Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent.
– Jim Jarmusch
The heist film flagged across the 1980s, hinted at a comeback in the 1990s, and only reappeared with any kind of measurable regularity around 2000. Were we to look for attendant political or socio-economic factors that may have provided new terrain for the heist, the period 19802000 is bookended, on the national scene in the United States at least, by Jimmy Carter-era inflation and the tumultuous end of Bill Clinton’s second term. Meanwhile, Reagan- and Thatcher-era economic policies unleashed a heady form of capitalism that caused astonishing market fluctuations (for which international art markets, particularly for modernist works, provided a telling index). But eventually they also bred economic woes. The recession during George H. W. Bush’s presidency set up Clinton’s famous 1992 campaign catchphrase, ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’ At the other end of the decade, Clinton’s scandalous affair fostered or mirrored a morally ambiguous attitude about getting away with things without paying the consequences. By far the majority of heist films since the 1990s enjoy some successful outcome against society, oppressive institutions or main-stream morality. In other words, the cultural mood across the period may have invited filmmakers to reshape a genre that, at its origin, had typically ended in failure.
Going hand in hand with the marked rise in heists that end in successful thefts, the last decade has also seen a noticeable increase in the number of heist productions, especially remakes. Heist remakes have not generally been part of a postmodern historical recycling of previous styles and works. Nor, as a rule, has the prodigal heist film extended the narrower tendency of 1990s crime films to resuscitate 1930s or 1940s crime fiction sources, a ‘return to the roots of the crime genre itself’ (Wilson 2000: 144). It may have been that the narrative possibilities of noir attracted filmmakers who sensed all too acutely their late arrival on the filmmaking scene. This is the argument David Bordwell makes in his assessment of contemporary Hollywood storytelling: ‘the movie-consciousness of modern Hollywood again emerges as a sense of belatedness, of coming late to several mature traditions’ (Bordwell 2006: 75). The layered film allusions and ‘adventurous plotting’ of recent Hollywood memory, feeding audiences nourished on film history, betray a desire for originality borne of this ‘belatedness’. The heist plays a role in this phenomenon. Figuring prominently among the agents of change in Bordwell’s analysis are the films Reservoir Dogs (Quentin Tarantino, 1992) and The Usual Suspects (Bryan Singer, 1995), and director Steven Soderbergh, who ‘exemplified the resulting pluralism’ (ibid.). It is worth noting a correlation here to two components of the heist film’s history. The first is Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton’s 1955 study Panorama of American Film Noir, in which three of the four exemplary titles used to frame the end of a crucial moment in American cinema were heists (see chapter one); the other is to recent theoretical analyses of genre, in which the heist figures as a counter-example of generic durability (see Introduction). It is not mere coincidence that the heist appears when a crisis of conceptualisation occurs or the role of the filmmaker’s place in the industry seems up for grabs. Both have been at stake in the last twenty years during which independent cinema has grown as a partner with Hollywood and globally film industries have expanded their geographic and generic borders in all directions.
If, as I have been arguing, the heist film offers a short-hand for directors seeking to define their work as authentic and original art while demarcating their role as creators with control over their products in a mass market, then we should not be surprised by the heist film’s resurgence. On the other hand, it should surprise us that a desire for authenticity and independence come in the form of a remake. A heist remake should be able to offer some account of its relation to the original film and the genre from which it ‘steals’ its material, as well as to the concept of originality more generally, in order to name its own status as a creation. My argument will be that the heist remake entails a subtle and problematic shift in the genre – less in syntax and semantics and more in overarching message. Contrary to the call for unabashed thievery from the respected independent filmmaker Jim Jarmusch – his remarks (see the epigraph) are a general theory of poetic creation that displaces the emphasis from originality to ‘authentic’ theft – several high-profile, post-1999 heist remakes perpetuate a discourse of aesthetic originality. John McTiernan’s
The Thomas Crown Affair, Steven Soderbergh’s
Ocean’s Eleven and F. Gary Gray’s
The Italian Job come immediately to mind. These titles do not cover all the contemporary heist has to offer – I will trace the most significant trends at the beginning of this final chapter – but they raise questions afforded lately by the genre’s predilection for remakes. My focus in this chapter will eventually be on Soderbergh’s
Ocean’s series. Given the director’s association with independent cinema and his proven track record of financially successful remakes for Hollywood (Warner Bros.), his use of the heist will be a key in determining the heist film’s audience appeal and platform for self-conscious directors in contemporary cinema.
The dizzying number of heists that have appeared since the late 1990s is reminiscent of the highly productive era between 1955 and 1975. But the 1990s did more than just retain the lineaments of the heist film. There were conventional variants like John Woo’s art theft thriller
Once a Thief (1991), Roger Donaldson’s remake of
The Getaway (1994) and Albert and Allen Hughes’s critique of US power in the Vietnam era,
Dead Presidents. But while these and Soderbergh’s
The Underneath (1995) and
Out of Sight (1998) fostered interest in the heist in the latter half of the 1990s, the genre’s more recent ubiquity may have benefitted from the impact of other high profile crime films, notably Tarantino’s brutal heist-gone-wrong film,
Reservoir Dogs; Mann’s sharp police procedural,
Heat; and Singer’s narrative pirouette around multinational corporatism,
The Usual Suspects. All three foreground the competitive, violently tragic and mimetic relationships (in both psychology and craft) of the hyper-masculine worlds of police and professional thieves, and all three relish process – particularly the process of thoughtful storytelling and dialogue – while skirting conventional aspects of the heist genre (see T. Anderson 2007 on Tarantino; James 2002 on Mann; and Larsen 2002 on Singer). These films did not revive the most conventional aspects of the heist
per se. But they did reawaken spectators to the pleasures of (criminal) process and narrative experimentation, and invited others to step into the vacuum left by the heist’s extended leave of absence at a time when a rehabilitated heist might have something relevant to say again.
