Looper, or: Selfishness and violence and all its consequences

Looper (2012)

Directed by Rian Johnson

***SPOILERS***

When director Sam Peckinpah held a fiery demeanor in defending his masterfully bloody affairs, he’d berate then-directors' unrealistic portrayal of violence and say something like:

 “Well, killing a man isn't clean and quick and simple. It's bloody and awful. And maybe if enough people come to realize that shooting somebody isn't just fun and games, maybe we'll get somewhere.”

When he was feeling academic, he might say something like:

 “There is a great streak of violence in every human being. If it is not channeled and understood, it will break out in war or in madness.”

And when he really just wanted to nail down the humanity behind his films, he’d say:

“I'm a student of violence because I'm a student of the human heart.”

While the critics of Peckinpah seem as adamant today as they ever were, his influence has transcended the naysayers, stretching to all-time great filmmakers (Akira Kurosawa for Seven Samurai, and Martin Scorsese for, well, everything) and those new hip guys with style (Quentin Tarantino, Nicolas Winding Refn). The meticulous attention to violence in the moment, the grunt work involved, and its relevance to the characters—Peckinpah took a key asset of Westerns that countless filmmakers tiptoed around and gave it texture. Beautiful, bloody, invigorating texture that feels fresh even by today’s standards.

Let’s watch the infamous final scene from his first major work, The Wild Bunch:

It’s strange how slow-motion deaths were enough to rouse controversy, as Bruce Willis running through a joint of mobsters and lighting them up seems commonplace these days. What works so well in The Wild Bunch is that Peckinpah recognizes the role of violence in these men’s lives. The portrayal of violence itself is blunt for simple reasons, because, well, yeah, DUH. This is violence.  Peckinpah understood how violence was snuggly juxtaposed with his characters, to the point of defining their demeanor, their style, their way of life. That mentality towards violence carried itself into the narrative as well as the depiction of violence in later films, from defining what it is to be a samurai (Seven Samurai, Samurai Trilogy) to, I don’t know, a crazy one-sided shootout with a bunch of Nazis:

Arrivederci.

If these two scenes seem similar…well, you can find a bunch of interviews with Tarantino speaking of the influence Peckinpah has on his films. But emotion behind the mission for the men of The Wild Bunch and the Basterds is where the sale is made. It’s what renders countless action scenes meaningless, where violence merely becomes a by-product without any moral or emotional ties to the characters at hand. In The Wild Bunch, the subject of loyalty is prominent throughout the film, to the point where it becomes intimately intertwined with the heavy presence of violence in these men's lives:

This mentality carries alllllll the way to the final shootout in The Wild Bunch, giving the scene emotional weight to balance the bloodiness at hand. Tarantino not only recognizes how the gruesomeness of violence is translated to the screen on an illustrative level, but a visceral level as well. The sheer anger on Eli Roth's face as he blows away Hitler's is the result of Tarantino's craftsmanship. For a movie that so finely deals with identity, featuring several characters swapping personas and donning disguises, the mutilation of Hitler's face at once combines this arcing theme as well as the ever-looming idea of being able changing the course of history with a single bullet.

This scene practically mimics another World War II film called The Dirty Dozen, which was also criticized as an "unrestrained orgy of violence" by "critics" who don't really know any other way of assessing massively violent scenes. Such reactions were a response to The Dirty Dozen's final shootout, which isn't quite as one-sided as Inglourious Basterds, but also features a bunch of Nazis being trapped in a room and massacred. As J. Hoberman wrote in his piece entitled "'A Test for the Individual Viewer': Bonnie and Clyde's Violence Reception", The Dirty Dozen evoked World War II in a "drastically revisionist way".

"The Dirty Dozen is a glorification of dirty fighting that openly mocks society's ambivalent dependence on the killer instinct. An army psychologist calls the Dozen 'the most twisted bunch of antisocial psychopaths,' adding that he 'can't think of a better way to fight a war' and thus endorsing what could be termed the movie's tough-minded realpolitik, its 'dirty' secret."

Violence is so extravagant in these films because its a direct result of the characters. It stretches beyond the politics of the film and directly defines people as individuals. People would ask Peckinpah, "Why are your films so violent?" How could they not be? The characters of a Peckinpah film—along with the characters of a Scorsese or Tarantino film—deal in violence because they don't know any other way. This psychologist's assessment that the Dozen are a "twisted bunch of antisocial psychopaths" is a way of alienating these individuals, thus banding them together. They're cast away from society because violence is their method of communication. Thus, they exist in these groups, separated from others, and feeding off each other, building the presence of violence and the meaning it carries in the film. It's a very mature and academic method of utilizing violence in a film, and it's a grasp Rian Johnson puts on display in Looper.

Johnson is quick to note that loopers are a special breed, recruited and bred for killing, defined by the attributes of their guns and their bloody fixation on the golden payday. Because violence so affectionately defines these men, violence becomes their emotional response to the arcing theme of selfishness in the film. Whether its lashing out on a mad rampage, cozily bunking in a barn and waiting for your prey, or a chest-bursting telekinetic overload, violence is the pulling of the emotional trigger, defining these men, carrying the narrative, and ultimately shaping Looper's themes and motifs.

