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.

It still scored better than Batman (which I like) and Avengers (which I haven’t see yet – but hope to) in Gizmodo.

My son sent me this dissection via Gizmodo which has much of what we complained about and a few things we never thought of.

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.)

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.

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.

I’d also count Lopper as at least the second science fiction Buddhist parable to star Bruce Willis.

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.

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/