In Kelly Reichardt’s latest film, The Mastermind, the scheme of James Blaine “J. B.” Mooney (Josh O’Connor) to extract four Arthur Dove paintings from the Framingham Museum of Art gets off to a rather poor start. On the day of the heist, an October morning in 1970, class is out for a teacher’s workday, a fact Mooney, an unemployed carpenter, discovers when he arrives at the school with his two boys in tow. Forced to improvise, he deposits the children at a local bowling alley, near where he is to meet his getaway driver, anyway. Moments later this jumpy underling pulls up with the stolen wheels, fingers the envelope of cash Mooney hands him, and ducks into another suddenly appearing vehicle. “This is real shitty, man,” Mooney yells as the car backs away. “Real shitty!” 

After the robbery has begun in earnest, things don’t improve much. One of J. B.’s two henchmen flashes a gun at a schoolgirl in the museum, tussles with a security guard, and, once outside, pulls the weapon on the schoolgirl’s friends, whose car is blocking the circular driveway the crew needs to escape from. This loose cannon will, in a matter of days, be arrested for a bank robbery and rat Mooney out to the police. When the news hits the local paper, the last of Mooney’s partners demands a meet-up outside of town, where a crew of mobsters ambush the thief and toss him into their car. Wedged in the back, J. B. wears the fidgety, self-righteous air of a scolded child. “I don’t think you thought things through enough,” the thuggish driver offers as his colleagues, in the back of the frame, load the Doves into the trunk, fishing them out of the barn where Mooney has stowed them. An hour into the movie, the jig is already up.  

Reichardt’s finely plotted films, despite their slowness and open-endedness, are often gripping examples of genre as much as they are deconstructions of it; she works like a canny jazz soloist who, in order to play around the downbeat, must know exactly where it falls. In First Cow and Meek’s Cutoff, she subverts the white masculinist strain in the Western by centering, in the first film, a gentle cook and a Chinese immigrant who open a pop-up bakery in an 1820 mining town, and in the second, a strong-willed wife who misplaces her trust in a Native American captive her lost party of settlers has taken hostage. Wendy and Lucy, which follows a young woman from Indiana heading to Alaska to find work during the Great Recession, is a road-trip movie in which the car breaks down at the start of the film. River of Grass, the filmmaker’s debut, depicts the fugitive wanderings of a loser named Lee and a dissatisfied housewife, Cozy, who must go on the lam after they believe—incorrectly, it later turns out—they’ve shot and killed a man whose backyard pool they’ve crashed.

In The Mastermind, the droll speed with which Mooney’s plot is foiled is but one of the many ways Reichardt upends the conventions of the heist film. In contrast to the cat-burglar elegance that typify the genre, the Framingham rip is laughably clumsy, a near smash and grab. Fecklessness and betrayal have hollowed out the game camaraderie the band of criminals usually share. Most jarring of all, it’s never explicitly clear why J. B. hatches his boneheaded plot in the first place. 

One likely motive is boredom. The film opens with the art school dropout standing apart from his sons and wife as they tour the museum. He seems distracted and moments later lifts a figurine of a soldier from a glass cabinet, slipping it into his glasses case. At a deadening dinner with his parents, he is needled by his self-important father, a circuit county judge, for not having done as well as a peer named Kip, who runs his own outfit. Mooney asserts that Kip is an inferior carpenter and that he himself has no interest in being a manager. A few scenes later Mooney cons his mother out of the seed money for his criminal venture by pretending an architect has commissioned him to install Japanese-style cabinetry in a refurbished house in the tony end of town (he needs funds for a workspace and tools, he tells her). The cruel pretense seems a bitter commentary on the life that would be expected of him, or the one he might one day have to resign himself to. 