Selfishness and selflessness of each character is either the result from violence or the after-effect of violence. Violence consumes the entirety of Johnson's take on the future, where merely stealing from someone else means a shotgun to the back. At no point is violence meaningless or impertinent to the apocalyptic atmosphere of 2044. People are pushed against the wall, people are paid to kill, and people are fighting for their own selfish needs.

The first emotionally weighing instance is when Young Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) decides to sell out Seth (Paul Dano). It's a smaller moment where Young Joe is truly forced to contemplate the consequences of his greedy actions, while also the result of these two men's careers in the violent business. Seth is unable to shoot himself because his future self sings a song upon being transported back to 2044. Looking into his own eyes becomes Seth's emotional crippling, while future Seth takes the advantage of the weakness to run. A bit of foreshadowing for Young and Old Joe, these loopers are more than willing take advantage of themselves along with their co-workers, in an effort to gain what has rightfully been obtained through their bloody career.

But for now, Young Joe is selling out his friend for some well-earned silver. And as a result, both present Seth and future Seth must now pay for their actions, which is fittingly gruesome. In an instantly classic sequence, we witness future Seth's fingers disappearing, then his nose, and then his other body parts, one by one. For a film that features so many characters being emotionally crippled as a result of their violent actions, this serves as a bit of symbolic justice. As we witness future Seth's body parts disappearing one by one, the desperateness in his crawl increases alongside his willingness to die. As future Seth crawls on the ground to the door, he is presented with resolution from the end of a gun. Both of these men suffered from their decisions intimately linked with violence, and future Seth for his selfish actions.

In the moment where present Seth is unable to shoot his future self, he understands he has "fifteen paces" before the man is out of his blunderbuss' range. It's this idea that your weapon, your level of experience, or your emotional involvement comes to effect how violent the result will be. It's what alters the shootout between Young Joe and Kid Blue (Noah Segan), what allows Old Joe (Bruce Willis) to notice Young Joe's gun in the diner, and what causes Young Joe to kill himself in the end. While a blunderbuss doesn't define Old Joe, who became a self-employed mobster in the future, the rack of automatic weapons at his disposal in 2044 seems fitting for his emotional response, which is the result of both killing an innocent child and his own selfish need to return to the future. As Young Joe's involvement with violence was always a one-sided, stationary affair, he's understandably shitty when taking on Old Joe.  Old Joe perpetuates that aged wisdom and skilled fighting tactics allow him to conquer Young Joe, but selfishness will actually decide the true winner in the end.

Old Joe's selfishness is what what allows him to be captured by Kid Blue in the first place, as choosing to kill his former friend's (Suzie (Piper Perabo)) child becomes a lapse in judgement, not spotting the camera that allows Kid Blue the upper hand. Cid's (or the future Rainmaker) telekinetic reaction to the man threatening his mother, Sara (Emily Blunt), causes gloriously violent consequences, as it implodes a mobster brandishing a gun and causes the momentary lapse where Old Joe is captured. Young Joe's willingness to sacrifice himself for Cid allows him to narrowly escape the house before it implodes, and it also leads into Young Joe's deciding moment in regards to his own selfish desires. It's this division between selfishness and selflessness that not only defines the trajectory of the narrative, but also foreshadows the fact that one path allows for clouded mindset where Old Joe believes he can change the future, and the other path allows for a clear vision of Cid's tragic loop.

Built throughout the film is the life a looper leads and why he leads it. Loopers are separated from society in the opening scenes, as they kill during the day and party at night. They form no true human attachments (mainly sticking with prostitutes) and only befriend their fellow killers. When forced to close a loop, it becomes a liberating payday. "This job doesn't exactly attract the most forward-looking thinkers," Young Joe says, meaning the golden payday and financial freedom are worthy enough of a prospect to take the lives of other men. And as we've seen already, Young Joe (along with any looper) is more than willing to sacrifice their friends, or even their future selves, in order to keep what is rightfully their's. "You had your life, and now it's time you let me have mine," Young Joe reasonably retorts, to which Old Joe amusingly brushes off. Old Joe believes he has the answers—and Old Joe is also clouded by his own selfish needs.

This is what allows Young Joe to see the path—the loop—of Cid's future, where the bloody death of his mother (subtly mentioned earlier in the film by Old Joe himself) becomes the cause of Cid's terrorizing reign in the future. Old Joe actively acknowledges that by killing the mother he's creating the Rainmaker, yet not for one second would that disallow him from doing it. It's Young Joe—who has emotional ties with this child and his mother, who isn't trying to make up for thirty years of violence and disguise it as righteousness, and who recognizes the tragedy of his future self's (and his own self's) greedy actions—who's able to manifest this dystopian future as the result of a single man's actions, and thus allows Young Joe to become a martyr. It's not a pronouncement of right vs. wrong or the selfishness of mankind, but instead the emotional bearing on these particular men who deal in violence simply because they don't know any other way. It's their profession, it defines their emotional ties to one another, and it's their method of communication. And in the end, it's one selfless action that allows Cid and Sara to lead a life that seemed wholly unattainable in a violence-ridden world.

Oh, and just to brighten your day: