In an endless stream of the genre that ought to, at this point, be called “making sociopaths empathetic,” Shonda Rhimes’ latest hit, Inventing Anna, is the most apologetic yet for behavior that has no real “cause.” Other than, you know, “society.” And, speaking of, it takes Anna little time to ingratiate herself in New York’s high society thanks to what her “fashion friend,” Val (James Cusati-Moyer), calls “peasant face.” After all, “Her face was basic…which is how you know someone is legitimately wealthy. No one who looked like that could get away with being poor. Not in our world.” A fair assessment (what with inbreeding’s aesthetic effects lingering in all rich people’s bloodlines). But Anna did get away with it for quite some time, living on borrowed favors, connections and, therefore, money. Particularly that of her “futurist” boyfriend, Hunter Lee Soik, whose name was changed to Chase Sikorski (Saamer Usmani) for narrative purposes that fit in with the show’s disclaimer, “This whole story is completely true. Except for all the parts that are totally made up.” In many regards, that’s the same disclaimer Anna might have given, had she been “kinder” to the ones she was scamming. But that’s the thing about con artists, innit? They’re not exactly concerned with the emotions of others.
Like The Tinder Swindler a.k.a. “Simon Leviev.” Another recently dredged up con artist for Netflix who has prompted people to draw parallels between him and Anna (and how they would make the “perfect couple”). Some would say that what Anna did was far less detrimental than Leviev, who had numerous women on his Ponzi scheme hook. While also pretending to be rich and using other people’s money to come across that way. But not so. Anna might not have had as many people believing she was “in love” with them, but she did fake quite a few platonic relationships to insert herself into her “prized” New York echelon. And yes, Rachel DeLoache Williams (Katie Lowes) counts as a victim of that fakery, no matter what Team Anna types might use as a justification to besmirch her.
Regina George once said of Cady Heron (as did Paris Hilton of Kim Kardashian), “I, like, invented her.” Not only does Anna feel that way about “creating” Rachel’s success, but she also did the same of the “Anna Delvey” “brand” as well. What brand is that, exactly? Well, it’s, quite frankly, “being millennial.” Or rather, the cliché of what it means to be millennial. The very one that appears so prominently in a show like Search Party, yet even those characters are made to be less empathetic (in turn, making them more believable) than how Anna is rendered by Rhimes’ deft hand as she re-creates the period of Anna’s time in New York. Although a white girl is rarely respected by Black women, Rhimes seems to, like Neff (Alexis Floyd), appreciate Anna’s so-called “hustle.” The thing everyone assumes is très New York, the “world capital” of “hustle” and “getting shit done”—that is, if you know how to cut the right corners, like Anna, to do so. As though acting like a bitch full-time in order to come across as an heiress is something to be “revered.” What’s more, Rhimes lays on thick this constant “a man would never have to put up with I do” rhetoric. Nor would a man have to face any jail time the way Anna did (see: the aforementioned “Simon Leviev”).
In this sense, it harkens back to another one of Jessica Pressler’s adapted-for-the-screen articles for New York Magazine, “The Hustlers at Scores.” Not only because Pressler wants to make a consistent commentary on how the frat boys and Ivy Leaguers of Wall Street get away with robbing and conning the masses while others are condemned to pay for their crimes, but also because the same adaptation tactic of incorporating “the journalist” into the narrative is key to driving the plot. In Hustlers, Pressler gets changed to the character “Elizabeth” (Julia Stiles), whereas in Inventing Anna, she has an even more integral role as Vivian Kent (Anna Chlumsky). The journalist, who, like so many, can’t help but somehow be conned by Anna’s allegedly “winsome” air. Even though she has about as much charm as a pap smear.
Nonetheless, Vivian is convinced Anna represents something “bigger” about American culture, the millennial generation and society at large. Lamenting that Anna is turned into little more than another meme and punchline, Viv tells her husband, Jack (Anders Holm), “I just feel like everyone missed the real story. Something about class, social mobility, identity under capitalism. I don’t know.” It all sounds like yet another vague attempt at intellectualism from a middle-class white girl who feels as though she wants to better understand how others get so easily fucked over by the system in a way that would leave them little choice but to “get creative” the way Anna did. In essence, Vivian wants her readers to ask themselves: is Anna really to blame when she’s a product of our flawed, ailing society? One that itself feeds back into the idea that moral bankruptcy is “okay” anyway since you’ll probably end up having a TV show made about you. Well, yes. She still is… to blame.
