Heisted On My Own Petard

The jig is up for heist film fans. In the April 1 Globe and Mail, Lynn Crosbie (“Ocean’s Thirteen? Just Shoot Me”) argues that heist films and the glorification of the outlaw is in bad taste and she makes the case for comparing real life villains (or “Thieving Scum,” in her words) to their more glib, slick and nihilistic counterparts in films like Ocean’s Eleven (the remake) and a TV series like Heist. She does understand that there is a certain Robin Hood air to some of these stories and that we often identify with the thieves. And yet she tries to talk us out of this identification with both real life and fictional thieves in favour of common decency and the acknowledgment of the suffering real thieves have caused. A very sober and serious point. (And yet she somehow manages to slide in a compliment for Frank Sinatra in the original Ocean’s Eleven. How does he come up when the subject is human decency?)

I happened to read her article the day after I had re-watched the film Snatch – a movie that has heists and attempted and failed heists galore. So I felt duly chastened. But I would watch the film again. It makes me laugh. And it’s a prime example of some confusion she inadvertently introduces into the subject of crime and film. First of all, it’s a mistake to lump the serious films about crime (like Natural Born Killers which I agree is a fine film and straddles the line between comedy and brutality) with the funny films about crime. In the serious films like The Grifters we see that con men and women have nothing in their souls and nothing to look forward to. But a film like Snatch gives us the satisfaction of the catchy nicknames of some of the characters (for example, Boris the Blade, who we mainly see using guns), an 84-karat gem, and a continuous stream of bad-to-worse scenarios that are funny even when people are being killed. We see a wide range of criminals here – the brutal and the devious, the unkillable (both of whom are killed) and the hapless. If you took this film as a model of the criminal world, you would come away thinking that most criminals are just not that bright. And the statistics might back you up on that. Meanwhile, it’s a comedy and comedy is all about overthrowing the natural order of things, with those on the bottom (thieves, let’s say) coming out on top. Surely she’s not arguing that all films about crime be relentlessly dramatic and earnest?

Then there are the films like Pulp Fiction where the forces of the law are nowhere to be found and it is the supposed ‘bad guys’ who come to represent our entire range of human possibilities with some of the characters being redeemable and some not. Slick yes, but it’s hardly an amoral film when the final meaningful action is the laying down of a gun.

Meanwhile, the one aspect of the heist film in particular that Crosbie doesn’t really cover is what I will call the puzzle element. How are they going to steal the jewel, break into the vault, get around the security system, etc.? It’s a purely intellectual joy – a puzzle that we try to figure out or we watch for all the pieces to fall into place. And there are still thematic puzzles to be sorted out as well.

A 1999 remake (another bane to Crosbie) of The Thomas Crowne Affair isn’t about a violent bad guy, nor is it only about an art thief. It’s about the affair between the thief and the insurance investigator, and it’s about their mutual mistrust not just as prey and hunter but as man and woman. And it’s funny and a little sexy, with Pierce Brosnan giving us a little look at what his Remington Steele character might have been like before he settled down. That same year, 1999, Entrapment gave us a remarkably similar film about master thieves and the difficulty of trust between men and women.

What’s going on to some extent here is a confusion of genres (serious films showing us bad people) and comedies (films giving us fun characters). If she wants to argue that criminals can only appear in films that make them look realistic and, of course, bad, then her aesthetics are not much further advanced than those of the Hayes Code that first sought to ensure that all criminals were shown punished for their crimes on the screen. (And how realistic is that, given what we know about crime statistics?) What about those times when the thieves are actually doing something that will benefit people – say, like in Sneakers where the devious but basically decent characters are trying to stop a plot for world domination? This has the tone of a heist film, but the protagonists are simply closer to the right side of the law. Even in the remake of The Italian Job there are questions of loyalty and proper vengeance. The good thieves have to steal from the bad thief.

If Crosbie’s main complaint is about bad remakes (Fun with Dick and Jane and the recently announced Ocean’s Thirteen), then I can understand and probably agree. But if it’s that we should go to films expecting movies both to ‘get things right’ and to make things right, then I say no.

What I’m arguing is that most of us try to be law abiding, although many have to fake it on occasion. We watch films about Robin Hood types with a little bit of envy and we don’t want to think about consequences. That’s what many films are at least partly about. The best heist films are also about other things – love, trust, the willingness to take chances, doing the right thing. In other contexts, these are valuable lessons. The heist is a metaphor for who we would like to be in relation to our own lives. People with imagination and cunning taking the chances we never dare and going for the gem or maybe even Aladdin’s genii. We watch these characters hoist the anal guards of the secret hordes and hoist us on the petards of our decent self-righteousness. We watch a wide range of often seedy characters we are compelled to identify with while many people insist we must see the villain as outside of us and beneath us. Crosbie seems to prefer that we keep people like this at arm’s length, but we are secretly people like this in some ways. So much of who we want to be perceived as is a series of alarms and codes and a thick wall separating us from people we see as our inferiors.

And these films are the sudden explosion at the thick vault door of our imagination, or maybe some tumbler in the heart just clicks into place.