INTRODUCTION
It’s hard to imagine a television show that is more badly written. Not merely because of the many, gaping, show-ruining plot-holes. Nor is La Casa De Papel uniquely bad simply because the acting is often cartoonish, the dialogue is strained and vacillates between stilted and puerile, the characters are poorly drawn, or because of the frustration-inducing technical problems. Nor because the writers of the show don’t seem to have done any – and I mean ANY – research into the Spanish economy.
No, what makes this show uniquely, and at times seemingly deliberately awful, is the absolute moral idiocy.
It isn’t just that they don’t know how to write a story about an anti-hero – they don’t. It isn’t just that they pick the wrong side of a complex moral issue…though they do that as well. The writers don’t understand basic moral concepts like right and wrong.
Money Heist is what someone might almost expect from a Basque Separatist – but they would be informed on the economic realities of Spain.
It’s what you might expect from a social-failure who took half a semester of econ at a juco before dropping out to work on his “novel” (read: mooch off his mom girlfriend…who lives in Canada…she’s totes real).
You might expect it from a died-in-the-wool Communist of the old school – but those kinds of Commies were all well read and understood plot and narrative and character arcs.
No, this show is uniquely bad in a way that feels deliberate. The show is so grotesquely bad that one could imagine a conspiracy theory wherein extreme rightist groups made the show to demonstrate the stupidity and moral vacuity of leftism. Kind of like a “CIA put crack in black neighborhoods” type conspiracy theory. It feels like the show is going out of its way to be stupid and bad.
And because I love you, I decided to watch every single episode. Why? So I could report back and give you some talking points. Maybe you’ve seen the show; maybe you have family or friends who’ve seen it; maybe you’ve considered watching it. In this deep-dive review we’re going to consider the show, in its entirety: THERE WILL BE SPOILERS…deal with it. This will be a review of the show as a whole and not specific episodes. My hope is that after reading this you’ll be able to think through not only La Casa De Papel as a show and as a cultural phenomenon, but also think through what’s happening to storytelling and how it impacts us morally. For sake of ease I’ve broken this review into parts, critiquing its take on economic, politics, storytelling, and morality. If you’re really impatient skip to the last § on morality, since that’s the most important §, along with the conclusion.
ECONOMICS
So, when I said that you might think the writer of this show dropped out after half an econ class at juco…well, that might have been extreme. They might have dropped out after reading some communist literature left on a park-bench.
The premise of the first two parts is that it’s totally morally OK to print a billion Euros because the Central banks do it and it won’t hurt the economy. Which is wrong. Then, inexplicably, when they steal $4B worth of gold reserves, it is such a massive shock to the Spanish economy that the whole system is going to crash and burn, leading to hyperinflation. Um…no.
So, fun fact – the show keeps saying that the 90 tons of gold ingots in the Bank of Spain are the nations gold reserves. Which is false. Spain has about 280 tons of gold reserves. And moreover, nations don’t simply hold gold in reserve but also forex reserves – of which Spain has over $80B. These data aren’t hard to find – they took about as long as it took to type in rather obvious search queries and for the internet to give me first search-page answers.
Now, for those keeping score at home, that means that the $1B they printed had no (according to the Professor) negative impact on the economy, but stealing $4B would send it into a tailspin – markets dropped 14% in hours! But the gold reserves they stole only account for about 5% of the total Spanish reserves.
So either the writers of the show thought that viewers were too stupid or too lazy to fact-check them, or they have such a low view of stock markets that they think that markets would go into freefall after a bank-robbery that would have almost no real-world impact on the goods and services that the market provides, or they themselves were too stupid or lazy to check into things or they just didn’t care.
My guess is a combination of all the above. Printing a Billy has no impact; stealing 4 has such an impact that it will create “the worst economic crisis” of the modern era.
Just no.
And the writers think they’re cute and clever by mocking gold reserves because governments don’t use them to buy or sell.
A, it’s not true – given the fact that countries do, in fact, buy and sell physical gold in exchange for their fiat currencies or other devices! B, what does that have to do with anything?! It can’t be both a victimless crime and checkmate unless the show presupposes that the Spanish government is dumber than a sack of turds – or they think you are…but they seem to think both.
