Heist films are the secret weapons of the proletariat. The heist, a subgenre of the caper, is made of a group, mostly men, who plan on stealing from an institution. Different individuals with various talents are required for the job – the watchman, the getaway driver, the locksmith and the brains. Different motivations are also given for the attempt, some as flimsy as revenge, vanity, ideology, passion or greed. “The Bank Job” does not limit itself to the well-worn aspects of this genre’s becoming a smart, suspenseful and satisfying film. Heist films have an ability to provoke class antagonism. To understand why “The Bank Job” is good agitprop, besides being a good film, it will do well to go back and study its antecedents. I believe heists have their origins in legends, like those about Robin Hood and in tales like Sabatini’s “Captain Blood.” These literary characters promoted the citizens’s equality through income redistribution. Indeed, Robin Hood was the forerunner of the trickledown effect – especially with his spreading of aristocratic donations among the peasants. Notably, all activities that took place during the heist were to be carried out by the working class. So if elites wanted to get in on the action, they donned the garb of proles, which is why neither the “Thomas Crown Affair” nor “Ocean Eleven” are considered heist films – the rich who steal for pleasure never support class struggle. In contrast, Robin Hood was actually an aristocrat – Robin of Loxley – while Captain Blood was a middle class physician turned pirate. Only the marginalized can help their kind, so we have the silly spectacle of politicians kissing babies, picking Texas twangs and boasting of apprenticeships in Chicago slums. Other genres could very well claim to apprise the film-goers to the inequality and injustice rampant in our daily lives. But, if films like “The Constant Gardener,” “Erin Brockovich,” “The Insider,” including anti-war screed too numerous to mention, can provoke, they rarely inspire. They relate irrelevant information to the working class – government is too powerful, and corporations rip off the rabble. Who needs such when we can relax with Jon Stewart? At least he mitigates the obvious with humor. Rather than excite the downtrodden, these films enervate them by propagating fear instead of hope, instilling discontent in the present and disillusionment in the future. For these very reasons – its foundation in the now, its pursuit of a better future – the heist film remains the proper weapon for class warfare. Heist filmmakers begin by manipulating the audience’s feelings of empathy and disgust. Viewers get torn between their predilection with every crime yielding its proper punishment and their penchant for watching the underdog succeed. Stanley Kubrick veered toward retribution in “The Killing.” As the protagonist loses the loot when a clumsy baggage handler at an airport drops his suitcase, the fluttering greenbacks become a metaphor for extinguished, free-floating and unmoored dreams. Jean-Pierre Melville took a different tact in “Bob Le Flambeur.” The final scene has cops capturing Bob. The cynicism evident in the final dialogue is about a criminal escaping from the crevices of justice. In the “Bank Job,” Terry, a car salesman, and his loser crew are propositioned by a former model, Martine. She lets on that a bank at Baker Street, London, has had its security system disabled to allow for weekend repairs. Millions are up for grabs. As good heists do, things begin unraveling when an extra member is added to the group. Director Roger Donaldson might have believed he was simply relating a fictional account of an actual event, but he could not have been more wrong, even though a bank was actually raided in 1971. As Karl Kautsky noted in “The Class Struggle,” “[Banks] are the means whereby the private property of non-capitalists is rendered accessible to capitalists.” Meaning the choice of a bank was not arbitrary; instead it was strategic and based on its representation as the contemporary leviathan. More important than the bank in the film is the use of Dutch angles shots. These slightly off-balance shots show a world askew, a visual motif of the toppling of the established superstructure. Those diagonals resist the temptation to be vertical, to conform to society’s expectations. So the question after all these words is: what does this have to do with you, the reader? The answer is not much. But what deserves to be shown is that heists are a microcosm of our concealed revolutionary spirits. When we watch the films in the theater, we connect with the characters in a way we do not outside our homes – in essence, we lend tacit support to social justice. So we ignore Nick Leeson and Jerome Kerviel, blue-collar buccaneers responsible for ruining Baring Bank and defacing Societe Generale, while we condemn Bernard Ebbers and Ken Lay, convicted CEOs of WorldCom and Enron. To us, the former strike against the corporate behemoth; the latter, represent it.
—-Contact Freke Ette at [email protected]