A material clue, though, is dropped later in the film. After ditching his wife and kids to evade the cops, Mooney holes up with an old buddy, Fred, and his partner, Maude, in their farmhouse in what is maybe upstate New York. Fred, like a fawning nephew, reads aloud from an article about Mooney, now a bona fide fugitive. “No more chipping away at the edges, huh?” he says. “This time you’ve blown it all up!” Maude is less charmed. Her glare could burn a hole through Mooney, and, in a late-night tête-à-tête, after J. B. has taken the last beer in the fridge, she commands him to leave. An intimate gesture seems to suggest the two had once slept together, and that Mooney might try to seduce her. But she isn’t having it. A Dove painting hung in the office of Professor Pruitt, Mooney’s thesis advisor in art school, Maude says. “He was your fence,” she asserts.  

O’Connor’s expression, faced with this accusation, is warmly, reflexively gaslight-y. Earlier in the film, the would-be getaway driver asks, “How exactly do the paintings get spun into cash?” “You keep asking me that,” Mooney says. “You keep not answering,” the driver replies. “Because . . . you don’t need to know,” Mooney says. A flit of concern sails through the fog of his self-satisfaction, like a small bird, and disappears again.  

Maude’s theory is never confirmed one way or another, and Pruitt never appears. Mooney does enjoy a full free day between the completion of the robbery and the appearance of law enforcement officers in his home, and he seems to be in no rush to contact anyone. On that afternoon, rather, after his wife and kids have cleared out, he hangs one of the paintings above the couch in his living room and admires it, with a look of spent labor, something even close to awe. Is he meant to resemble an artist gazing upon their finished work? Was something like this moment, this cosplaying as a creator, his reward? 

Reichardt grew up in Miami, with an undercover narcotics agent mother and a crime-scene technician father, and many of her films hinge on criminal acts. In Night Moves, ecoterrorists blow up the Peter Green Dam in Oregon, accidentally killing a man who was camping nearby. In Wendy and Lucy, Wendy is arrested and fatefully parted from her beloved dog after shoplifting pet food from a supermarket. The plucky bakers in First Cow illegally milk Chief Factor’s cow at night. And the outlaws of River of Grass, despite their initial misapprehension, end up committing a slew of petty crimes, and a last, fatal one; Lee lifts clothes from a laundromat and booze from a liquor store, and is later shot and killed by Cozy. 

Reichardt has cited as an influence Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” in which the science-fiction writer presents a narrative theory inspired by Elizabeth Fisher’s Women’s Creation. The ur-technological breakthrough of our species, Fisher wrote, was not a carved bone to bash an enemy’s head or an arrow to pierce their flesh, but a “recipient . . . some kind of sling or net,” a bag to hold berries, leaves, sprouts, and roots. Riffing on this idea, Le Guin presents a counter-metaphor for fiction. Stories, she contends, need not be akin to weapons and the heroic, linear conflicts in which they are put to use; they can, rather, resemble giant totes full of jumbled, jostling items. And if the story is a bag, the storyteller is the person who collects and curates what goes inside. 

For Le Guin, the myth of Prometheus is an exemplar of the opposing and dominant narrative template, that of a masculinist or tragic-heroic bent, the kind that centers the glory and tragedy of the hunt. Each metaphor—the Promethean and the carrier bag—suggests a distinct image for a criminal. In the first, the lawless figure is a fitting symbol for the artist, both being glamorous iconoclasts who run afoul of bourgeois norms and answer to their own audacious desires. And in many great crime films that tacitly adhere to the Promethean premise, the crook is, indeed, very cool, shot through with dark passions that run parallel to the director’s own. Michel, the anti-hero of Bresson’s Pickpocket, embodies a searching intensity that marks the film as a whole. The old-world manner and familial concerns of Don Corleone echo the chiaroscuro and drawing-room ensembles Coppola decorates The Godfather with. Goodfellas’s Henry Hill, addicted to the flashy lifestyle of the gangster, is a mirror for Scorsese, who harbors a parallel avidity for the sensuality of cinema itself.  

