The Cost of Consumption

Lift opens like a rowdy action movie.

A handheld camera follows a small group of thieves as they run through an upscale department store, the focus chaotic. Within seconds, the heist falls apart: 5-0 is on the scene, and everyone runs every which-way, fleeing to the dark streets as fast as possible. Cut to daylight -- the camera moves in, from the Boston skyline to neighborhoods, where people live, headed to work, wheeling their kids in strollers, hanging on street corners. On the ground, real life is complicated and crowded, full of unmet needs and frustrations.

These clashing introductory scenes establish the two worlds inhabited by Niecy (Kerry Washington). In one, she works a legit job at that upscale department store, Kennedy's, designing floor and window displays; in the other, she's a thief. But she's not like those guys in Lift's first scene. She doesn't break into stores at night. She does her stealing in broad daylight. Niecy's a shoplifter, a booster. And she knows her shit, from Marc Jacobs and Versace to David Yurman and Christina Perrin. She knows what's in and what's not, what's going to be hot each season.

Niecy's gig at Kennedy's is a good way to keep track of trends and surveillance systems, as well as a way to keep her illicit activities in check, as it gives her a schedule and a certain perspective. When she does lift, Niecy is filling orders for clients, taking just enough and just the items she knows will sell to her friends, family and women who frequent a particular beauty salon.

She doesn't take chances, but she thrills to the risk: Scenes where Niecy steals -- by cutting tags or paying with false credit cards -- are shot in slow motion and blasted through with edge-blurring light, and images appear under waltzes or classical music.

In one instance, as she sets up the perfect distraction -- she drops a security tag in a white shopper's purse and the unknowing decoy is stopped on the sidewalk outside -- Niecy floats on by, her girdle barely bulging with stolen designer scarves, her own heart-pounding pleasure emphasized by a local kid's beating on his plastic-pail drums.

It's easy to see how this thrill might become addictive. Even more alarming is the way this thrill is so easy to come by. Niecy's fellow thief, Christian (Todd Williams), the one who organized the group robbery at the beginning of the film, is philosophical about it, noting that the retail industry expects -- and the security industry depends on -- some loss, planning that 10 percent of department store merchandise will be stolen each year. He flashes his platinum jewelry, pressing Niecy to come work for his expanding operation, whose numbers include the extra-smooth and easily violent Quik (Sticky Fingaz).

Niecy, however, wants to work on her own, in large part because she understands her self-image and individuality in relation to the work she puts in. She's afraid to accept help, and more afraid to stop working.

Premiering June 26 on Showtime, Lift, winner of the Grand Jury Prize at New York's 2001 Urban World Film Festival, examines our consumer culture in a way that is less venal and less macho than the usual heist movie. Yet its insights into that culture are keen. The film takes as its ground a complex of entangled and codependent industries, from fashion to garment to advertising, from magazines to runways to department store exhibits, that encourage endless and endlessly changing desires, unfulfillable by definition.

Not unlike drug addiction (which is, as William Burroughs observed, the perfect consumer product, as the user, once hooked, never needs convincing again), the fashion industry manufactures need in order to convince consumers to feel it, pay for it, and then seek it out all over again, year in and year out.