Inventing Anna: Why Do We Love the Psychopath Protagonist?
People commit financial fraud all the time, yet only psychopaths get TV deals?
An audacious twenty-something German heiress emerges in the lives of New York’s elite, seemingly out of the blue. Her refined taste in fashion, outrageously high standards, and tragically broken accent-from-nowhere made her difficult not to notice. This is Anna, our latest psychopath on screen, in Netflix’s trending new series, Inventing Anna.
Inventing Anna is Netflix’s latest true-crime series produced by Shonda Rhimes. The series retells a fictionalised account of the fake German heiress, Anna Delvey, also known as Sorokin[a], and her attempt to scam banks out of millions ($40m!) to fund her ‘vision’ for a new Soho house. And to finally have a working credit card in her wallet.
The story of Anna, played by Julia Garner, is told through the lens of a journalist, Vivienne Kent, played by Anna Chlusmky (inspired by Jessica Pressler), digging to find the truth about New York’s mysteriously wealthy newcomer. No one quite knows where she is from, who she is, or where she got all the money she claims to have. Infamous for her flashy Instagram and expensive taste in pretty much everything from underwear to private jets, admittedly, Anna is charming and aspirational (in the moments she is not wearing her hideous glasses). Or so I felt while I was gripped to my sofa for an entire weekend bingeing on the series.
Before I was woven into Netflix’s alluring and strange 9-episode TV show, I’d discovered Anna’s story through Fake Heiress, a podcast by two BBC journalists, Vicky Baker and Chloe Moss. In the 6-episode podcast series, they also recount the story of a cunning con artist through an immersive audio experience decorated with everything from voice-over actresses to narrate Anna to the intimate fictionalised supposings of her inner thoughts.
Jessica Pressler first broke the story in an investigative piece, How Anna Delvey Tricked New York’s Party People, for New York Magazine. Since the article was published, every retelling has been intriguing and compelling. Inspiring and cunning. Both evil and genius. But was it ever necessary?
What is our fascination with scam artists?
Inventing Anna is just one of the many trending TV series featuring a protagonist displaying all the behaviours of your average psychopath. From currently trending Tinder Swindler, to last year’s You, and Disney+’s upcoming Theranos-inspired, The Dropout, we are so intrigued by the psychopathic protagonist. But are these really the stories worth telling, or have studios become so lazy as to solely rely on a data spreadsheet for ideas throwing reasoning and moral judgement out of the door?
In recent years the documentary genre has grown 63% between January 2018 and March 2021, Parrot Analytics found. In May 2021 for The Ringer, they found that true crime was the fastest-growing sub-genre. CivicScience also found that 44% of U.S. respondents report they watch true crime somewhere, but Netflix was the most popular platform for this niche. This week Inventing Anna is topping those charts with 77m hours of views. Seems like they got a good deal for the £360,000 they paid Anna for her story, right?
Glamourising scam artists on TV
The issue with Inventing Anna is not the clearly askew moral values of the production team at Netflix, or our thirst for a juicy scam, but the glamorisation of scam artists in TV.
They’re extreme versions of dynamics with which we’re all familiar: exploitation, manipulation of trust, seductive performance, inflation of the self.
One journalist writes for the Guardian: “ Part of our evergreen fascination with scams — an amorphous zeitgeist that includes everything from Fyre festival to the Tinder Swindler — derives from recognition. They’re extreme versions of dynamics with which we’re all familiar: exploitation, manipulation of trust, seductive performance, inflation of the self.”
Shows like Fyre and Tinder Swindler are great examples of condoning unacceptable behaviours by scam artists while telling a story with insane juxtapositions and contradicting character desires.
Fyre, a documentary exposing the fraudulent luxury music festival founded by con artist Billy McFarland (coincidentally associated with Anna Delvey), was interesting, shocking and clearly portraying the wrongdoings of McFarland and his whole team. Even Netflix’s new Tinder Swindler paints Simon Leviev, a love-bombing con artist, as a heartless money-leech. But Netflix did not purchase the rights to Simon’s story for £360,000. They went to a victim, and let them retell the story.
