Lupin: race and mythology
Netflix’s Lupin is utterly fascinating. The show follows professional thief Assane Diop, the son of a Senegalese immigrant in France. Assane’s father was framed for the theft of an expensive diamond necklace by his employer when Assane was a child, causing his father to hang himself in his prison cell. Twenty-five years later, Assane sets out to seek revenge on the wealthy and powerful – and white – Hubert Pellegrini who framed his father in the first place.
Lupin is not only fascinating to me. The first ten-episode part, which launched on Netflix in January 2020, was watched by about 70 million households during just its first month. It’s the most-watched non-English series on Netflix. It’s not hard to see why people fell in such love with it. The leading actor, Omar Sy, is fantastic at showing us subtle changes in his facial expression. He’s a great actor in his portrayal of Assane Diop. The show explores elements of race and classism in Paris society through the eyes of a man who grew up the victim of power dynamics far greater than he is, and this is portrayed in every quiet tick of his eyebrows. But, for me, the fascination is a bit more mythic.
Lupin is the perfect demonstration of mythology in action. As I’ve written before, mythology happens when narratives are used by an individual or a community to better understand themselves or their place in this world. Lupin shows us exactly how mythology works, and how an individual uses a narrative to inform their identity.
In the show, Assane uses the Arséne Lupin books, by Maurice LeBlanc, like a textbook. In one shot, you see how he has the book tabbed and marked with notes in the margins. Its more than just a fun book to Assane – it’s a blueprint for how to live life. At first, it appears to be used as a guide on how to excel in the art of thievery. It clearly informed him of his potential role as thief, and how to pull off a great heist. His rise from quiet immigrant child to professional thief is clearly informed by his experience with the Lupin books. He used the books to draw a blueprint of his career, and even saw his career opportunities through the books themselves.
But the Lupin books were not simply instructions for Assane’s career. Arséne Lupin also was a particular type of character who had a particular way of navigating through the world. Lupin is a Robin Hood type figure, one who is understood as a force for good even though he moves on the other side of the law. He is the “gentleman burglar”, who is suave and protective of women, and targeting the rich elite.
Assane takes notes on this as well. His instance on being a gentleman burglar is focused on his revenge on Pellegrini. Pellegrini not only framed his father but is also the ultimate in privileged wealth. When he successfully steals the necklace, he uses pieces of the diamonds to help others, including the wife of a convicted man. He also stole from violent villainous types to give his ex-wife, working as a single mother, a large roll of cash. In these shots, we see his stealing as ways to help the communities and individuals around him who are in need.
But, what is particularly interesting about Lupin, is that aside from Assane (Omar Sy) and his son, most of the other characters are white. As someone white myself, I don’t feel I have the right eyes or voice to see or speak on much of the issues of Black life and representation – and I’m also not French, and therefore have little understanding of what race relations looks like in France. But I can approach the discussion of these racial elements from the perspective of myth.
In Lupin, and for many capitalist societies like France, there are two primary categories of class: the privileged wealthy elite, and the oppressed working class. These two categories can cross, and when they do they form the middle-class, a strange class of people who carry elements of both categories, often paradoxically. Institutionalised racism, embedded into the systems of capitalism in many European countries, ends up having an inherent connection between classism and racism.
In fact, the connections between classism and racism have manifested in insults we still use even when there are white people discussing other white people. The insult “white trash” for instance, was used to demarcate how the poor whites were on similar levels of society as Blacks – they were the trashed versions of whites.
This connection is not something that was missed by the creators of Lupin. The racial dynamic between the different classes is quite clear. Pellegrini, as well as all the other elites in the show, are all white, while the other working-class members, when Assane moves among them, are all Black. My personal understanding is that this is meant to clearly indicate these racial and economic categories as distinct from one another. This is not to say that there are no Black wealthy members of the elite in Paris, but that there are none in Lupin.
