It’s easy to project a straight line from the romantic exile embodied in the first moments of Brick to the triumphant suicide that concludes Looper. Anyone who’s been broken up with or rejected can probably relate to those fantasies. Suicide in a place she can see. And wouldn’t it be better if she knew that your sacrifice was all for her, that you were gifting her the rest of her life. And wouldn’t the absolute very best thing be to watch her stand over your body, and touch you one last time, in gratitude. Maybe then, you could finally move on with your life.
This is an impossible fantasy, but filmmaking allowed Johnson to come as near as you can get. Did it bring him a sense of closure? Looper ends a cycle of movies that was rigidly consumed with the search for a release valve from heterosexual male romantic fixation. Johnson’s broadening of scope may simply be a function of his going to work for Disney. But I like to think he finally found some peace.
The irony is, Johnson became a studio filmmaker just at the time that the entertainment industry was dealing with its own disintegrating relationship. For over a century, the industry’s banishment to the margins of every perspective but those of white men had been taken for granted. Something that you could complain about, but that, like a sitcom husband, would never change.
But then, seemingly in an instant, complaints became demands. Had the power dynamic flipped in the relationship between artist and audience? It became the consensus that the entertainment industry owed a massive and immediate debt to every demographic group it had previously excluded. And Rian Johnson, whose work had spawned out of the paradox of emotional break-up logic — “I know I suck, take me back!” — was given, or took upon himself, the job of winning one of these demographics back: women.
And so he would continue working the theme of gender reconciliation. What began as a personal need in Brick, and was depicted as a societal problem in Looper, would soon be re-examined on a galactic scale.
But before moving onto that, lets take Looper for one last spin. I want to show that whatever emotional catharsis that Johnson achieves in that film (for audiences as well, but more truly for himself), comes as the payoff of a new kind of narrative structure, one which Johnson had been developing, at varying levels of consciousness, across his career.
I’ll call that innovation in narrative the “Effigy Story.”
I’ll attempt to define the Effigy Story in terms of four prevalent characteristics.
The climactic event is the death of its protagonist.
By climactic event I mean more than “the thing that happens at the end.” I mean a moment that gives the entire story its meaning and purpose.
In some narratives, you get the sense that the author had difficulty deciding on a resolution, and flipped a coin five pages before typing The End. But Looper is definitely not like that. You can tell that Johnson decided that Joe would die early on in the writing process. Massive amounts of plot architecture have been reverse-engineered simply to compel Joe’s suicide.
Even features you wouldn’t expect. Joe’s weapon of choice, the “blunderbuss” that all loopers carry, is a clumsy shotgun only effective at short range. So, when Joe is in that fateful moment in the cornfield, he can see Old Joe about to kill Sara, but he’s too far away to shoot him. Turning this gun on himself is his only choice.
Other techniques serve similar purposes but are less poetic. What stands out is Johnson’s compulsion to remove any uncertainty regarding the results of Joe’s decision to kill himself.
So, every scene with Cid reduces him to a plot automaton. He is a child with godlike power, and any event that displeases him causes him to fly into a homicidal rage. The only thing that will calm him down is his mother’s voice. Joe witnesses this mechanic play out, and tells Sara that Cid will grow up to be a killer. But she begs him to imagine what would happen “If he did good with it. If he grew up with me raising him. If he grew up good.” There is a tremendous anxiety in this repetition. Johnson must have you know that Sara living or dying is completely determinative on the question of Cid being good or evil.
But even this is not deterministic enough! A further conceit is established that an adult can look at a child and, in a flash of insight, perceive their entire future. This is first stated by Joe’s gangland boss, Abe, describing seeing Joe for the first time as a street urchin: “I could see. Like seeing it happen on the TV. The bad version of your life. Like a vision. I could see, how you'd turn bad. So I changed it.” (Again, the repetition betraying Johnson’s anxiety at not being understood.) When Joe arrives at his moment in the cornfield, time freezes, and Joe’s vision of Cid’s “bad version” life — Old Joe killing Sara, Cid growing up to become the Rainmaker — plays out on screen as an objective truth, as Joe in voiceover recites Abe’s monologue, ending with “so I changed it” before he pulls the trigger.
