a literal cry for help, heard as a figure of speech — "Happens all the time,’…"

The theme as tabloid farce and pure missed-connection: a woman literally shouting that her literal heart, in a purse, has literally been stolen, and a whole sidewalk hearing only the figure of speech — a lover's lament — and smiling it off, the patrolmen quipping "Happens all the time." The cry is maximally urgent and maximally clear, and the culture has exactly one slot for "she stole my heart," so the literal truth cannot arrive as anything but a cliché. It is the Loach touch-me and the scream-as-showtune again: a message with no channel by which its literal meaning could be received.