Economics of 'Money Heist': Cheer for the looters, but mind the anarchist doodle

'Money Heist' has grown to be more than a show. The red costumes and Salvador Dali masks used by its robbers have been worn in carnivals and protest marches from Rio de Janeiro to Riyadh. (Illustration by Suneesh K.)

Like millions of people around the world, I have stayed up nights in the last four years and binge-watched each season of Money Heist on Netflix and then waited impatiently for the next one. The Spanish series is one of the biggest Netflix hits ever. In the first few weeks after Season 5 dropped on October 1, 67 million Netflix members—one in every three subscribers—watched the show. And the actual viewership number would be higher, because many subscribers would have been watching with family or friends.

In fact, Money Heist has grown to be more than a show. The red costumes and Salvador Dali masks used by its robbers have been worn in carnivals and protest marches from Rio de Janeiro to Riyadh. The Dali mask is now a trademark of rebellion for hackers.

But now that the second story of the show is over—technically Part 2 of Season 5, which dropped last fortnight—it may be time to reflect a bit on what this extraordinarily popular series represents.

I have been careful to avoid any spoilers about this last part of the show.

For those unfamiliar with Money Heist, it deals with a bunch of bank robbers led by a genius known as ‘The Professor’. In the first story (Seasons 1 and 2), they enter the Royal Mint of Spain, take hostages, print about a billion new euros and escape with the loot. In the second (Seasons 3-5), they hit the Bank of Spain and aim to make off with the country’s gold reserves—about 90 tonnes of the metal, worth 4 billion euros.

The show is marked by fiendish plotting, with the Professor’s meticulous plan anticipating almost every move that the police and army could make to foil the heist. There are shootouts and deaths, but the real thrill for the audience is the battle of wits between the Professor and the security forces. There are unexpected twists, and it’s all edge-of-the-seat stuff.

But then, heist movies are nothing new, not even great heist movies. What explains Money Heist’s extraordinary popularity? Even after discounting for the fact that Netflix has dubbed Money Heist in dozens of languages (including Hindi, Tamil and Telugu), making it easily accessible to audiences world over, the show is many times more successful than say Ocean’s Eleven (or Ocean’s Twelve), which has an equally clever plot and features global stars like George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts and Matt Damon.

The key to Money Heist’s success is that it presents the robberies as ideological acts more than criminal. Its recurrent theme song is Bella Ciao, the anthem of the Italian partisans who fought Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime and the Nazi army. The common people of Spain are shown to be supporting the robbers and the core idea seems to be that governments deserve to be looted by citizens. In Ocean’s Eleven, the robbers steal from a rich thug. There is no ideological or moral question involved; it’s just fun.

Money Heist’s message resonates with the frustration that lies deep in the hearts of a majority of humanity. So we cheer for the looters.

And this is where the problem with Money Heist lies.

First, the show’s economics. In the first story, where the robbers take over the Spanish mint to print currency, in a key scene, the Professor says: “But (you think) what we’re doing is okay…when other people do it. In 2011, the European Central Bank made 171 billion euros out of nowhere… just like we are doing, only bigger. 185 billion in 2012. 145 billion euros in 2013. Do you know where all that money went? To the banks. Directly from the factory to the pockets of the rich. Did anyone call the European Central Bank a thief? ‘Liquidity injections,’ they called it. And they pulled it out of nowhere…Out of nowhere.”

The Professor is referring to the Western central banks’ “quantitative easing” to tackle the financial meltdown of 2008-09, and his explanation is a sort of anarchist doodle of a complex engineering drawing. But even if we leave that aside, all currency anyway is essentially a promissory note backed by a pledge from the issuer. Yet if it is really “pulled out of nowhere”, as the Professor claims, it would rapidly lose value. Like the hyperinflation that is plaguing Venezuela. The show’s creators are merely pandering to our inherent suspicion of government to justify the Professor’s theft, which is—just a theft.

In the second story, the Professor cleans out Spain’s gold reserves, which would of course drive the country immediately into economic and societal chaos. And such chaos always hurts the poor more than the rich.

Ironically, the gold reserves make sure that a currency is not “pulled out of nowhere”. What exactly does the Professor want—a return to the barter system?

In valid realistic terms, the Professor is a crazed terrorist.

And having enslaved the hostages—innocent common citizens for whom the Professor’s idealistic heart presumably bleeds—and repeatedly putting their lives in danger, why don’t the robbers share with them some of the stolen money and gold?

To paint these people as answering to some higher calling, as revolutionaries fighting for justice against some abstract “system”, is lowest-common-denominator populism.

The heroic-robber conceit fails in other ways too. Berlin, the man in charge of the siege of the mint, rapes one of the hostages and probably causes her death. But in the second story, where he appears only in flashbacks, the showrunners take great pains to convince us that he is a noble adventurer.

Palermo in the second story betrays his team and helps a vicious security guard escape. This directly leads to the deaths of two team members. But Palermo is forgiven and it’s again one happy family.

In both stories, The pointspersons of the police force are women. Both change their allegiances to join the robbers. In the first story, the Professor, under an assumed name, seduces Raquel while the siege is on, preying on her vulnerabilities—she has to look after an aged mother and a little daughter and fend off an abusive ex-husband. Yet, Raquel finally decides that the robbers serve a higher cause than any government and joins the gang.

In the second story, Alicia is an brutal officer who tortures one of the robbers for months. She blackmails another into exposing herself after holding her daughter hostage. And promptly gets her shot by a sniper. When Alicia’s methods are leaked to the public, and the “unjust” government slaps criminal charges on her, she goes on the run and joins the Professor. Again, all is forgiven because she now hates the government.

I could go on. The core problem with Money Heist is that it is a heist film that wants to take a moral high ground. But it provides no coherent sense of justice, because it’s all clever and manipulative pretence.

Manipulation is integral to popular cinema. But it is useful to recognise it for what it is, once the tears have dried and the adrenaline rush ebbed.

Money Heist is possibly as gripping a crime thriller as any ever made. But while binge-watching the show, we must not take its virtue-signalling too seriously.