SCAMMERS ARE HAVING A CULTURAL MOMENT
“New Anna Delvey just dropped.” That’s what a friend posted in a Slack channel recently upon reading about a New York City promoter associated with an archipelago of buzzy restaurants and bars, who had been sued for allegedly pocketing the money of people who thought they were his investors.
From the aforementioned Delvey, a.k.a. Anna Sorokin, the fake heiress shacking up at fine hotels, to disgraced U.S. congressman George Santos, spending campaign funds on Botox, there’s something delectable about consuming the details of a grift — especially when there’s an aura of glamour around it.
You could say that scammers have been having a pop cultural moment of late. From the disastrous Fyre Festival impresario Billy Mcfarland to Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and her faulty medical devices to crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-fried, it feels like we’ve been inundated with these stories. But the con artist has long had a hold on the popular imagination. How else to explain the arrival of another iteration of fictional con man Tom Ripley?
Steven Zaillian’s Ripley, the latest adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, was released on Netflix recently. This one stars Irish actor Andrew Scott as the title character, who is recruited by the wealthy father of Dickie Greenleaf (Johnny Flynn) to bring his dilettante son home from Italy. Given that the story is more than a half-century old, it is no spoiler to say that Tom takes the elder Greenleaf’s money and eventually ends up murdering Dickie and assuming his identity in Rome.
This, of course, is far from the first time Ripley has been depicted in pop culture. Perhaps most famously, Matt Damon played the character as a youthful beauty in Anthony Minghella’s 1999 film The Talented Mr. Ripley. Before that, the French heartthrob Alain Delon took on the role in 1960’s Purple Noon. Elsewhere, John Malkovich, who makes an appearance in the Netflix show, was Ripley in the 2002 Ripley’s Game, a take on one of Highsmith’s later Ripley novels.
So why do we keep adapting this mid-century novel? Zaillian said it goes back to Highsmith’s text, which she wrote from Tom’s point of view. “He has these traits that I think we all relate to,” the director said. “He has aspirations, envy, pride, desires, the same things that we all have and that we try to keep in check. He’s not able to keep them in check, and that’s where the story leads.”
Zaillian’s assessment gets at the enduring appeal of the con man, and why it’s so easy to get a little thrill when a “new Anna Delvey drops.” These characters, be they real or fictional, are relatable. Almost.
For the comedian Laci Mosley, whose Scam Goddess podcast is the subject of an upcoming book, the cultural attraction to scammers is twofold.
“I think that people are curious about people who have the audacity to create rules of their own and exist in a reality that is essentially something that they have dreamed up for themselves and works for them,” she said.
But also, she added, people are fearful of being scammed — which contributes to the fascination. That explains the recent virality of a New York magazine story in which a writer admitted to falling for a scam call.
Other recent films have tapped into the nightmare of being at the opposite end of a grifter: In the Jason Statham thriller The Beekeeper, the hero goes on a rampage after his landlady falls for a phishing scheme. Meanwhile, in the upcoming comedy Thelma, June Squibb becomes an elderly action hero after she falls for a phone scam.
In real life, there seem to be two tiers of grifters. Some are essentially amusing. Delvey, for instance, has been embraced by the same New York society set she tried to con her way into. In September, she co-hosted a fashion show for the designer Shao Yang at the East Village apartment building where she is under house arrest.
Then there are the scammers the public abhors. Theranos founder Holmes, for example, was met with scorn when she attempted to reinvent herself as “Liz” in the New York Times, ditching her famously deep voice and framing herself as a maternal figure, before starting her prison sentence. That’s because her grift was cruel rather than merely materialistic. Her official crime was fraud, but she also toyed with people’s lives.
Of course, fiction gives audiences permission to root for con men even when the crimes are serious.
Take, for instance, Emerald Fennell’s Ripley-infused movie Saltburn.
The film ends with its middle-class-striver protagonist Oliver (Barry Keoghan) having systematically dispatched the rich Catton family and taken over their family estate. When he dances, naked, through the halls, his triumph is cathartic even if Fennell doesn’t exactly celebrate him. It’s fun to emulate Keoghan’s movements — there’s dastardly wish-fulfillment afoot.
Tom Ripley is also a murderer, a fact that the new series doesn’t gloss over. But Zaillian said he doesn’t see Ripley as a psychopath.
“I thought he was, in many ways, a normal person who goes too far with the things he wants or the things he needs,” the director says.
I think that people are curious about people who have the audacity to create rules of their own and exist in a reality that is essentially something that they have dreamed up for themselves.
— PODCASTER LACI MOSLEY