The Mechanics of Time Travel and Humanity in Looper

Looper was excellent, I have to say. It deserves a place alongside the best dystopian time-travel films, 12 Monkeys and Primer, and in many ways, it compares favorably to them. It was stylish and earnest in equal measure, which is hard to pull off in our post-Tarantino era, and it was crafty and precise in its construction of an anachronistic gunmetal future.

It's hard to maintain, with any seriousness, that any film -- Looper included -- could challenge the merits of 12 Monkeys and Primer, which are both justifiably held up as the best, sharpest, most uncompromising films in the time-travel genre. Still, I think there's a case to be made that Looper is more subtle than either of these leaving more room for a larger view of humanity. To talk about that, though, I'll probably spend most of my time talking about those other two movies. As a bonus, at the end of this entry, there's a thorough explanation of how I think the time-travel rules work in Looper, accounting for all the "paradoxes" that some armchair critics get so hung up on.

Here's the thing about 12 Monkeys... in this film, there is a sense of complete helplessness on the parts of the main characters, as if fate is a storm they're caught up in (maybe I just have Sandy on my mind). For most of the film, James Cole is a confused, twitchy nutcase who can't seem to navigate basic social situations, much less act as an elite agent from the future. This mirrors the state of all the characters in the film, who don't really have much of a hold on their present or their future, and are at the mercy of the winds and waves of circumstance. After all, this is a strictly deterministic framework... everything that's happened must happen, even given the possibility of time travel. This kind of determinism leaves little room for humanity, except as an anxious, hopeless, and powerless little cloud of particles. For a science fiction movie with an impossible premise, this creates quite a harsh and inhospitable film.

Primer is very different, but frankly, not much better. These characters DO have agency... in fact, they're flush with it. Whenever they use their time-travel machine, they spawn a new universe, where things can go differently from their source timeline. This allows them to treat their world as a simulation, or a specimen under glass... going back in time, they're essentially hitting a reset button, or opening up the glass case, tweaking some conditions, and letting the whole thing play out again, now differently. By building larger time-travel chambers, they can go back further, and their simulation enlarges to include their previous selves. It's a baroque, cynical story of what would happen if humans were able to operate the universe like a computer, or a massive complex machine.

This is, in a sense, a perfectly INDETERMINIST universe, the opposite of 12 Monkeys. If a pair of humans can simply step outside the world, tweak a few switches (i.e. decide to place bets on certain stocks) and see how everything plays out, it suggests that there are no larger reasons, no absolute consequences, and no patterns that really hold, except by happenstance, meaningless collision, and mindless interaction. Whatever purpose or pathway the universe seems to have, people like Aaron and Abe can just step outside it. This is what gives the film its mechanical coldness... it's a drama of absolute agency, where the characters lose any of the resistance that allows them to assert their humanity.

(note: spoilers ahead, which gradually accumulate, until the whole movie will be ruined)

Looper manages to find a middle-path between these two options, which is why it can be cynical and sad and frightening, and also hopeful, with space for agency and heroism within the conditions created by fate and time-travel. In Looper, "fate" isn't deterministic... it's more like an attractor, or a gravitational force, pulling every iteration toward a certain path but still allowing divergence. Clearly, most versions of Joe outgrow Looperhood and travel the world, meet a certain woman, and then travel back in time. Most versions of Cid, unfortunately, become the Rainmaker. But at least one instance of Joe takes a different path, and at least one instance of Cid is saved from his fate.

This, I think, is where Looper is better than either of those other time-travel films. It creates a space for humanity, somewhere between fate and free will, and it does this without being too sappy or soft around the edges. That creates the space for a few incredible moments -- Cid's rage, Seth's torture and murder, Abe's weathered, blithe melancholy -- that really gave definition to Looper, really set it apart from its colder, more nihilistic cousins. It also manifests a much more palatable pop sensibility as a result.

As a bonus, I think Looper accomplishes this feat in a fluid, self-consistent way. This isn't obvious to everybody... lots of people got hung up on what they felt were "plot holes." As for me, on the contrary, I think, among all recent time travel movies, this is probably the most fun film to explain. I take it on faith that deep under all this convoluted plotting, there's some obscure set of rules that's self-consistent... that's the whole puzzle-game appeal of time travel movies, and at least for me, it's sufficient fuel for suspension of disbelief.

