After a While You Tell the Walls
On Value, Alienation, and Alchemy in Michael Mann’s THIEF (1981)
1.
On March 30th in 1981, John Hinckley, Jr., shot US President Ronald Reagan with a revolver. His aim was off. Instead of dying, Reagan emerged from the hospital with even greater support from the nation, opening the way for him to enact a deadly political agenda. His eight years in office ushered in the era of neoliberal government, massively disinvesting from the public sphere while cutting taxes and regulations on corporations and the wealthy—a period of increased incarceration, union busting, and community destruction resulting in massive wealth transfer toward the most affluent. One can’t help but imagine a future in which Hinckley’s shot succeeded. There is no promise things would have been that much better, but the possibility haunts.
On March 27th of that year, just three days before Hinckley pulled the trigger, Michael Mann’s Thief was released to a mostly indifferent public. There is no evidence that Hinckley saw the film. In fact, a notorious element of Hinckley’s case was his love of a different film: Scorsese’s Taxi Driver from 1976. Hinckely wanted to impress the film’s young actress, Jodie Foster, and saw himself in the story of Travis Bickle (played by Robert De Niro). Taxi Driver and Thief have much in common: both are grounded in a transitional moment between the post-WWII liberal consensus and an emergent neoliberal order, and both focus on an alienated man whose life has been damaged by the violence of American power1. However, Thief is distinct in channeling its narrative away from political reaction and into an overt critique of capitalism and class oppression. As such, the historical convergence of Thief’s release with Hinckley’s attempted assassination was prophetic: few other films capture so starkly the brutal alienation, abandonment, and suffocated dreams lurking in Reagan’s vision for the future.
Mann himself was explicit about the film’s politics. Speaking decades later with The Ringer, he stated that Frank, the film’s protagonist (played indelibly by James Caan), is “the locus of a leftist, existentialist critique of American capitalism. That was the intent.” Thief was even marketed as a “blue collar” film, with images of Caan in denim on the poster—suggesting something akin to Paul Schrader’s 1978 film, Blue Collar— and downplaying the film’s uniqueness (to its box office detriment). And while it is absolutely true that Thief makes a critique of capitalism and voices pro-worker arguments, what makes the film interesting is the visionary, indirect route it takes in making doing so.
The opening shots establish a world of asphalt, concrete, glass, iron, and steel—a world of wrought matter. We attend not to politicians, workplaces, or evidence of “societal decay,” but to the make of cars, the glare of streetlights and storefronts, the construction of vaults and drills and welding equipment, the composition and voltage of electrical lines. We rarely see organic life, and when we do—trees and bodies of water are prominent—they suggest something almost impossible: a dream of life that will inevitably succumb to the scrapyard and the street. And within this world, people move through physically constructed space as through a cavern. Whether it’s a bank, a prison, a foundry, a government office, or a diner, the human body is either swallowed up by surfaces, vulnerably exposed within them, or coiled with explosive force against its confines. In Thief, some-one or -thing has shaped this world’s raw materials, and the lives circulating within it seem partial and fated.
At the center of this is Frank: a man who has had his soul annihilated in prison. He has since regenerated it through sheer force of will, and he has begun to dream with it, renewing his imagination from within the alienating depths of his imprisonment. But by the film’s end, he has canceled its existence once again, dissolving in an act of pyrrhic vengeance. In Frank’s story, we have something almost mythological: a single human body warring against the powerful and their logic with such ferocity that he becomes almost an elemental being, his soul materialized into a weapon of retribution. It is a political and materialist vision, but it is also a portrait of psychic alchemy. Ultimately, in Frank, Mann advances a vision of the psycho-material violence that capitalism perfected in the 1980s.
2.
It is crucial to note that the cool, aesthetic surfaces and materials of Mann’s style are not natural: they are socially and historically determined—they are the surfaces of commodities. In all his lines of work, Frank is a man who knows what things are worth: he knows the precise value of the cars on his lot, the clothes on his body, and the diamonds in the bank vaults he breaks into. And the deeper question the film begins to push toward—and a question which ultimately breaks Frank—is whether value is something conducive to life, or if its true function is only to enforce the living death of his segment of the population.
The film’s title has more than one valence: Frank is a thief, but he is also someone who’s been stolen from his entire life. In many respects, he is a pure product of the American ruling class’s system of value and deprivation. We learn in an exchange with the bureaucrat who denies his application to adopt a child that Frank was raised in a government orphanage: “I got some ABC type information for you, lady. I was state-raised, and this is a dead place. A child in eight-by-four green walls. After a while you tell the walls, 'My life is yours.’” Without understanding this aspect of Frank’s life, we understand nothing. He began life discarded, living in the grip of the state. Later, barely an adult, he was arrested for stealing $40. As a result of defending himself in prison, his two year sentence turned into eleven. Until his release at thirty-one, Frank had never known even basic bodily autonomy. All of the steel, firepower, muscle, and concrete used to enforce the rule of capital had been for him the most intimate facts of existence.
Frank knows there are systems at work beyond human life and that their rule dictates that anyone, like cars or any other commodity, can be scrapped. When we encounter him in the film, he is driven, with an almost inhuman degree of focus and energy, to avoid this fate and to steal back his own life. He hopes to achieve this by stealing diamonds from bank vaults with virtuosic technical precision and personal autonomy. At one point, Frank boasts, "I'm self-employed. I'm doing fine. I don't deal with egos. I'm Joe the boss of my own body[.]” He depends on no one and owes no one; no one exploits him but himself. He takes no risks on the street and instead offloads his merchandise at a slight loss to leave the more treacherous dealing to others. As his father-figure, the master thief Okla (played by Willie Nelson), puts it, Frank is stealing these diamonds as the quickest route he knows “to reclaim his debt from society”—an inversion of the carceral cliché.
The future he is moving toward directs his every action. In fact, Frank has intensely visualized this future in a collage he carries with him. To his new love interest, Jessie, he shows a 5 x 8 piece of posterboard that he has covered with images cut from magazines: it depicts a home, a wife, children, and Okla. He carries the image folded up in his wallet and gazes at it throughout the film: a talisman born from within the depths of his worst alienation in prison. As he explains to Jessie in the film’s central diner conversation, his relationship to time was profoundly altered there:
“I was 20 when I went in. 31 by the time I got out. Anyway, you don't count months and years. You don't do time that way . . . You gotta not give a fuck if you live or die. Forget time. You gotta get to nothing means nothing. When you achieve that attitude, you can survive.”
He goes on to explain that, after a vicious beating while defending himself against a prison gang’s sexual violence (which was participated in by guards and led by a police captain, whom he killed), he re-emerged into the general population expecting to die. However, he found that he was now, in a way, free: “ So I hit the yard. So you know what happens? Nothing. Nothing happens. Cause I don't mean nothing to myself. I don't care about me. I don't care about nothing. And I know from that day that I survive. Because I achieved that mental attitude.” And it is at this moment—while describing a mental state of transcendence within annihilation—that he presents her the collage. Out of that mentality of absolute self-alienation, he dreams of a future where his time begins again.
Frank’s psyche is dislocated in time: his imagined future is utterly real to him— it’s where he really is—only it hasn’t arrived yet. As he says outright, pointing at the collage, “That is my life.” All he needs to realize it, to enter his future life, is enough money. In a sense, Frank has viscerally internalized the logic of capital. He lives each second as a resource, a commodity, to be consumed in production of his own future life. An ouroboros, he is worker and boss in one, clinging to the faith that he can resolve this contradiction by entering the imagined life his collage represents. His wager is that he can reclaim enough of his debt from society—to steal back enough of what was taken from him—to begin to actually live for once, perhaps for the first time, before his living death becomes a final mortality.
In one of the most singular touches of Frank’s collage, he has included images of death and skulls. Jessie wonders if he is deranged. As he tries to explain to her, what is good about life— and what is denied one in prison—is one’s capacity to die right: “Inside you are on ice from time. You can't even die right. Out here: people grow. Get old. Die. Children come after. It’s just a cycle.” To die in a way that allows you to become part of other people, to be redistributed and absorbed into other generations and their imaginations, memories, dreams: this is what Frank knows he and others crushed by the system have been denied. In place of the false death of alienated time to which he has been sentenced, he seeks to steal his way into eternity through a paradoxical internalization and destruction of the logic of capital.
In the film’s central diner scene, Frank bares all of this to Jessie in the only way he knows how. It is blunt and hurried, and slightly insane, but Caan imbues Frank with an almost unbearable soulfulness2. He wants Jessie to agree to join him in his collage world, to become his wife, and to trust that the life of thieving will end. She is rightly afraid. Having escaped a terrible situation in her past, she resists another entanglement. Further, she is afraid of entering the despair of his inner contradiction—his self-exploitation in the service of a dream he believes is real. In his final plea, he tells her, “Look, I have run out of time. I have lost it…all. So I can’t…I can't work fast enough to catch up. The only thing that catches me up is doing my Magic Act. But it ends. It will end. When I got this, right here [pointing at the collage], it ends. It’s over.” He explains that he has a way of accelerating things, and that the dream will arrive sooner than later. Before they part that night, she agrees.
