Talking of "worst-case scenario", Judeofascism's reality outstrips fiction:
12 Monkeys posits that mankind was driven below ground shortly after the New Year of 1997 when a killer virus destroyed all but a fraction of the world's population, leaving animals untouched on the surface. By 2036 the survivors are living in a subterranean Orwellian dystopia. With the development of rudimentary time travel, imprisoned "volunteers" are dispatched to locate the organism in its 1996 unmutated state. Scientists will then supposedly retrieve in their efforts to make an antiserum to
restore mankind's rightful place "topside". However, most of the travelers have died or gone insane from temporal dislocation excacerbated by the crudeness of their captors' machinery. Some may have found themselves permnanently stranded in past eras, and become mad Jeremiahs raving about the End of Days.
James Cole, a convict serving long, hard time for unspecified antisocial acts, is chosen as a subject because of unique powers of observation. As in La Jetee, his gifts are energized by the potency of a recurring memory. Uncannily both post- and pre-traumatic, it evokes The White Hotel heroine's eeries psychoanalytic recuperation of her future death at Baba Yar(3):
Through a slow-motion white haze, in an airport lounge, a man aims a pistol at a fleeing red-haired figure, while a lovely woman runs towards the gunman, her arms outstretched as in supplication. The protagonists' faces are unseen.
This central recollection will make visible Freud's nachtraglichkeit. Remembrance of it generates, and is generated by the narrative; it will be altered and elaborated as Cole gropes his way towards its fateful meaning.
Cast against his standard omnipotent macho types, the much underappreciated Bruce Willis plays Cole with exceptional range and pathos as an inarticulate 21st century Woyzeck. His shaven head, bar coded with his crimes, is bowed submissively before ruthless guards and the icy interrogation of sadistic scientists. Subliminally prompted by recall of the defiant working-class heroes of Willis' cinematic past, the viewer marks the spark of rebellion still smoldering within him.
Cole is sent back to Phildadelphia during the Christmas season of 1996 to track down a mysterious terrorist group -- the "Army of 12 Monkeys" -- which the future's research has implicated in the virus' release. Inserted by error into Baltimore of 1990, he's violently disoriented when arrested and confined to a decaying county asylum. The madhouse is a panopticon nearly as oppressive as his original prison (the film's Foucauldish equation between institutional psychiatry and political despotism is questionable as well as hardly new, but Gilliam works this worn vein well).
Cole is treated by Dr. Kathryn Railly: typical of most feminine cine-therapists, she's obsessively neat, addicted to rationality, thinks every nameless fear can be named, and is too caught up in her work for romance until a male patient kindles her fire. (Madeline Stowe's fiercely intelligent interpretation redeems the stereotype). Railly predictably diagnoses Cole's prediction of impending plague as an extravagant paranoid delusion. But, finding him unaccaountably familiar, she's drawn into his plight
beyond her professional concerns.
The heavily tranquilized Cole is befriended by a fellow patient, Jeffrey Goines (an over-the-top Brad Pitt, likewise cast against his to-die-for romantic types). The son of reknowned virologist Leland Goines, Jeffrey babbles manic Marxist riffs against the establishment. From the first, it's insinuated that he's not only mad, but that he may be mad in craft. During a grim TV expose of animal experimentation, Jeffrey notes Cole's mumbled assertion that "maybe people deserve to be wiped out..." with edgy attentiveness, then arranges Cole's abortive escape.
Cole vanishes from a hospital seclusion room, wrenched back into the future. Still another devastating screw-up plunges him, mother-naked, into a hellish World War I battle, only to be hurled forward into the Baltimore of 1996. By now Railly has become a skeptical expert on apocalyptic delusions through the ages. Cole kidnaps her after a lecture on her specialty: the agony of impotent foreknowledge she calls the "Cassandra complex". Cole already is a sufferer, and Railly herself will soon become another victim.
