The Unfortunate Naming of Money Heist
…and the great offense I take to it.
Bella ciao.
The song that was so carefully and so beautifully chosen to highlight what this show was going to be about. This was why this song was made the anthem, an icon of a show that peaked in popularity just as the world’s people had to withdraw to their homes turn balconies into stages. Here I am going to restrict what I say to strictly the original streaming of the show — the first two “parts”. Titled La Casa de Papel in Spanish, I take great offence to the rebranding of this show as “Money Heist”.
Google the name of this show and you will see what a global phenomenon it has become. I’m guessing all shows are going through a patch greener than they would have hoped, what with the world-wide lockdown forcing everyone to stay at home. And this show is not perfect, there are several clichés despite their desperate attempts to swerve far away from any, several of the twists are predictable and some are agonisingly hinted at by the narrator Tokio. By the end, no matter what side you took the story could not have ended entirely happily for you — the many heart-wrenching casualties that it left on the way. Perhaps the single most powerful thing about the heist here was that all the casualties that will break your heart are the robbers themselves. Oslo. Moscow. Berlin. It hurt.
If this was another show where there is a genius with a plan who is always one step ahead of the police and manages to divert them at every step by hook or by crook, the villains would have won by episode three. What makes this special is that throughout the entire heist, the “villains” commit not one murder. And why is this, you ask? The reason for this is the purported reason for this heist. You see, our mastermind Salva is an idealist. A genius, but an idealist. No one said the two could not go hand in hand. There is only one golden rule that he has laid down — no deaths. And the reason for this is perhaps the single most important element in this show and one the title of it completely ruins.
You see, at every step, his ideas, his plans, as intelligent and mentally satisfying as they are, stem not from a place of wanting to prove themselves or even make the money — as one would expect is central in a heist — but to resist. Two of our main characters have lost someone in a heist. Their nearest and their dearest. They know all too well about the burns you can get when you play with fire. And they don’t play with fire to have fun. For one of them, Tokio, I will not speak. There is little engagement with her character, mainly because I think there is not much to her character. Tokio is a woman broken by life. Having lost her boyfriend in a heist of her planning, she believes she killed him. Her mother tried to turn her in, didn’t succeed and the Professor, our man Sergio, rescued her. Her mother died not soon after. Two deaths. A woman with a well-acknowledged “short fuse” and an uncontrollable urge to shout and run away. So, to be honest, I don’t know why she played with fire. Mainly because she has nothing else to do and nowhere else to go, I think. But also because she likes it a little. The other man in question, the brains behind this heist — for him the heist was only the face of something deeper. Something for the people to see, an escape ticket to use to get away after they did.
The rather unsophisticated name ‘Money Heist’ also completely ignores another perspective on this show — one that is not as obvious or happening as the ever-tumultuous plot, but is important all the same. There is a very specific reason our atracadores go through great trouble to steal from the Mint: the idea that the money that they’re stealing is “no-one’s money”. There may even be a follow-up question to be asked here of how much they must truly believe that, and how much of it is to justify to themselves what is nothing more than dirty robbery. In the later seasons, the show seems to lean more into this question when it shows our OG robber squad playing Robin Hood and raining money on the city of Madrid from a grand blimp only when they need a big enough distraction to suit their agenda, begging the question of how much money and power only change the source and direction of manipulation, without really making a difference to the people being manipulated and used. Regardless, this theme is undeniably the defining point of the show, particularly in the first two parts. It is a theme the writers repeatedly come back to, a point that all the imagery relentlessly points to, and a point that a name as materialistic and terribly one-dimensional as “Money Heist” absolutely squelches into the dirt.
I’m trying not to spoil the show for any potential viewers so I will refrain from going into the details but I will say this: something emphatic happens in the final episode. Fairly central to the theme of the entire show, very important plot point (don’t miss it). The lyrics of the part of Bella Ciao that begins to play at that point isn’t about the fight or the struggle but literally translate to ‘and if I die [in the resistance] then bury me in the mountain so that people will walk by and say, oh, what a beautiful flower’. That’s why I think it’s only fair to say that this show was not meant to be about the heist — not at all. The heist is used just as a vehicle to carry a bigger story here. Featured in Jerry Silverman’s ‘Songs that Made History Around the World’, Bella Ciao is no ordinary song. This song that suddenly found itself the anthem of a gen-Z Netflix show is in reality a 150-year-old song about resisting and finding beauty even in destruction — all in the name of resistance and emancipation. An anthem of Italian anti-fascist resistance, over the years a hymn of freedom. So, you see, this central song of this show has very little to do with a “heist”, a robbery, and has a lot to do with the idea of resisting at any cost. A middle finger to the establishment and its immunity cards by the people in the red workman’s suit and Dalí masks. “Goodbye, beautiful bureaucracy, it is time for the resistance”, say the robbers. Whether they were delirious, self-obsessed, desperate, hypocrites or true statues of resistance is a question for another day. But one cannot ignore that this was always meant to be the central idea of this show. This is not a heist show, there is a lot more that is offered to the viewer — many more subtleties to explore, so much fun to be had.
While this show has many vices, when I was watching it the the idea I got was that its biggest virtue never got the limelight in this part of the world because of the name that sounds like a 9-year-old’s dream action movie. The original name La Casa de Papel, which translates to ‘The House of Paper’, does a lot better job of capturing some of the ideas on display here. What was the Mint, or as they keep calling it the “fabrica” (factory), if not a giant house printing pieces of paper — essentially a factory of money. Turning meaningless paper into something that has the potential to make or break lives. Circling back to the idea of stealing “no-one’s money”, this could even be extended to raise questions pertaining to the nature of money itself. What is money? What is society? What makes paper into money? (Probably worth mentioning at this point that the workman’s suits that are heavily used in this show are red so these questions are inevitable.) Who are the bad guys? This requires a complementary determination of who the good guys are. Where does the line get drawn? What makes one team good? Is it because you’re told they’re good? Based on what your answer is, do you draw this distinction because of an idea given by years of internalised bureaucratic righteousness or, on the other side of the spectrum, due to motivated cinematic intent?
You don’t exactly get these questions from the name ‘Money Heist’, no?
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[Note: I wrote this little piece in the summer of 2020 when I watched Money Heist for the first time and it’s been lying in my drafts ever since. Now that they’ve announced the next (and last) season I thought I would let this go out into the interwebs. In the year that has since passed, I learnt more about the real “heist of the century” (verdadero robo del siglo): the Buenos Aires Bank Heist that this show seems to be largely based on. I may write more on that later.]