Now on to the explanation, for those who want a way to understand this film so that there are neat patches and bridges over its internal contradictions. If you were inclined to dislike the film because of its time-travel paradoxes, you probably won't buy this, because why should you be any more sympathetic to my suspension of disbelief than to your own? But if you want to like the film, but are hung up on the time travel paradoxes -- like, How does Seth come back in time as a capable middle-aged man, when his young self has been mutilated and possibly murdered? -- I think this way of understanding the rules of the world will do the job.

THE MECHANICS OF TIME TRAVEL IN LOOPER, ACCORDING TO JESSE

We start with the givens. Clearly time is not a deterministic, closed system, like 12 Monkeys... the whole action and resolution of the film belies this. So various parallel versions of the same timeline can be different. Also, there is a "first" timeline, where the Rainmaker is first traumatized, and a "final" timeline, where he's finally freed from his trauma. Those are just the initial premises.

So how can this all fit together? In this system, time runs more like an endless spiral than an actual straight line or closed circle. In the very first loop, Cid was traumatized by something else... his mother was killed by a vagrant, maybe. So he becomes the Rainmaker, and takes over the Looper system, and just closes loops whenever they're scheduled to close, not because of some vendetta. In THAT loop, Joe's wife is killed, and Joe goes back to try to prevent The Rainmaker's rise. That starts an infinite cycle of loops, like a spring, with each coil (i.e. loop) being basically identical, save for a few minor differences. Every time, by trying to save his wife, Old Joe kick-starts the Rainmaker's reign of terror, and each time, the Rainmaker tries to close all of the Loops... maybe to prevent his mother from dying, or maybe just out of vindictiveness toward the Loopers who took her.

This results in a psuedo-infinite, indeterminate number of loops, until eventually, one of the Young Joes realizes that the only way for him to end the cycle is to kill himself before he can create another Rainmaker.

In this schema, it's important to note: a change in one timeline can cause sudden, drastic effects in the neighboring timelines, like an Old Joe from a previous timeline suddenly disappearing when the new Young Joe commits suicide. But they don't retroactively negate every coil in the spring... they just cause a kink in a couple loops. That's why you can have an Old Seth, who lived his whole life as an able-bodied man, but who is suddenly, drastically affected by amputations carried out upon his Young Self in an adjacent timeline.

Working from this schema, the movie basically shows us three "coils" (loops). It shows us the very first loop, where Young Joe closes his own loop, then sails off to see the world and meet his wife. This loop ends with the rise of the Rainmaker, through some unexplained psychological trauma. The film also shows us the middle loop, which is repeated ad nauseam: when Old Joe appears, hoodless, Young Joe fails to close the loop. Young Joe then allows Old Joe to kill Sara. From there, Young Joe runs away, travels the world, and meets his wife; this is the loop that most of the film dwells in, and it's the loop we see concluded in Young Joe's imagination, with the murder of Sara. The film also shows us the final loop, which looks like the middle loop, except that Young Joe commits suicide before he can become Old Joe. All the timelines after that have no Rainmaker, and Cid grows up to become something more benevolent.

That's how I make everything fit together. Now that I'm through with that, I can get back to thinking about the moral and metaphysical philosophy that's on display here. Lucretius, anyone?!?

RIP Ray Bradbury, architect of my empty spaces

I don't know how much of this memory is true, and how much is made up, or assembled from bits and pieces of other memories, but I remember being very young -- 9, 10, 12 maybe -- and being with my dad in a car. He was a fan of stories on audio tape, and on this particular day, he decided to listen to one with me: a story called The Wind. It was about a scientist who had spent his whole life studying the weather and advising people on weather safety, and who had recently come to an understanding that the wind was actually a sentient entity with a dangerous vindictive streak.

I was young, and I didn't always catch the point of things, especially when they were slow-burning and atmospheric. But my dad managed to explain the end of the story to me in approximately a single sentence, and I was suddenly aware: aware of how you could feel a great, fearful powerlessness in the face of absolutely nothing... aware of how, even in the absence of anything unusual, you could make yourself scared, simply by virtue of being alone and at the mercy of the world.

