Looper

For his very first screening, Brett decided to gently poke me in the ribs and show a sci-fi film (specifically, 2012’s Looper) directed by The Man Who Killed Star Wars.  I actually have kind of a lot to say about the film – like a lot, a lot – so I’m going to try to be relatively brief about the synopsis (good luck with that!) and then expand on everything at the end.

Fortunately for Joe, in the 2040s they have invented recoil-less shotguns

Joe is a “Looper”.  What does that mean?  Well, it means he lives in the 2040s, before time travel has been invented.  BUT, we learn in exposition, by the 2070s time travel has been invented, though it is outlawed.  Still, various crime syndicates find a use for time travel because technological advances basically make it impossible to get away with murder.  So, the clever plan is to send folks the crime syndicates want offed into the past, where due to forewarning of their arrival (by notes also sent to the past) they are killed by folks called Loopers and disposed of in a manner that allows the criminals of the 2070s to get off scot free.

There are some complications here.  For one, we might want to know why Loopers are so called.  It turns out that this comes from the process of “closing the loop” – whereby the crime syndicates in the future, 30 years after a Looper’s retirement, send that Looper back into the past to be killed by their younger self.  This closes the loop.  Of course, various precautions are taken to prevent a Looper from knowing that they are killing their own self, the most obvious being that all the victims who are sent into the past are sent with a bag over their head and a gag in their mouth, so that the Looper kills them before knowing their identity.  In fact, the way a Looper learns this identity is by finding that their payment, which is always found strapped to the back of the victim, is not the usual silver but instead gold.  This payment is sufficient for the Looper to retire on, and their services are no longer used.

This is a messy system, but it’s one the Loopers sign up for voluntarily.

Failure to close the loop, however, is a very big no-no for a Looper.  In fact, we see just how big of a no-no it is when Joe’s best Looper friend Seth has his future self sent back.  Old Seth cleverly decides to hum an old tune that Young Seth would recognize as personal when he is sent back, causing Young Seth to hesitate and finally allow Old Seth to escape.  We learn at least three very important things from the sad story of Seth.  The first is somewhat unrelated but will certainly come back into play, that being that by 2040 a certain proportion of the population is born “TK”, that is, telekinetic, and they have parlor-trick levels of telekinesis, the ability to float quarters and the like.  The second is gleaned from Old Seth, that a crime lord named The Rainmaker has taken over all the crime syndicates in the future and is closing all of the loops.  And the third is that, once Joe under duress turns Young Seth over to the 2040-style crime syndicate bosses, that any physical torture that is carried out on Young Seth is applied to the on-the-lam Old Seth.  Cut Young Seth’s fingers off one by one, and Old Seth immediately develops nubs.  The crime bosses catch up with Old Seth, terribly disfigured and dismembered, and they kill him.  Because, as I said, failure to close the loop is a no-no.

As you might guess, Young Joe is going to fail to close his loop.

Can we read the abridged version of The Tale Of Genji?  The syndicate is DEFINITELY coming for me sometime this decade.

But first!  Let’s ignore the out-of-sequence depiction of Young Joe failing to close the loop and start over.  Young Joe awaits a victim, who arrives late (the crime syndicates of the future, like Mussolini, are at least able to make the trains run on time), executes him as per his normal procedure, and rips the rear of the victim’s jacket to find his “golden parachute”.  Old Joe is dead, Young Joe is now retired, and he spends his life first pissing away his money and then living as a freelance hired assassin for nearly 30 years.

Towards the end of his life, he falls in love with a beautiful woman, and leaves the life of crime, only to finally be sought out by the crime syndicates.  When they apprehend him to close his loop, they accidentally shoot and kill the woman who is now Old Joe’s wife and the love of his life, and he decides enough is enough, he’s not going to go down without a fight.  In the anteroom of the time machine, Old Joe manages to slip his bonds and scuffle with the thugs sending him back in time.  He gets the bag off of his head and wins the fight, but seeing little option of escape, he jumps into the time machine anyway.

Now, however, when Old Joe appears in the field before Young Joe, he is immediately revealed, and Young Joe pauses just long enough for Old Joe to turn backwards, and catch the shotgun blast with…that’s right, the gold strapped to his back.  A gold bar falls loose and Old Joe quickly hurls it directly into the forehead of Young Joe, knocking him out and allowing Old Joe to effect his escape.

Trust me, I’m from the future, don’t order the meatloaf

At this point, the chase is on.  The contemporary crime syndicate wants to capture Young Joe for failing to close his loop, and Young Joe wants to capture and kill Old Joe to get out of whatever punishment he has coming.  Eventually Young Joe manages to coax Old Joe to a familiar diner by carving the name of his waitress into his arm, which shows up as a scar on Old Joe.  Old Joe somewhat naïvely trusts Young Joe a bit, and lets him in on his plan – Old Joe has learned (via a birth date and hospital location) that one of three candidates in this very town must be The Rainmaker as a child.  He tells Young Joe that he intends to kill The Rainmaker as a child in order to save his wife in the future, just before the crime syndicate shows up and the shooting starts.  Bang, bang, everybody escapes in separate directions, of course.

