Shoplifters Of The World Unite
For nine months now, I’ve been telling people about what I describe as “an objectively perfect movie”, one I’ve now seen four times since finally streaming it in January. It’d been sitting on my Letterboxd watchlist for at least a couple of years, and I only can assume I stumbled upon it happenstantially while browsing Hoopla or Kanopy. It took just one viewing to go directly into my self-care rotation.
I’ll disclose this up front: its critic score on Rotten Tomatoes is a mere 43%; its audience score not much better at 69%. I couldn’t tell you why, because I’ve never read a single review or comment. It’s objectively perfect, and everyone else is wrong.
Let’s talk a little bit, then, about the unsung gem that is 2021’s Shoplifters of the World, a movie I assume nobody likes because, like The Smiths themselves, it’s a thing that is decidedly earnest, and earnest is something we never, ever can be allowed to be.
I should note here that I’m not a fan of The Smiths. By which I do not mean that I hate them, or even that I don’t like their music, but only to say that I don’t really know much about the band itself, and what of their music I know basically is whatever would have been in rotation back in the day. The songs that everyone knows.
That’s okay, though, because the single most important thing to know about Shoplifters is that it’s not actually about The Smiths. I mean, it is, but it isn’t. It’s not even about fans of The Smiths. I mean, it is, but it isn’t.
(Point of personal privilege: every time I’ve watched the movie, there’s one moment in particular where I swear I’m looking at downtown Troy, New York, and I mean I’m damned certain. So it was with some small glee that I read in the above-linked article that there was no budget to film on location in Denver due to the music licensing, and indeed they filmed in and around the Capital District, where I grew up.)
Spoilers ahead. This post is meant for people who’ve watched the movie because I keep talking about it, and want to know what, exactly, it is that I see in it. If you’re pretty committed not to seeing it, then by all means read on. I’d just prefer that if you do intend to watch it, that you stop here and come back after you have. Also, do not watch the trailer. It’s basically a synopsis of the entire movie.
Shoplifters is a love story, but not the titular one of Dean and Cleo which bookends the movie. It’s not a love story in the sense of romantic or sexual love, although it has both of these things. It’s a story about what we might call humanistic love: a story about the need to see and be seen. That love story is told through Shoplifter’s spinal arc: Dean, a disaffected fan of The Smiths, hijacks a Denver radio station during its late-night metal show, at gunpoint, the day the band broke up.
The funny thing about Shoplifters is that the protagonist of the movie, or the hero at any rate, isn’t any of the four world-weary Smiths fans making their way around a haphazard Denver nightlife. Each and every one of them—Cleo, Billy, Sheila, and Patrick—are important in and of themselves, but also and perhaps more so as facets of what’s happening back at the radio station.
Oh. No, the hero isn’t Dean.
The hero of Shoplifters of the World is the radio station’s metalhead disk jockey, Full Metal Mickey, who makes it very clear that he hates The Smiths.
Dean takes Mickey hostage in part to impress his unrequited crush (Cleo) by doing something dramatic on the day The Smiths ended, but the core of that act simply is a desire to be seen. Over the course of this hostage story, Dean and Mickey begin to see each other as something other than, and deeper than, their first impressions: Dean as obsessive hooligan, Mickey as cheesy burnout.
By the time we are deep into the hijacking, there comes a moment where Dean puts the gun down, and even wanders over to look at a shelf of CDs. Mickey takes note, but does absolutely nothing. In fact, at one point he expressly tells Dean that he’s “really glad you came in tonight”. They’d bonded over vegetarianism, the New York Dolls, smoking pot, broken hearts—and in the end, yes, even music.
(On that last: the host of a party that, coincidentally, his friends are at, calls in to the station to support what Dean is doing. prompting him to note with something approaching both surprise and pride, “They’re listening, they’re really listening.” It’s more or less around this point that the hijack story begins to shift, and you get the impression that the fact that there are people out there responding to The Smiths marathon he’s being forced to play maybe is part of what makes Mickey take notice.)
After bonding with Dean over shared stories of heartbreak, Mickey tells his listeners “not to forget the songs that made you cry, or the songs that saved your lives”. This isn’t about songs, per se (although it is), except in the sense that anything that reveals us to ourselves transcends the mundane as a kind of poetry.
