Okay so the ending is the beginning, right?

That’s the first thing that messes with your head. Little boy at the airport watching a man get shot, and then you find out the boy IS the man, or will be, or already was? Gilliam’s playing with time like it’s silly putty and honestly it kind of broke my brain the first time I saw it while I was in my Le Gery Bastion period.

I watched this during a weird period of my life, of course, when I was struggling myself with myriads of internal, external wars, where I couldn’t really trust my own memory. Like I’d remember things and not know if they actually happened or if I’d just thought about them so much they FELT real. I was on heavy doses of happiness, you know, the real happiness, the ecstasies. So watching Cole go through that same thing hit different. He’s got those memories, those scars, and everyone keeps telling him he’s gone crazy but he KNOWS what he knows. I knew what I knew. Bizarre timing! His body knows it even if his mind can’t make sense of the timeline.

The whole prophet thing - nobody believes you until it’s too late. Cole’s trying to warn people about the virus and they just lock him up and pump him full of drugs. Classic. I mean not to get too personal but I’ve had moments where I tried to tell people something important and got the “are you okay?” look. That look that means they think you’ve lost it. Cole gets that look the entire movie. People asked me, looking into my blood-ridden eyes, are you okay? Of course dude. I am just feeling my time, that’s all. The boy next building used to say to me—

“Ah! You look like you are on drugs.”

But no I wasn’t. I was simply playing my time with various satisfactory moments.

So here’s what really gets me. See this circling thing here: Cole figures out eventually that he cannot actually change anything. He’s not there to stop the virus, he’s just there to witness it. He’s already part of the past, so how can he change it? The mission was pointless from the start. He was always going to die at that airport. The universe or fate or whatever you want to call it already decided.

The boy next building told me, handing me over one CD, said—

“you watch this, crazy man, you look like him, running away from reality.”

Then I watched on my VCR, no offense to that neighbor fella.

Free will might just be a story we tell ourselves to feel better. Cole’s running around thinking he has choices but every choice just leads him back to the same place. I used to run around and tried to find my own space too. Was real. It feels like those dreams where you’re trying to run but your legs won’t work right.

I tried to go back once. Not literally time travel obviously but in my head I tried to redo things, to imagine different choices. But you can’t actually change the past, you can only obsess over it. You can’t change The Double. And the person you were back then doesn’t exist anymore anyway. You’re different now. The whole river thing, you know?

Cole’s stuck watching himself die over and over in his memory. That’s its own kind of hell.

Dr. Railly starts out so sure of herself. She’s got her psychiatry degree and her rational worldview and poor Cole is just another patient with delusions. But then things start adding up and she realizes he’s been telling the truth. She crosses over from the normal world into his nightmare.

And then she falls in love with him which is almost worse because now she REALLY can’t save him. She knows what’s coming and she’s powerless to stop it. She just has to watch it happen.

When Cole says he wants to stay in 1996, before everything goes to shit - man, I felt that. Don’t we all have some moment we wish we could freeze? Some time before things got complicated or broken or just different? But time keeps moving whether you want it to or not.

The scene where she’s screaming and he’s dying and that kid is watching - knowing that kid will grow up to be Cole who will come back to die while the kid watches - it makes me nauseous just thinking about it. The loop is so tight and so cruel.

Five billion people dead from a plague. When I first saw this maybe early 2000s,1 that seemed pretty out there. Biblical plague type stuff. But now after COVID? After watching the world shut down and everyone in masks and the death counts climbing?

Gilliam got something right about how the end might come. Not from bombs or aliens but from something tiny we can’t even see. Something that spreads through the air, through contact, through all the ways we connect with each other. The virus turns intimacy into a weapon.

And that guy Peters who releases it - he’s not even some supervillain. He’s just an extremist who thinks he’s saving the planet. The banality of apocalypse, I guess.

This is probably reading too much into it but airports are weird liminal spaces. You’re not really anywhere when you’re at an airport. You’re between places. Waiting. In transition.

That’s where Cole dies and becomes a ghost of himself. Where he stops being a person trying to change things and becomes just a fixed point. A thing that happened and will always happen.

I hate airports anyway. All that waiting around to go somewhere else, thinking the next place will be better. But wherever you go, you’re still you. Your problems come with you. Cole spends the whole movie jumping through time trying to fix things and he just ends up exactly where he started.

By the end Cole just seems exhausted. He gets tired of fighting it. Tired of knowing things nobody believes. And actually gets tired of carrying around the future in his head.

That’s a specific kind of tired that’s hard to explain. It’s not just physical. It’s like your soul is tired. When you know something bad is coming and you can’t stop it and nobody will listen to you. That helpless frustrated exhausted feeling.

The Stoics or whoever would probably say just accept it. Love your fate. But how do you love a fate where you die on airport tile while a woman screams and a child watches? How do you make peace with that?

Okay so if everything is predetermined, if Cole was always going to die there, if the loop is closed and nothing can change - then why does he run toward Kathryn at the end? He’s not trying to escape the bullets. He’s running to her. Toward love or connection or whatever you want to call it, even though it’s pointless. Even though he knows how it ends.

Was that the point? You cannot (or will not) change the ending but you can choose what matters to you in the moment. You can still love someone even in a universe where nothing you do matters.

Cole dies. The virus gets released. Five billion people die. The future happens exactly as it was always going to happen.

But in that moment at the airport, he chose her. He chose love. And, like that, in a meaningless universe that’s the only thing that gives it any meaning at all - the choices we make even when they don’t change anything.

I’m overthinking a sci-fi movie. But it stuck with me. The image of that boy watching, not knowing he’s watching himself, not knowing he’ll spend his whole life running toward that moment. Time is a flat circle or whatever. We’re all just running in loops. But maybe the running matters anyway.

Footnote