Across the 2000s several filmmakers, some on the margins of Hollywood, found critical acclaim, if not financial success, with the heist. The flashback structure of the noir heist provided Scott Frank (who wrote the screenplay for Soderbergh’s Out of Sight) an opportunity for examining narrative sequencing through the troubled memories of an accident victim-turned-robber (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) in The Lookout (2007). Wes Anderson, for his first feature film, teamed up with Luke and Owen Wilson on the indie caper Bottle Rocket (1996) and more recently adapted a Roald Dahl book into the eccentric stop-motion animated heist The Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) (perhaps not wanting to be outdone by the stop-motion animation of Nick Park’s The Wrong Trousers, 1993). With more of an edge than these comedies, David Mamet’s Heist provided a venue for the director’s ongoing moral critique of American economic vices; crewmember Blane (Delroy Lindo) wonders aloud to the gang leader Joe Moore (Gene Hackman): ‘Some people say love [makes the world go around].’ Moore replies: ‘It is love. It is love of gold.’ Other directors have made a living off the heist as part of their crime repertoire and creatively reshaped it in their own image. This is certainly true in the United Kingdom, where Guy Ritchie’s exhilarating depictions of lad culture in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) and Snatch (2000), not to mention Jonathan Glazer’s abrasively intelligent gangster showcase Sexy Beast (2000), rejuvenated the genre and marked the heist lexicon along with Roger Donaldson’s pseudo-historical heist, The Bank Job (2008).
The aforementioned heist directors are keenly aware of their relation to mainstream audiences and production limitations, and one cannot fault them for invigorating a form that has hardly been the sole domain of indie, or idiosyncratic, filmmakers. With money to be made on the heist again, rather predictable comedies (for example,
Mad Money or,
Tower Heist, Brett Ratner, 2011) and conventional dramas (such as
Flawless, Michael Radford, 2007, or
Man on a Ledge, Asger Leth, 2012) appear every year. Established filmmakers of widely different backgrounds, as well as star actors, have been swept into the current. Consider Frank Oz’s departure from his usual comic fare in
The Score (2001), starring Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro and Edward Norton; Barry Levinson’s media-circus caper
Bandits (2001) with Bruce Willis, Cate Blanchett and Billy Bob Thornton; Spike Lee’s
Inside Man (2006), starring Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, Jodie Foster, Christopher Plummer and Willem Defoe; or Louis Leterrier’s
Now You See Me (2013) starting Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Mark Ruffalo, Isla Fisher, Woody Harrelson and Jesse Eisenberg. Everyone seems to want some of the action, and for now the genre shows little signs of losing its momentum.
One of the most significant facts about the heist in the 2000s is its globalisation. It continues to be a mainstay in Europe: in France with a Jean Reno vehicle like
Ultimate Heist (
Le premier cercle, Laurent Tuel, 2009) or Cédric Klapisch’s
Ni pour ni contre (2003); and Germany, where
Run, Lola, Run (1998) director Tom Tykwer made
Der Krieger und die Kaiserin (2000;
The Princess and the Warrior). In Latin America, Cuban director Fabrizio Prada’s
Tiempo reel (2002;
Reel Time), filmed in Mexico, experimented with an 86-minute robbery filmed in a single take, and Fabián Bielinsky’s ethereal Argentine production
El Aura (2005;
The Aura) put the actor Ricardo Darín to good use as an epileptic taxidermist bent on carrying out the perfect crime. The Chinese-language films
Am zin (1999; Johnnie To,
Running Out of Time) and
Tian xia wu zei (2004; Xiaogang Feng,
A World Without Thieves), as much con-artist or police procedural films, respectively, barter in heist motifs and motives, while South Korea’s recent violent crime films, typically procedurals and serial killer films, have left room for a critically acclaimed film
Dodookdeul (2012, Dong-Hoon Choi,
The Thieves). Do we read in this trend a globalisation of socio-economic conditions that encourage the heist – free markets, even in non-democratic states, that produce new kinds of marginalisation in their consumer societies with a concomitant desire for a piece of the economic pie? Whatever the case, it appears the heist has mutated into an idiomatic shorthand in new cultural and economic contexts that demands scholarly attention.
Gun-wielding nuns in Ben Affleck’s The Town, revising the surreal mask and gun of Kubrick’s The Killing
To round out this survey, it must be said the heist film has been able to fall back on its footing for expressing social dissatisfaction, or even utopian aspirations. The former is at work in Ben Affleck’s heist about professional thieves in hardscrabble working-class areas of Boston, The Town, or Spike Lee’s Inside Man, one of only a few heist films to register the aftershocks of 9/11. Lee’s hostage/heist hybrid set in Manhattan pits a savvy police negotiator (Denzel Washington) under administrative scrutiny as a rising African-American against an equally clever bank robber (Clive Owen). In the end, both get away with what they want. The film holds no punches in indicting politics, high finance and the media (though it falls too easily into a recombinant discourse of Nazi blood money and theft). The presence of one character, a Sikh suspected of complicity in the crime robbery, unmistakably registers Lee’s ongoing critique of racist America in a post-9/11 New York, given the setting (the financial district), Muslim suspect and racially-charged dialogue.
More inclined to dramatic bombast, Christopher Nolan’s
Inception projects the architectural and utopian impulses seeded into the genre from its origins. In the film’s psycho-technological universe, corporate spies penetrate the dreams of their victims and parasitically ‘extract’ information. The film both inverts the prison film’s spatial breach (breaking in to take vs. breaking out to escape) and toys with heist semantics: instead of stealing from someone’s mind (‘extraction’), a professional thief, Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his crew attempt to plant a thought in a competitor’s head – ‘inception’. Crews penetrate banks, payroll trucks, museums, private villas, casinos, jewellery stores, even dowagers’s apartments, so why not an individual’s cognitive vault, the subconscious? One character names Cobb’s faculty for converting dream space into believable illusion, ‘imagination’; another calls the imaginary worlds the crew creates for their subjects ‘pure creation’.
Inception casts the filmmaker as a master thief and formulates the ‘shared dreaming’ of its thieves as an allegory of cinematic creation and reception.
