantasy color is the gospel of all those who are bound by gravity. In the instant flight, we temporarily lost the historical, meaningful and moral gravity, and realized the existence of "gravity" for the first time. Jean baudrillard further pointed out in "The Illusion of Doomsday" that if the flight speed exceeds the speed of the first universe, we will get rid of the bondage of gravity and enter the real nothingness. In Baudrillard's view, the reality we live in has provided this dangerous acceleration, and I prefer to believe that this is just his wishful thinking; Otherwise, how to explain the popularity of science fiction literature as the ultimate fantasy in contemporary times? We still have a desire for fantasy, which proves that "region" and "map" have not yet merged into one.
Fantasy literature belongs to the art of our time. I don't want to use the generic term of science fiction, because in my opinion, it is absurd to forcibly tie an imaginary hot air balloon to the scientific line. Whether it's the time travel in Twelve Monkeys, the history of the soul in The Base, or the drugs that can change time and space in Let me cry, the police said that they provide not a scientific and technological foresight, but a dimension to reflect on reality. It is meaningless to discuss its technical feasibility.