So I saw the science fiction movie Looper a couple of weeks ago. A lot of stuff is going on. Some of it is time travel stuff and it gets kind of complicated, but I want to focus a bit on the family dynamics. The two main male characters become mass murderers in response to losing their mothers. One goes back to mass murder after losing his wife. The socializing role of women is played on pretty strongly. The movie emphasizes the fragility of family ties in an atmosphere of economic decline. The movie is mostly set thirty years in the future and the most common jobs depicted are prostitute, hitman, and farmer. The chief off-camera economic activities that are alluded to are drug dealing and vagrancy. Mothers abandon their children out of drug abuse, personal irresponsibility, or else are killed. The damaged sons find themselves trapped in a cycle (loop!) of destructive and self-destructive decisions. One interesting element is the absence of fatherhood. I don’t mean that the fathers are absent (though they are.) It is that I can’t remember any mention of the absent fathers. I remember a reference to a husband, but that character doesn’t actually exist. No one seems to overtly miss a father. Characters find paternal figures or take on paternal roles. The emotional needs exist and are evident to an outside observer (there is a quite poignant moment between two supporting characters who might be the same person), but the characters don’t seem to have a language for what is going on. Recovering the two parent family seems beyond hope and almost beyond imagination. It heightens the sense of familial fragility.
Anyway, there is a lot more stuff (and good stuff too) going on in the movie. A question for anyone else who sees the movie. Would you say that it is more Buddhist or Christian in its orientation?
January 17th, 2013 | 12:54 am
“Would you say that it is more Buddhist or Christian in its orientation?”
It depends on how you interpret the ending. If young Joe (Gordon-Levitt)is right about how things playout in the future then Buddhist, primarily.
The problem is the writers throw a wrench in the works early in the film when they show you the entire arc of old joe’s life (Bruce Willis). If you recall, when old joe was young joe they showed that he closed his loop, yet somehow the rainmaker became the rainmaker anyway.
If you deduce the rest correctly then young joe’s assumptions at the end of the film were wrong, which makes the movie simply an ironic tragedy … of which only a few select geeks with an obsession for narrative consistency would be in on.
January 17th, 2013 | 3:14 am
[...] So I saw the science fiction movie Looper a couple of weeks ago. A lot of stuff is going on. Some of it is time travel stuff and it gets Source: Postmodern Conservative [...]
January 17th, 2013 | 11:41 am
I hadn’t thought as much about the Buddhist option, I had simply thought it was a criticism of materialism from the perspective that true human worth comes from unconditionally loving another.
If I can self-aggrandize, here are more of my thoughts on the movie: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/schaeffersghost/2012/09/looper-another-view/
January 17th, 2013 | 9:03 pm
Nice review Coyle. And Looper is definitely one of those movie’s that’s worth it’s own discussion thread here on Pomocon. Glad to see Pete being the one to get the ball rolling.
My reason for suggesting the movies influence is more Buddhist than Christian are the following:
Buddhism, is, among other things gnostic and tends to view the world as a storm of appetites and desires that one must awake from and resist if one is to transcend them and be enlightened. I think you’re right on about the materialistic themes in Looper, but whereas Christianity understands the world as once good, now fallen, but eventually to be redeemed, Buddhism sees the world in its physicality to be by nature false and something to be denied.
Young Joe’s final act appeared to be the result of awakening to how his existence would result in things ending badly and then denying that existence (assuming as I mention above that his conclusion was correct).
The impression I have of the world portrayed in Looper is that the best one could hope for is to not be caught up in the spiral of descent that the world was caught up in which suggests to me a gnostic dualistic cosmos not an eschatological redemptive one.
Just my two cents.
January 17th, 2013 | 9:38 pm
Pseudoplotinus, I agree with a predominately Buddhist interpretation, but the story doesn’t treat relationships as poisonous in themselves. Personal love is shown as mattering even if it can lead people to evil (though not only evil.) Joe’s problem (at every point in his timeline until he chooses self-sacrifice) is that his approach to those relationships is utterly selfish. Old Joe thinks he is trying to save his wife, but he really isn’t. He is trying to save what he has in the form of his wife. His act of self-sacrifice is the first time he treats someone else as being as important as himself and that importance can’t be nothing if Joe’s death is to have any meaning.
I’d also count Lopper as at least the second science fiction Buddhist parable to star Bruce Willis.
January 18th, 2013 | 11:44 am
Neither. The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
Coyle is right that there are interesting games being played with property.