It is the film’s architectural and spatial imagination that holds our attention here more than the dreamscape
per se (see David Kyle Johnson 2012 and Thorsten Botz-Bornstein 2011). Where the train is a signal transport technology of the nineteenth century, the jet aircraft is the late twentieth century’s upgrade. The film’s in-flight heist, in the secondary dream, suggests an intertext with Fritz Lang’s silent thriller
Mabuse in which the henchman feigns sleep on a train to steal a commercial treaty.
Inception exploits this dilated threshold of the international flight. It recalls what Marc Augé calls the ‘non-places of supermodernity’, the troubling archetypes of which are airports and airplanes – the very spaces in which the film’s travellers carry out their central heist; spaces in which neither identity, nor relations, nor history really makes any sense; spaces in which solitude is experienced as an overburdening or emptying of individuality, in which only the movement of the fleeting images enables the observer ‘to hypothesize the existence of a past and glimpse the possibility of a future’ (Augé 1995: 87). The heist’s success depends upon the evacuation of identity during the flight, both for the crew posing as travellers and for the mark, Fischer (Cillian Murphy). The flight also figures in concert with the physics of the rest of the film. The flight time calibrates its relativity (hours to days to years) with regards to the first dream frame’s action in an urban centre and luxury hotel that has all the nondescript appeal of downtown Los Angeles, and then again with the descent into the unconscious in the second dream frame’s snowy mountain sequence. The two dreams are measured intermittently by the suspended time of the ‘kick’ montage in which the crew’s druggist, Yusuf (Dileep Rao), drives the van of team members, all in shared sleep, off a bridge in protracted slow-motion. The speed of the in-flight heist and torpor of the van’s fall fits with Jean Baudrillard’s notion of the ‘suspension of existence’ whereby the effect of speed reduces the world to ‘an image’, ‘ushering one into a state of sublime immobility and contemplation’ (1996: 70). Finally, the film’s architectural imagination literalises the utopian impulses of the heist film, just as it underscores the malleability of space. Cobb and Mal’s imaginary dream city, though thoroughly contemporary in one sense, evokes the uncannily antiseptic feel of Ideal City paintings of the Italian Renaissance. The crumbling dream city is as eerily geometric and evacuated of humanity. The city’s oppressive design reconstructs elements of the world imagined by twentieth-century urban planning, from the International Style to the Postmodern. The warm colours, wood panelling and lush green yard of Cobb’s homey domestic space contrast sharply with the monochromatic style of public and corporate spaces. In all these senses,
Inception revives the
zeitgeist and urban spirit of the original noir heist – down to the use of architectural plans and Los Angeles in Siodmak’s thrillers.
Cobb and Ariadne stroll through the imaginary city Cobb and Mal built
Theft and Creativity: The Remake as Heist
The aforementioned films suggest the heist has extended its lifespan and perhaps even refreshed its conventions. But the salient story of the contemporary heist in the first decade of the twenty-first century, is the dual predominance of the remake and what might be called the franchise series. I will turn my attention to a narrow set of mainstream heist films of the last decade that offer fodder for interpreting the potentialities of the genre along these lines, namely Steven Soderbergh’s
Ocean’s Eleven,
Ocean’s Twelve and
Ocean’s Thirteen, a veritable franchise, and F. Gary Gray’s
The Italian Job. Gray’s dramatic comedy relies on the inherited semantics and syntax of the heist genre, but also makes a claim about reuse and originality in this age of resurging heist remakes that requires our attention.
Ocean’s Eleven, on the other hand, draws inferences about film art in relation to high modernist painting, originality and commercialism. As these films revolve around so many forms of thieving, doubling and copying, they emblematise the most salient problematic of the heist remake since 2000, and give us some purchase on the genre as a self-reflexive statement about film as art and commerce. Contemporary heists do not conceal their thievery, yet they do perpetuate the myths of originality and autonomy from institution in their films – without disavowing a commercial interest that may at times be in conflict with those myths. It is not that commercial interest has not always been a part of the heist; it is that the failure that so often capped heist movies afforded a certain humility in the face of an impossible desire for absolute freedom or transcendence.
What does it mean for the heist film to find renewed success in the form of remakes? The question is not innocent. The idea of reusing materials – stealing – is built into the story structure of the heist, so the genre must be aware of its proprietary theft. Thomas Leitch argues that ‘true remakes’ entertain an ambivalent relation to their original films by referencing them, treating them ‘as forerunners instead of true originals’ (1990: 148). The intention behind this ‘ritual invocation/denial’ is to elevate the copy above the original (1990: 146), an effect at work in both Gray’s
The Italian Job and Soderbergh’s
Ocean’s series. Though Leitch determines that the stakes of this ‘competition’ are overtly economic rather than philosophical, Verevis counters that Leitch overstates the extent of competition between a remake and its original. Original and remake, in contemporary Hollywood, ‘generally enjoy a (more) symbiotic relationship’ (Verevis 2005: 17) from which remakes strategically accrue value by drawing on their models’ own value for marketing purposes. The remake doubles as a production or commercial strategy and an aesthetic challenge that does not exclude the possibility of creative takes on previous films, as Verevis surmises: ‘As instantly recognizable properties, remakes (along with sequels and series) … satisfy the requirement that Hollywood deliver reliability (repetition) and novelty (innovation) in the same production package’ (2005: 4). On the other hand, the very film on which Verevis bases his gentle corrective is Gray’s
The Italian Job, a film organised around a violent competition among thieves and which posits rather baldly the difference between an imitator and an original genius (Verevis 2005: 17). Though not specific to the remake, another commercial strategy that has a place in this discussion is that of the auteur: studios profit from the ‘cult status’ of a filmmaker, the auteur, a designation frequently attributed to Soderbergh, who ‘remakes
himself and his earlier remakes’ (2005: 10). How, then, do the films of Gray and Soderbergh deal with issues of commercial and aesthetic value, and of copy and original, in their heist remakes – how do they heist material for their own purposes?
