In Mythocracy, Yves Citton makes a distinction between two types of ‘attractors’ that are deployed by cultural producers to first grab and second hold attention. The first type of attractor is the ‘hook’, which operates on the level of initial perception and strives for visibility in a media ecology saturated with attention seeking content. Hooks often rely on established genres and stylistic precedents, hoping to take advantage of previous trends and patterns of audience engagement so as to breakthrough public indifference and get noticed. The second type of attractor is the ‘plot’, which refers to the integration of form and content, to the concatenation of actions within a narrative sequence. Some plots ‘re-iterate’ pre-existing grammars and conventional narrative structures, re-affirm expected outcomes and solidify prior interpretative habits. Others ‘reconfigure’ inherited syntaxes, ‘so that originally ungrammatical sequences push to be accepted as grammatical (acceptable and meaningful)’. When it comes to the politics of form, there is a temptation to oppose (bad) re-iterative plots, which deepen ‘the attractive force of the predominant grammaticality’, to (good) reconfigurative plots, which perturb, estrange, innovate, subvert, oppose, and rebel against conventions. Re-iteration enhances the identity spectators feel with the present, whilst reconfiguration clears new experiential and intellectual paths along which difference might emerge.
Such a framing; however, remains attached to fantasies of apocalyptic upheaval and sudden convulsive rupture. As absolute novelty cannot be recognized – it evades existing modes of perception and conception – attractors, Citton glosses, ‘always carry with them the inertia of past habits’, the memory drag of previous encounters. There is a ‘stickiness’ or ‘inelasticity’ to the present which makes claims for a complete break improbable, no matter how much revolutionaries would like to surcharge the power of the decisive political act. Instead, the infra-politics of cultural form is one of pushes, thrusts, and pressures, of the slow accumulation of gestures which build towards a threshold from where social restructuring can occur. To overcome ‘sticky social realities’, plots more or less intensely diverge ‘from the inertial force that leads societies to preserve in their present way of being inherited from the past’. Rather than outright dismiss commercial culture as irredeemably conservative or endorse experimental art as axiomatically progressive, Citton insists that every plot has the potential to both pull audiences back into the dominant social dispensation but also to push them towards variations of thought that differ differently, to intimations of imagining and acting otherwise.
One type of cultural bait that has consistently attracted my attention involves the story of the individual or collective who short-circuits the relationship between money and socially recognized work. If outlaw appropriators adhere to the dictates of the crime genre, their missions also seemingly exceed the genre’s remit and might be interpreted as ‘myth attractors’, figures whose ideas and narratives organize, express, and give shape to otherwise ill-defined sentiments, vague apprehensions, and obscure yearnings. It is not a quirk of the production cycle that the crime wave sweeping across Hollywood has coincided with growing incredulity at the promised rewards of salaried life and intensifying indignation at a system felt to be rigged against citizens, communities, and collectives. For Citton, once their attention has been a hooked, a spectator gives over their sensibilities, emotional complexions, and systems of valorization to the plot, whose mechanisms channel and redirect flows of belief and desire. In this respect, narrative machines function like ‘reprocessing plants’ that are ‘in charge of updating and “cleaning-up” the values that circulate in a society’. And, just like with plots, there are narrative machines that ‘confirm, condone, and strengthen’ the dominant value system, and others that bifurcate habitual modes of valuation, whose re-evaluation of values directs behaviors towards alternative goals.
Any narrative machine, regardless of whether it is embedded in a blockbuster movie or dis-articulated by an art-house film, contains multiple, contradictory impulses and demands. On the one hand, narratives can act as accomplices of power, naturalizing its operating systems, inculcating its languages, or revitalizing value systems that might have dulled or lost their luster over time. On the other, narratives can affiliate with the allies of counter-power, advancing alternative conceptions of the world, propagating a disjunction that might metastasize into non-reproductive behaviors. One of the questions underpinning my interest in outlaw appropriation is to what extent can these scenarios of criminal activity disqualify and challenge one of the fundamental presuppositions of late (or is it too late?) capitalism: the natural right of waged work. Are outlaw plots allies of a left-wing imaginary engaged in an effort to push spectators away from passively accepting the permanence of exploitation and domination? Or, are they complicit in a re-iterative reprocessing of values which exploits feelings of discontent and integrates these affects back into the symbolic universe of capital? In what follows, I would like to briefly entertain some of these speculations around renewal and divergence as they relate to Bart Layton’s sleek Crime 101 and Daniel Roher’s virtuoso Tuner.
Variations on the heist genre, Crime 101 and Tuner explore the influences and situations which magnetize characters towards criminal vocations, as well as charting the practical skills required to execute these jobs successfully. Plotted along the Californian stretch of Route 101 – from which the movie derives its name – Crime 101 is organized around Mike (Chris Hemswoth), an LA based jewelry thief who specializes in ripping off ‘couriers’ – the workers who transport money and diamonds from one destination to another. Ever alert to opportunities, Mike is not himself an opportunist. Each score is meticulously planned and researched, from the biological precautions taken to minimize the potential for forensic debris to the cybernetic use of spy-ware technology to hack and extract information from upcoming targets. Mike’s disciplined commitment to bodily anonymity and aptitude for imitating dominant behaviors can perhaps be linked to his status as ‘transclass’. For ‘Mike’ is also an invention, an identity created to erase the psycho-social traces of his former self, James Davis, who grew up poor and in a foster home. Yet this absence of personalized history begins to feel like a deficiency after a chance encounter with Maya (Monica Barbaro), in whose company the gaps and silences around his past betray the work of repression. Rather than function as its enabling condition, the generic any-self-whatever that Mike performs is increasingly felt as an obstacle to his future.
Whereas the interior spaces of Crime 101 are often empty and devoid of personal touch, Tuner immerses its viewers in a version of working class New York where cultural and familial traditions doggedly persist. The film follows Niki White (Leo Robson), an apprentice piano tuner who works for his uncle’s (fraternal rather than genealogical) company, a family business out of synch with uberized service work. Almost by definition, Niki’s trade as a tuner places him on the side of preservation and restoration, of ensuring that residual artistic practices have a chance to survive and perpetuate themselves within the margins of the present. This conception of a vital connection and relay with the past is embodied by Niki’s uncle, Harry Horowitz (Dustin Hoffman), who is a veritable archive and memory of the jazz acts and movements that have passed through the city and whose motifs continue to resonate and reverberate through Harry’s storied being. For Niki and Harry, tuning is not so much about listening for specific pitches but more a form of pre-cognitive perception; it relies on sensation or an intuitive feeling about the arrangement of the world and its composition. Before servicing pianos, we are told that Niki himself was a child prodigy, a virtuoso pianist whose career was cut short after he developed hyperacusis, a condition which means that he has a heightened sensitivity to sound. Whilst his hyperacusis forecloses one iteration of virtuosity, Niki discovers that it opens another: that he has an ear for cracking safes.
In the tradition of semiotic analysis from which Citton emerges, narratives are said to structure the evolution of an initial condition to a final condition, a transformation presented in terms of ‘the gain or loss of a (generally immaterial) Object (love, glory, Graal) by a Subject’. Whilst Mike is a serial thief he is not compelled to take on missions like the knights of romance, for whom valor cannot be accumulated but must be constantly renewed through chivalric deeds. Instead, Mike is closer to the saver: he is working towards a target number of dollars that once attained he can quit the game. Despite all of Mike’s efforts to go undetected, the 101 thief has become an urban myth of sorts within the LA Police Department, a legend that Detective Lou Lubesnick is determined to prove is real, that the 101 hits form an intentional pattern. For semioticians, Lou functions as an antagonistic opponent, the cop whose unrelenting pursuit of the public good will intercept and prevent Mike attaining his desired Object. Crime 101 complicates this schema; however, though an inversion of the role of ‘protector’ figures who stand above the fray but ‘destine’ characters towards certain goals and imbue their actions with particular values. On the one hand, rather than act as an ‘anti-destinator’, Lou’s superior blocks his investigation, believing that his wild speculations have led him away from the metrics that count: closing cases. On the other hand, after a disagreement over risk and comportment, Mike’s fence, ‘Money’, turns on him and hires a more impulsive associate to tail Mike and thwart his plans. In a move that is indicative of the film’s wariness of institutions, police officials actively sabotage Lou’s case, whilst it is the criminal underworld who take on the task of downing the 101 thief.