Frank describes what he is doing as a Magic Act. Put differently, he is pursuing the alchemical transformation of alienation’s lead. The material objects around him in this dead world are made less real by comparison: industrial strength steel safes and complex security mechanisms are almost unreal to him, illusions, and he deals with them as if by magic. He lives beyond himself, beyond the real. Just as commodities transform consciousness and reality by concealing the history and conditions of their production, so Frank believes he can transform his own devalued reality and cancel his own history. His aim is nothing less than to refurbish the discarded commodity of his own self and extract from it the alchemical gold of self-created autonomy under capital: to become the living fruit of his own labor. No outstanding debts. No history. On a purely individual level, Frank seeks to negate the negation of his own life.
3.
The paradox and ultimate tragedy for Frank is that all of his energy—the fire beneath the alembic—was born from and sustained by this very alienation. His desperation is his super-power, and as he tells Jessie, he achieved a sort of negative transcendence in prison by ceasing to care if he lived or died. But as he draws closer to his dreamed reality—having actually found the wife who was once only a figure in his collage—his flame of alienated intensity begins to falter. As Mann stated to The Ringer, Frank has begun to lose his edge: “Why is he vulnerable and weak? Because he had nothing, now they have something. And when he has something that has meaning, it could be threatened to be taken away from him and so that weakens him. . . . [He has] tremendous power [only] when [he has] absolutely nothing.”
In this weakened state, Frank agrees to a deal with Leo, a crime boss who has offered to cut him in on high-value heists. Leo had made the offer prior to the diner scene with Jessie, and Frank had been ambivalent; however, in his struggle to persuade Jessie, he realizes that he needs Leo and his promise of more money faster: no Leo, no Jessie. Immediately after their discussion he calls Leo to tell him the deal is on. It is a fatal choice. Only after the film’s central heist, arranged by Leo, does his true form become clear to Frank. Of the $850k Frank was promised for dangerous, nearly inhuman work, Leo delivers only 10% and invests the rest in a business venture Frank had already passed on. It is effectively a return to his prison sentence: a guarantee that his alienation will never end, and he will always be stuck with the deadness of an exploited present—with lead.
The exchange that ensues across multiple scenes is central to the film’s anti-capitalist argument. While in Leo’s house, in the immediate realization that he’d been taken, Frank responds to Leo’s overtures with absolute coldness and conviction: “You are making big profits from my work, my risk, my sweat. But that is okay, because I elected to make that deal. But now, the deal is over. I want my end, and I am out.” Crucially, Frank’s explanation is given in terms of labor: he believes he freely entered a contract, but now he finds that the conditions of his very life had been contracted. Dismissing his complaint, Leo quips, “Why don't you join a labor union.” Frank retorts that his union is the gun he carries—a sign of Frank’s blend of class consciousness and anti-sociality. Frank demands his full payment in 24 hours and leaves.
That evening, in retaliation, Leo murders Frank’s partner (Barry, played by Jim Belushi). Then, while Frank watches, he throws Barry’s corpse in a vat of acid. Looking down at Frank where he lies on the floor, surrounded by his enemies, Leo gives gives full voice to the claims of capitalist power:3
“You got a home, car, businesses, family, and I own the paper on your whole fucking life. . . . Your kid is mine because I bought him. You got him on loan, he is leased, you are renting him4. I'll whack out your whole family. People'll be eating 'em in their lunch tomorrow in their Wimpyburgers not knowing it. You get paid what I say. You do what I say, I run you, there is no discussion. . . Get back to work, Frank.”
Ultimately, Frank is a worker, and like all workers, his life is under a contract whose terms he is absolutely not free to choose. He is told that he may live only if he consents to the piecemeal destruction of his soul. To live, he must create value for another. And for Frank, this kind of life is precisely the death he has warred against for the entire film.
4.
All repressive violence begins with the destruction of dreams. Frank knew intimately the capacity to dream is the capacity to live5—the capacity to experience time as something other than theft, loss, a sentence. Having lost everything he could imagine in prison, he works out in his collage the conditions for a life in which he could actually live again: a dream of a time in which dreams reciprocally shape reality. A time in which one’s death becomes part of something more: something created freely by those who, in turn, continue the dream. He carries his collage with him everywhere, letting it guide him toward that life. But in the end, he simply crumples it all up, throws it away. A dream dead on the asphalt.
