Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

Nov. 21, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

06:46

2263 Looper: The Freedomain Radio Movie Review

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, provides a philosophical review of Looper starring Bruce Willis and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Neither violence nor others will set you free.

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Hi everybody, it's Stefan Wallen from Freedom Made Radio.
	I bow to the wishes of the community and will provide some thoughts on the movie Loopers.
	This is going to be a spoiler fest, so if you haven't seen it, don't watch this.
	Basic story is in the future there's hitmen who go back in time and shoot people, dispose of the bodies in the past and so on.
	And the young hitman is a drug addict and sleeps with prostitutes and so on.
	And he's had a bad childhood, as he talks about later in the film.
	He's an orphan.
	He found himself on a train heading into the city and so on.
	His mother sold him to a thief gang and so on.
	So he had a bad childhood.
	This is one of the reasons why he self-medicates with drugs and is coldly indifferent to murder.
	Now, in the future, they close the loops, as they say.
	So you have to shoot your older self.
	They send them back in time.
	You shoot the older self and so on.
	And that's how they close the loops and all that.
	So Bruce Willis plays the older version of himself.
	Now, this hitman, this repeated serial murderer...
	He finds a woman who rescues him, who gets him off drugs, who loves him, who supports him, who turns their life into a great thing, and then the crime syndicate comes and kills the wife, and so the older guy decides to go back in time and kill off the children.
	He can narrow it down to three.
	He kills off the children in order to prevent the child from growing up, to be a crime lord, to kill his wife, and, you know, it's all kinds of fun Stephen Hawking brain-exploding stuff.
	Now, the one thing that is really noticeable about this is, first of all, there is the identification that a bad adulthood very likely comes from a bad childhood.
	I mean, this is very new.
	There was the, you know, the sort of fixed killer guy, right?
	The Edmund of...
	Of King Lear, who has no particular reason to be bad.
	He's just bad.
	He's thwarted in his succession plans and therefore he just becomes this killer or whatever.
	But there's never, in the past, there was really not much mention made of people's childhoods.
	Now it's pretty much commonplace that if you have a bad guy, at some point you will hear about his history and his history will have been really bad as a child.
	That's Positive, I guess, but the problem is that the identification of childhood vulnerability as so often the source of adult dysfunction, as I've said before, all dysfunction is the avoidance of legitimate grieving.
	There is a tough guy mentality about how to solve the problems of childhood pain.
	There's two poles, right?
	So on the one pole, someone is going to come into your life and clean you up and fix you up and make you better and make your soul whole and healthy.
	And that's the oriental woman who comes into the killer's life and makes him into a great person.
	This, of course, is a massive fantasy.
	It's the idea that some external love agent is just gonna find the good buried deep inside a serial killer and turn him into a great guy.
	And it's just a fantasy.
	It's a way of avoiding the work that you have to do to deal with your history, to deal with your past, to go through whatever legitimate grieving and rage you need to go through, if that was your history, It's the fantasy, that salvation, that the big heart-love cavalry is going to ride over the horizon and save you from the Indians of your own invention or your own avoidance.
	And this is very tragic.
	This is how people get stuck in dysfunction, as they imagine that there's some external solution to internal problems.
	There is no external solution to the problem of inner pain.
	This is a work that you have to do yourself.
	So that's one.
	The other idea, which is really correlated to the first idea, is the idea that violence will also solve your problems.
	Either murder or suicide, which really are two things that are approached as solutions to this problem.
	There are two things, right?
	In order to avoid the older man killing one of the kids, he kills himself, which erases the older man.
	So there's this violence that's going to solve it.
	Now, the violence plus the externality of the solution are really two sides of the same coin.
	Because if you're waiting, I mean, imagine if you're waiting someone who's promised to be there, and it's cold and it's wet, but if they're an hour late or two hours late and you couldn't go anywhere, you'll be really angry, and you'll be quite aggressive, I would imagine, and upset if they didn't call, you have your cell phone, and whatever, oh, I just forgot, you'd be upset.
	So if you're waiting for something, that is not coming you tend to get more angry and so waiting for an external solution to internal agony only raises your level of aggression because you're expecting something to come which is never going to come and because of that you end up getting more angry which is why the solution is murder or suicide anything to avoid an examination of the internal state so as a movie I think it's fairly good entertainment it's really really violent and kind of disturbing that way
	but The gruesomeness of the history, which is not examined.
	I mean, imagine, I'm not saying it would be an action-packed sequence, but if the younger version of, like, the younger version of the killer decides to go into therapy and examine himself and really confront his inner demons, then that would change the course of the future.
	And so there is a kind of Suicidality.
	And many people, of course, would rather suffer the most unbelievable negative events in their life rather than introspect and follow Socrates' first commandment, know thyself, not shoot thyself in the chest, not travel through time to prevent a kid from becoming a murderer.
	And in this they do say, right?
	So because the kid, the young kid who's going to grow up to be the crime lord because his mother is not killed and so on, he doesn't become a crime lord.
	So there is a chance of change in the future.
	But it's very cynical about the capacity of the existing generation to save themselves, to introspect, to learn about themselves, and so to avoid repetition.
	There really is just a suicidality that is the best option.
	But that's a pretty grim depiction.
	I'm extremely hesitant to say that there are people past redemption.
	I think that anybody can wake up, almost anybody can wake up in the morning, look in the mirror and say, it's time to equate myself with my history and learn how to free myself from this endless cycle of human aggression.
	Thank you so much.

▲