Crime 101’s multiple plots clinch together around Sharon Combs (Halle Berry), an insurance broker who secures the wealth of high net worth individuals. Sharon has worked hard to attain her position and maintained her integrity despite having to endure a corporate and professional environment steeped in sexism and racism. She reaches a point, however, where no amount of mindfulness will help her unsee that the system now works against her, that her employers and clients regard her as a depreciating sexual asset, a has been. Sharon not only loudly quits but approaches Mike with an opportunity to make ‘walk a way money’, the type of low probability job Mike ordinarily turns down but feeling the heat from Lou and disconcerted by the menacing Ormon, he accepts the gig and brings the film towards its kinetic denouement.
Perhaps in keeping with the LA mood, Crime 101 opens on the highway with a meditative monologue encouraging listeners to harness the powers of creation, to manifest their dreams, to believe that they are where they need to be. In many respects, the film’s triumvirate of principle characters are precisely not where they need to be and each encounters Evil within their particular line of work. Whilst Mike operates through controlling situations and seeks to mitigate against the chances of causing physical and psychological harm to his victims, Ormon is erratic, impulsive, and violent, the psychotic other to Mike’s noble thief. Likewise, Lou is a straight cop committed to truth over expediency, a fidelity to justice not shared by his colleagues who force, tamper, and manipulate evidence. Sharon meanwhile struggles against an industry that refuses to see her as a subject but simply as bait used to attract and hook clients. Yet in order to unstick themselves from the present, each character must imitate the conduct and values of their Evil Other. Sharon sells out her clients, Mike has to kill, and Lou lies about a shooting. Although it would be a stretch to say that they consciously organize themselves into a team, through their informal, improvised, and perhaps unconscious forms of cooperation, Sharon, Lou, and Mike reciprocally and unconditionally gift one another a new life. In this sense, if Mike loses his desired Object, the money needed to quit crime, he gains an Object he did not even know he desired, the opportunity to become James Davis again.
Tuner’s narrative programme works in the opposite direction and processes the disequilibrium Niki’s world is thrown into when Harry is hospitalized after a heart attack. With no clear financial route available to alleviate the medical bills, Niki hooks up with a crew who promise him ‘real money’ in exchange for his preternatural talents. The collective present their project as a vigilante form of economic redistribution, a re-allocation of wealth from below in defiance of an iniquitous system that serves only to reinforce class hierarchies and partitions. The excessive wastefulness of the rich is further emphasized by virtue of the fact that the crew only moonlight as a criminal gang: during the day, they run a legitimate security outfit, which conveniently allows them to scope out future targets. Such a double life is only possible, Uri, the gang’s leader explains, because their clients are so exorbitantly and inattentively well-off they do not even notice that they have been robbed. Hence the crew’s missive to never take more than would be missed, a mantra of restraint that Niki takes to heart.