I've always associated that feeling of insignificance and vulnerability with late-night car rides. That subtle story had the power to reconfigure that experience for the whole rest of my life. How crazy is that?

A number of years later, when I had decided I wanted to write fiction, I picked up a book of short stories called The October Country. That's when I made the connection: that old story, the one about the phone call and the howling wind, was written by this Ray Bradbury guy... a writer I knew only by name, as one of those famous "classic" science fiction authors.

For me, Bradbury's name will always be synonymous with a feeling of smallness in the face of the infinite. In The October Country, he captured the anxiety and soul-sickness that can result from this feeling of insignificance, but that's not the only face of that figure.

It was a number of years later than I read The Martian Chronicles, amid my studies at college, which included a fair amount of postmodern and Eastern philosophy. And in The Martian Chronicles, I found another facet of the crystal I had glimpsed in The October Country. Again, here was this sense of vastness and emptiness, this sense that life is barely a wisp of smoke in the infinite cosmos. Here was a human race, glimpsing its own far future: a barren landscape with just a few traces of culture, a few scraps of memory, an occasional resonance where there was once life and love and prosperity. The Martian Chronicles is about the black hole of the universe swallowing up the Martians, with the human race slipping into the same abyss, only a few steps behind.

But the strange thing about The Martian Chronicles is that it wasn't terrifying, or tragic, like The October Country. In a way, it was strangely comforting, as though emptiness and insignificance were a release from the turmoil of the world of the living. Mars was a warm embrace, a receptive womb of mortality at the center of a tranquil void. It was sad, but it was also luminous and peaceful, reminding us that our ghosts would always populate this particular place and time, and that the rest of existence and nothingness would go on fine without us.

Only an author as great as the late Ray Bradbury could step into my emotional geography and inhabit these amorphous territories, giving them such specifity and definition. Existence in the face of the infinite is strange and uncertain, pregnant with the beauty and anxiety of the sublime, and Bradbury got to struggle with that for 91 years. I hope, now that he's moved on, that mortality is as tranquil and receptive as Bradbury imagined it to be.

Speculative Realism: Children of Men (2006) and Never Let Me Go (2010)

It seems there's a new genre emerging in film, consolidating certain totally-unrelated developments in literature, which is too broad and diffuse for these things to really announce themselves. This is a genre I'd call speculative realism, and I think, though it's barely a glimmer in film history, we can already account somewhat for its beginnings.

The two movies that suggest the beginning of true genre identity are Children of Men (2006) and Never Let Me Go (2010), both based on recent books. These represent the plateau of certain trends in science fiction that have been building for a while, and they firmly plant themselves within some boundaries that have been established by a bunch of other movies, as discussed below. And I think there are going to be more like this. I can sense it just over the horizon.

The main thing that strikes me about Children of Men and Never Let Me Go is that both are understated films built upon science fiction premises, whose thematic sights strongly diverge from that premise, and instead converge upon broad social themes. Children of Men is about society's fascistic responses to crisis, and Never Let Me Go is about the sacrifices made by individuals in service to the vast, impersonal social order. Of course, there are stylistic similarities between them, as well... understated, gritty palettes, the use of the photographer's eye to capture the beauty of the mundane. But the genre identification is more about the set-up and follow-through.

Of course, science fiction has long wrestled with social problems. Zombies, evil artificial intelligences, man-made monsters -- it's all about our enthusiasm and anxiety over progress and social control, right? But going back, very few films engage with broad social conditions like these new sci-fi films are doing, or locate these conditions in individual experience in such a direct, unsensational way.

Still, it's not entirely without precedent. Strange Days (1995) is a direct precursor to this cinematic movement, and echoes can be felt as far back as Godard's Alphaville (1965). Terry Gilliam may be considered a direct forerunner, as well, with films like Brazil (1985) and 12 Monkeys (1995). These don't have the strict realist impulses of the Cuaron and Romanek films, but they do have the interest in creating complex social relationships within a speculative setting. On the other hand, there is at least one recent sci-fi film with a deadly realist impulse, but without the social engagement shared by the films listed above: John Hillcoat's 2005 adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, which is gritty and deadpan (i.e. "realist"), but which handles its sci-fi premise with an intensely traditional hero-myth structure. You might attach Blade Runner and Alien to that side of the genre boundary, as well.

