a bit of a hot take but despite his obvious flaws I donât agree with the narrative that sam loomis is a Hardcore Ableist and objectively the shittiest psychiatrist on planet earth. I think a more nuanced outlook on the character is possible.
if michael is mentally ill, then 1960s psychiatry would have been underequipped to treat his demonstrably very severe case. the field was lacking in simple experience; the therapies used to improve his (speculated) condition often didnât produce lasting results. therefore, halloween from sam loomisâs perspective goes like this: he is assigned a child patient with symptoms of an extreme case of a notoriously difficult to treat disorder, then slapped with a time limit of 15 years to do his work by the criminal justice system, which also insists his patient grows up at an institute for the criminally insane.
picture a mental asylum from the sixties. thatâs what weâre dealing with. there was no hope of michael being healthily socialized at a place like that. his doctor was set up to fail from the very beginning.
strictly going by the canon established in the original film, we are told loomis tried for eight years to improve michaelâs condition, with zero results. nothing in the original canon contradicts this. still, the âblackest eyesâ speech does seem to suggest loomis was perpetuating his âevil personifiedâ narrative about michael from day one.
but why, if loomis has always seen his patient as a murder-machine that cannot be rehabilitated, did he try for the better part of a decade to treat him? why would he waste his time?
probably because he didnât always think of michael that way.
this is a man whose pride and confidence in his abilities as a doctor have been so demolished after years of consistent, overwhelming failure to improve his patientâs condition whatsoever, that the only way he can continue to live with himself is by adopting the mentality that michael cannot be treated, that he is a lost cause.
I am not defending loomisâs actions. there is no rational or ethical way to defend a doctor who deems his child patient âuntreatableâ. michael would have been only 14 when loomis threw in the towel. his actions are inexcusable.
but I also donât see weight behind the claim that dr. loomis is an inherently wicked, bigoted person, instead of a person who did his best to exhaust the limited resources that were available to him, before succumbing to his very human flaws and slowly internalizing the only narrative that would salvage his dignity / ensure his failures didnât get more people hurt.
it is easy to write sam loomis off as a plot device or a two-dimensional baddie. he can be more than that.
loomis may once have genuinely cared about michael. he may once have invested a great deal of energy to achieving a breakthrough with him, despite the bleak prognosis.
in sam loomis, I donât see a man who hates his patient because of what his patient is; I see a man whose sympathy for his patient wrestled more and more every day with the growing fear that his own shortcomings might cost another life, until one day, the sympathy lost.
maybe the position of the latter character is just as flawed, but in another time, in a more compassionate era, preferably one that didnât stick little kids in criminal mental institutions, michaelâs case would have been very possible for loomis to treat.
tl:dr shitty 1960s psychiatry failed dr. loomis, too. sam is a highly flawed man but if michael deserves to be given depth then so does he.
real tldr; I have the right to headcanon that sometimes loomis drove mikey to the mcdonalds drive thru and bought him chicken nuggies
gummygunk
romaincrisis
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