Coles forces her to drive him to Philadelphia and describes his chronic airport flashback, in which she has now begun to appear. She asserts he's incorporating her into his psychotic system. He ignores her jejune theorizing; gets off on the untainted air, the car radio's wonderful Fats Domino music, and eventually on the entire messy, marvelous panoply of "topside" life.
In skid row, Cole rescues Railly from rape and worse by slaughtering two derelicts. He ferrets out the offices of a ragtag animal rights group which Jeffrey Goines briefly joined, then left with other militant activists to form the "l2 Monkeys" strike force. Jeffrey abruptly renounced this group to make common cause with his father's "responsible" research. Cole infiltrates a party at the Goines' mansion. The obviously still lunatic Jeffrey asserts that during their confinement Cole had pushed a plan to destroy civilization by stealing and releasing one of his father's dangerous viruses.
Cole flees back to the woods where he has left Railly locked in her car trunk. He's now truly verging upon derangement, thinks he may have unwittingly prompted Goines to undertake the very catastrophe he's been sent to observe. By turns furious and moved, Railly pleads with him to surrender to the police who have hunted them down. Cole cries out his fondness for a world he knows is doomed, then is plucked out of her life once again and flung back to his fascist future.
The scientist-elites gleefully grant him full pardon for his work. But, ridden with intolerable guilt, hammered by his scarifying experiences, Cole has come to believe defensively that Railly has been right all along: he is mad, the technocrats and their blasted world are manifestations of his insanity, he must persuade these figments to send him back to the time where he has always existed. The shaken Railly undergoes a parallel volte-face, follows a trail of evidence which culminates in a photograph of World War I trench combat from her archive of crazed prophets. It unmistakably exhibits a naked Cole.
When the two are united again in 1996, it's now Railly's ironic task to convince Cole he's been sane all along, and that cataclysm indeed awaits the world. They embrace the love which has always been awaiting them across the reaches of time, and employ whatever means they can to avert the calamity. Sought as dangerous fugitives, they alter their appearances and are transformed into the dramatis personae of Cole's memory.
Driving to a flight which is supposed to take them to the ocean Cole has always yearned to see, they encounter an unlikely beastiary roaming the streets. Jeffrey's "army" has kidnapped his father and released the creatures from Philadelphia's zoo. Railly and Cole are overjoyed: they reason that the animals' liberation has been Jeffrey's sole aim all along and that the plague must have been caused by other means -- hence no longer is their burden.
But the airport is thick with police and agents from the future. In a coup of purest cinema, Cole's traumatic memory commences to play itself out. Dr. Goines' redheaded laboratory assistant, a person from Porlock barely registered at the margins of awareness on several earlier occasions, purchases tickets to locales Cole's future mentors had told him were the plague's sites of outbreak after Philadelphia. At the bidding of a security guard, the assistant unlatches a case filled with test tubes, carefully opens one and passes it under the guard's nose with a tiny satisfied smile, before passing through the gate. Apocalypse has been set loose.
[...]
doctorgreenberg.net
The real thing:
Mystery illness on the move
Monday, March 17, 2003 Posted: 11:47 PM EST (0447 GMT)
GENEVA, Switzerland -- The virulent and so-far untreatable form of pneumonia that has caused widespread fear in Asia and around the world has surfaced in several more countries, health officials say.
World Health Organization (WHO) officials say they are investigating suspicious cases of the deadly but mysterious illness in England, France, Israel, Slovenia and Australia, all of which previously been clear of infection.
As of Monday, at least 167 new or suspected cases of the pneumonia -- including four deaths -- had been reported around the world, WHO said.
But this number could be bolstered further, following reports Tuesday that the number of victims in Hong Kong had doubled to more than 80.
Most of the cases to emerge in the past three weeks have involved health workers in Hong Kong, Vietnam and Singapore. China said 350 people had what appeared to be the same illness in an outbreak that began last November in Guangdong province.
[...]
cnn.com
Sounds like Judeofascist terrorists will go to any length to blackmail China out of interfering in their Iraqi crusade, eh?
Gus |
