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| FilmDistrict/TriStar Pictures |
Then I saw it. I saw a mom who would die for her son, a man who would kill for his wife, a boy, angry and alone, laid out in front of him the bad path. I saw it and the path was a circle, round and round. So I changed it. ~Joe Simmons, Looper
When Looper came
out last fall, it generated a lot of buzz as a smart and noteworthy science
fiction film. I missed it in the theater but caught it recently and found it a
thought provoking story—and one that could be a page from our own.
Looper is
set in 2044, when “loopers”—low level but well-paid assassins—kill hooded and
bound targets sent back by criminal organizations from 30 years in the future
(where time travel has been invented but outlawed). But the job, as 25-year-old
looper Joe Simmons (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) puts it, “doesn't tend to attract the
most forward thinking people.” Eventually, the crime bosses “close the loop” by
sending back the older looper to be killed by his younger self, who then
receives a huge payoff and can live the next 30 years as he pleases. When Joe fails
to kill his older self, we watch the lengths to which both the older (Bruce
Willis) and younger Joes will go to save others in a world that is all too much
like our own.
Looper
presents us with a bleak world, one I find reminiscent of The
Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford or Children
of Men. Its Ecclesiastes-like
tone captures an ancient weariness of repetition and vanity. The plans we
make, the empires we build, the wealth we strive for, the quests for power and
control—all mere dust in the wind, doomed to be sought after and ultimately
lost by generation after generation.
The film’s themes are powerful and weave together well. Much
has already
been written of
the film’s exploration
of violence as a vicious and escalating
cycle or “loop” that destroys souls, lives and civilizations. Looper also lays bare the human
condition and our spiraling propensity for selfishness and destruction. It starkly
portrays how one choice can lead to another until we are speeding so fast down a
path so dark that we can’t recognize ourselves anymore.
Yet Looper also explores
themes and images reflecting the
profound power of love. We see it in Sara’s (Emily Blunt) repentant, tenacious, self-denying, willing-to-die-for-her-son
love and Joe’s life-altering decision to break the loop of violence. Both
are acts of the deepest and most redemptive expression of love: sacrifice. And those
acts break the cycle of violence and restore a thread of hope
Framed by the film’s Ecclesiastes-toned world caught its own
monstrous and violent loop sludging towards destruction, that hope feels
tenuous. Looper left me yearning for
something more—not from the film itself but something to save our world and the people in it.
Looper may
be a science fiction film set 40 years in the future, but it is a haunting and
profound presentation of our own world and condition—both in its darkness as
well as its light.
While faith and God are not mentioned in the film, Looper is saturated with the language of
and longing for salvation in a broken world full of broken people. It is
permeated with the yearning for meaning, restoration, redemption
and freedom from the cycle of violence and death.
As we watch, we yearn for something to intervene. And when
the thing that changes everything is love, it resonates with us. We know love
changes everything because it is imprinted on the marrow of our soul.
According to our own Story, the capacity to love and
sacrifice is inherent in us because we bear the image of the One who created us—who
is Love. But we are, as
Scot McKnight reminds us, “broken image bearers.” As broken beings, there
are limits to our power to love and redeem. Our efforts, as momentous and
stunning as they are, can’t save the world. We may break a loop, but—like the
Ecclesiastes-toned world of Looper—there
are more always festering; we are caught in a larger loop of brokenness and
destruction.
But our Story is all about God changing that. As Peter
puts it, Jesus, “following the deliberate and well-thought-out plan of God”
to redeem, restore and resurrect we broken image bearers, showed us how we were
meant to live. And in an act of unparalleled sacrificial love, he laid down his
life—and then “God untied the death ropes and raised him up. Death was no match
for him.”
That changed everything. The loop was broken and the Way opened
for God to remake our shattered images. As C.S. Lewis puts it in Mere Christianity, God invites, “[G]ive yourself to me and I will
make of you a new self—in my image. Give me yourself and in exchange I will
give you Myself. My will, shall become your will. My heart, shall become your heart.”
We are created to love—and even in our broken state we love
profoundly. But, as Lewis puts it
in The Great Divorce, “You cannot
love a fellow creature fully till you love God.” When God’s heart becomes our
heart, our profound capacity to love grows because we live and breathe in a
Love that is remaking the world and all its creatures.
Looper gives
us our own world, one yearning for redemption where love has the power to save.
In the end, I found Looper a work of art on truth’s path that leads to the One who made us to love, to the Name that can
raise us, the one Name alone that can save us all—to the One who breaks the loop and changes it all for
good.