The economy of Spain has problems that the writers either don’t understand or deliberately ignore. Yes, increasing monetary supply creates inflation and hurts people. And, yes it is a crime with victims. Yes, governments DO print money. Yes, I think that quantitative easing and bad monetary and fiscal policies are bad and harmful. But Spain is a democracy. The people could elect leaders that would fix monetary policy. But the solution to government mismanagement and malfeasance isn’t terrorism.
What if, using the show’s economic logic, because the Spanish Mint prints money unwisely that means that anyone could or should – do they think that won’t have economic consequences? Perhaps they do – because the writers are morons. But that’s not how the world works. Bad government policy does not justify economic destabilization – unless you’re a Communist trying to overthrow the bourgeoisie Capitalist, imperialist system. But that just brings us back to a failure to understand economics and human nature and morality.
In short, the show doesn’t seem to understand rudimentary concepts like supply and demand and inflation and monetary supply. Watching the Professor pontificate with his Marxist-Leninist platitudes might have been compelling 100 years ago. But we’ve seen enough Communism since the 1920s to know it doesn’t work. Spain fought a Civil War to keep the commies out. Maybe this is just sour grapes. But that brings us to our next point.
POLITICS
The politics of this show are as baffling as they are mind-numbing. A brief review of Spanish History may be warranted, so I’ll try to make it fast.
A long time ago Spain was a Roman province, later it wasn’t. Then it was 2 kingdoms, then 1, then it had a great idea. Let’s send Columbus to go get us trade route to the Indies. Columbus failed, but he did bring back gold and tobacco as well as….…well, who cares, the gold was good enough. They go so much gold that they could finally afford the armada they always wanted. So Spain had an armada and tons of gold, then they decided to put it to good use and tried to force everyone to be Catholic. And then they tried to force England to be Catholic too. But England didn’t want to be Catholic, so Spain tried to kill Queen Bess. But nobody kills Betsy. She sends Sir Francis Drake to burn your Armada. Lizzie will send Drake and he will burn any and every armada that tries to invade England and make it be Catholic…it’s how she do. Then Spain stopped trying to make EVERYBODY Catholic and just focused on making some people Catholic. Later Napoleon invaded. Then other things happened. Spain tried to act tough in the Western Hemisphere and Teddy Roosevelt said, “no you don’t” and Spain lost Cuba, as well as other places from Simon Bolivar and other Caudillos. Then other stuff happened and Spain had a Civil War. But this was an extra bad Civil war because it basically was led by pretty scummy people on either side. Franco was the scummy guy who won, but eventually people stopped liking Franco so much, and Spain became a monarchy…for a while. And now they’re not a monarchy, but kinda they are…and they hardly ever try to force anybody to be Catholic, anymore. Which is a bummer if you’re into that sorta thing. But it’s pretty cool otherwise.
Admittedly, I am not an expert on Spanish history…but I’d like to see you do better, and be sarcastic at the same time…that’s what I thought. The important part is the Civil War part because that has shaped Spain ever since. And nowadays it’s really popular to hate Franco and to label anyone who was to the right of the Communist insurgents as “fascists”. Note the scene in part 5 volume 2 of Money Heist where the home-invading, terrorists, who just committed felony assault against a high-ranking government minister look out at the streets and one says “it’s starting to look like the Warsaw ghetto”.
No.
Just no.
There is no equivalency, and to make such a comparison is ignorant bordering on holocaust-minimizing. But that’s all part and parcel of La Casa’s portrayal of government.
Oh, btw, the Professor and his accomplices and the adoring, fawning Spanish populace call the murdering, raping, kidnapping, robbing, defrauding, torturing, terrorists…wait for it…”the Resistance”!
Ohhhhhhhhhh, wow – I mean they sing “Bella Ciao”: an Italian anti-fascist partisan song!
I mean, do you hear the people sing…singing the song of arrogant moral idiots? (I know that’s not how the song goes, but just roll wimme homie.)
Yeah, anyone with an IQ in trip diggies is not being taken in by such a lazy, shameless, naked, and childish attempt to give the robbers moral authority.