By the time Joe’s moment of truth arrives, Johnson has stacked the deck so much that his decision loses any element of subjectivity, of faith. Technically Joe brings the hammer down on himself but Johnson has been leading him placidly to that moment all the way, like the designer of a slaughterhouse.
This actually segues nicely into characteristic two.
The protagonist is killed by the author.
By this I mean even more than just Johnson’s rigging of the story so that Joe is checkmated into killing himself. This is more about what Johnson does not do.
Despite all the plot work that goes into setting Joe up with this forced choice, Johnson does not reach that moment in the cornfield by exhausting the dramatic conflict between Joe and Old Joe. In fact, most of the exposition required to make it 100% unmistakably clear that Cid will definitely be fully evil if and only if his mom dies is only necessary to compensate for the failure to exhaust the conflict.
Here’s what I mean by that. Joe and Old Joe actually only meet twice. And while both conversations are interrupted by third-party gunfire, the timing of the two interruptions are very different. In the first, Joe and Old Joe try every argument they can think of to persuade the other to collaborate on a shared goal. Only after they realize that persuasion won’t work do they reach for their guns, and only after they pull their weapons do other gunmen show up. That’s dramatic exhaustion.1
But the second time they meet, the interruption comes before Joe can play his best rhetorical cards. Old Joe is able to offer Joe the thing he has, to this point, wanted more than anything else: money, and the freedom it represents. But now Joe also has something Old Joe wants: the information that it’s Old Joe himself whose violence causes Cid to become the evil Rainmaker. But, whoops, here comes this third guy that Joe has to kill, and by the time Joe catches up to Old Joe it’s in that cornfield and there’s no more time to talk.
Because Old Joe never learns the critical truth, he is never able to knowingly choose the dark loop, choose the timeline which is dominated by violence but he gets to keep his wife, over the one where the conflict is eased but he has to let her go.2 And the fact that Johnson doesn’t give him the opportunity to knowingly choose darkness implies that he believes that Old Joe wouldn’t make that choice, if he were given all the information.
This is to say, despite all the laborious plot mechanics that Johnson erects to force that final explosion of violence, he just fundamentally does not believe that this apocalyptic ending arises inevitably from the dramatic conflict. In the critical moment, he relies on an unlucky coincidence to drive his antagonists to their doom, claiming the killing blows for himself.
This is especially important in this case because Old Joe is, literally and figuratively, Joe’s fallen doppelgänger. He represents the evil inside Joe, that has been so fully nurtured that only death can cure it. But that evil side of Joe is partially motivated by a misunderstanding, so Old Joe only represents the superficial affect of evil, not its conscious embodiment.
That leads us elegantly leads us to characteristic three.3
The protagonist is both and good and bad in a way that can't be broken down into discreet elements.
Looper seems to be trying to tell the story of Joe’s redemption. But is Joe a bad person?
Fiction is full of characters who have bad and good qualities. Serial killers who love animals. Men who cheat on their wives but are loyal to their children. Joe, I would argue, is not one of those, because Joe’s character cannot be broken into discreet elements. He’s elementally both-bad-and-good.
Both-bad-and-good characters are not uncommon, but usually that quality is expressed as a sort of probability cloud. They make both bad and good choices in a roughly alternating pattern. Brendan in Brick is like this. Usually the source of the both-bad-and-good quality is authorial indecisiveness, a desire to have it both ways.
But in Looper, Johnson actually finds a way to explicitly define his protagonist as both-bad-and-good. The audacity of it may never be matched.
Joe’s character is tested, and defined, in Looper’s first act. The setup: Seth, his best friend and fellow looper, is in trouble with the mob, having let his own Old Seth escape. Joe is under pressure to betray Seth’s whereabouts by Abe, the mob boss who raised him, and who knows him better than anyone.
With a setup like that, the author has enormous freedom to define their protagonist.
Joe, who is hoarding money so that he can retire from crime, could actively turn his friend in for a reward. That’s a shade of darkness not in Johnson’s typical palette. On the other hand, he could heroically resist betraying his friend, and give in only under the threat of torture. This may have seemed like too much of a cop-out for Johnson. In fact, before the interrogation begins, Abe very forcefully promises Joe that he will not be harmed, and is clear that he knows torture will be unnecessary because he understands Joe’s nature.
Instead, Abe threatens Joe’s money. But he doesn’t even threaten to take all of it. Just half. He literally says fifty percent! Johnson has finally externalized his need to split the difference.