The Italian Job, which grossed more than $106 million in the US alone, encodes in its two thefts a theory of aesthetic and mimetic activity. Early on John Bridger (Donald Sutherland) mentors his protégé Charlie Croker (Mark Wahlberg), explaining that his life philosophy is to steal in order to live well, and that stealing is
not about the money, that is, merely accumulating wealth: ‘There are two kinds of thieves in this world. The ones who steal to enrich their lives, and the ones who steal to define their lives. Don’t be the latter. Makes you miss out on what’s really important in this life.’ Bridger is apparently thinking of his estranged daughter, Stella (Charlize Theron), much of whose life he has missed as a result of being in prison. His definition nevertheless applies to the film’s core opposition between Croker and a rival thief, Steve/Frizelli (Edward Norton). Their respective views of theft equate to two models of imitation or mimesis: either as a creative poetics or mere mimicry. Late in the film, when Croker’s plan to rob his nemesis has been unmasked by accident, Steve mockingly underscores their similarities as thieves and questions the prospects of Croker’s ‘play’: ‘I mean that’s very poetic and all, but I just don’t see it.’ Pointing to Steve’s inability to use the stolen gold creatively, Croker spits back: ‘You got no imagination. Couldn’t even decide what to do with all that money, had to buy what everybody else wanted.’ Steve’s consumption habits derivatively mimic those of Croker’s team. The audience remembers the beginning of the film, where the driver Handsome Rob (Jason Statham) says he wants an Aston Martin (‘I’m just thinking about naked girls and leather seats’) and Lyle (Seth Green) a ‘NanG17 decoder with 70-watt amps (they’ll ‘blow women’s clothes off’), while Left Ear (Mos Def) shows himself to be something of an aesthete (if not a fetishist): ‘I’m going to Andalusia, Spain. Get me a house, library full of first editions, a room for my shoes.’ When Steve’s turn to pitch in comes, he shrugs and replies, ‘I don’t know, I haven’t decided yet… I like what you said, I’ll take one of each of yours.’ He shows the card he is about to play, his plan to kill the team off and steal the gold for himself. Once Steve thinks he has succeeded in that, he moves to LA, acquiring exactly what everyone else intended to buy. Steve’s crass, derivative imitation confirms his lack of ‘creativity’ or ‘imagination’. The film thus implies a hierarchy of imitative modes that places creative, inventive activity – understood as ‘poetry’ and ‘imagination’ – at the top and mere mimicry or copyist activity at the bottom. By characterising originality and imagination in this way, the film links the criminal to art and the heist to creative production, and in turn invites one to read other heist films according to the same themes. More specifically, it establishes a hierarchy of imitative modes that organises other elements of the film, at times in problematic ways, and in turn appears to formulate a model for reading the film (against) itself, if not the recent spate of remakes that rob from their forbears.
One subplot defines a more significant instance of imitation or doubling with Lyle, the geeky computer hacker and stereo aficionado. His skills are called upon in the final getaway sequence when he hacks into the LA computer system to reroute traffic. Throughout the film Lyle insists on being called ‘Napster’, claiming to no avail that it was he who had invented the peer-to-peer file-sharing program, only to have it stolen. In a flashback to Lyle’s time at Northeastern University, Charlie relates his story. Shawn Fanning, the real-life creator of the sharing program in 1999, makes a cameo appearance to steal the program from Lyle, who is caught napping at his computer screen. Napster’s real-life troubles – Fanning’s business was assailed by musicians and the music industry – evoked the legal troubles of artistic production and consumption in ways that open onto the question of copyright and originality in a digital era. In one sense, it is one form of contemporary concerns around mimesis – sharing without poetic ‘license’. To rephrase the problem in terms akin to the late German cultural critic Walter Benjamin, what are the consequences of ‘copying’ for a work of film or any other art ‘in the age of its [digital] reproducibility’ (1939: 251)? Can one speak of originality, at least with the same aesthetic connotations, in an age of reproductions, facsimiles, digital ‘sharing’? I do not take the film to be deeply pensive about it, but it does engage the question of copying in meta-generic terms.
The Napster subtext is just another instance of the copy/original problematic raised by the film and countered by the notion of a generational transmission of creativity – from John Bridger to Stella, and to Charlie. The film develops other sets of original thief types, including a sentient-aesthetic one and a prosthetic one. When Bridger is mentoring Charlie on the two opposing categories of thieves early in the film, the camera cuts to a close up of an elegant Bulgari diamond necklace in a Venice boutique. Having missed out on his daughter Stella’s most important years because he was in jail, the doting father buys her a gift, then phones her in Philadelphia:
Bridger: I just wanted to let you know that I’m sending you something.
Stella: Hmm, does it smell nice?
Bridger: No … but it’s sparkling!
Stella: Does it have a receipt?
Bridger: I’m sending it to you from the store…
Stella: Don’t break my heart, daddy. You told me you were through.
Bridger: After this, I am, I swear to you.
Of course, Stella questions the gift’s provenance – has her father broken the law again? Bridger assures her he has obtained the gift through the proper economic rules of exchange. But Stella’s first question was whether the gift smells nice, implying it might be flowers or perfume. Bridger responds that it is ‘sparkling’, a precious stone, perhaps a diamond. Stella’s immediate preference is for something fragrant, colourful, layered, maybe exotic – something vegetal and sensorial. Bridger loves what glitters – Stella is Italian for ‘star’ – he opts for an object devoid of the associated senses of smell and taste, preferring the cold, hard, edgy, angled and polished – something geometric and mineralogical. Natural, yes, but crafted through work to reflect and manipulate light – not unlike the filmmaker. The difference here may be read as an allegory of valid competing aesthetic models and of their respective figures of valuation, which are still superior to Frizelli’s mimicry. Stella seems more invested in the vegetal and sensory, but she is technologically savvy. She opposes her father’s criminality but has inherited his professional skills, working as a ‘safe and vault technician’ for the Philadelphia police. ‘I do it for the money,’ she says. Her safecracking does not derive from any deep moral conviction regarding society’s needs. Nor does it correspond to her father’s aesthetic criminality, a desire for life ‘enrichment’ rather than self-definition or pure accumulation. It is just a job. Her interests are pecuniary, purely capitalistic. She is in it for the monetary value of the work that requires her special skillset.