A SUB-POINT ON POLITICS
So, one of the major motifs of the show is the Spanish government’s simultaneous incompetence and hypercompetence – but mainly incompetence. This is particularly poignant when we look at the portrayal of policing. On one hand they have the incredible spy network necessary to track a satellite phone of the coast of nowhere to capture Anibal Cortes, but a 120 pound woman with a rifle who is screaming is able to hold back the elite SWAT and military of Spain. Apparently the Spanish elite counter-terrorist forces have the ability to carry bulletproof shields, Roman testudo-style, but not to toss a concussion grenade. They can scramble hundreds of police and soldiers in minutes, but nobody is using thermal goggles to find someone hiding in a tree…which would seem like a natural place to hide…IN A FOREST! They engage in torture in a black-site, but that black-site is able to be found and overthrown with minimal effort from a pack of Pakistani hackers.
Somehow the Spanish government is both a monolith and a bunch of chumps!
And, let’s not forget the conclusion! In the end when the Professor tells Tomayo that they have to let them go otherwise Spain will have egg on its face. But they still fake the deaths of the terrorists and Spain still doesn’t get the gold back…so explain to me why they didn’t ACTUALLY kill the terrorists who have terrorized Spain repeatedly.
I mean, I know that I’m not a professional writer, but I’m a not too shabby logician. What exactly did Spain, or Tomayo benefit by not just killing these turds who have robbed, raped, tortured, and murdered their way through 2 “heists”, all the while trying to embarrass Spain, and Tomayo personally, at every turn. The climax of the show is that Tomayo realizes that the Professor has defrauded Spain, he hasn’t returned the gold, but just gold-colored metal, and he has all the terrorists on their knees with guns to their heads, and this is AFTER the Professor has invaded Tomayo’s home and probably ruined his career – and Tomayo doesn’t kill them, but instead fakes their death and puts them in Witsec while they keep the gold?
To quote the Latin…what the heck?...I mean Cui Bono?
The government are portrayed as bloodthirsty idiot thugs, and as careful master strategists. Not different characters, but even the same characters act so stupidly that it’s clear the writers just think: governments are bad…use them for plot devices.
STORYTELLING
Which naturally leads us to our next point, which is that the writers are just awful at storytelling. The show could be likened to a soap-opera, but at least soap-operas have suspense. After Season 2, nobody wonders if they’re going to “make it”. Admittedly, some characters die, but the fact that everyone has to act so unbelievably out of character to ensure a happy ending is a sign of bad writing at its best.
But what really is awful isn’t the plotting – which is bad – but the characterization.
Let’s look at a few examples. On one hand Raquel Murillo is a tough, no-nonsense lady-cop, who busts crims and is a tender mom. But she’s also an abused wife, whose sister is now dating her ex, and whose mother has Alzheimer’s. Ok. A bit tropey, but not bad. We have some humanizing. We have vulnerability. She’s a relatable character to a lot of women – and even to men.
But then, she’s seduced by the Professor – the mastermind behind the “heist” who is trying to personally destroy her, and, btw, was willing to MURDER her mother in cold-blood. She’s victimized by the Professor. Just like how she was victimized by her ex-husband. And how she was made to feel guilty for not committing adultery with her partner. Men are constantly trying to exploit and hurt her and so, at the moment of truth she…..wait for it…decides to throw her life away and join in a life of crime with the Professor…remember him; he’s the guy who tried to wreck her life, who’s a terrorist criminal, who set a raping psychopath loose on a bunch of government functionaries, and who deceived you and slept with you all the while trying to pump you for information to further wreck your life.
Is this not a #metoo moment? I guess I don’t really understand the new sexuality. Because, for me, as a fundamentalist, I would look at Murillo as a victim. I would even say that because of the Professor’s lies, her sex with him wasn’t truly consensual. He might as well be a rapist himself.
Let me explain. If a woman sleeps with a man who sneaks in her bed, thinking it’s her husband, even though the woman consented to sex, she consented to sex with her husband, not the interloper. If twins attempted to do wife-swapping, that would negate the consent if the wives didn’t know they were being swapped. If an evil twin, of whom the woman knew nothing slept with her, again, consent would be nullified. Is consent not nullified here? Even if it isn’t rape, it certainly is gross sexual exploitation.