It's a central tenet of these speculative realist films that they eschew two frameworks that are usually central to science fiction... first, the mythic hero structure centering on a messianic central protagonist; second, the utopian framework that drives most science fiction to either applaud or condemn human progress. Obviously Never Let Me Go has almost no trace of a hero's journey... if anything, it has the gray struggle of gothic romance, eventually leading to acceptance and resignation in the face of an unsympathetic world. It's also mercilessly uninterested in portraying any sort of utopia or dystopia. It portrays progress from the perspective of progress's victims, and it does not sit in judgment of this system, sanctioned by the society, which is so cruel to a chosen few.

Children of Men is a little more heroic, and a little more openly dystopian, but it still downplays both of these frameworks. It's only about a dystopia in so far as it shows a society that's broken down in an attempt to preserve itself... unlike 1984, there's no sense of sinister dominance or absolute control. Rather, the whole film shows entropy and decay winning out over the cynicism of a fascistic government. And as a hero, Theo doesn't win any mythic warrior awards. He protects his charge, as he's been hired and obligated to do, and he's admirable in his loyalty, but his role as a protector is purely secondary to Kee's role as savior of the human race. The film's quiet, unsentimental ending shows us just how insignificant Theo was... how he was essentially an observer, a dedicated servant, and that the true work of saving the species is a much longer journey, of which we have seen only a fragment.

This both connects and distinguishes these films from some recent close relatives. In particular, I'm thinking of District 9 (2009), which certainly starts out as a speculative realist film, a science-fiction film transplanted into a very modern morally-ambiguous social ecosystem. As promising as it was, District 9 eventually mutated into a heroic rebel fantasy, with the transformed Wikus as the token boundary-crossing hero figure, and the apartheid South African society as an oppressive dystopia. Stylistically, the pseudo-documentary format of the film was also too self-conscious to quality as realist. In all traditional realist filmmaking, the eye of the camera is purely transparent, built to preserve continuity and present the characters in a direct, lucid style.

Gareth Edwards' debut feature Monsters (2010) has a similar profile to District 9... it's built around an interesting speculative social reality, but eventually becomes about the main character's acceptance of the hero/savior role, his personal journey of enlightenment, and the traditional romantic love story that ensues.

How about Duncan Jones' Moon (2009)? Another contender, but in that case, I think the setting was too remote from the everyday social reality that it was working to establish. By taking place in an isolated space station, and by adopting certain surrealist tropes, Moon became a direct psychological investigation, more of a cerebral rubik's cube, rather than a film of human experience shot through with social reality.

What connects and differentiates Children of Men and Never Let Me Go is hard to pin down... the sense that they're taking place in an unpredictable, unplanned outside world, controlled by ambient social and political forces... that much of the action is improvisatory and reactive, and that "fate" and "destiny" are conspicuously absent... that ideals and ethics are a loose, unreliable veneer over a wilderness of id and instinct... all these implications are present, and important to the soul of the genre.

There IS one other film that I think belongs squarely in this genre space, and it significantly precedes the two recent ones I've mentioned. This is Michael Haneke's Le temps du loup / The Time of the Wolf (2003), and though the premise isn't exactly high-concept (society breaks down for some reason and everyone becomes a refugee), it does pursue that premise with a relentless eye for the social realities of a struggling populace. It watches like a case-study of what would happen if you took a rural society, with its expectations for comfort, security, and civility, and hit the reset button on its hierarchies, power structures, and property ownership. It doesn't hurt that it's beautifully poetic and humanistic at its critical moments. It is a film that will stick with you.

There are a few that might qualify that I haven't seen yet. Spike Jonze's Scenes from the Suburbs might be a great reference point for this emergent genre. I won't know until I get to check it out, though.

I think it would be lovely to see Jim Jarmusch take on a serious science fiction project... this would be a great area for him to contribute some work. And I can think of one or two novels that would be pretty sweet if you adapted them as speculative realist films: how about Ursula LeGuinn's The Dispossessed, for instance?

Splice: A discussion of parenthood in horror

This is a meditation on Vincenzo Natali's new film Splice. For a more succinct evaluation, read my review at BlogCritics.

