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

all of these things in real time (so to speak) as his actions change Young Joe’s experience from his own prior experience, throughout the movie it is actually Young Joe who is most capable of understanding the perspective of those around him, including his own older self. Old Joe steadfastly refuses to see things from any perspective but his own (despite its constantly evolving nature,) having a special degree of contempt for his younger self. Even as his own actions are clearly destroying him from within, taking from him the very love that spurns him to such drastic actions, he pushes through his own pain, believing in the just nature of his own path. In the mind of Old Joe, all means are justified by his intended end: reuniting with the woman he loved and saved his life.
At a relatively young age, Young Joe seems particularly capable of understanding the perspectives and actions of those around him, even if avarice generally prevents him from acting upon that understanding for the benefit of others. For instance, Young Joe understands the mistake his best friend, Seth, has made almost as soon as he arrives at his loft, after having failed to “close his loop.” This budding understanding would be the theme throughout the remainder of the movie, after Young Joe also fails to close his own loop.
Old Joe, alternatively, knows everything Young Joe knows, remembers everything Young Joe experiences, and feels everything Young Joe feels. When trying to remember the woman he fell in love with, he finds her being replaced by the woman Young Joe is falling in love with as a consequence of his own actions. Unable to cope with this loss, even if it would mean protecting his own love, Old Joe continues his quest to find and kill “The Rainmaker” who, at the present point in the movie, is a 10-year-old boy named Cid.
In the interactions between the two, Young Joe shows his understanding of Old Joe’s perspective early on.

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

wife.
When questioned by Sara, Cid’s mother, about why the older version of himself would want to kill her son, Young Joe correctly speculates that Old Joe believes that if he kills the Rainmaker before he’s too powerful to stop, then Young Joe’s life would unfold exactly as Old Joe’s life did over the course of 30 years. His task completed, Old Joe expected to disappear from the present (since nobody was there to send him back in time in the first place) and some version of him would go on living his life happily with his now-living wife. Clearly, it has already been shown in the movie that this will not be the case, because Young Joe is already falling in love with Sara and getting his life straight 23 years before Old Joe even meets his wife.
Young Joe is also introduced to the perspective of Cid and is later able to relate this perspective to his own experiences, something Old Joe is incapable of doing. Cid, like both Joe’s, wants to protect what was his own, in his case his mother. He believes he needs to be powerful enough to stop any harm from coming to her and will do whatever is necessary, even help a killer, to do that. Young Joe relates to Cid the story of how he grew up, angry and alone, after his own mother abandoned him. How the time travelling Mafioso Abe “put a gun in his hand and gave him something was his own.” It was his desire to protect what was his own that spurned Young Joe into action, and it was this same desire to protect what was HIS own that spurned Old Joe into action. These three competing goals all come to a head at the final confrontation of the three male characters. At the end of the movie, Young Joe recognizes all of these details and reaches an understanding of Old Joe, Cid, Cid’s mother Sara, and his own role in the situation. He states as much in his final lines of the film:
“Then I saw it. I saw a mom who would die for her son. A man who would kill for his wife. A boy, angry and alone. Laid out in front of him: the bad path. I saw it. And the path was a circle. Round and round. So I changed it.”
Why was Old Joe so stubbornly incapable of dual perspective despite sharing the same experiences and feelings as Young Joe + 30 years?

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

regrets.
Young Joe, meanwhile, doesn’t carry nearly the baggage that Old Joe does. In his eyes, Old Joe had his chance at life and wasted it, but that doesn’t necessarily ensure that Young Joe would also waste his own life, though this was the most likely outcome. In essence, Young Joe hasn’t had the opportunity to make the mistakes that Old Joe has, and just like Cid, is being judged as guilty by Old Joe before doing anything to earn his ire. It is that lack of warped and narrow perception that allows him to consider a picture bigger than his own wants and needs, and ultimately leads to his heroic sacrifice to save the future from the mess his older version creates. Despite the fact that both Old and Young Joe essentially make the same choice, to change history for what they believe is the best, they are left at odds due to mutually exclusive ideals of what is best.
The ability to engage in dual perspective of Young Joe juxtaposed with the unwavering denial of Old Joe, despite their literally shared perspective, offers an intriguing look at the concept of dual perspective. In the end Old Joe chose to sacrifice children for his goal, while Young Joe chose to “save Hitler” for his. Would perfect knowledge ensure perfect agreement? Or would it only result in more forceful disagreement if one’s own definition of what was most important was threatened? The movie seems to have its own answer to this question, but it need not be the only possible answer.