This entry is part of our Power of Film series, in which people recount the ways certain films have helped them understand God, the world, and themselves in deeper ways. Occasionally, they even encounter God shining through the celluoid. (SPOILERS are possible in this series.)
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In 1996, I was a blonde haired, blue eyed, Northern California daughter of a banker father and a stay at home mother. Mike, my boyfriend and star football player, and I, a dancer with my high school squad, set out on a typical Saturday evening date-night. Not telling my parents goodbye, I hurried out of the house and into Mike’s Mustang. Our movie started in 15 minutes.
The lights were dim and previews running by the time we arrived in our theater. Thankfully, the coveted seats behind the rail for resting your feet were still available. I surrendered myself into my movie oasis, raised my black boots and skinny jeans onto the railing, and reached for my boyfriend’s hand. Two hours later, I awoke.
12 Monkeys is a film directed by Terry Gilliam about a deadly virus that has nearly wiped out all of the human population. Survivors have fled beneath the earth’s surface, including a scientific council which is determined to send a human back in time to gather information about the origin of the contamination. Bruce Willis plays James Cole, an imprisoned convict and the council’s nominee to investigate the Army of 12 Monkeys, a group suspected to be responsible for the contagion. Their hope is that Cole, through revisiting the past, will acquire enough information to prevent the elimination of the population. Along his journey he meets Madeleine Stowe, a psychiatrist, and Brad Pitt, an institutionalized mental patient. The film centers on quantum jumps and in turn explores scientific, ethical and political themes, as well as mental illness, the nature of reality, human nature, and Armageddon.
Its dramatic and creepy musical score, my fear of zoos, and Brad Pitt circa the late nineties were enough to grab my attention. However, I don’t remember much about the experience of actually watching the film. Rather, my recollection begins at the movie’s end. As the credits rolled, my mind was racing to work through the plot, to piece together the themes and the character’s interactions. 12 Monkeys was one of the smartest, brilliantly dark and deep films I’d seen in my short life. I felt an uncomfortable stirring in my gut and restlessness in my heart. As Mike and I pushed through the theater’s doors and emerged into the light, he said, “That movie sucked. What a mess, I don’t know what the hell it was even about.”
I was not a Christian and not really interested in being one, but something happened that night while I watched 12 Monkeys. My spirit awakened. I realized, quite clearly, that I was living a cliché. I realized, quite clearly, that I was capable, or, better, that I was made, to be someone other than who I had grown into. Miraculously, and at the time inexplicably, it took only two hours to turn my life upside down from the inside out. My revelation that I related more to the patients in the mental hospital than to my boyfriend sitting next to me finally forced me to stop ignoring this intrinsic pull to live my life differently, to allow myself to think about exploring life differently. Prior to walking into the theater that evening, I was like everyone else. When I left the theater, I was a misfit.
Terry Gilliam once said:
“To be deemed to be OK, to be part of the culture, that’s the kiss of death. When I’m pushing against something it helps me define what I believe. I’ve always been led to see what’s beyond, what’s ‘round the corner. The world tries to say that this is what it is, and don’t go any further, because out there are monsters. But I want to see what they are. So when I talk about the others in the group not having done more, that’s because I really admire them, and I get angry when I see those with extraordinary talents not using them.” (IMDB, Gilliam, accessed October 18, 2011)
To quote 12 Monkeys, “The future is history,” and my life was never the same. I didn’t come to know Jesus until years after my exodus from that theater, and it required a lot of pain to get there. But as it would seem, Jesus was with me long before I knew His name. Something miraculous, something transcendent, shifted in me that evening…and it was not the Army of 12 Monkeys.