Content Warning: This article discusses a fictional depiction of suicide.
As with many high-concept sci-fi movies, Looper's ending comes with a handful of questions that speak to its deeper meaning. Rian Johnson's Looper tells the story of a near-future society in which contract killers — known as "loopers" — are hired to kill targets from the future who are sent back in time to die. Looper stars Bruce Willis and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Old Joe and Young Joe, respectively, and also features Emily Blunt, Jeff Daniels, and Paul Dano in ing roles.
When Looper's Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis's two versions of Joe come face-to-face, the film quickly becomes a mind-bending sci-fi fable about the complexity of time travel. Even knowing that loopers are eventually sent into the past where they unknowingly kill their older selves, Young Joe inadvertently allows Old Joe to live. In doing so, he entertains Old Joe's idea about killing the Rainmaker — the person behind his wife's death — thus preventing their current predicament by changing the timeline.
However, this creates an issue for Young Joe, as the Rainmaker turns out to be a child named Cid with powerful telekinetic abilities. This pits Young Joe and Old Joe against each other as one seeks to protect the boy while the other tries to kill him. Looper ends with Young Joe erasing Old Joe by taking his own life to protect Cid and Sara, potentially preventing the boy from becoming the Rainmaker.
How Looper's Time Travel Works
The two most memorable aspects of are its bizarre blunderbuss weapon and its unique approach to depicting time travel. Looper's time travel is explained to be a one-way system exploiting a constant and exact window of 30 years, three months, two days, eight hours, and five seconds, and the complexities of its use made it immediately illegal. Therefore, it's only employed to send back those marked for death by criminal organizations — they're sent into the past, killed, and discarded without any fuss. It's presented as a simple, brilliant, and relatively unproblematic approach to the fictional phenomenon.
A key part of Looper's time travel is that it's only explained as much as its characters understand it. Therefore, the specific rules are hard to define, even though the logic largely speaks for itself. Unlike other sci-fi action movies, such as The Tomorrow War and its time travel paradox, Looper plays its science close to the chest, making it difficult to dismiss with logic. All that truly matters regarding the film's use of time travel as a plot device is that it's one way, and what happens in the present affects the person from the future — evidenced by the horrifying scene involving the torture of Seth (Paul Dano).
Why Loopers Have To Assassinate Themselves
One strange and somewhat unexplained element of Looper's story is how the titular assassins are forced to unknowingly kill their future selves. Referred to as "closing your loop," it comes with a hefty payday and the explicit knowledge that the looper in question has exactly 30 years to live. Though Looper doesn't get bogged down in the complexity of why loopers close their own loops, the logic behind the idea is simple to puzzle out.
Looper explains that the dangerous nature of time travel was what led to it originally being outlawed, and therefore, even the criminals using it exercise caution. That's essentially the idea behind each looper closing their own loops: it's neat and tidy, and allows each looper's life and death to remain untangled from others'. Were this to be done differently, loopers would be terminated by one another, and should there ever be an issue in closing one loop; it could have a knock-on effect that would devastate the entire organization. Having every looper close their own loop is therefore a logical means of keeping their work self-contained, even if it doesn't entirely work out for Joe in the end.
Why Did Young Joe Take His Own Life?
Looper's unique blend of complexity and simplicity makes it one of director Rian Johnson's best movies, and nowhere is this more evident than in Young Joe's solution to his predicament. His decision to take his own life is abrupt and mostly unexplained, but his reasons can be deduced from the film's wider context and the scene itself. His opposition to Old Joe's plan was established upon him realizing that Willis's character intended to kill Cid to prevent him from becoming the Rainmaker, and the final scene sees the Joes' conflict finally come to a head.
Seeing his older self on a selfish path of destruction and knowing that he'll kill both Sara and Cid, Young Joe sees only one choice. By killing himself, he immediately removes Old Joe from the equation by erasing him from existence — like a dark inversion of Marty McFly's Back to the Future story — thus allowing Cid to live out his days with Sara in peace. He does this hoping that Cid will grow up not to become the Rainmaker, but it's just as much about Young Joe refusing to become the man capable of murdering children for his own selfish ends.
Looper Is About Morality And Personal Responsibility
As Looper's central conflict is between two different versions of Joe, its deeper theme is relatively close to the surface. Young Joe fighting against the man he knows he will become is emblematic of his struggle against his own morality and sense of personal responsibility. Though Young Joe knows killing people isn't good, he does so for selfish reasons, and it's only through his meeting with Old Joe, in one of Bruce Willis' best action movie roles, that he's truly faced with the problems of the path he's on.
The Real Meaning Of Looper's Ending
Though Joe's death may seem like a drastic measure, it's more an act of self-sacrifice than anything else. By taking his own life, he's not just saving Cid but also giving him hope and breaking the cycle he had inadvertently created for himself. In addition, Joe closes his own loop in a more responsible way, taking full responsibility for his actions not just in the past, but the actions of his older self, too. In effect, Young Joe's death proves that his interaction with his older self prompted his character development, ultimately proving that Looper's opening monologue about the dangerous complexity of time travel was entirely correct.