The emphasis on technology, on using machines and devices to perform a job, says something of the investment in techne thematised in many a heist. It is a crucial factor in reading Stella’s motivations. Pure and proper revenge would straightforwardly dictate killing Steve for the brutal murder of her father. The screenplay puts a great deal of emphasis on competition and rivalry within the revenge story. Charlie wants revenge. One could ask why they would not simply choose to kill Frizelli. They do not simply kill him precisely because that would mean reverting to his actions, mimicking him. Charlie’s team will punish him, but it will first exact revenge by stealing back from him in an exceptional, even exacting, poetic fashion. Stella’s motivation for cracking Steve’s safe will be to avenge her father’s death, but it will also shift her investment in technology, showing her transformation from a reliance upon technique to an intellectual and sensorial enterprise. The team steals Steve’s safe only to discover it is a model Stella does not know. She discards her tools and relies upon her tactile abilities to crack the safe. There are no prosthetics here; she succeeds by assuming her father’s prowess. Stella’s success rests upon extra-technological and exceptional sensory capacities that define her genius (like that of her father). She had represented a new school of safecracker that relied upon technology as opposed to a more primary form of sensibility. If both modes depend upon mediation, they are certainly not equal; the one is aesthetic, the other technical.
F. Gary Gray follows a long literary and cinematic tradition of linking theft with aesthetic activity (and more generally the criminal with the artist), and with filmmaking in particular. After the initial ‘Italian job’ in Venice, when Bridger sums up the successful execution of Croker’s plan, Charlie replies: ‘You could have pulled this off with your eyes closed.’ Bridger: ‘No, you saw the whole picture, covered all the angles.’ This emphasis on visual composition from a filmic standpoint underscores Gray’s implicit claim of superiority. Croker is an obvious stand-in for the filmmaker. But Croker may not be the only one. Stella’s ability to crack the safe for the Philadelphia police required not just any technology – she used a special camera to visualise the electrical system of the safe. For the job of cracking Steve’s safe, she must be attentive to the signs that break the code. In what could be considered a paradoxical gesture in a film work – especially since Charlie has been positively identified as a visual genius by his paternal mentor Bridger – she sacrifices new-school dependence on visual technology in order to crack the safe. For her transformation to be complete, it is not about seeing but listening or feeling. To cast it in terms of transgression, she has traded her loyalty to the police and is now on the opposite side of the law; what the story shows is her transformation into a being like her father. By standing on the other side of the law, by transgressing the law – and by transcending a mere monetary motivation and pure revenge – her safecracking eschews economic endeavour in favour of one that is coded as aesthetic.
The Italian Job thus constructs several categorical oppositions, most notably between Croker’s genius as aesthetically superior to Frizelli’s copying. In so doing, we come upon the double bind of the heist film in the age of the remake: the contemporary heist operates in which a compromised economy according to which it aspires to show that the pure genius and poetry of the criminal act – echoing an innovative aesthetic – do not merely amount to the sought-after economic gain. This amounts to a curious metageneric position: the individual heist film is bound to its generic formula yet owes its existence to the claim of originality. It thus becomes axiomatic that the recent heist remake, especially if it ends with a successful theft, achieves success only by diminishing an irresolvable tension between its claim of uniqueness and its generic re-inscription. This contrasts with an earlier instantiation of the heist film, which was not based so much on its mode as comedy or tragedy (itself an interesting topic), but, rather, on its aspirations being achieved through the failure of the heist.
Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Series: Heist as Fine Art
Steven Soderbergh occupies a relatively unique place in American filmmaking today. Admired by critics and audiences of studio and independent cinema alike, Soderbergh has been able to bridge the two worlds in ways few directors have, producing an ‘eclectic’ or ‘hybrid’ oeuvre (Baker 2011: 2; 12) and managing to retain ‘authorial’ command over his work, engage social questions even in his more overtly commercial fare and still achieve fantastic commercial success – most notably with his
Ocean’s heist series. It is not a stretch to say that Soderbergh is a key figure in the theorisation of the Hollywood-Independent film and festival relationship in the last two decades. Chuck Kleinhans (1998) and Geoff King (2005 and 2009) both use Soderbergh as a primary illustration for explaining how the indie scene has evolved in an interdependent relationship with Hollywood, rather than existing in stark opposition to it. Drawing on their work, Aaron Baker argues that Soderbergh’s ‘relational independence’ (2011: 15) with Hollywood ‘gave him the commercial viability to continue directing and preserved a large measure of creative control, while at the same time reaffirming his reputation as a filmmaker dedicated to the social impact of movies, knowledgeable of the medium’s history, and yet open to innovation’ (Baker 2011: 12). The road through his particularly ‘hybrid’ work was not without effort – it required collaborative associations with Clooney and other, lesser-known team players who regularly work with him. Soderbergh has succeeded in the ‘seam’ between the two worlds (King 2005: 261–2).