In The Mastermind, though, there is nothing remotely cool about being a criminal. I kept expecting Mooney’s luck to turn around, for him to flee the country or come back to his family, or to somehow recover the paintings, imagining the movie would make good on a tacit Promethean promise. But like Cervantes’ knight-errant, it’s all windmills for the poor bastard. After being banished by Maude, J. B. drifts among the boarding houses of Ohio, marked by kitschy cat art and views of brick walls. His wife hangs up on him when he calls for a much-needed cash infusion. Donning an ill-fitting gray suit he lifted from the closet of a rented room, he resembles more and more what he is—a homeless man, witnessing, with bewilderment, the passing vignettes of those who still enjoy society’s embrace: a naval cadet gently setting his Dixie cup on his infant’s head; a couple at a picnic; two boys standing on a rusted car throwing rocks into a river. In the film’s closing sequence, and in an ugly echo of his prior shakedown of his mother, the desperate crook mugs an old lady, rushes off with her purse, and ducks into an anti–Vietnam War protest where he is mistaken for an activist and thrown in a paddy wagon by the Cincinnati police. 

Here we have a film that makes the life of crime seem completely shitty and lonely—not because the filmmaker has set out to send a message or pass moral judgment, but because her art, I think, authentically subscribes to the kind of worldview that is evoked by Le Guin’s image of the carrier bag. “Science fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction,” Le Guin writes in the same essay, “is a way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe.” In this philosophy the criminal, a figure whose transgressive behavior irrevocably separates them from most others, lives in a state of terminal confusion about where they are and what is around them, pushing again and again the meshing that holds them and everyone else. A creature like that is less likely to be a daring individualist than a lost soul who is down and out or a spiritually indigent creep who is contemptuous and paranoid. With the exception of the daring bakers in First Cow (who steal the milk to a generous, if profiteering, end) and a remorseful co-conspirator, played by Dakota Fanning, in Night Moves, a pathetic air hangs over all who break the law in Reichardt’s filmography.

If a criminal is not an apt symbol for the artist in Reichardt’s work, what is? In Showing Up, Reichardt follows the passive-aggressive friendship between two artists, the more freewheeling and expansive Jo (Hong Chau) and the irritated and bedraggled sculptor Lizzy (Michelle Williams). Jo is Lizzy’s landlord and has left Lizzy without hot water for two weeks. Lizzy works in the administrative office of a local art college, where she is hardly recognized as an artist in her own right. Her divorced parents use her as a go-between for their ongoing spats, and her mentally disturbed brother has little capacity to pay attention to her. Lizzy is hardly sexy or even happy, but she is crankily incorruptible and capable of tender devotion, even sorcery. In one scene, she removes, with an apology, an arm from a small clay girl she’s working on; when she affixes a new limb, the piece glows with a sudden majesty.  

Reichardt captures this same aura of unassuming magic and quiet immersion in two short documentaries of sculptors at work (both can be streamed on the Criterion Channel). One of them, “Bronx, New York, November 2019,” follows Michelle Segre for a day in her studio; the other, “Cal State Long Beach, CA, January 2020” records Jessica Jackson Hutchins and Alexander Demetriou. Segre, wearing a utility glove, threads a needle through a giant black kite-like thing. Demetriou slaps and shapes big blocks of clay, like a pizza maker. Hutchins smoothes her paint-covered hand over the cracks in a bulbous ceramic work. In the first of these films, Reichardt now and then cuts to an elevated train rattling across the Bronx or to men hosing trucks in a carwash, seeming to indicate that the artist, while doing something special that is worth filming, is contiguous with other vital curiosities. It is as if Segre is an item in a big bag of the city while fashioning her own in the sanctity of the studio. 

This dual citizenship of the artist—having one foot in our world and one in the universe of their own creation—is what is so moving and subtly subversive about the portrait of Lizzy in Showing Up. She is a regular Joe with out-to-lunch parents and a tiring day job who also, on occasion, practices beautiful and transformative rites in her studio-garage. A criminal would not be a coherent image for such an ignorable but serious laborer with intelligent hands. A gentle handyman, maybe, or an acupuncturist, or, in loftier terms, one of Shelley’s “unacknowledged legislators.” 

