The State and 12 Monkeys

Anthony Gerren
English 312
11-18-09
“All ideology represents in its necessarily imaginary distortion is not the existing relations of production (and the other relations that derive from them), but above all the (imaginary) relationship of the individuals to the relations of production and the relations that derive from them.”
--Louis Althusser

The State and 12 Monkeys
In the film, 12 Monkeys, a new state, run by the “new priests” – scientists and doctors – with the requisite elements of fascism, e.g. oppression and cruelty, controlled the remnant of humanity. Science is the new god and technology its right hand. These function by ideology – the system of ideas and representations, which dominate the mind of a man or a social group. The dominant State Apparatus, the trade-union Ideological State Apparatuses and the religious ISA, which performs not only familial and educational functions, also controls the ISA function of “communication” – television, radio, film – and “culture” – literature, sports, the arts, etc., having replaced the Church (these ideas are discussed in the essay Ideology and State Ideological Apparatuses by Louis Althusser). A manufactured virus kills 99% of humankind in 1996 and the survivors were forced to go underground. By 2035, time-travel was discovered. A different future was desired and attempted. The power structure or the state, fluid and malleable, easily adapted to the new circumstances – the altar of the state taken beneath the earth, but still hyperactive. James Cole (Bruce Willis) reluctantly agrees, in exchange for a pardon for his prison sentence, earned in that present (our future). He now dangerously, goes to the literal past (our present) to intervene and preempt the virus attack from ever occurring. Since Cole was a proletarian and relied on the powers-that-be to deliver him from his fate, he was used up and crushed like a bug.