Aim.  Shoot.  Reload.

Young Joe, armed with a piece of a map that Old Joe had on him, follows it to a farm where lives a young mother and her son.  She’s not very hospitable to Joe at first, but she begins to trust him as he saves her bacon, first preventing her from shooting a deaf-mute beggar thinking he was a more sinister fellow, and second helping hide her son (and himself) from a syndicate goon sent out as what appears to be sort of a random search party.

Well, his best friend at day care thinks he has a little boy named Tommy living in his mouth, so we’re just thankful for what we DO have

Well, as it turns out, the boy, Cid, is supremely telekinetic and has anger management problems, and knowing only that in the future The Rainmaker appears to have been radicalized by witnessing a Looper kill his mother, we can kind of figure out where this film is going.  In the meantime, Old Joe wipes out his first two targets, is captured by the syndicate, and manages to wipe every single one of them out, too.  Old Joe heads over to the farm where, obviously, the real Rainmaker lives, and, yadda yadda yadda, he has mom in his sights as she shields her son and covers him as he runs off into the cane fields.  Young Joe, from a distance, foresees these events transpiring and realizes that this is the moment that radicalizes The Rainmaker, and having no chance to shoot Old Joe instead turns his gun on his own chest, killing himself and causing Old Joe to blink out of existence just in time.  The End.

OK.

So I feel like I should get it out of the way and earn my RAM chip by saying what is good about this movie.  The best thing about this movie is actually the first act.  The setup is actually very well done.  It’s a movie where many directors would likely be tempted to get into the meat of the story quickly, but there’s a lot (a lot, a very lot) to motivate before we can actually do that, and Rian Johnson avoids that trap, spending almost too much time (but not, it was perfect) setting everything up before the payoff moment when Young Joe fails to close the loop and we really hit the story in earnest.

The rest?  Well, there are problems.  I think I’ll deal with them in two broad categories: Problems with the syndicate story, and problems with time travel.

Let’s deal with the syndicate first.  Killing your employees is, to put it mildly, a dumb idea.  It seems that once a Looper is no longer useful to the syndicate, they allow them to wander the planet for thirty years unmolested until the future where murder can no longer be committed without detection and THEN send them back in time to kill them.  Things can only go wrong here.  For one, sometimes for reasons like those shown in the film, loops aren’t closed, and that’s evidently potentially BAD, timelinewise.  And hence the insistence on closing them.  But really, wouldn’t it be easier to just kill your Loopers in 2040 while you still can and avoid the problem of sending them back in time?  Or, even better yet, don’t kill your Loopers at all!  What possible reason does the syndicate have to kill all of its hirelings?  You know, this isn’t really the best part of the benefits portfolio.  “Let’s see, full platinum health care, that’s good, oh say, a membership to a gym, well that ought to help me stay in shape!  And what’s this, you’re going to MURDER me in 30 years?!?!”  You might actually scare away potential employees that way.  And, let’s be honest, if those employees were going to turn on the syndicate in some way, they’re probably going to do it before their expiration date, which they generally know, seeing as they can count to 30.  I mean, if you can trust these guys for 30 years while they know all along you’re going to kill them, shoot, they’re probably fully trustworthy and don’t need the killing after all!

And by the way, there is literally NO WAY that Young Joe was no longer an asset to the syndicate.  Why retire him?  He is a good murderer for you. Keep him around. Good companies have solid retention strategies for their employees, and the syndicate just really is not cutting it on this count.

But what about Closing The Loop?  This is also pretty dumb.  There are, it would appear, literally thousands of Loopers around.  If all of the above arguments weren’t persuasive and you still decided on killing your Loopers 30 years after retiring them, why not, I don’t know, send them to a different Looper who isn’t going to have any qualms about it and in fact won’t even know whether the person they have killed is a fellow Looper 30 years older or just your garden variety syndicate fodder.  I mean, this wasn’t a one-time administrative error, this is a freaking POLICY! And it wouldn’t appear that there is any reason they can’t send guys to other Loopers.  Old Joe was in China when he got sent back to Kansas City to be killed, so there aren’t any geographical limitations on the time machines.

And (Rian Johnson, you should never have gotten me started), fine, I’ll give you a pass on the spatial difficulties of time travel, but as long as I’m at it let’s at least acknowledge that “the sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see are moving at a million miles a day, in an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour, of the galaxy we call the Milky Way”.  Et cetera.  So, if a time machine was only a time machine, and not a time-and-space machine, jump three years into the future/past and you’re going to miss the Earth by over a billion miles.  At least it would be quick.  You know what else it would be?  A REALLY FUCKING CONVENIENT PLACE TO HIDE DEAD BODIES.  And look, I’m saying that if you can time-and-space travel a person from China to Kansas City, then you can damn well time-and-space travel them into the vacuum of space and be relieved of all need for Loopers in the first place.  Problem solved, syndicate.  You’re welcome.