Parenthood is complicated. Any parent of a teenager will tell you that. But for Elsa and Clive, the characters in Vincenzo Natali’s Splice, this complexity is intensified to dangerous levels, as they become the surrogate parents for a hybrid semi-human creature of their own ill-advised creation. As this creature, Dren, develops, the three form a clandestine family hiding out in back rooms and abandoned barns, and their struggles bring into relief the other parental relationships in whose orbits they fall.

The life cycle is a common theme in horror, developed in countless films that include pregnancy, birth, and childhood, all of which provide some flesh for the genre’s claws. Rosemary’s Baby, Dawn of the Dead, The Fly, The Brood, Inside (À l'intérieur), Orphan, The Exorcist, Children of the Corn, Pet Semetary, The Others, The Innocents, and dozens of others have appeared to reinforce the “creepy child” cliché and haunt us with veiled faces of young faces with dead eyes. Perhaps this is because pregnancy and birth are bridges to another world, or that they’ve got such deeply-rooted psychological implications for us; perhaps it’s actually rather easy to see children as “other,” since their minds are so opaque to us conditioned adults.

There’s something unsettling about the way we’re so accustomed to casting children as ghosts, monsters, and abominations. Surely it’s worth the shock value, but it also seems exploitative at times (one of the essential threads through horror, I guess). Splice is a refreshing exception to that tendency: Dren is certainly strange to us, an unidentifiable creature developing into an experimental analog to a human teenager, but she’s more recognizable than incomprehensible, and Natali focuses more on her humanity than on her monstrosity. She comes alive as a character in intoxicating sequences of self-actualization: when she strokes a Barbie doll, when she puts on makeup in the mirror, and when she dances with Clive, her Cassandratic fixation.

That’s why Splice, despite its insistence on being about physical biology, is much more a film about the complexities and responsibilities of parenting, which is the source of the real narrative drive and the palpable suspense that builds in Elsa and Clive’s lives. This theme is introduced early, in Elsa and Clive’s discussion about having children, and it infuses their relationship from that point forward, as they struggle against one another to decide whether they’ve created a “she” or an “it” (a conversation that becomes much more complicated toward the end of the film). Both Clive and Elsa seem to oscillate back and forth between these two positions, which provide the emotional riverbed for the downhill rush of narrative.

This theme is comfortably transparent, addressed as it is in a number of expository dialogues between Clive and Elsa. Most telling is their argument, late in the film, where Clive exposes Elsa’s willingness to use Dren as a surrogate child without the attendant stakes and responsibilities. The relationship between this conversation and Elsa’s murky family history is suggested; Clive obviously thinks that Elsa’s hesitation stems from her own mistreatment by her mother. Whether he thinks she’s reacting against this phantom matriarch, or subconsciously imitating her, is left an open question. What’s far more important – and more interesting – is Clive’s assertion that Elsa is “afraid of losing control,” which is probably the most apt description of Splice’s actual narrative trajectory.

After all, the tension in Splice, for at least the first two-third of the movie, isn’t due to the stalking of a dangerous monster, as it was in Species and Alien. The suspense stems from Clive and Elsa’s knowledge that they committed their scientific sin in the face of every warning and injunction, and that they’ve taken on an impossible task: the task of protecting a living creature from discovery and harm, and of protecting themselves from institutional punishment. Of course, this dovetails with the theme of paternity… Clive and Elsa’s lives would get MUCH easier if they killed Dren (as Clive attempts in an early scene) and destroyed the body, but they can’t, because they’ve taken on the role of parents to the growing creature. Thus, before our eyes, they inevitably drift into their dilemma, and as early as Clive’s evasive conversations with his brother, we can see disaster looming on the horizon.

Gross-outs aside, this impossible escalation is where Splice most resembles The Fly, with which it is often associated. Cronenberg's sick tragedy, the chronicle of a man's slow and inexorable transformation into a repulsive monster, is a reverse template for Splice, in which the creature evolves from a half-formed fleshy thing into a blossoming specimen of (modified) human form. Like Splice's Clive and Elsa, there is a human observer named Veronica (Geena Davis) in The Fly... and like Clive and Elsa, Veronica has to decide how personally to take this tragedy, and whether to invest emotionally in an insoluable situation, or find a way to renounce it. Again, though it's not spelled out, the specter of parenthood is present.