Perhaps the sharpest difference between Tuner and Crime 101 is their respective depictions of the labor of outlaw appropriation. The tension of Crime 101 spirals outward from the presentation of three robberies which escalate in scale and in different ways do not go as planned – there is no routine hit. An element of risk appears inherent to each action, an unpredictability which suggests that each score is itself a type of singularity, an event which produces possible worlds. Mike, then, utilizes the creative forces of invention and inserts a delay between action and reaction to potentially realize something new, to instantiate a branching within flows of belief and desire. For Maurizio Lazzarato the other of this ‘activity of genius’ is the ‘activity of the automaton’, in which ‘attention is completely absorbed in the realization of the purposeful activity, and memory is a habit inscribed in the body’. With his heightened auditory capacity, Niki is deployed by the crew as a specialist, one whose body is broken down and fragmented into specific organs and contacts point in a fashion reminiscent of an older, Fordist distribution of labor. Such an association is accentuated by the use of a montage sequence to depict the repetitive and boring nature of the job, a sequences whose images, shapes, and rhythms cite an earlier modernist language that captured industrial technologies and machines. The screen takes on the architecture of cogs, wheels, vaults, the movements of a world in motion. Where no job is ever identical for Mike, Niki’s labor is primed to the reproduction of specific activities and imitation rather than invention – which, should not be all that surprising considering that he learned how to crack safes from watching YouTube videos.
This is not to say that Tuner’s thieves conduct their work without unexpected incidents. Niki starts to diverge from the gang after a job extracting the passcode for a crypto wallet takes a fatal turn. Yet what proves to be his undoing is not getting caught in the act of safe-cracking – the gang operates within an insouciant impunity – but in re-gifting a vintage watch, the type of object that someone will notice. As his involvement with Uri’s gang deepens, so to does his relationship with Ruthie, a prodigiously talented pianist and student composer who harbors ambitions of becoming an assistant to Marius Maissner, a revered contemporary composer. Ruthie’s success turns to shame, as Maissner observes that a watch Niki has given her bears a striking resemblance to one that belonged to Maissner’s grandparents and which survived the holocaust but had recently been lifted from his safe. Rather than report the theft to the police, Maissner grants Niki the opportunity to retrieve the companion watch, which requires Niki to break into Uri’s safe – the only time he is caught. Subject to extreme physical violence, Uri’s wrath is only broken when his associates argue that they need to return the ‘holocaust watch’. Absolved by Maissner, Niki nonetheless appears to have lost Ruthie (Love) but in doing so, picks up the piano again and the film ends with a final improvised performance.
Both Tuner and Crime 101 organize and adapt sentiments and attitudes that express a belief that capitalism does not work for those who count themselves as part of the many. In the scenarios they stage, the myth of hard work is consistently experienced as a myth, an abstraction that is no longer felt to be the highest calling one can have. And yet their relationship to change remains ambiguous. The model of collective action in Tuner are motivated less by an ideological opposition to capital and more about establishing a niche for themselves within its economy. There is a cruelty displayed towards bodies that defy their commands and their relationship with Niki is not so much marked by partnership as it is by exploitation, the mechanization of his body and memory to a single task. Despite its pairing of Ruthie, the elite virtuoso artist, with Niki, the virtuoso tuner and working other of artistic production, the film struggles to envisage modes of collaboration or dialogue – a performer-spectator binary. Perhaps this is because the age of free association and collective riffing has died with Harry. Tuner concludes with the mutilated artist on-stage but solitary, an exceptional individual barred from collective joy. For Crime 101, it seems the institutions of collective will can only impose measures of success that are antithetical to the ethical values and principles of autonomous individuals, whose intelligences force them to take matters into their own hands. The film arguably re-iterates the mythic of the heroic individual who must overcome the corruptions of state and corporation. Positioned as a successor to Michael Mann’s Heat, Crime 101 might be felt to reconfigure the grammar of the heist movie too. Notably, Mike is allowed to escape and have his crimes transferred to Ormon. Perhaps this could be considered a diminution of the radical defeat inscribed in Heat, a compensatory form of pleasure that allows the audience to indulge in a happy ending for the good (and handsome) thief. Yet if this feels like a guilty pleasure, it is nonetheless formally consistent with the film’s own argument that in order to modify the present, subjects cannot shift it with claims to Truth but must lie, tell stories, invent myths. Crime 101 pushes counter-myths, counter-conducts, and counter-scripts, instantiating a break in which its characters might script and finally become the myths that they should be.
Thomas Travers 