Pete I think is right that there is a familly breakdown.
The movie is not Confuscian. On a level of generality perhaps you have grounds for a sort of overlapping consensus for a Buddhist/Tao/Confuscian AND Christian Critique.
Of Course you realize this is Copyright?
I watched it just for entertainment.
January 18th, 2013 | 2:27 pm
“I’d also count Looper as at least the second science fiction Buddhist parable to star Bruce Willis.”
Funny. Diehard never struck me as particularly Buddhist.
“Joe’s problem (at every point in his timeline until he chooses self-sacrifice) is that his approach to those relationships is utterly selfish. Old Joe thinks he is trying to save his wife, but he really isn’t. He is trying to save what he has in the form of his wife. ”
My gloss on Old Joe is that he had reverted to the rage that had him before he met his wife. It was as if once she was taken away he lost what made him better, and reverted to his older/lesser self. In an indirect way it points to the notion that relationships have a way of pulling you into the storm of the world as opposed to the life of detachment celebrated by Buddhism.
Young Joe’s act of self sacrifice can also be glossed as a supreme act of detachment, by surrendering his own life on behalf of the boy who he believes will be delivered from the catastrophic effects of Old Joe’s rage as a result.
There is definitely a subtext running through the movie about the contagion of rage and the difficulty of extricating yourself from it.
January 18th, 2013 | 5:29 pm
“Funny. Diehard never struck me as particularly Buddhist.”
I was talking about Hudson Hawk (that’ll make you wish for the extinction of the self.)
Actually Shatterday from the 1980s Twilight Zone.
“My gloss on Old Joe is that he had reverted to the rage that had him before he met his wife.”
My take is that Old Joe wasn’t ever really better than Young Joe. Sure he stopped taking drugs and killing people, but that was because he was getting what he wanted without those things. This comes up in several ways in his conversation with Young Joe. Young Joe points out that it would be very easy to save his wife’s LIFE. He could just tell young Joe how to avoid her. Or (and I’m not sure this is articulated) he could have taken any one of his numerous opportunities to kill Young Joe. wife’s life saved and problem solved. Instead Old Joe’s plan is to kill a bunch of children because he thinks that a future version of one of them is responsible for killing his wife. And he thinks he is so much better than Young Joe. It also shows up in old Joe’s language of how he soaked up her love “like a sponge.” His orientation isn’t just selfish, it is hideously selfish. Though if we were in his place… let us not judge lest we be…
Young Joe’s act of self-sacrifice can be seen as an act of detachment, but it can also be seen as an act of relational love – or at least sympathy. He is saving a brave good woman and giving a boy a chance to grow into a decent man. He gives up his life to save them because, for the first time he recognizes that equal importance of others even if there is nothing in it for him. He also chooses not to sell out others for a bunch of silver and thirty or so years of doing what he wants (or thinks he wants.)
January 19th, 2013 | 8:49 pm
I bet the movie is Harvardian. Some bunch of scriptwriters or producers had a great idea for how to use Bruce Willis and the kid-who-will-be-Robin in a time-travel movie and worked out a storyline pretty quickly. I say that because it has enough logical holes in it that the viewer could only justify buying the ticket by a grand effort of putting the mind securely in park for the duration. That was our experience when we saw the movie last year. We spent the the whole ride home saying, “What about _____?”
My son sent me this dissection via Gizmodo which has much of what we complained about and a few things we never thought of.
January 19th, 2013 | 10:25 pm
The guy who made the movie hasn’t made a lot (though one of the was the terrific Brick with Gordon-Levitt), so I’m guessing he had the ideas kicking around in his head for a while. I dealt with the time travel paradoxes by not worrying about them as such. Things work how they work and that is okay with me. The thing with Old Joe’s wife’s body is a problem however.
It still scored better than Batman (which I like) and Avengers (which I haven’t see yet – but hope to) in Gizmodo.
January 19th, 2013 | 10:40 pm
Time travel movies always require a degree of ‘mind parking’ by nature. The question is does the story deliver sufficiently to justify the effort of suspending disbelief? The satisfaction of watching young Joe deal with the existential dilemma of facing his own mortality squarely in the face fulfilled that requirement for me. I thought film dealt intelligently on that level. But yes, there were a number of logical continuity issues to overcome.
BTW, the movie that ranks up there with dealing with the paradoxes if time travel with the most sophistication is a film called Primer. But you’ll need a flow chart to track all the sub plots and sub sub plots.
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