Ring-Around-the-Rosie with Hitchcock: An In-depth Look at Looper

               While average theatre goers may have had various reasons for getting out of the house to see Looper on the big screen, few probably looked up at the action and instantly saw in the artfully crafted spiral of the story the hand of the notorious Alfred Hitchcock. That’s right! Hitchcock.

                Here I’ll tell you that if you haven’t seen Looper yet, there are some spoilers ahead, but I’ll keep it as spoiler free as possible. The scenario is basically this, the character Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), is an assassin for criminal organizations thirty years in the future. They send back targets via time travel and he quickly and possibly painlessly takes them out. During one such hit Joe is confronted with a target that happens to be his future self. He has to kill future Joe (Bruce Willis) in order to keep what he perceives as his life.

                That’s as far as I’ll go with that, but let’s step back a little. Actually, let’s step back a lot. In 1958 Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo greeted the world, not with time travel per say, but a spiral. Hitchcock masterfully crafted the story of a woman who is basically murdered before she is murdered. Our hero John Ferguson (James Stewart) only solves what happened because he is forced to relive the death of the murdered woman when he meets Judy Barton (Kim Novak) who played the murdered woman’s double and not to mention his love, obsession, whatever you want to call it.

                It was Hitchcock’s Vertigo that later in 1962, inspired Chris Marker to create La Jetée, a film which tells through photographs the story of a man in an apocalyptic setting used by evil scientists who send him back in time through dreams to investigate events before the world went kaput. There he meets a woman who is an obvious tie to Vertigo in her profile photograph, in a moment where the two characters look at tree rings, etc. The time traveling man does not realize that this woman is a woman he saw on a peer in his childhood when he witnessed the death of a man.

                La Jetée later inspired the film Twelve Monkeys which came out in 1995, and funnily enough also stars Bruce Willis as this year’s Looper does. It even says in the beginning credits of this film that is related to La Jetée (if you’re curious). Twelve Monkeys is about James Cole (Bruce Willis), a man who is sent back in time (by means of his exceptional brain) by scientists to a point before earth was ravaged by disaster to possibly find a way to stop it from happening. In the past he meets a woman, who (though he does not realize at the time) he saw in his childhood at an airport when he was the spectator of the death of a man. If you don’t want to know the conclusion to these two films, stop reading. La Jetée and Twelve Monkeys both end with the time travelers finding out that the men they whiteness dying in the past are actually themselves in the future, and this is the spiral started by Vertigo.

                Looper is not exactly the retelling of these past films but has evident roots in them. The differences are that the future Joe physically transports to the past and that time lines can be altered. I don’t want to spill too much, but there were also some very Dickens-esc moments as well. One of the lead villains resembled Fagan from Oliver Twist in that he trained up abandoned youths to do his dirty work. One of the main characters also pulls a Sydney Carton (A Tale of Two Cities) act, a book that was a base for The Dark Knight Rises (Christopher Nolan) which came out earlier this year and also starred Joseph Gordon-Levitt. This was probably not a planned connection, but it’s one of those things worth noting. I don’t want to give away too much, so I’ll just say that that’s just another loop in a never ending spiral.

                I’ll let you find out whether the future Joe dies as he was envisioned to die by letting you go and see Looper for yourself. Mind you this film is very gory, has drug content, sexuality, and is rated R for a reason so leave the kiddos with a baby-sitter.