Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Twelve Monkeys
1995 · Terry Gilliam · Twelve Monkeys on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Look at the ceilings and walls in the Baltimore psychiatric ward. (camera)
Pratt shoots from low angles with extreme wide lenses, so corners bow and ceilings press down. The same curvature returns in the underground future, then eases only slightly in 1996.
Payoff: The distortion tells you perception here cannot be trusted, before the plot ever raises the question. In the reading: expressionism / architectural distortion. Bent architecture is what the reading calls expressionist distortion: the building's shape carries the character's state.
Watch Willis's face when he is strapped down or behind glass. (performance)
Gilliam banned Willis's smirk and his usual action-hero habits. Cole spends the film being moved, hosed, questioned, restrained. He looks, and almost never acts.
Payoff: A physically capable man is kept from acting, which is the film's whole engine. In the reading: powers of the false. Willis can only look and endure, so the film hands you two equally believable stories about him and settles neither.
Listen for tango music arriving under the thriller scenes. (sound)
Piazzolla's accordion and strings keep sliding in where you expect suspense scoring. The melancholy runs against the plot's forward push instead of with it.
Payoff: The music grieves for a world already lost while the story is still trying to save it.
Count the animals: caged zoo beasts, a snail, a horse downtown. (setting)
Animals turn up in all three time frames, sometimes in cages, sometimes loose in city streets. The humans, meanwhile, live underground behind bars and plastic.
Payoff: The film keeps setting the caged against the free without ever spelling out the comparison.
Notice how abruptly the film drops you into another year. (cutting)
Audsley cuts between eras without dissolves or titles, sometimes mid-scene. The jarring sound of Cole's arrivals hits you at the same moment it hits him.
Payoff: You are disoriented on the same schedule as Cole, which keeps his sanity an open question.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch what Cole sees and what he is told. Notice every place where the film lets you doubt either.