In the first act of Hamilton, Eliza Schuyler takes in the bustle of New York in a new age and sings “look around at how lucky we are to be alive right now”. In the second act she looks at the death of the war of independence and how few survived and sings “look around at how lucky we are to be alive right now.”

At the climax of Frozen 2, Elsa sings “show yourself”, asking her enemy to stop hiding but by the end of the song she is singing “show your self” urging her to reveal her own nature, because she has discovered the thing she was hunting was herself.

You get the idea: we’re talking about recontextualisation.

My two favourite kinds of stories are mysteries and heists and they have one major thing in common: recontextualisation.

There’s also recontextualisation in magic, but it works the opposite way. Here’s an empty hat, now there’s a rabbit in it. You don’t get to understand how the hat appeared empty but wasn’t. In fact the whole point is you don’t get to recontextualise. You’ve been fooled instead.

Recontextualisations in films and TV shows can be much the same. Sometimes a movie twist ending that reverses everything you’ve just seen can annoy the hell out of you because it’s like a magic trick. You weren’t given enough information. You were lied to and deceived and now it feels like the writer has gone “hahah, you’re an idiot, I tricked you”. But if you do it right, then the reveal does the opposite: because you’re almost on top of it yourself, and because the author leads you to it so perfectly you feel like you’ve learned more. The new meaning makes the solution satisfying and also makes the story richer and deeper. Things you didn’t quite understand suddenly come into focus. Things that tickled the back of your brain suddenly make sense.

You get to feel, if the author does it right, like the detective. Like the revelation almost came from within. And the last little bit of surprise is welcome because you suddenly realise you were given all the information to begin with. You’re not being tricked, you’re solving a puzzle. Once you had a mystery, now you have the answer. And you’re dazzled at how at first you were fooled, how cleverly you were fooled. You applaud, but not like the confused audience of the magician who has no idea where the bunny went, but as the puzzle solver who got there in the end and adored the journey for its difficulty and elegance.

This idea: that mysteries should be solvable, was deeply important when the genre was being formed by luminaries like Christie, Sayers, and Chesterton, and so much so that the mystery writer Ronald Knox made up ten rules mysteries had to follow to “count” as “fair”. But as well as being fair, they also must be difficult. Otherwise, there would be no point. This is a very gamer concept — as humans, the only thing worse than a puzzle we can’t solve is a trivial one we can solve too easily.

Some dismiss the murder genre and the heist genre as nothing but puzzles but to me, the puzzle is the point, and the point is sharp indeed. Because inside this is not just a chance to feel smart, but for the mystery, to find justice against a dark deed. And for the heist, to find a different kind of justice — and another emotion as well.

When I was finishing up Relics, I realised that although the text of the work is about morality without religion and the desperate loneliness between us, there was something deeper to the work. In the end, Relics is about faith in humanity. Faith in each other. That we are better than just unthinking monsters, and we mean a great deal to each other, and that the cure for what ails our world is to believe in each other, deeply and strongly. The last words of Relics are “We believe in you.”. And that’s the thesis. I really do believe in us. I think we can be better angels. And I want you to read Relics and feel that, and take that sense away with you.

Partners isn’t just about my revelation about how terrible the police actually are and how powerful copaganda is. It’s also not just about how two different people end up echoing the things they love in each other. Deep down, it’s about the thing I fear most: the intimacy of a partnership. How when you really work with someone else you have to trust them. Two player RPGs are terrifying to me, just like having a two-person conversation is. The rawness of that, the sense of being known by that…that’s lying at the heart of that RPG.

And the Score is about hope.

When Cassian Andor is put in the terrifying Imperial prison, the script and camera is at pains to tell us that there is no hope. This place is escape-proof. The very floor itself is death to touch unless someone allows you to do so. No bars. No windows. Very few guards, but all of them violent. And a constant regime of fear and competition to keep people docile and disunited. Just enough food to keep you alive. Just enough work to keep you exhausted.

And then, all of that falls apart when they escape.

Every strength becomes a weakness. The electrified floors are vulnerable to water. The few guards makes them easy targets. The brutal weapons gives the inmates the tools to fight back. The centralised controls makes it easy to take over the entire complex. The work has made them strong. The competition has kept them focussed.

Despair turns into hope.

The start of every good heist film, I think, explains how hard the job is, and I was really keen to include this in The Score. Oceans 11 does this really well. Leverage does this perfectly. The job seems impossible. And then bit by bit, they show you how to pull off the impossible. To make you believe that you can steal the unstealable. Escape the unescapable. Rewrite the rules you’ve been told. Turn strengths into weaknesses. Tear down the gods and pull down the pillars of heaven and make off with freedom and glory.

The last word of Tony Gilroy’s Rogue One is “Hope”, and it’s no accident its the underlying theme in Andor: hope set against terrible despair and terrifying odds. Not every heist film is about those kinds of odds and that kind of impossibility but the recontextualisation in heist films is about this same fundamental reveal: that what you thought could not be done CAN BE DONE.

And just as you leave the murder mystery feeling like the puzzle can be solved because you are smart, you leave a heist story feeling the powerful can be torn down because the impossible is possible. Plenty of stories, yes, are about overcoming impossible odds, but few of them take so much time to explain the odds in exacting detail, and whereas most stories require Strength of the Heart or One Man Who Does Not Yield to win through, the heist shows you how to win with your clever clever brain. And like the rush of mystery discovery, it not only shows you how to beat evil, it helps you see that your brain lies to you. That the things you think are impossible can be done. That the very tools that keep you down are the tools you can use to set yourself free.

The recontextualisation is metaphorically, at least, both personal and political. Hopefully, in some heist stories, it will be textually political as well. We steal from the rich and powerful because we must. Because they take everything from us. We live in a world where we feel terribly powerless against vast god-like figures who seem so unassailable; systems we feel can never be broken; time and tide that lead only to disaster; monsters who seem ever closer to dragging us further into suffering, fascism and despair. These are war times. These are oppression times. This is the dark dystopia we all feared would come.

The Score is about hope.

Take it, and light the darkness.

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