It doesn’t really help to try imbuing her intense desire to live la dolce vita with profundity. Or to make her seem like some kind of genius in the art of reinvention (please, don’t let there be another show called Reinventing Anna). “Holy shit, who is she?” Jack chimes in during the first episode, “Life of a VIP,” with well-timed “shock” after Vivian points to different photos of Anna on Instagram that are hung up on her “Anna wall”/impending baby’s room. As though a girl who changes her looks often (especially whilst in her twenties) is meant to be the automatic signal of a gifted con artist and mastermind (that would make Madonna one for sure). Thus, Vivian piggybacks on her husband’s question with, “Who the hell is Anna Delvey?” Anna’s answer, as she briefly narrates during the opening scene of the first episode, is: “You know me. Everyone knows me. I’m an icon. A legend.” The point being that, in the age of the internet, where nothing is real, all it really takes is asserting you’re a legend and an icon to “be” one. But Delvey is no such thing, and when the hype around Inventing Anna dies out, she’ll go back to being another footnote in New York’s scam-laden history.
Like any decent scammer posing as a richie, however, Delvey knows the importance of name-checking all the right artists in order to be seen as erudite and cultured. For instance, she makes sure to mention Doris Salcedo while being shown 281 Park. The building she has her eyes set on for the Anna Delvey Foundation, a social club meant to far usurp the likes of Soho House in terms of exclusivity. She also assures her investors, “Christo promised to wrap the building.” It’s all just enough of a “dash of superior knowledge” to get people to buy into her bullshit. Including the “Cindy Sherman soliloquy” she gives to Talia Mallay (Marika Dominczyk) at a gallery. Telling her she should buy the picture of one of Sherman’s first photographs of herself in the frame, Anna waxes, “Before this series, Sherman was just another photographer hiding behind the lens… Then one day she steps into her own frame, considers herself to be worthy. Rather than being forced into a role in the male-dominated art world, she takes a leading role in her work. And it changes the world. This is not dress-up. This is bravery. This is a moment in art.” Obviously, she’s likening her own “transcendence” into becoming the person she wanted to be—rich and powerful—to what Cindy Sherman does, which is actual art. But such is the bastardization of the medium in a century that values nothing tangible.
By episode three, “Two Birds, One Throne” a.k.a. “Nora,” it’s evident Anna is done being in Chase’s frame, wanting to use his benefactress and connect into the high society world, Nora Radford (Kate Burton), solely for herself. Like Val, Nora seems to come from the ether of the writer’s imagination in re-creating Anna’s timeline for entertainment purposes. Although, one humorous aspect of the timeline that’s true occurs in episode four, “A Wolf in Chic Clothing” a.k.a. “Alan Reed,” during which we see Anna crashing in Billy McFarland’s (better known as the Fyre Festival guy) SoHo apartment. Or rather, the headquarters for the credit card company, Magnises, that he ran. How deliciously appropriate: a scammer running a business based on money that isn’t actually real. It is also in episode four that a key quote from Pressler’s original article is used about “genius” being rare. The one that goes, “Money, like, there’s an unlimited amount of capital in the world, you know? But there’s limited amounts of people who are talented” (though no shortage of people who, like Anna, think they are). In effect, Anna is repurposing that chestnut about how money can’t buy class. How even though she might not have descended from the wealth she claimed to be, she still had the taste that proved otherwise (hence an episode title like “Too Rich for Her Blood”). That she was “rich at heart.” Which, in her eyes, made the project of the Anna Delvey Foundation integral to bettering the already-insulated world of the elite.
As for the running motif about her constantly searching for some sort of father figure to latch onto in the series, Rhimes’ writers again lay it on thick with the feminism shtick (and it is very much a shtick within the context of this series). So it is that she complains to her adopted Daddy figure of the moment, Reed, “My dad’s always been so uninterested, so indifferent. Maybe if I was a boy, he’d be proud.” At another moment, she says, “My father will think I’m useless,” further manipulating Alan and his own daughter issues as she gets him on the hook for believing in her “cause.” The Foundation. It doesn’t stop there, with Anna adding other Electra complex-laden, woe-is-me gems like, “I think my father only ever wanted sons… I think my dad expected me to fail. All men underestimate women. Even the one who’s supposed to love us.” This includes Anna’s boyfriend, who has been standing in the way of her greatness (as far as she’s concerned) for too long for her to allow it to continue, serving the ultimate coup de grâce in correcting him about the quote from “John Lennon” he keeps reciting regarding the cockamamie business venture he wants her to be a part of: “A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality.” She finally snaps back that Yoko was the one who said that, not John. Just another case in point of how women are rendered into parentheticals next to men.
After Vivian visits her at the prison and hears Anna’s take on being underestimated, we’re reminded of what now feels like that long-ago nightmare of Trump being president as a news report features his orange mug in the background and Vivian seethes to Jack, “There are zero consequences for these men.” It parrots what Anna has been saying as Trump gives a State of the Union address. Proving that “men fail upwards all the time,” Anna also notes that Alan was promoted even after being directly responsible for defrauding his company. Though, at the very least, he does “suffer” the “consequence” of being assigned a racquet ball court that isn’t number one—instead, number twelve. Ouch. Practically Siberia for the exclusive workout club social scene.
