I Like to Watch | Inventing Anna (2022)
"You gotta fake it to make it."
Such a cliché. Such a nearly universal truth. The thing we don't want to say is that faking it borders just on the razor's edge of lying about it. That faking it might crossfade into shoveling a bit of bullshit in order to deceive those around us in order to support that false bravado.
“Yeah. I just go in and walk around and wait to see if someone tells me I have to wear a mask.”
He was a portly gentleman (fat as a house) but otherwise an ordinary enough looking cat. I pride myself in being able to talk politics with anyone without being too judgy (a skill I have been honing for some time now) so this was just another practice session.
“Seems like a lot of work to prove a point.”
“Yeah. But I’m not gonna wear those things unless I absolutely have to.”
“I hear that. I’m not as worried about it. The cloth masks don’t make much difference anyway but I’m triple-vaxxed. I wear mine to protect everyone else.”
“You trust the pharmaceutical companies with the vaccines, then?”
He had me. He had a point.
A few months ago, I binged HULU’s Dopesick with Michael Keaton. Before that I binged Season Four of Goliath with Billy Bob Thornton and JK Simmons. Just prior to that my nineteen-year-old nephew overdosed on fentanyl and died. I read article after article, caught a few documentaries, and the obvious conclusion for anyone with a brain cell to spark is that Big Pharma is filled with the most egregious liars in the history of predatory capitalism.
Why would anyone believe a single word uttered in support of Big Pharma even if Dr. Fauci swore by it? Note that I like Fauci. He’s feisty and knows his shit. But if Fauci came to my house and said he vouched for Charles Manson to crash on my couch for a few nights, I’d show him my boot up his ass.
The question is no longer who is bullshitting us, who is using information to create narratives that serve their interests, but why do we believe who we believe and what does it say for the future of the society?
In high school (and sort-of college) I had a friend. His name was Ryan. Ryan looked like a prettier version of Ric Ocasek, the lead singer of The Cars. Tall, thin, dark, with a helmet of black eighties hair, and while he was sort of gangly in physicality, was a whiz at getting the girls to drop their panties for him. He was intense. Charismatic. He was cool.
Ryan was also completely full of shit. He scammed so many people it was almost comical and, I suppose, as long as I wasn’t on the scam end of things, I was alright with it. People wanted to believe him no matter how off his message was.
He convinced a car salesman to let him test drive a brand new Firebird for two weeks. Once he swung by my home with a brand new VCR and a box full of videocassettes that were of brand new movies. They hadn’t even been put out for rent yet. He had won over the Blockbuster counter girl with a story that he was a film reviewer and needed to see the movies in order to write his articles. And could she loan him a VCR?
He could get into movies for free, managed free meals, and had cash on hand without working a steady job on the regular. I was amazed at his ability to con everyone and walk away with the very people he conned thanking him for it.
He dropped out of high school because he knocked up his girlfriend. It was a highly Christian public high school in the middle of Kansas and he was almost instantly ostracized. His girlfriend had the baby but her parents refused any notion of marriage. That’s how he and I became friends. I like the outcasts and he was definitely cast out.
He and I would hang out every weekend on his scammed largesse and we had a ball. One summer, we went to see Footloose seven times in a row because he was banging on of the theater managers. We ate free popcorn, Raisinettes, and Dr. Pepper all day and night. The guy was sort of magical.
I went off to college and we lost touch until one day, he was at my dorm room door, in a different state, with a backpack and a grin. I was surprised and thrilled. I introduced him around to my college friends, took him to eat, let him crash on my floor. A few days later, he sat me down and spun a tale of his impending death due to a brain tumor. He had always wanted the college experience before he died and could he crash with me and audit classes for a few semesters?
It was all crap and underneath I knew it to be but I wanted to believe him, so I did.
After three months of a perfectly healthy Ryan borrowing cash from me, from my friends, eating for free on my cafeteria card, telling professors he was an actual student so he could take classes and meet girls whom in turn introduced him to their friends so he could scam them, too, I had had enough.
I demanded proof that he had a tumor. I know how stupid that sounds as it was obvious he had no illness but I was grasping at straws. He refused to produce anything resembling proof and turned on the tears. I kicked him out and told him I’d expose him to everyone. I bought him a bus ticket back home and dropped him off at the station.
I ran into Ryan a few years later (no tumor) in Atlanta. He invited me to stay and enjoy the city on his dime. When I arrived at his apartment, he was being evicted and convinced me to pay his outstanding rent which, I’m embarrassed to say, I paid. We partied that weekend (on my dime which I was assured would be paid back—it wasn’t) and I left Georgia with the same question as posed above: why did I believe him when I knew he was false?
It seems that exposing scam artists of all kinds has become a vast reservoir for our entertainment in the past couple of years. Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, The Tinder Swindler, The Inventor: Out For Blood In Silicon Valley, LulaRich, and WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn all expose charismatic shysters making ridiculous claims and bilking people out of their money. Hell, Adam Neumann even looks a bit like Ryan.