As the heist remake idealises the motives of its criminals into a hierarchised structure that sets commercial interest below others, Steven Soderbergh’s success in the genre necessarily draws our attention. Perhaps more than any other American director at work today, Soderbergh has tried to cut through an incredibly resistant binary between high and low culture as it relates to its film correlates: commercial/serious and studio/independent. After bursting onto the scene with
sex, lies and videotape in 1989, he has gradually forged enough industry means to be able to alternate between what are viewed as polar opposites: experimental and independent works, and mainstream projects. Soderbergh has repeatedly been taken to task for disregarding the distinction between detached artistic creation and commercial production. Forcefully, and quite sincerely, he argues that despite ‘a lot of questions about commercial films and non-commercial films’, he has ‘never really made that separation in [his] mind’ (Andrew 2003). Not long after his independent neo-noir
The Underneath, a remake of Siodmak’s
Criss Cross produced by Soderbergh’s own Populist Pictures, the director turned to another heist story in
Out of Sight. He considered the latter a turning point in his career but was wary of becoming ensnared in large-scale commercial projects: ‘It was a very conscious decision on my part to try and climb my way out of the art house ghetto which can be as much of a trap as making blockbuster films’ (ibid.). Soderbergh was not looking for a way to break free from the industry
per se, but for a means of accessing industry resources and gaining the upper hand in production and directorial decisions. (
The Underneath cost $6.5 million; by contrast,
Out of Sight, produced by Jersey Films and Universal Pictures, cost an estimated $48 million, and the budget for
Ocean’s Eleven, a Warner Bros. production, ran to $85 million.) Soderbergh’s thinking on this matter is complex, but making a blockbuster is in essence what he did with the most successful of the heist films to come out in the 2000s, the
Ocean’s Eleven series. The question is whether
Ocean’s Eleven actualises his idea that there is no separation but finds a way to join the commercial and the non-commercial aspects of the criminal endeavour while also tackling the issue of originality. At best, the heist promotes a dual economy in which art and commerce live happily together. At worst, the heist remake dissimulates its monetary motives beneath a mask of aesthetic creation and originality. Soderbergh resides between the poles.
Ocean’s Eleven and
Ocean’s Twelve equate stealing with fine art. They use museums and galleries as targets (e.g., the Bellagio Casino and Hotel in Las Vegas) and drop big name artists.
Twelve eyes an
objet d’art, the Fabergé gold Coronation Egg, but Impressionist and Modernist paintings from France predominate in each film – Monet, Magritte, Renoir, Degas and Picasso – functional stand-ins for the volatile and excessive values of the art market over the last thirty years that appear to elude everyday economic principles. Soderbergh’s heists reassert their generic links to the gangster film, that ‘central paradigm for investigating the contradictions of the American dream’ (Thompson 2007: 19), its underlying greed and mis-valuation of human capital. The heist retains the gangster film’s interest in a transgressive, entrepreneurial form of capitalism and links it to art, asking where objects derive their value. Art, for all of its excesses, becomes a double metaphor in the heist film: first, as a figure for a collaborative aesthetic feat that provides an analogy for film itself; and second, given the volatilities and eccentricities of art markets, as a relay for other systems of value often siding with art, including the spiritual, social, historical, symbolic or authentic (Throsby 2001: 84). Over and above money and power, Soderbergh values the aesthetic, which shares its pride of place with ‘teamwork’, ‘loyalty’, ‘friendship’ and performative ‘creativity’ (Baker 2011: 6, 26).
Soderbergh is taking his cue from the vicissitudes and excesses of the international art markets by incorporating Modernist painting into his film’s themes in a manner that affects all heist films, since all are ultimately about value in some societal sense. In the last few decades a number of economists and sociologists have reconceptualised the idiosyncrasies of art markets (Velthius 2005a and 2005b; Throsby 2001; Heilbrun and Gray 1993; Frey 1997, 2000; Frey and Pommerehne, 1989; Grampp, 1989; Bourdieu 2010, 1993; Abbing 2002; Robertson 2005; Smith 1988). They recognise at least two separate systems of value at work in these markets, the economic on the one hand, and the cultural or symbolic on the other (Throsby 2001: 33; Bourdieu 1993; Smith 1988). While the two at times correlate – the cultural value of an object might enjoy analogous economic value – the reverse is just as true (Throsby 2001: 34). At times Soderbergh’s films presuppose that art and money operate according to incompatible ends, yet in the same breath in which they say that their thefts resemble art, injecting them into an exceptional market, or that the value of certain objects or exploits differs from mainstream markets, they are all the while asking to be players in that market dominated by pure business interests, and enjoying the profits all the same.
Tess is associated with modernist art in Ocean’s Eleven
The allusions to fine art in Soderbergh’s
Ocean’s Eleven revolve around Julia Roberts’ character Tess Ocean, Danny’s ex-wife. A curator, she is drawn to Terry Benedict’s (Andy Garcia) apparent appreciation of fine art as the CEO of the Bellagio. The Bellagio’s Gallery of Fine Art regularly exhibits in cooperation with museums around the globe. The film extends this equation when Benedict discusses with Tess a Picasso painting,
Woman with a Guitar (1914). Yet the discussion – a kind of exchange – is never fully consummated, since Benedict refuses to be kissed in view of his hotel’s surveillance camera. For Benedict, art is exchangeable in the restricted sense that it is subject to exchange-value; it can be bought and sold, but also disregarded, not looked at, appreciable without any aesthetic sense and bearing only monetary value. When Tess asks him what he likes about the Picasso, he cannot respond because he lacks aesthetic sensibility. He can only reply imitatively that he likes that she likes it. Danny, presumably, values his Tess differently. Tess, as a curator and linked through Benedict to the Picasso, is a metonym for fine art, specifically modernist art. A brief but important sequence confirms this when Linus and Rusty track her routine at the Bellagio. The first time we see her is as the object of their gaze while she descends a staircase. Soderbergh may be alluding to an axial modernist work, the heralded Marcel Duchamp painting
Nude Descending a Staircase,
No. 2. The controversial canvas surprised even Duchamp’s fellow Cubist painters during the Salon des Indépendents in Paris in 1912, as well as the American public and critics who ridiculed it at the groundbreaking New York Armory Show in 1913. The painting’s fragmented depiction of what may be a human form seemingly in motion recalls the proto-filmic photographic studies made by Etienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge. Muybridge entitled a series of photographs of a nude subject in his book
The Human Figure in Motion,
Woman Walking Downstairs (1887). Soderbergh may be indulging himself in this allusion to the birth of cinema and its overlooked alliance with modernist art in Duchamp’s painting, and with the same tongue-in-cheek tone of much of Duchamp’s work. Julia Roberts is not nude, much to Linus’ chagrin, but in a red dress, shot from a low-angle and coupled with a shift in music – she is framed as a work of art. In trying to steal his ex-wife back from the clutches of Benedict, Danny is not only interested in robbing Benedict’s money, but is also after an exceptional work of art.