You can achieve the desired and familiar tension juiced out of manipulative and exploitative characters to expose, or revel, at the exclusive world most of us will never be privy to without paying the criminal.
The story is particularly unoriginal when we distill out the likelihood that no one ever questioned her because she was an attractive-enough white woman.
At the end of the day, Anna’s con in Inventing Anna (and real life) is not a work of genius. The story is particularly unoriginal when we distill out the likelihood that no one ever questioned her because she was an attractive-enough white woman, less so because she was a rare, masterful and genius scam artist.
Anna Delvey, and other female con-artists check the boxes of the aspirational #girlboss with the same 24 hours in a day as Beyonce. Writers online write about Inventing Anna through the lens of hustle culture, and it makes sense. As one Guardian article put it, “scams are all the rage for Generation Hustle”.
Perhaps because executing a cunning scam is the height of productive work, without it looking like hard work. When we’re all cramming our to do lists with busyness and trying to condense more hours into a day than available, watching someone live a duplicitous life and not sweat for it or the money. Sure it’s a little tempting, a little aspirational.
However Anna didn’t want money as every episode insisted. What sane person risks it all not for the money?
These characters want fame. Like Delvey’s fictionalised friend said: “Everyone wants something. Money. Power. Fame. Love.” For Anna, it wasn’t about the money, and therefore not about getting the most without doing the hard work.
Why are we giving psychopaths TV-deals when it’s clearly satisfying some sick need to be known.
She of course didn’t get it all without working a little bit. Manipulating New York’s elite, being quick on her feet to keep the con running and acting the part in her own delusion is all very hard work but is it really ethical to document these scammers through the lens of hustle culture? Why are we giving psychopaths TV-deals when it’s clearly satisfying some sick need to be known, and why are we painting a detailed picture of the simplicity of scamming, the beauty of the art and the sexiness of succeeding without making it look like real hard work?
I think if we’re going to glamourise con artists, scammers and other ‘genius’ thieves, why don’t we start with showing both sides of the story. The one where they live in glamour and the one where they are ruthless, alone and scheming.
People commit financial fraud every single day, yet only psychopaths gets TV deals?
So while it doesn’t make us bad people to love the psychopath on our TV screen, the story wasn’t significant enough to justify validating the sick wants of Delvey in real life. People commit financial fraud every single day, yet only psychopaths get TV deals? Displaying that someone had the guts to step out of societal order and con Big Bank isn’t exactly the message anyone wants Big True Crime Studio to send out to the world.
Making psychopaths famous
In the end, Delvey got what she wanted. Not only through the article, glamorous trials (subsequent fashiongram), numerous podcasts, plays (see Anna X) and even book deals (see My Friend Anna), but now through the world’s most accessible true crime streaming service: Netflix.
She conned even the viewer out of our desire to know more, for her own psychopathic desire to be known.
And maybe, the interest of this particular story is beyond Anna, in the lavish and secret lives of New York’s elite, but despite this we didn’t see anything we haven’t seen before about the lives of the elite and yet Anna got everything she had ever wanted and more. She conned even the viewer out of our desire to know more, for her own psychopathic desire to be known.
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As Carreyrou, author of Bad Blood, puts it: “I’ll leave it to the psychologists to decide whether Holmes fits the clinical profile [of a psychopath], but there’s no question that her moral compass was badly askew.”
Perhaps she believed her own tale, perhaps she had a really tough upbringing and wanted to make the most out of life. But the way she did it, isn’t genius, it isn’t new and it isn’t worth the $360,000 Netflix paid for the rights to Anna’s all-too-common story*.
Carreyrou did later in a 2018 interview with Vanity Fair, add that he thinks “she absolutely has sociopathic tendencies.”
And in the words of Anna herself: “I actually see it as a compliment because they see Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk and Steve Jobs as sociopaths, so if they mean it in that way, I’ll take it.” she said.
Is this a character who truly deserves the attention dollars we are pouring into them? I think not.
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*She served a 2 year sentence. She paid half of her Netflix earnings to those whom she owed money.