Or consider Monica Gaztambide, one of the most interesting characters in the first season, a woman clearly suffering from Stockholm Syndrome (she is literally NAMED Stockholm by the other banditos), who is sexually exploited by Denver – one of the most thoroughly despicable and unlikable characters in all of TV. Her dilemma of falling in love with her abuser could have been a great insight into her as a character, but instead the writers force-fed us a bunch of saccharine garbage about true love. And again, like with Raquel Murillo, we’re supposed to celebrate when these women run off and live happily ever after with their abusers – men who deliberately exploited them for money and sex.
The show, despite its all too obvious wokery, has a shockingly low view of women. In the minds of the writers, powerful and competent women are really just waiting around for a man – literally ANY man – to come up and grab them by the…to come up and take charge and they melt into puddles of pathetic. If the writers really believe that deep-down all powerful women really, truly just want a man to exploit them, then that’s an odd view from a show that is so very obviously and deliberately politically woke.
But I imagine that the writers really do see women that way. One can imagine these folks, sad and lonely, fantasizing about how there’s a beautiful, sad, lonely woman out there who, despite being beautiful, successful, rich, with a record-setting libido, is just waiting for someone [insert one of the sad lonely male writers] to come and take her away from the rat-race.
I mean, that’s A way to look at women…not the one I’d recommend, but hey, in the digital porn age, all men are heroes for whom women are desperately, longingly waiting. The exploitation of Murillo and Gaztambide seems more like wish-fulfillment than a real insight into human nature.
But that’s what you can expect from a show that is so incredibly self-consciously cool and political. The Soviets proved that self-consciously politically correct writing is trash…Money Heist is giving us the redux – as is Netflix broadly.
I could go on and on about the bad storytelling, but just these two examples ought to suffice to demonstrate that these writers don’t truly understand human nature. They have lost the capacity to put themselves in other people’s shoes and can only understand characters based upon their own limited personalities. They cannot expand their horizons beyond themselves, which is what good writers do. Good writers are able to understand and sympathize with perspectives not their own – with perspectives they might disagree with, or even hate.
That’s why Tolstoy and Milton are geniuses and Alex Pena, et al., are hacks.
MORALITY
Here is the crux of the matter. The show started off fascinatingly. It looked like a new take on the caper-film. It was going to be a deep psychological drama that dealt with serious issues in human nature. I liked the first season, I really did. I was able to overlook the plot-holes and the cartoonish nature of the police because the human-interest story was what was happening to the characters. I thought it was going to be a classic anti-hero story.
But it wasn’t.
It was a tale told by an idiot.
You see, there are several ways to tell a morally compelling story where the protagonist is a bad guy. You have the Ocean’s Eleven version where their crime is victimless – mostly – though in the original they don’t profit from their crime, revealing the ethic of those days. There’s the Bonny and Clyde, or Anna Karenina type story, where we know the bad guys are bad guys and we just watch them burn-up like meteors entering the atmosphere. However, there are two excellent anti-hero stories that are worth considering to see how it SHOULD be done: Breaking Bad and The Godfather.
In Breaking Bad, we meet Walter White, and weak and ineffectual man who takes control of his life by breaking-bad. We watch in titillation as he slowly transforms into a villain of the highest order, all the while justifying himself, saying that what he did was for his family. Until the end, when he admits that he did it all for himself. We are reminded that Walter White was a bad guy and by rooting for him we learned that we too, want to break social conventions and be free to get power and money and to skirt the law. But we know that it’s wrong to do so and that once you get into evil it transforms you into something unrecognizable. Doing evil changed Walter from a weak man into a strong one – but a wicked one all the same.
In The Godfather we meet Michael Corleone who was never supposed to go into the family business. He was the golden-child who was supposed to go into politics and move the family out of the mob and into legitimate business. But when his family needs him he throws in his lot, all the while lying to himself that he will get the family out of crime and into legitimate business. His famous line is that, “every time I get out they pull me back in!” Michael justifies himself constantly, and Kay tries to warn him. In the first film we get this exchange which defines the whole film, and possibly the series:
Michael : My father is no different than any powerful man, any man with power, like a president or senator.
