“Man, how exciting!”

Big-time heists like the Paris job occupy a special place in the public imagination. They aren’t like ordinary crimes, which are dreary and depressing. Novels, movies and TV shows have trained us to believe a good caper is thrilling, even admirable. We think we know the vocabulary and visual terrain, from the dashing perp (Cary Grant in Hitchcock’s “To Catch a Thief” is your go-to guy here) to the shocked-and-outraged victim to the feckless investigators.

That sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Comments are closed.