It feels particularly ironic to begin a column that is concerned with deconstructing cliched maxims with a kind of aphorism, but certainly, in my experience, it seems that humans enjoy settling into camps. Groups. Sides of coins. For ‘Us’ to exist, there must be a ‘Them.’ Whether socially or politically, we often define what we are by what we are not. Such distinctions – or preoccupations with the negative space of our selfhood – extend into art and current affairs, as we bracket off a ‘high-brow’ culture from its ‘low-brow’ counterpoint. My interest, then, is in that messy, fertile, comedic ground in which the two intersect; for the zeitgeist, that slippery, abstract thing which purports to being a kind of spirit or mood of our time, made up of God-knows-what, coheres to no such boundaries. Think Gen Z protest culture, podcast fatigue, the politics of Snapmaps, the Plush renaissance – think Eduroam angst and the end of a reading culture – think Lily Allen and the Louvre. 

If we are to recover anything from writing, and chatting, and exchanging information (because essentially this column is the equivalent of being cornered at pres – and no, you can’t escape and grab a drink), then let it be our sense of humour, or our ability to take life and ourselves less seriously. When contemplating a title for this column, I floated the name ‘Laughter in the Dark,’ the title of a Nabokov novel. Despite having decided against all-out plagiarism, the phrase still seems apt as a kind of prologue for writing. For, in ridiculous, obscene, and almost profanely turbulent times, it seems to me that humour is our best recourse – else we are overcome entirely. It’s all just laughter in the dark. 

In the spirit of laughter, then, and darkness, let’s talk Louvre heist, shall we? Darkness here is a misleading term – for surely the most delicious aspect of the whole saga is the fact that it took place in broad daylight. You can almost hear the mellifluous, money-softened laughter of Hollywood’s various executives as the news broke: 

‘They escaped on… Sscooters? In the middle of the afternoon? Get Leo on the phone.’

Visions of box-office busting figures indeed – ah, sweet reverie. But who will take on this mammoth project? Spielberg? Picture the scene: a Louvre gift-shop mug quivers. The camera cuts to Harrison Ford (perhaps cryogenically frozen if the project drags on, though what with the sheer volume of Botox floating around Hollywood, 2.5- 3 milligrams should achieve the same effect). But wait! Wes Anderson steps up to the plate. The Louvre’s glass pyramid is rendered in beautifully saturated symmetry – Owen Wilson’s profile enters view as the camera guides us to the rear mirror of his escape vehicle – the Voi scooter takes centre stage, in an unprecedented moment of PR. We hear the dulcet tones of Lou Reed as Adrian Brody places a pair of tinted spectacles on his wonderful nose, no doubt spitting his gum at some poor lackey off-screen. In saffron print, a caption unfolds across the screen: 

Part One: The Heist. 

Scratch that; ignore it all entirely. A Hans Zimmer score rises in the background; there is darkness, and then light, and then, somehow, a plot that no one quite understands, but we all pretend to anyway. Yes, you guessed it: Christopher Nolan (or ‘Chris’ to his friends, and that especially unbearable brand of film nerd) has wrested control of the whole enterprise. Roll on award season! Following the roaring success of Nolan’s project, Sofia Coppola directs a moody biopic about the Louvre director’s wife. And, if all else fails, Quentin Tarantino will have a crack at it, ensuring that, of course, the plotters are barefoot throughout (for what says ‘heist’ more than a five-minute sequence of Uma Thurman’s twitching toes á la Kill Bill?) 

Perhaps, by now, you have landed on my real point – that is, if you haven’t been deterred by my roundabout digression through Letterboxd. Are we living in an age in which the director as an individual is more prominent than the picture itself? And, if the director has assumed an unusual celebrity status, what are the problems of the director-as-personality? I would argue that when we exalt the director as a kind of demi-god, we risk exacerbating the danger of self-parody. We only need compare the success of Wes Anderson’s early works –The Isle of Dogs, the Darjeeling Limited, the Royal Tenenbaums, Fantastic Mr. Fox– to his mature output – The French Dispatch, Asteroid City, the Phoenician Scheme – to observe a kind of trend in which the director almost appears to caricature himself, as if someone had fed his early oeuvre to ChatGPT and demanded that it generate a film based on his style. Perhaps it’s unfair to take Wes Anderson as our anecdotal evidence for this shift; after all, Anderson is particularly prominent as a director who is as much concerned with style as substance. 

Yet a parallel occurs to me, between a changing sense of authorship in the medieval period and a shifting model of directorship in the twenty-first century. In the early Middle Ages, the status of the author was a negligible concern; scripture, after all, was issued directly from the mouth of God, so what did it matter about the identity of its human mediator? Over the course of the thirteenth-century, however, focus shifted onto the human identity of the author as an individual craftsman rather than neutral conduit of the divine. In the mid-twentieth century, film theorists proposed a similar idea: the ‘politique des auteurs’ suggested that the director should imprint their personal vision upon the film in spite of the collaborative nature of the filmmaking process. Though such ideas of auteur-hood have been floated since the 1950s, I would argue that the theory has only been realised fully in the aftermath of social media and the televised press tour. For, the name of the filmmaker as a kind of deified puppet-master assumes greater significance when we receive a face, and a pontificating soliloquy about their ‘vision’ during a press junket on Graham Norton’s sofa, to match. 

All this is to say, then, that as in all areas of life, social media has changed the game. Directors are stars in their own right; Louvre heists are Oscar-bait; we are all in danger of becoming parodies of ourselves. In the face of inflated egos and our general ridiculousness, it is only right that we poke fun. In fact, I’m thinking about working on a screenplay… about a Parisian jewellery heist… thoughts?