In that light, then, let’s take a quick look at the wandering quartet of Cleo, Billy, Sheila, and Patrick.
Patrick, long in a celibate relationship with Sheila, over the course of the night comes to realize that it’s not that he hates sex, it’s that he’s gay. Sheila (who at the start of the evening tells Patrick that “this night will open our eyes”) comes to realize that it’s okay that she actually wants sex, and okay if she and Patrick aren’t together anymore. (She nonetheless tells him that she’ll always be on his side.) Billy spends the night saying things his friends find peculiar which he then nervously brushes off, but to us it’s clear that he’s struggling with identity dysphoria and might, in fact, be trans, even if he doesn’t quite yet have the language.
Cleo is flailing over the breakup of The Smiths and talks a lot about how she wants out of town, out of her life that’s going nowhere, maybe to go to Paris to be with Bruno, the boy all of her friends know doesn’t actually exist (although it’s not until tonight that they come to tell her as much). It’s only really when Dean, at Mickey’s urging, dedicates a song to Cleo—“How Soon Is Now?”—that she realizes Dean was in part doing all of this to get her attention—more than anyone it’s by her that he wants to be seen—and that maybe there’s something in Denver for her after all.
Each and every one of them over the course of one night in Denver come to see themselves better, although not in all cases to see each other better. (No one, for example, ever really understands Billy’s deal, but at the same time, when he asks if he’s “one person or a hundred”, Patrick tells him he’s “only ever known one of you”. That’s still being seen, if incompletely.) All of this is just what’s also been happening between Dean and Mickey back at the radio station, as the movie’s soundtrack of The Smiths songs—diegetic and non-diegetic at one and the same time—echoes the inner and outer moments of the four.
This musical trick is what enables Dean essentially and effectivly to be scoring the night his friends are having elsewhere across town, and underscores (no pun) why I call the hostage story the movie’s “spinal arc”.
The Smiths, then, rather than being what the movie is about, are its cultural touchstone to make a point: that it’s okay to be earnest, and to be honest about who you are and how you see the world. We live in a society that somehow takes earnest to be cringe, when earnest and honest are the only things that really matter, and we should be grabbing onto whatever comes our way that helps us reveal ourselves to ourselves—and reveal us to others, who then hopefully will come not just to see us, but to find in turn a way to see themselves.
The things and the people that open our eyes to ourselves and to each other might, indeed, as Mickey says, go on to betray us. (This almost certainly is how the movie addresses the Morrissey of our present time despite being set in 1987.) Whatever we at one point found in those things and those people, however—whatever help those people and those things gave us—as Dean says, never can be taken away.
Mickey is the hero of Shoplifters of the World because he had every reason to take the first opportunity he had to be rid of Dean. A lone Denver cop shows up early on in response to complaints, and Mickey turns him away. The four friends are just that: friends. They might not always see each other or themselves, for who and what they are, but they also often very much do even if they never mentioned it until this night. Mickey? He’s a metalhead on the overnight shift who doesn’t need this shit. Except that he listens, and he sees, and he lets Dean have his moment to be seen and let others know that they, too, are seen.
It’s Mickey, after all, who is on the air as Dean surrenders to the police, telling the crowd that’s assembled outside the radio station, “Tonight two musical cultures reached across the divide to each other, and it seems that in these uncertain times of chaos and fear, a song can still save your life.”
Shoplifters of the World is a love story in the sense of fellow-feeling and mutual recognition, by finding a way to show ourselves to ourselves and to each other, openly and despite the nervousness and fear the world sets upon us instead. Maybe that’s romance of a kind after all.
The film opens proclaiming itself to be “based on true intentions”.
Back in 1988 a fan of The Smiths really did plan to hijack a radio station and force it to marathon the band. At the last minute, he instead surrendered while sitting in his car in the parking lot. Why? He really saw the people he was about to threaten, truly saw who and what that made him, and couldn’t go through with it. What happened afterward?
Having so seen others, having seen himself, and having been seen in return, everything changed.
We are human and we need to be seen.
Learn to love me
Assemble the ways
Now, today, tomorrow, and always