And poor J. B.—what is he? In The Mastermind, there are a couple glimpses of an artist lurking inside the failed thief. Mooney has rendered painstaking color illustrations of the paintings to be taken, distributing them to his henchman as they roll up to the museum. And there is a hypnotic six-minute sequence of J. B. unloading the Doves from a homemade wooden container into the loft of the barn, in the dark of night, alone. But these flashes of skill and attentive labor answer to a different priority. They serve only taking, the removing of art he seems to admire from a space where others could see it. Like many destructive and unhappy people, he is close to being an artist and yet very far from becoming one. Having internalized the worst emphases of the Promethean premise, he finds himself in a carrier-bag world. 

Mooney is someone we’ve all encountered our fair share of: fatal sufferers of main character syndrome who, below a layer or two of charisma, are nothing more than mooches and takers. But, as I thought about the film, another association came to mind. In his beautiful study The Gift, Lewis Hyde explains the etymology of an “Indian giver.” The epithet now describes someone who demands the return of a present. But the term, he writes, was originally used by colonists to characterize Native Americans, who, when offering a pipe, expected it to be returned—a logic still so foreign to our Western sensibility that Hyde is moved to slander its antipode. “The opposite of an ‘Indian giver,’ [in this original sense]” Hyde writes, “would be something like ‘white man keeper’ (or maybe ‘capitalist’), that is, a person whose instinct is to remove property from circulation.” Mooney, from the moment he pockets the toy soldier, fits this description to a tee. 

1970, the year in which Reichardt’s film takes place, is a hinge between the utopian visions of the 1960s and the institutional breakdown that is soon to come. The vibe shift is already presaged by Fred’s ludicrous response to his friend’s debacle. “I sure do appreciate the fact, knowing that once in a blue moon, someone I know and love is gonna come along and blow my mind,” he says. “And you, sir, have blown my mind.” Such amazement at an empty, destructive gesture that is vaguely redolent of revolution and performance art but in fact partakes of neither foreshadows not only the nihilistic spirit to come, in the decade of the ’70s, but what will succeed it in the rapaciousness of the ’80s and beyond: a spirit that touts creativity and human ingenuity but keeps its eye squarely on the profit line. I am thinking of a self-fashioned puppeteer like turtlenecked Steve Jobs, and on through him, toward the rogue’s gallery of contemporary “disrupters” we know all too well.  

Among such current moguls, Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, appears to be unusually well-intentioned. Earlier this year his AI company risked the ire of the federal government by refusing to permit its large language model Claude to be deployed in programs of mass surveillance or the creation of autonomous weapons (though the LLM, via Anthropic’s partnership with Palantir, was reportedly used to execute the kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro). Anthropic has also released a so-called “constitution,” a lengthy training text meant to instill in Claude an ethical compass. On the face of it, there is a lot that separates a man like Amodei from Mooney. The former has a PhD in biophysics from Princeton University and possesses a nerdy charm, often seemingly involuntarily scrunching up his face when listening and thinking. The latter is a seductive hipster who dropped out of art school and is sly but not all that bright.  

On the other hand, both steal art. In December, I received an email with a notice that I might be a member of a class action suit recently settled by Anthropic for $1.5 billion. The tech giant had fed Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror, two pirated datasets of copyrighted books, to Claude as part of its training. My novel, The Poser, this email informed me, was likely among these lifted caches (seven million digitized books were taken in total). A link directed me to a page where I could type my name, the book’s, or its ISBN number. I entered the title, and sure enough, there was my old pal, a work of fiction I spent nine years creating. Writers who agree to the settlement are expected to receive about $1,500 per title, though copyright infringement of this kind normally incurs damages of up to $150,000. Anthropic was recently valued at $380 billion. 

