Grim Liberation: Class, Cooperation, and Utopia in Michael Mann’s <i>Thief</i> (1981)

Where it is typical for the heist film to represent the heist as a collective labor process, it is also typical for these films to end with the undoing of the collective for moral reasons. Michael Mann’s 1981 Thief revises this tendency to propose that it is not an inherent human incapacity to work collectively that undermines the success of the collective and its utopian implications, but rather, the persistence of capitalist class relations. The film’s insistence on the perseverance of capitalist class relations in 1981was a striking intervention.As the process of deindustrialization transformed work relations in America, some came to feel that the working class was “disappearing”. Others sought to show that the American working class was not disappearing but was nonetheless undergoing a transformation of class composition: Thief reflects on this transformation in class composition through its focus on a vulnerable and indebted protagonist, through an allegory of the capitalist’s co-optationof the collective workers’ capacities, and through its bombastic conclusion, which reminds us of the important role that of class struggle plays in historical change.