Theatrical Louvre heist sparks viral frenzy

The details make it sound like a work of fiction.

Thieves made off with $100-million worth of precious French crown jewels — pieces that once belonged to Queen Marie-Amélie, Queen Hortense and Empress Eugénie — from the Louvre in Paris, the world’s most visited museum. It happened on a Sunday morning, in broad daylight. The caper took seven minutes from start to finish. They left on mopeds. And an institution that should be virtually impenetrable was, alas, penetrated.

I can see the slick, Steven Soderbergh-style split-screen montage now.

The Louvre Heist has gone absolutely viral. It inspired Halloween costumes. It’s been rich terrain for memes, as well as comedy TikToks and Instagram Reels; I saw one parodying a haul video, a popular genre in which influencers show off what they’ve bought (or, in this case, stolen) to their followers.

Media outlets are publishing listicles of the Top 10 heist movies and books. The Louvre Heist Is Terrific read a headline in the Atlantic.

IKEA Switzerland made a cheeky little ad about it for a glass dome: “Won’t protect your crown jewels either… but it will give them the right spotlight.”

I’ve seen the Louvre Heist described as both “literary” and “Animaniacs,” and both are correct. It is the stuff of a classic novel and a slapstick Warner Bros. cartoon. I bet there’s a Netflix documentary already in development.

This is all a bit weird, right? There is a conspicuous lack of pearl-clutching re: the Louvre Heist, which has clearly captured people’s imaginations in a big way.

But why? Here are a few theories:

One, successful heists at this scale scratch a particular itch. They are deeply satisfying, the nexus of precision planning and deft execution (although the Louvre crew made some mistakes). This wasn’t some convenience-store smash-and-grab; this took thought. This is highbrow.

But heists are also just exciting, which is why there are so many films about them. The stakes are high, and the thrill lives in the very real possibility of being caught — we want to see if the thieves can not only pull off their elaborate caper, but actually get away with it.

Think about any heist movie. The thieves are almost always the protagonists, which also puts you in the dizzying position of rooting for criminals.

“Heist movies are Robin Hood fantasies where hypercompetent thieves take on powerful institutions that loom over our moral lives,” writes John DeVore at MSNBC. “They cut across cultural and political lines because everyone’s been screwed over by a bank, or an insurance company, or, if you’re a formerly colonized country, a Western empire.”

Real quick: are you picturing Robin Hood as a handsome fox? (You’ve thought it, I’ve thought it, we’ve all thought it.) I very much doubt these thieves were robbing the Louvre to feed the poor or repatriate precious stones, but yes, they could be perceived as little guys — right down to their blue-collar construction getups — sticking it to a big, influential institution that displays jewels symbolizing hoarded wealth, power and colonization.

Two, the Louvre Heist could become an amusing pop culture moment because it was a largely victimless crime in that no one was murdered or kidnapped or held hostage or robbed at gunpoint. To quote Caity Weaver, who wrote the Atlantic article: “How nice to read about a heist rather than a massacre.”

How nice, indeed. A museum heist seems… refreshing? quaint? old-fashioned?… in comparison with other entries in the never-ending parade of horrors constantly being burned into our brains by our phones. It’s hard to get particularly apoplectic about the theft of the unethically sourced jewels once belonging to Napoleon’s second wife when the world is on fire.

Three, people love gossip and the Louvre Heist story is gossipy. “Did you hear they dropped a crown?” “I heard they stopped at a red light after they fled.” And what was stolen wasn’t just jewels, but history — and what is history if not gossip that’s been written down or passed along orally or evoked by objects poorly secured at the Louvre?

Finally, people romanticize everything French people do, from wearing stripes to smoking to embodying “effortless French-girl beauty” to robbing a museum with a cherry picker and a dream.

People are entertained by the Louvre Heist because it’s, well, entertaining. But the reaction to it is also a comment on how truly anything can be made into content. Any crime, any news story — it’s all grist for the mill.

Despite its Hollywood details, the Louvre Heist is a real thing that really happened. And yet, it starts to take on an unreal quality the more it’s parodied, satirized, debated, discussed, etc.

I feel the same way about all those murder podcasts, an extremely lucrative genre that essentially takes grisly news stories of yore and repackages them as entertainment. Real things that really happened, giggled over by hosts giving you promo codes for mattresses in boxes.

Someone being murdered by a serial killer is not the same as a museum robbery, so I am not admonishing The Great Mupper Caper memes about the Louvre. But the memes exist in the same feed as the news stories, the podcasts, the comedy reels.

And in the great infinite scroll, the lines between fiction and reality, satire and sincerity, get ever more blurred, in a world where it’s already getting harder and harder to tell the difference.

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca