While the trailer may lead you to believe you’ve seen this movie before, trust me — you haven’t. In fact, the director works very hard to weave a tale of time travel, crime and guns only to use that framework as the backdrop for an allegory about consequences and sacrificial love.
At the center of the story is a child — a little boy with the power to rule the world and an unlikely mother struggling to fill the responsibility of training him for his destiny. The story is not about Jesus, but Looper does a good job of swirling together themes of redemption, forgiveness, sacrifice and choice.
Lisa Cole Smith
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The director uses his science fiction future world to examine important questions for our current time. We live in a culture that says personal choice is an ultimate right but rarely owns a sense of responsibility. We need only look at our political climate, religious confrontations and social wars to see that we too frequently use principles and ideology as justification for impatient action while eschewing the real change of slow, systemic examination.
So many times having the right answer or a good cause gives us the feeling that we have the right to at least shout down the opposing side if not eliminate it all together. Many times it seems we aren’t really interested in dialogue, facts and nuance anymore. Instead we are preoccupied with whether or not feelings are getting hurt and whose interests are being served. We are living in more and more of an immediate culture with little consideration of long-term consequences.
In Looper, filmmaker Rian Johnson puts this all on the table in a mob gang style battle. Through this cinematic exercise it quickly becomes clear that nothing is as simple as we would like it to be and the “right” choices are often the hardest to make. In the movie, Bruce Willis’s character, Joe, has returned to the past to ensure his “salvation,” unaware that the consequences of the choices he is making will ultimately lead to another kind of personal hell. At best he will have murdered three innocent little boys to prevent one of them from killing his wife. At worst, he will not only have the haunting memories of these young deaths but in effect have created the very monster he started out to destroy — in the process becoming a sort of monster of his own.
Ultimately, I think the question of the movie is: “Can one’s salvation come at the unwilling expense of another?” Does the end justify the means? Or in a more blunt way: Is our happiness really the ultimate goal of life and are there consequences to making the pursuit of happiness our ultimate value? It’s clear to me the filmmaker had some of this in mind as he worked. On the Tumblr page for the movie, the director posted the following quote from Shakespeare’s Macbeth:
Naught’s had, all’s spent,
Where our desire is got without content.
‘Tis safer to be that which we destroy
Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.
Lady Macbeth speaks the truth she and her husband have learned too late. By killing a friend in order to take his place on the throne they suffer the consequences of being haunted mercilessly by their own actions. What they thought they wanted, needed and were owed becomes a curse instead.
As a Christian, I find this to be one of the places where have the opportunity to stand in stark contrast to our culture and much of the world. If our primary value is seeking and doing God’s will, it directs us down a very different path than one governed by our needs and desires, or even our own happiness. Instead we are led on a path of submission and self-sacrifice leading to a sure joy by participating in God’s kingdom.
In the violent world of Looper where bloodshed is a legitimate means to remove obstacles, erase enemies and silence those who know too much, it is a mother’s soft whisper that calms the storm of destruction: “Shhh. I’m with you. I love you.”
Ironically, in this wild ride of big guns and tough men, it is that loving whisper that stills the greatest storm. It was the whisper that left me blown away by this movie. It reminded me that even if I could see into the future, people and situations are too complex to anticipate. Instead, I must examine each choice I make, each interaction I have — not in light of what seems best for me right now, but according to who God would have me be. Because, in the end all we are is the “means.”
Lisa Cole Smith (lsmith@convergenceccf.net) is pastor of Convergence: A Creative Community of Faith, a Baptist congregation in Alexandria, Va.