I’ve watched all of these and a few others and the conclusion offered by experts is as murky as my own. Researchers engaging in studies looking for the answer end up explaining the how of scams but rarely find anything conclusive as to why we fall for them. I believe that we fall for them because somewhere, deep down and despite kind of knowing they’re full of shit, we want to believe them. Maybe there is something that necessitates our belief.
“You trust the pharmaceutical companies with the vaccines, then?”
“Good point. The vaccine and booster were free. I suppose that was a motivator.”
“Nope. They need more testing.”
“Well,” and I knew this wouldn’t be persuasive but it was all I had, “I guess I’m proof-positive. Been vaxxed and boosted. No COVID yet, no adverse side effects.”
He looked at his phone. “Nice chatting. I have to find this Pokémon.”
I understand why I believed (and still mostly believe) Fauci. In a global pandemic, we have to believe someone providing a solution to the threat. If the CEO of Pfizer had been the face of the vaccination push, I’d like to believe I would’ve been more like my portly Pokémon player and been a bit more skeptical. I’d like to believe that but I can’t know.
I most likely believed Fauci because I wanted to believe him. Even though he was suggesting that I put my trust in the biggest bunch of pathological corrupt capitalists in modern history, allow Jim Jones to borrow my Prius for just a day or so, let Charles Manson couch-surf at my place, I wanted to believe him, so I did.
The latest of the check out this scam artist series on Netflix is Inventing Anna, Shonda Rhimes's take on the Anna Delvey story.
For those uninitiated to the bizarre tale, Anna Delvey (aka Anna Sorokin) was imprisoned for bilking people and banks and high New York society of buckets of cash and services by pretending to be a German heiress with a trust fund. She took in a lot of people for a lot of money.
The quick take from the internet goes like this:
Anna Sorokin is a Russian-German convicted fraudster. Between 2013 and 2017, while living in the U.S., she pretended to be a wealthy German heiress under the name Anna Delvey, and in 2017, she was arrested after allegedly defrauding banks, hotels, and acquaintances of a total of $275,000. She was convicted of multiple counts of attempted grand larceny, larceny in the second degree, and theft of services in relation to these offenses in 2019.
After moving through five prisons, Sorokin was released in February 2021. Six weeks later, she was rearrested by immigration authorities for having overstayed her visa. She has spent the last year in ICE detention, where she is fighting deportation to Germany.
In the Rhimes series, Ozark star Julia Garner portrays Anna with such a bizarre, almost Borat-style accent that it is hard to believe any bought her schtick. After watching the first episode, I went into the rabbit hole to hear what the woman actually sounded like and, to Garner's credit, she sounds pretty much exactly like her with a tad more exaggeration. “She got it right in a way,” Sorokin acknowledged.
Based upon the New York Times article about Anna by Jessica Pressler, each episode begins with the half adorable/half frustrating caveat "This whole story is completely true. Except for all of the parts that are totally made up." Given the new normal of formerly legit journalists buying into the clickbait of creating narratives rather than reporting news, I feel like that caveat should be above the masthead of many of our vaunted media.
Over eleven episodes Anna is seen first as a villain, then as a bit of a folk hero, and finally as a sort of mix of the two. There is certainly a case to be made that those taken in by her sort of deserved the ripoff as, unlike the victims of the hedge fund managers, corporate lawyers, and Big Pharma, her victims were ridiculously wealthy circulating in crowds of the ridiculously wealthier. Like Robin Hood if he just kept the bags of gold for himself.
Why did any of these people believe in her bullshit?
The best explanation offered is that she was cool. Anna Delvey was like Donald Trump in that she would make broad claims and even when someone showed her proof that it was made up nonsense, she would deflect and tell the lie again. And again. Somehow this worked. Unlike Trump, this practice somehowmakes this twenty-six year old con artist sympathetic.
I know exactly when I was hooked. Anna Chlumsky, playing a version of Pressler, is pregnant but still visiting Anna Delvey as she is locked up in Riker's awaiting trial. It's their first meeting. Garner as Delvey explains how poorly dressed Chlumsky is, how she would prefer the VIP treatment of an actual approved press interview. Then she says, just as she's getting up to go back to her cell, "Are you pregnant or just very, very fat?"
Why did any of these people believe in her bullshit?
Because she didn't care if you liked her. Unlike everyone else among our affirmation-addicted bunch of apes, the Anna Delvey of Shondaland didn't give two shits what you thought of her or even if you bought her bullshit. She had what the rest of us (and certainly the image-conscious high society-types she bilked) are missing: a disdain for the approval of others.
I watched the first two episodes on one night. The next night, I watched the remaining nine episodes. It was a full-on binge. I don't do that very often as of late. It fries my old-ish GenX brain and leaves me a tad loopy. Inventing Anna, however, was a notable exception.