In The Fly, there's a double-layer of paternal issues: Veronica's caretaker role with poor Seth Brundle, and her actual pregnancy, which threatens to result in a possible freak-baby from her mutating love interest. And as Seth informs her, these two concerns interlock... as Brundlefly starts to realize his own dire situation, he points out to her that the baby might be all that's left of his humanity. Veronica has to content with compounded responsibilities and anxieties... her love for an unborn child of uncertain origin is bound up with her compassion for a hopeless case.

This subtext -- Veronica's responsibility toward Seth via the unborn baby -- is the only hint in The Fly of a parenting theme that becomes foregrounded in Splice: the perverse tendency of parents to turn children into objects, whether it's a doll (Shutter Island), an experiment (Dren), or a tribute to a lost love (Seth's baby). Elsa offers us a clear picture of a binary neurosis at its finest, shifting between extremes of unconditional motherly love and mechanical, scientific coldness towards Dren. Dren's alarming defiance triggers Elsa's "detached, scientific" self, which is essentially her excuse to be cruel to Dren under the auspices of scientific objectivity. As Elsa shuts off her short-circuiting maternal instinct, she suddenly decides to treat Dren as an object, rather than as a family member. This mode-change is almost as jarring as Aaron's transition into Roy in Primal Fear.

I mentioned a two-tier structure of parenthood themes in The Fly... turns out there are more layers to the paternal metaphor in Splice, as well. In particular, Clive and Elsa's parent relationship to Dren, where they stand on the line between treating her as an experiment and treating her as a family member, is echoed in the investors' treatment of Clive and Elsa themselves. Like Dren, looking for understanding and validation from her surrogate parents, Clive and Elsa are constantly engaged in a relationship of subservience and subversion with respect to NERD's high-level financiers, represented by Joan. Before all the hubbub about Dren's loyalty and family ties, there is an original betrayal that sets the central tragedy in motion, and this is the investors' decision to cut Elsa and Clive off of their important research and force them to work toward a financial bottom line. Their decision to stop their unconditional support of the research, and to turn Clive and Elsa's lab into a tool for profit, is a prelude to Elsa's eventual treatment of her "experiment."

So how does Clive's behavior fit into this? He has to be convinced to treat Dren as a living thing, rather than a dangerous and unfortunate curiosity. However, his relationship with Dren eventually evolves into something totally unlike a parent, even a reluctant one. His sudden sexual interest in Dren could be seen as yet another form of objectification, but it actually reads more like a final bit of humanization after Elsa's mistreatment. Clive is willing to treat her as a viable sexual partner, to gratify her desire and indulge his own, and this validates one of Dren's few expressions of her own agency with regards to her "parents."

However, this conduct reveals a dangerous force within Dren. In the midst of this very vulnerable, very human moment of ecstacy, Dren almost does something very animalistic indeed, if I'm interpreting it right. She raises her stinger above Clive; I have to presume that she intends to kill him after mating with him, and that she's only prevented by the arrival of Elsa. This is where the line between human and animal suddenly blur in Dren, and it seems to blur in Clive, as well; the disruption resulting from this development is the final destabalizing factor that will blur the line between parent and lover, human and animal, and a whole host of Freudian complexes, and it will bring the fragile family crashing to the ground.

Like all good explorations, Splice doesn't have a message it wants to communicate, unless you get hung up on that whole "don't play God" thing. In truth, these characters are playing God in the same way as the majority of humans, who create children in their image, who learn to guide those children into adulthood, and who have to negotiate a complicated space between respecting the personhood of those progeny and treating them as means to an end. What Splice does well is to illustrate the true complexity of that space, and to evoke the real anxiety and uncertainty that comes with parenthood: the high stakes that come with investing your own emotional well-being in somebody else, and the fear of losing control, inherent in the knowledge that you simply don't know how this child is going to turn out.

This is the truth of fear: in every great decision and commitment, there must be a cold core of helpless terror in knowing that we surrender a little bit more control over our own lives. The only thing separating us from Clive and Elsa may be hope and circumstance.