Re-inventing “Inventing Anna”

One of Netflix’s most popular shows this week is “Inventing Anna.” Shonda Rimes developed this nine-part series for Netflix (no shade on Shonda, she is awesomely talented), based on a real woman who called herself “Anna Delvey.” Anna showed up in New York one day and told everyone she was a German heiress with a megamillion trust fund. Then she connived her way into elite social and financial circles. She lived a posh lifestyle, decked out in high fashion, staying at luxury hotels, taking limos and private jets, cavorting on yachts. She documented it all (stylishly, of course) on Instagram. She made plans to found her own arts club, which is apparently a thing (to me it sounded like a Mall of the Americas for the fabulously wealthy). She found bankers and attorneys and “gallerists” and architects to sign onto the project, even though her background was rather shady.

She also found a posse of friends to surround herself with. There was a young editorial assistant from Vanity Fair, a celebrity fitness/lifestyle coach, a concierge at a five-star hotel, a boyfriend seeking financing for his internet start-up. In each case, she used her companions to further her own purposes. She took money from some, inveigled introductions and contacts from others, traveled, and was an extended, often uninvited, houseguest (“GET OFF THE YACHT NOW!”). In every case, she betrayed the people who seemed to care about her.

Ponzi schemes have a way of crashing and burning, though, and eventually Anna’s luck ran out. The big reveal: she was a liar, a fraudster and a cheat. Anna was not an heiress and she was actually born in Russia, the daughter of a middle-class couple named Sorokin who emigrated to a small town in Germany in the 1990s. The series (a little long, at nine episodes) tells a highly fictionalized version of Anna’s life, although much of it is based on a magazine article written by journalist Jessica Pressler.

I found pretty much every character in the series irritating and frustrating (except the spouses — hi, Pam Allen’s daughter!). Don’t even get me started on the tropes that infuriated me (such as the “being obsessed with your job and ignoring your own health and family is virtuous” trope and the “if you just push harder, you won’t need a C-section” trope).

At the same time, I also found Anna’s story fascinating. Why? An intimate look into the “lifestyles of the rich and famous” (say that with an Australian accent, just like Robin Leach)? A twisted Robin Hood fantasy, where the unthinking, out-of-touch wealthy are snookered into paying for the penniless? A fuck-you to the snobs and pretentious everywhere (haha, a middle-class girl from a tiny town in Russia fooled you!)? A commentary on how hard it is for a young woman to break into the clique-ish jock-y men’s club that is pretty much every business everywhere? Sisters are doing it for themselves feminism? Pick your explanation; it’s a veritable tabula rasa.

By the last two episodes, though, I was completely frustrated by the way the series seemed to glamorize Anna, as if the creators were rooting for her. Because let’s face it: Anna was not some hapless naif.

She faked trust documents which were so real-looking they nearly fooled Wall Street bankers. She used a voice distorter to pretend to be a German attorney handling her alleged trust. She lied over and over again about her ability to pay for things. Then she led her creditors on with promises of wires being sent and bank mistakes, carefully moving from hotel to hotel, bank to bank, to keep the deception going as long as possible. She had all sorts of scienter.

But what troubled me most about Anna Delvey was the not so much the way she defrauded hotels and financial institutions (admittedly bad) but how she betrayed pretty much everyone who cared about her. This woman had ride-or-die friends, one of the most precious things you can have in this world. And she shat on them all.

I went into the series thinking that it would be a commentary on the social media culture of our time: the way Instagram paper dolls are called “influencers,” the way your number of followers is more important than what you know or create, the foolishness of thinking that what people portray on their Facebook page is at all representative of what their actual lives are like. And at the end, even the two people who ought to be most skeptical — the lawyer defending her and the reporter who investigated her — seem to idealize her as much as her followers. Meanwhile, Rachel (who may have been a social climber, but, really, wasn’t everyone in Anna’s story?) who put her financial security and job at risk to bail out a friend in a jam was demonized and made to look foolish and grasping.

I know you’ve heard people discuss how Alanis Morisette’s song “Ironic” is full of anecdotes that are not ironic, but merely unfortunate. Maybe you’ve heard people wonder if the song is intentionally full of unironic things in a kind of meta-irony. So maybe Anna Delvey’s story is like that, too. Maybe our own fascination with Anna’s story, even as we find her repugnant, is part of the problem. Maybe we are meant to think long and hard about how social media has warped our perspectives so that we find ourselves entertained and intrigued by a grifter and pathological liar — whether you are a naive young woman trying to get published in Vanity Fair, a somewhat cynical reporter who’s been fooled once before, or a middle-aged suburban lady drinking wine.

We all should know better.