Where was I?  Oh yes, having Loopers kill themselves.  Convenient for the plot of the movie, very dumb for the syndicate.  I read online that Johnson’s cockamamie explanation was that you wouldn’t want Loopers to have to work with guys that they knew killed their older selves.  OK, fine, so send American Loopers to China and Chinese Loopers to America.  Again, problem solved.  Again, you’re welcome.

My point being, the entire setup of the movie doesn’t even remotely withstand scrutiny.

And of course, there’s also the issue of The Rainmaker.  Why is he such a bogeyman?  Well, we hear that he has taken over all the crime syndicates (OK, that sort of thing is probably liable to happen) and he’s dangerous because he’s closing all the loops.  But wait, aren’t the loops SUPPOSED TO BE CLOSED BY COMPANY POLICY?  He’s closing the loops of Loopers whose loops have to be closed.  Again, he sounds like a pretty efficient upper-management type.  Maybe he’s not so bad after all!  But, of course, we’re supposed to fear for the future if he gets in charge of these crime syndicates, because…BOO!  SCARY TELEKINETICS!

So looking at these flaws, either the plot here just wasn’t thought through very well (and having seen The Last Jedi, this seems plausible) or it was thought through and Rian Johnson, having seen the massive flaws here simply said “Fuck it, let’s film this anyway!” (and again, having seen The Last Jedi THIS SEEMS PLAUSIBLE FROM SOMEONE WHO THOUGHT LUKE DRINKING GREEN MILK FROM AN ALIEN TIT WAS A GOOD IDEA).  And I haven’t really gotten to the issues with time travel yet, but for sake of argument, let’s preempt our conclusions by saying, in a total parallel, that either Rian Johnson didn’t think his time travel through, or he just didn’t care.

What were the problems with time travel?  Well, you know, building a consistent timeline would perhaps be a good start.  The way I see it, there are basically two ways to build a time-travel time line.  The first I like to refer to as the Time Loaf.  Let me quote myself (from the Interstellar writeup):

Imagine the universe as a four-dimensional Time Loaf. In the same way that Peter Gabriel’s video for Big Time took a three dimensional loaf of colored clay and cut into it, slice after slice, to reveal the predetermined story inside, imagine the universe as the same sort of loaf. Any slice through the “time” dimension of the loaf will reveal one moment in the universe. Furthermore, we can retain forward causality (something that certainly seems to be a property of our universe) – we simply stipulate that the Time Loaf was constructed with forward causality as a rule. But because the Time Loaf is fully formed, all of time is predetermined. This is actually a pretty good conceptual place to start for a time-travel movie. If the timeline is unalterable, you tend to avoid the worst of paradoxes.

But this universe is decidedly NOT a Time Loaf.  Young Joe kills Old Joe, Young Joe turns into Old Joe, Old Joe gets sent back in time but does not get killed by Young Joe.  Time Loaf invalid.

The other way to construct a time-travel time line is to assume that each time travel event not only jumps in time, but also jumps to an entirely different universe.  Hence, Joe0 (who presumably as a youth killed Joe-1) is sent back in time and killed by Joe1.  Joe1 grows old, and is sent back in time, but is then NOT killed by Joe2.  We’re cycling through universes here.  And yes, in Universe2, Joe2 kills himself before he could travel back in time to Universe3 (which might result in, say, Joe3 never becoming a Looper at all?) but how can that have any effect on Joe1, whose only causal connection to time travel is from Universe1, and not Universe2.  Young Joe2 can’t kill Young Joe1, because he’s in an entirely different universe.  (This, of course, also applies to the nonsense about the scars and dismemberment, which if anything are modeled off of Time Hiccups – again, see Interstellar – and are appropriate for Time Loaf timelines.)  If you want past events to change, this multiple-universes setup is the type of timeline to construct.  It is, for lack of a better way to put it, typically the “happy ending” version of time-travel universes – the one where everything is made right in the end, but of course this is only because we have “changed the timeline”, and we get the happy ending in the last universe we are watching.  It is also the style of universe that does allow for free will.  The Time Loaf universe, on the other hand, is devoid of free will and typically plays out more like the Greek Tragedy style.  Oedipus kills his own father and all the rest, and it’s all inevitable, except for the story takes on an extra twist and some cool plot complexities by Oedipus jumping into the past, too.  Don’t be fooled into thinking Oedipus isn’t still doomed – he is – but his doom is brought about not by your classic tragic flaw but rather by a Time Hiccup.

But as far as this movie is concerned, the rules of time travel in Rian Johnson’s Looper universe make no sense under either standard time-travel paradigm.  Johnson seems to want to alternately set his story in one type of universe or the other, and rather than be consistent about it, Johnson has simply made up rules that work for the story he wants to tell.  And once again, having seen The Last Jedi, this seems…oh, you finish it.  I’m bitter.