Kay Adams : Do you know how naive you sound, Michael? Presidents and senators don't have men killed.
Michael : Oh. Who's being naive, Kay?
Michael justifies himself and his family by his Machiavellian belief that everyone with power is depraved and violent. Yet, he himself wants to go-legit. But does he really? Or is it just a lie he tells himself?
Anti-hero stories are powerful because they allow us to look at ourselves, but eventually the anti-hero has to be revealed to be bad, otherwise the show is just murder fantasy and crime porn.
In season 1 of Casa, I thought that that the show was going in the direction of the classic anti-hero where we all root for the crooks and then we are smacked in the face with the reality that they’re bad and we shouldn’t root for them, but we did root for them because we found in them something in us, in our shared humanity.
But that’s not how they did it.
Nope, they just went for it and wanted us to think that the bad guys were good guys.
Their justification? The government does bad stuff, too.
Seriously?
Are we 5? Is that a serious argument? In the end we get a Breaking Bad confession that the Professor committed his crimes, not out of devotion to a cause but for himself. AND THE SHOW STILL WANTS US TO ROOT FOR HIM. At the conclusion of the show when, instead of being executed or imprisoned for their crimes, the gang all get to live happily ever after, the Professor says that they finally have enough money that they will never NEED to steal again.
What trash.
What utter lazy, self-serving trash. Again, it would be one thing if we were supposed to recognize it as self-deceptive trash, but we clearly aren’t. The writers want us to accept the show on the Professor’s terms. They are moral idiots. The Professor can commit horrid crimes: loosing the rapist terrorist Berlin on people, committing Billions in theft, conspiring to commit murder, espionage, torture, physical abuse, and the sexual exploitation of Murillo, but we’re supposed to root for him. Why? Because the government also does bad things.
Because 2 wrongs make a right?
The ONLY character who even attempts to address the wretched moral idiocy is Arturo Roman, who could have been a brilliant antagonist, dividing popular loyalty and causing us to question the moral certitude of the raping, torturing, robbers. But no. He clownishly inserts himself into the second Heist and then commits a sex crime. Which apparently is wrong now [insert rising intonation]? Which seems to be the writer’s way of saying that if anyone questions the moral authority of the bad guys, they too are bad and even worse – there are none righteous; no not one.
You can do a show like what I suggested. Narcos did it brilliantly, contrasting the evil of Pablo Escobar with the popular support he had because of the legitimately good things he did for the poor of Medellín and Columbia.
The point is that there are LOTS of ways to tell this story that doesn’t end with a cringey happy ending where we’re told after 41 episodes that the bad guys were good guys after all. Don’t ask how or why, just put on your Dali mask and your red jumpsuit and join in the fun.
CONCLUSION
In closing, what can I say that hasn’t already been said? A lot. A show this bad would take months of my spare-time to write about all its awfulness. And ain’t nobody got time for that. But it is worth noting that the show panned in Spain, but has taken on wider audiences in America and elsewhere. This is disturbing. My hope is that people just watched the gunfights and the romances and didn’t really care about the moral of the story. But that’s a problem too.
The state of storytelling in America is at a new low. The popularity of shows like Money Heist reveal that we’re a nation of moral idiots. Look, I watched every episode (and it was painful, and I had to take a lot of breaks to play chess or do ANYTHING else in the later episodes). Watching isn’t the point. The point is that shows like Money Heist are forming our cultural consciousness and our understanding of morality.
Television matters more than ever. Netflix producers will have more impact on people’s morality than I or most preachers, even most preachers COMBINED will ever have. Fletcher once said, “Let me make the songs of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws.”
If Money Heist is anything, it ought to be a clarion call to Christians that we NEED Christian fiction writers and screenwriters and critics. To adjust a CS Lewis gem, good fiction should exist if for no other reason than that bad fiction exists. Christians can and should find a way to shape the imaginations and emotions of people. If we can say that we’ve done that, I’d say we’ve come a long ways towards revival.