Okay, pay attention because the plot gets a little complicated: In the future there are these guys called “loopers,” and they assassinate other guys who are from even further into the future. Sometimes the younger guys are asked to kill their older selves and it gets really weird. But meanwhile back in the present there are these other people called “nitpickers,” and they start pulling apart the logistical fabric of cinematic space/time and then launch themselves into cyberspace to destroy the future viewing pleasure of others who are behind the times and haven’t yet seen Looper. I mean—whoa.
Whatever else director Rian Johnson’s new time-travel thriller has accomplished, it has served to widen an age-old divide, highlighting once again the differences between two types of movie buffs. There are the people who carefully review the plots for logistical implausibilities, or point to blatant physical impossibilities—such as the chance that a plummeting damsel could reach out and grab a telephone wire without losing an arm—and cry, “Bogus!” And there are the people sitting beside them, in the theatre or on the couch, who hiss, “For God’s sake put a sock in it. It’s only a movie!”
I am a nitpicker. Always have been. I want my movies to make sense, and I want filmmakers to respect their craft and their audience, enough to make films that work on their own terms. Yes, I want fantasy, but fantasy with internal logic. In the words of Roger Ebert: “If anything can happen, who cares what happens?”
Logical flaws do have their uses. They can be teaching tools. According to New Scientist magazine, NASA has an ongoing competition to find the most scientific flaws in the 1998 movie Armageddon—the current record sits at 168.
But for those of us who lack that certain lightness of spirit, movie mistakes are a goad to our flesh. When Christopher Walken shoots down a jet aircraft from the cockpit of a Cessna without putting a hole in the window of his own airplane (McBain, 1991—you can YouTube it), the medium is diminished. When Christian Bale recovers from a broken back in The Dark Knight Rises by doing some push-ups, Orson Welles sheds a tear in heaven.
Then again, Welles himself was guilty. His masterpiece, Citizen Kane, frequently called the greatest movie ever made, rests entirely on an inconsistency that invalidates the entire plot. The story describes a reporter’s search for the meaning of Charles Foster Kane’s final word, “Rosebud.” However, as the opening sequence shows, Kane blurts out his ultimate utterance while alone in his room. No one is there to hear him.
The Citizen Kane example illustrates a fact about film logic: not all flaws are created equal. The majority of films will have some logical failings, but the key is placement. Glitches that are hidden within the film’s basic premise tend to slide past unobtrusively, such as Kane’s last word or the mysterious “letters of transit” that drive the plot of Casablanca (signed documents that would somehow force the Nazis to give safe passage to a man they desperately want to capture? Really?). Such failings are similar to the plot devices Alfred Hitchcock called “MacGuffins.”
The MacGuffin, Hitchcock said, is the thing that characters, but not the audience, care about. The suitcase John Travolta and Samuel Jackson retrieve in Pulp Fiction—the one with the mysterious glowing contents—is a classic MacGuffin. (Hitchcock borrowed the word from an old joke: Two men are travelling in a train car, and one is carrying an odd-shaped package he calls a MacGuffin. A MacGuffin, he explains, is for hunting lions in the Scottish Highlands. “But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,” his companion says. “Ah,” says the first man. “Well then, this is obviously not a MacGuffin.”)
A flaw like Citizen Kane’s opening is not really a MacGuffin—it’s just a flaw—but works the same way. It simply sets the plot in motion and is then forgotten. The rest of Welles’ movie flows masterfully from that introductory sequence.
Memento is another special case. Director Christopher Nolan’s breakthrough film is such a masterpiece of construction and internal logic that I am forced to swallow the inconvenient truth that it, too, rests on a basic flaw—namely that Leonard, the central character played by Guy Pearce, must understand the nature of his condition in order to behave the way he does. He often explains it to people. Yet if his loss of short-term memory sprang from a head injury, as the movie suggests, he would be unable to
retain the knowledge of his own condition. Let’s just skip that, shall we?
Some logical issues are peripheral. While watching the Harry Potter films I was annoyed by the strange rules of Quidditch—it’s like a basketball game where someone finally walks onto the court with a putter and wins with a hole-in-one—but this did not impact my enjoyment of the larger story.
Time-travel movies like Looper are always going to fall prey to nitpicking since they rest on a concept that is inherently paradoxical. But Looper seems perfectly designed to inflame the civil war between the hard-asses and the laissez-faire crowd. It’s because you want to cheer for Looper. Such an intelligent, well-made film deserves to be seen. The problem is that Looper does not hide its glitches very well.
Time-travel fables like the Terminator movies manage to avoid drawing attention to their implausibility thanks to a relatively simple premise—a cyborg goes back in time on a killing mission. Let mayhem ensue. Looper rests on a somewhat more complex structure and delves more deeply into the potential implications of time travel. Unfortunately, in the process it trips over its own plotting more than once. After watching it you may find yourself going back in time to puzzle over elements that don’t stand up to logical scrutiny. (Check out the message boards at imdb.com if you want to join the arguments.)
And yet I enjoyed Looper. Plot holes notwithstanding, it’s a movie that displays enough intelligence, invention and ideas to outweigh any logistical shortcomings. I recommend it. I understand what this means. I have crossed over, a traitor to my kind. My only defence is a promise to resume my nitpicking with renewed fanaticism next time out. A new Bond movie is coming next month—I pledge to be all over that one like gold on Goldfinger’s pet poodle. I’ll be every bit as annoying as ever. Just give me a chance.