Frank’s last act is one of absolute negation. He begins by sending his wife and child away with money and a body guard, refusing to explain anything to them. He is utterly cold and dead in his final talk with Jessie: the dream is over, it would never arrive—and so, to him, their life was never real. All he can do is separate himself, a final alienation, thereby saving the lives of both her and their child. With his family secure, he proceeds to blow up his businesses and his home. He sets fire to the cars on his lot, and bombs the bar he uses as a front. And then, breaking into Leo’s home, he murders Leo and his men (a maid looks on without alarm or intervention, and Frank does not harm her). Although he is shot, we discover he is wearing a Kevlar vest. And as he walks down the sidewalk into the night, the camera pulls back, lifting upward to view him from behind tree branches—one last glimpse of organic life. We have no idea what is next. But there is no next. It’s over.
Frank enacts a one-man revolution—that is to say, no true revolution at all. In a sense, Leo was right: what Frank needs is a labor union—at the very least, he needed people. He had Okla and Barry, but he lost them both. He had other underworld contacts and associates, but their solidarity was only as strong as their ability to evade arrest or reprisals from others. This is the alienated world Frank knew: the damaged life he sought to distill his golden future within. In Frank, we see the limits of individualism in response to class violence—and we see the despair of having no other viable option besides individualism. We see how an individual can be torqued into a demon of internalized labor time dreaming of its future payback. We see the crux of the neoliberal subject.
This becomes all the more desperate when read within 1981, when Reagan was preparing to wage brutal class warfare: when the vulnerable were being pressed into enclaves of individual survival, compromise, deal-cutting; when unions were decimated, and solidarity was severed. Leo will say to Frank, outright and plain, everything that Reagan stood for and concealed under “decency”: “Get back to work, you pitiful fuck, and be grateful. I own your entire life.” We see all this, and the moment of Frank’s revenge crystallizes in the same historical alembic as Hinckley’s revolver. It is a jagged, composite revelation of one possible exit from the nightmare, tragically closing over as soon as it was perceived.
Unlike Hinckley—who served his time and now tweets, releases his newest singles on Spotify, and sells his paintings on eBay—Frank’s ending is a mythical, alchemical act of total decomposition: a reduction to undifferentiated matter, a putrefaction and extinction of identity. It is not something a life can do: only imagination can make this anything other than death. It is the final movement of Frank’s “magic act.” He has become himself an object like his collage: a talisman of dreams, yes, but dreams that have died. Frank tears the value form apart to walk not into revolution, but into an endless past. His is an image of the psycho-material violence of commodified time, of waking up again and again into a stolen life. And it is a prophetic nightmare of the 1980s: to find the exit closed, the shot missed; to reach catharsis in reclaiming the dead dream from its killers—and throwing it into the void.
Thief is an act of imaginative witness. It is a counter-myth for an era whose myths continue to eat reality alive. In this myth, we encounter a soulfulness as well as a despair that are absolutely real, and which belong to our lives and our history, but which too often sink beneath the surface of our dailiness. After all it’s only a movie, only a song, only a poem. But the psychic intensities these works can disclose are the actual roots of our lives. There is so much energy in them, and they asks to be witnessed and recognized as part of the story, as part of our politics. This is the work of imagination—the psycho-material “magic act” of art.
Travis Bickle served in Vietnam and is absolutely suffering from PTSD. As I discuss later in this essay, Thief’s protagonist, Frank, was raised by the state and spent over a decade in prison. Thus, both Travis and Frank were exposed to unspeakable violence—the violence to uphold imperial capitalist power—and their alienation is a direct consequence of this.
Though I don’t assess the performances much in this essay, I think Caan’s performance is one of the greatest of its era. He makes choices that render Frank a soulful and quasi-mythic figure without sacrificing rawness or realism. Total virtuosity.
Leo’s diatribe is also filled with vile, racist language that reveals the unabashed white supremacy he represents. However, I’ve edited this language out of the excerpt for the sake of sensitivity.
When Jessie was unable to conceive, and Frank was denied adoption due to his stats as an ex-con, Leo secures a child for them on the black market.
If this sounds slightly romantic, keep in mind that deprivation of REM sleep will literally drive a person insane and can be lethal. Torturers know this.