The Looper in You

Rating: Null/10 (4 October 2012)

Would you kill yourself? For a Looper this is not a theoretical question nor is it a consideration of suicide. Rather, it's a decision that comes with the job. Will you kill your future self? If a Looper chooses to answer no, there are dire consequences, both personally and for the integrity of the causal relationship between the past, present and future. For audiences, the central question of the film might provide deeper contemplation: Would you kill your future self? And then by extension: Are we already doing so? Abe, the crime boss sent from the future says, "This time-travel $*** fries your brain like an egg." Indeed! The pretzel logic of time-travel plays a key role in the various plot twists.
In 2044, in an unnamed city in Kansas, there are skyscrapers as high as NYC, motorbikes that fly and cars that appear retrofitted to run on something other than gasoline. The transactional currency of choice: silver and gold bullion.
Organized crime controls the city, which is filled with poor, desperate people. There are also rich junkies who get their narcotic fix by putting a few droplets into their eyes. Such people protect themselves, and their property, from the hordes of vagrant poor by shooting them, apparently without consequence.
This fictionalized version of the future might give pause and allow other thoughts and questions to surface. What might the consequences of our actions, in current reality, be on our future? In 2074 time-travel has been invented and outlawed. The mafia uses it to send their marks into the past to be executed by Loopers. Organized crime has been mysteriously and single handedly consolidated, on a worldwide scale, by someone called, Rainmaker. And the order has been given to "close the loop" by sending all Loopers back in time to be killed by their past selves.
Joe, a Looper, is the main character of the film. His future self, old Joe is sent back, thirty years from 2074, to be assassinated by his younger self. However, old Joe out foxes the younger Joe and escapes. This puts the integrity of the timeline in jeopardy and the rules are clear on this. If old Joe isn't found and killed, then Joe must be killed and his silver confiscated.
In Rainmaker's attempt to close the loop on old Joe, his henchman kill old Joe's wife, the love of his life. To keep his peaceful, serene and cherished lifestyle, in rural China, in tact, old Joe plans to return to 2044 and kill the Rainmaker, who, at this time, is a child.
Old Joe has information narrowing the Rainmaker to one of three boys. When the Joes finally meet face-to-face, the older one tries to convince his younger self that killing the boy Rainmaker is a necessity. As Abe's posse closes in, old Joe provides Joe with information as to the whereabouts of one of the boys—escaping, again, to take care of the other two.
In each of the scenes where old Joe murders the young boys, the audience gasps in horror. Might these gasps also represent the horror upon realizing the consequences of our own current actions? Things we do everyday without consideration that these actions have on the lives of children around the world. Like old Joe, our prime importance is to preserve our cherished and comfortable lifestyle.
By 2044 some humans have developed telekinesis, the ability to move small objects with the mind. The information that Joe has been given leads him to a boy that possesses an evolutionary leap in these abilities. When this young boy gets frightened or angry, in the wake of his uncontrolled telekinesis, people might accidentally be killed.
The young boy believes that his mother died in such an incident and that the woman whom he calls Sara only pretends to be his mother. Sara is actually his mother but abandoned her son by giving her newborn to her sister so that she could continue to live in the city and work as Looper call girl. When her sister died, Sara came home to the farm to raise her son.
For a short while, Joe ends up living with Sara and her son on the farm and comes to know their story. He doesn't buy into old Joe's plan. In fact quite the opposite, he becomes their protectorate. This sets up a showdown, completing the loop, so to speak.
The payoff is at once surprising and satisfying and delivers a deeper message.
By 2074, the Rainmaker has gained control of his abilities. It's his childhood experiences that enable him to unleash terror onto the world without a guilty conscious. Might the young boy, and future Rainmaker, represent all the world's frightened and angry children? Might his telekinesis represent our ever-expanding technology? Frightened and angry children become frightened and angry adults while, at the same time, possessing technology with vast destructive capabilities.
Such perspectives give deeper meaning to Looper's ending. There are actions to be taken that try and preserve a comfortable future, for us personally, while disregarding the wider consequences for the collective—actions of old Joe. There are actions that attempt to provide a better future for all the children of the world, which potentially avoids creating a future Rainmakers. Such actions might require the annihilation of our present way of being in the world, represented in the film by Joe's actions to close the loop.
Looper provides an opportunity to understand, and to reflect upon, the direct causal relationship between the past, present and our role in creating the future. The choices that we make and the actions that we take, presently, even without time-travel, inherently turns each one of us into a Looper. Will you kill your future self? Are you already doing so?