Analyzing Looper's Dual Perspective

Looper is the story that takes the “If you could go back in time, would you kill Hitler?” question and offers a dual perspective of someone attempting just that, but being stopped by his own past self. As is often the case, nobody asks, “If you could go back in time, would you save Hitler (from becoming the monster he did)?” In this analysis, I’ll explore the dual perspectives of “Young Joe” and “Old Joe” and their general inability to see things eye-to-eye despite their particularly unique roles respective to one another. Dual Perspective is defined as the ability to understand both our own and another person’s perspective, beliefs, thoughts, or feelings. Looper offers a unique take on this concept. While Old Joe can literally experience

He offers to look at this woman Old Joe loves so he’ll know to stay away from her and thus save her life, since it was her association with Old Joe that got her killed in the first place. While there’s a suggestion that Old Joe understands this, he quickly waives it off, explaining that “they” didn’t have to lose her if only he could kill the Rainmaker and stop all the loops from being closed. At this point, neither version of Joe knows that it was Old Joe’s actions in the present that created the Rainmaker and his particular hatred of Loopers, culminating in the death of Old Joe’s

I believe that Old Joe was operating from a position of one who has been left broken and found salvation in the arms of another, therefore defining himself based on his relationship with her, despite all the terrible things he experienced and did over the 23 years between closing his own loop and meeting his wife. Without this connection to his wife what was Old Joe but a man who wasted most of his life? The contempt he initially directed at his younger self was most likely not for Young Joe, per se, but for the younger version of Old Joe. Young Joe, after all, had not yet engaged in the 23 years of bad living that Old Joe rightly