In fact, Assane plays up his race throughout the show, using the backing of Arséne Lupin as his guide. In the books, Lupin is a master of disguise, using wigs and other props to change his appearance at will to fit into new positions and environments seamlessly. While Assane cannot change his skin colour, he changes other elements of himself. More than putting on prosthetic noses, he also plays into his race as if it were a mask of any other. Despite being the only Black man in the room, he holds himself as well as the other members of the wealthy elite. Prior, when he fits into the role of janitor, he moves among the working class with the same known invisibility.
When playing the role of the wealthy elite, he also wields his race like a weapon against the white crowd, in a nice shifting of the typical power dynamic of race being used as a weapon against Blacks when class is introduced to the equation. We see this from the opening episode. When portraying himself as the wealthy man who successfully bid on a diamond necklace, the auctioneer makes a comment to Assane that he “wasn’t what he expected”. Assane does his very charming smile, leans his head in slightly with a tilt to show confusion, and asks “what do you mean?”. There is a hesitation and some backpedalling. Race was never brought up in this conversation, but it’s the suggested reason the white auctioneer did not expect to see a Black man in an arena where there is typically the white social elite.
This scene in the opening episode is actually the best demonstration of the way race is used in Lupin more generally – it is the implicit reminder, rather than anything explicitly discussed in your face. The show uses race the way society does – quietly manipulating thought based on audience expectation. It is the silent factor dangling between conversations, the unspoken marker of difference in the power dynamic.
Another early scene to set this silent power dynamic is in a flashback to Assane’s youth. Assane walks into an indoor pool, where Juliette Pelegrini, the daughter of Assane’s father’s employer, is also lounging. The difference in their social standing is marked at the very beginning, when Assane has to immediately explain his presence in the same room.
Juliette is smoking a cigarette on the other side of the pool and asks him if its “true what they say” about Black people, that they cannot swim. She then makes Assane swim to the other side of the pool in return for a kiss. An uncomfortable bit of a scene follows where Assane struggles to swim to Juliette.
This scene is frankly uncomfortable to watch – but it’s supposed to be. It shows the difference between the young Assane who struggled in the power dynamics, to the adult Assane who uses these dynamics to his benefit. It clearly paints the struggle of implicit racism, micro-aggressions, and the clear understanding of where the rich white elite of the Pellegrini family saw the Black immigrant family who worked under them. Juliette could not care any less for Assane – she enjoyed the process of seeing him struggle. And Assane acquiesces to the request not because he desperately wants to kiss a white woman, but because the power dynamics of their class and their race deem it necessary that he does.
These dynamics are all important because these are the elements that are frankly not present in the Lupin books by Leblanc. They are missing, not because they did not exist at the time, but because the wealthy white elite of the books did not need to confront their own biases. Assane forces them to by his shear presence. He flows in the system where it suits him – blending into the world of the caretakers to gain access – but fights the system when it does not suit him.
The scene of young Assane in the pool, and adult Assane after an auction, is a demonstration of the way Assane learned to see himself and his role through the Lupin books. He uses the character of Lupin as a kind of mask, a white mask to use the phrasings of Frantz Fanon whose book Black Skin, White Masks may be well suited to compare to Netflix’s Lupin.
Like most myths, Maurice Leblanc’s Lupin books are complicated, especially in how they are internalised and used by Assane in the Netflix show. It is more than just a demonstration of the ability of a thief to hide and move through the world – in many ways, the disguises and shifting nature of Lupin the thief is a metaphor for the way Assane felt the need to disguise and shift his own self and nature to fit into a world that saw him as the colonialised Other. He wears the aspect of white elite as comfortably as he does Black working class – he flows between these worlds as easily as the removal of a fake moustache.
The character Lupin, and the stories spun far before Assane was born, became the blueprint for how to move in the world – not as a thief but as a man facing social oppression. Netflix’s Lupin shows us exactly what mythology looks like in action for Assane.