Amodei, like Mooney, seems to have artistic leanings. He has a penchant for publishing long and stylized essays on his website, the most recent of which, “The Adolescence of Technology,” is divided into subheadings with names like “A surprising and terrible empowerment,” “The odious apparatus,” and “Black seas of infinity.” In October 2024, he self-published “Machines of Loving Grace,” the title an allusion to a Richard Brautigan poem, where he coined the phrase “a country of geniuses in a datacenter” to describe the best-case vision for a future with powerful AI intelligence. Amodei seems to be very proud of that line—he’s repeated it in all seven interviews I’ve watched of him. Or maybe he is simply aware of its utility as evidence of serious and even literary thinking, of a piece with Anthropic’s humanistic branding as a whole. 

The image of a creative type has been conjured by others to describe the murky, trial-and-error work of AI tech’s well-compensated minders. “What has long made the AI project so special,” writes Ellie Pavlick, a professor of computer science at Brown, “is that it is born out of curiosity and fascination, not technological necessity or practicality. It is, in that way, as much an artistic pursuit as it is a scientific one.” I think I understand what she means, mainly that no one, not even the experts, understand what AI is, or what use it will be put to. But the invocation of artistic pursuit in this context is also silly. These tech workers are not like artists for a great many reasons, the biggest one being that they don’t make art. The true creator, in this analogy, would be Claude, and Anthropic would be something closer to its NIMBY-coded tiger mom. 

The contempt for writers evident in Anthropic’s massive theft lives on in Amodei’s “country of geniuses.” The target of condescension, however, has shifted to Claude. In any human-friendly vision of a future that includes powerful AI intelligence, this incomparable machine would need to subsist as our slave and thus would never enjoy the self-determination implied by the metaphor of a “country.” Amodei’s pet image may make for decent high-brow advertising, but it’s bad writing.

Such familiar instances of “stolen valor”—the position of someone, often of a higher class status, who wishes to identify as an artist without having to be one—go as far back, I imagine, as the patronage of the arts. Prior to the advent of LLMs, I was often, in my life as a writer, treated and addressed like one: I’ve lost count of how many times when someone I’m talking to at a party, after learning I’m a writer, will suggest a novel or movie I should pen. (Such situations are the standard, of course, in most culture industries; in the way, for instance, a movie producer can hire a screenwriter, buy their work, and then replace them, or direct them to change it.)  Maybe if I were a Pulitzer finalist or had authored a smash hit, these instances of unsolicited advice would recede. But I doubt it, even though the people who pitch me these ideas seem to think in these terms. I’m an ideas guy, they appear to be communicating, I just don’t have the hard-won technique or time to write this up, but if you did, you’d be able to make a lot of money and go to glamorous parties. 

But the ideas guys misunderstand the nature of artistic practice. The whole point of writing is finding out what you and you alone have to say, and sharing it, and seeing if and what readership it has, now or in the future. This tantalizing prospect of discovery and expression is what, I suspect, these people really seek but are unwilling or unable to pursue. To give oneself to that kind of labor demands, among material privileges (which vary enormously depending on the artistic medium), self-trust, patience, curiosity, and a sustained indifference to external standards. It is these qualities, I would guess, these people most prize and shrink from and fetishize in the figure of an artist who they imagine has somehow been bestowed, by some official authority, the right to prosecute their own interpretation of truth and beauty.  

But such a view overestimates the artist and underestimates their audience. All people, I suspect, wish to be transformed—to live bravely and deeply—and this longing can be confused with the desire to become an artist. The creative maker is thus burdened with embodying a universal spiritual yearning in a culture that has no agreed-upon language for such. In a more equal world, we would see that the ordinary magic in Lizzy’s life belongs to us all, whether we make art or not.

I can imagine a different response to Reichardt’s film, though. Leaving the theater after seeing J. B. thrown in the paddy wagon or reading this essay, someone could well think, Yeah ok, but that’s not how it really works. Every day the Mooneys of the world get away with it—at least the clever or privileged ones. Look around you. Amodei is worth $7 billion, and he’s a lot better than the other crooks in charge. We don’t live in a carrier-bag timeline. We live in a Promethean one, where pursuing distinction is what matters most. Many who rise to power in any number of fields surely believe that. But that doesn’t mean they are right. 

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