Danny’s own creative energies are channelled towards the production of an image – but his medium is film. This makes Danny a visual artistthief, a stand-in for a film director. We have already seen Danny and Rusty constructing a replica of Benedict’s vault in plain view of the Bellagio, so the temptation is to perceive the collective efforts of the crew, notably the acrobat, Yen (Shaobo Qin), practicing to evade the security sensors, as preparation for what happens once they break into the vault. In fact, it is a film set that will be used to get into the vault. Danny directs his simulated video surveillance film so artfully that it fools Benedict. Benedict unwittingly invites Danny’s crew, disguised now as the SWAT team, into the actual, untouched vault to take the money without any trouble at all. Their performances in the casino and in the fake video film work, and Danny takes Benedict’s money through film artistry. As Aaron Baker points out, the Ocean’s team’s ‘storytelling, performative, and guerilla-technological skills … symbolize the independent-film sensibility’ (2011: 22).
Soderbergh is obviously fond of this kind of simulated play or visual trickery, and uses it to cheaper ends in Ocean’s Twelve. The actual heist of the gold Fabergé Coronation Egg turns out to have taken place long before a rival thief, the wealthy French thief Baron Toulour (Vincent Cassell), the ‘Night Fox’, thinks he has beaten the Ocean team by getting to it first and getting them captured. We never get direct access to the theft, it only appears as an afterthought in a flashback montage to wrap up the bet between Ocean and Toulour. Ocean’s Twelve turns the museum into a space of declined simulations: the egg is replaced by a holograph, Bruce Willis plays himself in cameo, Tess (Roberts) pretends to be the actress ‘Julia Roberts’, with Catherine Zeta-Jones playing the Europol crime specialist Agent Lahiri.
To return to the persistent division between high modernist art and commercialised mass art, the scholarship that has managed to collapse the divide has also consistently pointed to the ugly popular underbelly of high modernism – modernism has always incorporated mass art into its creations (see Huyssen 1986). Inversely, I am throwing into relief how a popular movie genre like the heist film relies just as much on the ostensible distinction between high and low. The Ocean’s films embrace the commercial aspect of their enterprise even as they hint at an alliance with values attributed to high culture that supposedly stand above or in opposition to sheer financial interest. In this scenario, the binary persists because it is not only modernism’s, but also mass art’s, little secret. The heist genre deploys this same opposition while dissimulating its own interest in it.
Likewise, originality remains a prime concern in these films. It is possible to imagine a remake that is not so beholden to its original material that it cannot in absolute terms achieve some form of originality – this runs counter to my preceding critique of
The Italian Job’s conventionality. If Soderbergh sought to make his
Ocean’s film better than the original, then the key to its aesthetic superiority, Baker suggests, is its conscious recognition of the tradition through its use of allusion and film history, its allusive ‘density’ in Bordwell’s term (2006: 60). By deftly incorporating film ‘connoisseurship’ into its reception, Soderbergh managed to create something original. But he himself might be hesitant to claim as much, even as his
Ocean’s series lays claim to original craftsmanship. Soderbergh feels the weight of history and of predecessors (Godard in particular) while recognising the limits of innovation and experimentation in the contemporary market:
In terms of the grammar of cinema, I haven’t seen anything made since the late 70s or early 80s that I felt was really pushing the ball forward… Some of the recent Godard stuff is pretty extraordinary, Notre Musique (2004) was really, really beautiful… But what’s the audience for that…? This is not an inexpensive hobby – it’s not something that you make and then hang on your wall. It’s a public art form. I’m frustrated by what’s going on in the business, in terms of what’s getting made, and I’m frustrated by my own inability to break through to something else. (White 2009)
Soderbergh’s counter-example to mass art is painting, one of the privileged metonyms for aesthetic (vs. commercial) value in
Ocean’s Eleven. Alongside other movie-conscious filmmakers faced with their ‘belatedness’ in the film tradition, Soderbergh has strategically embraced a ‘pluralistic’ form of theft (
à la Jarmusch) as a means for revitalising film narrative. As mentioned above, ‘adventurous plotting’ (Bordwell 2006: 75) may be a hallmark of all of Soderbergh’s ventures, but it works in conjunction with the meta-filmic dimensions of the
Ocean’s series – the team’s ‘storytelling, performative, and guerilla-technological skills’ (Baker 2011: 22) – to energetically allegorise the potential of film art for a broader audience than his indie work. The heist film is not the sole or even primary locus of that innovative, independent or ‘daring’ cinema (ibid.) of the 1990s and 2000s. Yet it clearly provides a structure that affords filmmakers a chance to express their aspirations, just as directors have done since the inception of the genre. Judging by the number of times Soderbergh has gone back to the well of the heist form, particularly the role he granted to
Out of Sight for escaping the ‘art house ghetto’, Soderbergh has been one of the key forces behind the heist’s return, which in turn has shaped other genres and modes of filmmaking in the last two decades. Soderbergh’s nearly compulsive return to the heist thus far in his career shows that he has, perhaps more than any other contemporary director, understood the stakes of the heist as a mainstream genre with the continual capacity to acknowledge film’s natural existence, holding commercial interest and the pleasures of craft and art in cooperative suspension.
In Soderbergh’s ‘State of Cinema’ talk delivered at the 56th San Francisco International Film Festival (27 April 2013), he made a plea for more thoughtful filmmaking that registers with the terms and history we have explored in our study of the heist film genre. The speech came shortly after the release of Side Effects (2013) and amid a swirl of rumours that the film might be his last directorial effort — that one last job. Soderbergh’s critique of the moviemaking industry lays out in expository fashion what his own production gambles and heist films express implicitly, by raising two interdependent problems: the lack of directorial independence and the difference between ‘cinema’ as an art form and money-making ‘movies’; and the debility of the studio system’s particular monetary incentives, including its faulty data-driven methodologies yet growing market share against independent productions.
Few independent filmmakers have Soderbergh’s insight into Hollywood or the credibility to mount such a critique. ‘State of Cinema’ is primarily concerned with business practices, but it requires, as Soderbergh well understands, an aesthetic definition of film. He defines ‘cinema’ as ‘a very elegant problem-solving model’ with a capacity for disseminating ideas, information and explanation through narrative. Conversely, he savages the studios for avoiding or eliminating ‘things like cultural specificity and narrative complexity, and, God forbid, ambiguity’ in their productions. I am certain he would admit to collaborative artistry (as opposed to studio creation by ‘committee’), in the spirit of his heist films, but his stated position is decidedly auteurist. The best films, he argues, bear a ‘specificity of vision’: ‘cinema’ is the ‘polar opposite of generic’ activity, the result of a creative ‘signature or fingerprint’. Soderbergh’s films do bear his signature and are marketed by a brand recognition dating from his early independent successes — he left his fingerprint (note the criminal connotation) on all of them. Thus, they cannot be seen as generic in the sense of being mass-produced. Yet his heist films are generic in another sense. They consciously and creatively exploit the genre’s syntax and semantics, inheriting those social stakes and valences I have discussed throughout this book. This leads us back to my observation about the internal contradiction of the contemporary heist, namely, that it imagines escaping from the conventionality imposed (in this case) by the studio system and achieved through aesthetic genius, but its yearnings are part and parcel of the conventional form itself.
Soderbergh’s multiple heist films speak to this desire to get out of the system, to escape its mind-numbing effects, to get away with art without the commercial pressures or disappointment with the industry — to pursue the aesthetic without want of money. Soderbergh’s ‘State of Cinema’ speech is another formulation of this desire. Perhaps it is in the films that we encounter a measure of ‘ambiguity’ — or more precisely, ambivalence — regarding this phenomenon in particular. In ‘State of Cinema’, Soderbergh claims there remains an auteurist trend doggedly pursuing ‘cinema’ — ‘you have filmmakers out there who have that specific point of view’. For them, he insists, ‘it’s not about money, it’s about good ideas followed up by a well-developed aesthetic’. It does seem odd, then, when he winds up his speech by noting the $25 million in revenues that marked the unexpected success of Christopher Nolan’s Memento — a film that meets his criteria of a signature, ‘problem-solving’ work of film art. It is hard not to see that it is about both money and good film aesthetics. Soderbergh’s non-heist films certainly meet his own criteria for ‘cinema’, as creative works that build on cultural specificity, narrative complexity and ambiguity. But it is in his heist films that he allegorises the tension between the two competing impulses.
Conclusion
In terms of the heist film’s social function, the community of structure that links heists across time turns out to be a common, perhaps unoriginal, yet very important pursuit: the heist explores what film’s role is as a mass-market art in a consumer society. In terms of the heist’s social
message, on the other hand, that message is susceptible to difference between filmmakers and to broader patterns of change over time. My own view of the genre’s evolving message is that the noir heist and earliest comic capers foregrounded sublime failure, in the context of a search for freedom or independence from societal constraints – surrogates for the poetic search for transcendence – before more recent heists have given in to an unproblematic relation between art and commerce in the usually successful robberies we see nowadays. Where the first phase of heists (stemming from a modernist origin) reject success in favour of an untenable but idealised dichotomy (art vs. money) – an either/or proposition in which you fail, where there is heroic failure but aesthetic success – the latest phase of the heist accepts that art and money go hand in hand – a but/and proposition in which you can pull off an artistic feat without losing the money – one that, paradoxically, still mythologises individual genius and exploits the art/commerce dichotomy for its own ends. The troubling aspect of the contemporary heist – represented by so many remakes – is that it perpetuates the binary notion that art is pure, original and liberated from pecuniary interest, while business is base, corrupt, derivative and serial. The problem is not that filmmaking, and genre films in particular, are business; it is that the contemporary heist, as a potentially thoughtful genre on this topic, appears to be saying one thing while doing another. If, as I have argued, the contemporary heist film promulgates a myth that the film artist can make a pure, autonomous art that would not be subject to market forces or commodification, then it builds this myth on tenuous ground, arguing for the originality or exceptionalism of its criminal feats – yet it does so via remakes from within generic conventionality.
It remains to be seen how long the heist will remain on the marquee. As with all genres, its endurance will depend on its adaptability. So long as a perceived or real struggle between the commercial and the aesthetic captivates filmmakers and audiences, it will likely endure. In terms only slightly different from these, the
Cahiers du cinéma critics came to a comparable conclusion with regards to Hollywood filmmaking while debating a series of ‘Questions about American Cinema’ in 1964. Revisiting their theory of the auteur, they made the following corrective in the very terms of freedom, institutional constraint and collaboration that define the heist formula’s search for escape, using a heist craftsman, Jules Dassin, to make their case:
François Truffaut: We used to say that we liked the American cinema but its filmmakers were slaves; what would it be like if they were free men? Well, the moment they become free they make lousy films. The moment Dassin is free, he goes to Greece and makes Celui qui doit mourir. In short, we liked assembly-line cinema, where the director was an operative for four weeks of shooting, where the film was edited by someone else, even if it was the work of a big director … we didn’t reckon how vital it was, for the American cinema, to work in these conditions…
Claude Chabrol: People were prisoners and tried to escape. They’ve become a lot more cautious and timid than they were before. It’s a crazy thing. I’m sure today Dassin couldn’t even imagine doing Thieves’ Highway.
Truffaut: It’s not a film that a free man wants to make. You have to be on the payroll to make this film – it was good payroll cinema.
(Hillier 1986: 176–7)
Truffaut and Chabrol identified the underlying institutional oppression that generates the industrial context for the heist film – it inspired directors to imagine a world in which a group breaks free from economic oppression. The Cahiers critics argued, on the contrary, that the studio auteur’s prowess arises from the very constraints inherent in the institutional enterprise, and that by necessity this explains how the filmmakers who made early heists recognised implicitly that that dream of escape must end in failure.