It’s the right price. Joe indeed betrays Seth to the mob, and Seth is brutally disfigured. Afterward, Joe attempts to purge his guilt by giving the sex worker he frequents that same fifty percent of his money. The dirty half. But she turns him down.4
Joe being irreducibly both-bad-and-good. Johnson intervening in the drama to interrupt a conversation between protagonist and antagonist, ripping a hole in the drama and patching it up with heavy-handed plot contrivances. These are related qualities. Both take a familiar storytelling template, the redemption arc, and estrange it from traditional cause-and-effect dramatic storytelling.5
But, to what end? That delivers us neatly to the fourth characteristic of the Effigy Story.
The death of the protagonist is a sacrifice that returns transcendent value.
All of these characteristics are expressions that derive from the same equation. A character sacrifices their life, but that sacrifice goes beyond what either dramatic necessity or balancing the moral scale would seem to require. Because the sacrifice transcends the needs of the math, it returns transcendent value.
Joe’s death saves Sara’s life. That seems fair! After all, Looper takes care to define male mistreatment of women as the original sin that knocked the world off its axis in the first place, and a sin which Joe is beginning to indulge.
But Joe’s sacrifice isn’t on her behalf, but Cid’s. It’s not for women that Joe dies, but for their sons.
All Sara wants is a chance to raise her boy to “do good with” his amazing inherited superpowers. After Sara says her last farewell to Joe’s body, she takes Cid back to their house, gives him a bath, and tucks him into bed. The last shot of the movie is Cid sleeping peacefully, able to innocently enjoy the maternal love that pervert Joe could only find in the arms of sex workers.
OK, you’re forced to admit. It’s a little out of line that Johnson would imagine the redemption of a misogynist society as a treat for tomorrow’s little boys. But even so, you argue, it’s a sacrifice on behalf of future generations. A selfless bequeathment.
And yes, it is a bequeathment. But it’s simultaneously, a reincarnation.
How could it not be? To imagine the life of this boy, who will use his godlike power to set the world right, is to claim it. It is yours to inhabit as you like, a liberty you paid for by identifying with Joe and experiencing the pain of death through that Effigy. That death grants moral permission to freely wield the enormous power of Cid to remake the world.
You can see how the destruction of effigies to such a purpose would seem useful to a wealthy and powerful society experiencing a sudden frenzy of guilt; a communal sensation so pervasive that it even implicates all of that society’s prior art. The arithmetic of traditional dramatic storytelling is a tool for a confident society, one that believes reason is on its side. Without that confidence, a turn to ritual is understandable.
We’ve been living in the “good Rainmaker” timeline for quite a while now. What else could you call this age of travesty, with its prevalent belief that the ever-increasing power of the Disney corporation can be used to redeem centuries of unthinking racial propaganda? And for this second childhood, and second lifetimes’s helping of motherlove, born through the mechanisms of time travel and blood sacrifice, we must thank Joe. But let’s be honest, his sacrifice alone could never have been enough. The rituals have continued.
For an even clearer example you can peek ahead to The Last Jedi. In the last scene featuring series antagonists Kylo Ren and Rey, they come to agree on almost everything. (Let’s kill Snoke, let’s fight these other guys, your parents are losers, we should have sex, etc.) They establish a fundamental shared understanding, and based on those premises try and persuade each other to switch sides. Yet neither can make the case, there is something intrinsically oppositional about them, and only when they realize this do they (just like Joe and Old Joe) start sneaking their hand to their weapon.
And imagine if Johnson had found a way to bring Joe and Old Joe together in agreement on this point before having Old Joe knowingly choose to kill Sara. You would no longer need all of the cumbersome mechanics establishing Cid’s two potential futures.
The numbering of these characteristics is random, and in fact its being determined ad hoc entirely by my ability to form these segues. That’s a part of the nature of the creative process that we tend to ignore! (Part of my intention here is to compensate for this typical oversight.)
And at the end of the movie, Joe makes a similar sacrifice. That one works: but in that instance he gives up 100% of his money to Sara. You get a sense for how the moral math is supposed to work.
I’m somewhat aware there’s a whole academic vocabulary for describing this, that I don’t yet have. I’m just a humble idiot with a degree in screenwriting from the University of Southern California, where they don’t force you to learn you about allegory.