As we slip into episode five, “Check Out Time” a.k.a. “Neff,” 12 George (in real life, 11 Howard) is about to become a distant memory as Anna has run her game on the hotel for too long. Even if the tipping in Benjamins factor had the staff duped for long enough. What’s more, the mention of Fyre Festival comes back (now a news headline for being an ultimate scam), foreshadowing Anna’s own smoke and mirrors gambit with Neff and further underscoring that nothing in this century is real, least of all people’s wealth. In contrast to Hustlers, we’re also given a piece of Pressler’s very intense career drama involving a story she wrote about a high school student who claimed to have made $72 million trading stocks. When he later said it was all fake, made up (how familiar), Bloomberg News reneged on the job offer they had made to Pressler, forcing her to stay at NY Mag—which was really for the best in the long run, as it would turn out. In Inventing Anna, Vivian’s first mistake was agreeing to write an article called “30 Reasons to Love New York,” namely because there are no reasons to. For love of “the hustle” that NYC brings out in people, Vivian chose to put “Donovan Lamb,” the kid who made millions trading stocks before graduating high school, as her number twelve reason to adore the city. This tendency to believe whatever people tell you if they’re confident enough also ties into Anna being able to show up in New York and become whoever she wanted to be. Pull herself up by her bootstraps (even if those boots belonged to other people) and “do the damn thing.”
In contrast to Rachel, who, Anna and select others feel, only rode on her coattails instead of “carving her own path” to a writing career. Still only faintly in the background at this juncture in the series, along with Kacy Duke (Laverne Cox), Rachel comes into full play in “Friends in Low Places” a.k.a. “Kacy” as they set out to the obscenely-priced hotel La Mamounia in Marrakesh. You know, because that’s where Khloe Kardashian stayed. Just another stereotypical indication of how millennial “aspirations” can be hyper-stylized for the sake of a “cautionary tale” (or is it an “encouraging” one?) like Inventing Anna. With Kacy falling gravely ill, it somehow seems logical for her to get on a plane instead of riding out the sickness in comfort and not potentially spreading her disease (but again, this was before Covid, when people were less concerned about such things).
Kacy’s sudden absence from the trip casts the die for Rachel to be the financial fall woman in episode seven, “Cash on Delivery” a.k.a. “Rachel.” Already depicted up to this point as nothing more than a hanger-on who only used Anna for her “money,” Rachel is at her most empathetic in this scenario, when we see the high stress of dealing with someone who appears so cavalier about a hotel not being able to charge her card. But, in this case, the one where Moroccans don’t fuck around, even Anna displays some faints signs of worry, with Rachel finally offering to put her own credit card down as a “placeholder” until Anna can “sort it” with her bank. It is also in “Cash on Delivery” that more overly grandiose statements about what Anna means as a symbol are made. Namely when Vivian declares to her editors, “My piece is about the swindle that is the American dream in the twenty-first century… It’s about why scam culture is here to stay. My story has a place.” Clearly. Along with countless others in this scam-artist-as-hero climate, including an upcoming series called The Dropout about Elizabeth Holmes (Amanda Seyfried) and her “company,” Theranos. Fond of wire fraud herself, Holmes is held up as another example of how women suffer more severe consequences than men when a business swindle is at last exposed. Be that as it may, few men get series about how their swindling was actually an essential rebellious act for the feminist cause.
At the end of “Cash on Delivery,” Delvey opts not to appear at her court hearing, Lindsay Lohan-style. And, speaking of that fellow lover of the Chateau Marmont, Delvey decides to dip out to Los Angeles to stay at said “castle on Sunset” after running another wire transfer scam. The desk agent who takes her ticket at the airport notes, “I love Los Angeles in the fall.” As if a desk agent would ever bother with such pleasantries. But, in this instance, it sets things up so Anna can rightfully (and in a meta manner) talk shit about New York by replying, “Beats this dump. This city’s full of pickpockets and thieves.”
Although episode seven would actually be a good place to stop the series, Rhimes feels obliged to let her writers run with an additional narrative that continues Vivian’s rather unnatural obsession with Anna (cue Regina George here, too, saying, “Why are you so obsessed with me?”). Enter episode eight, “Too Rich For Her Blood” a.k.a. “Anna?,” which allows Vivian the chance to pitch a potential follow-up story so that “Manhattan” magazine can foot the bill for her trip to Anna’s small hometown in Germany, the now “well-known” Eschweiler. By visiting Anna’s parents there and trying to interview others who knew her, Vivian hopes to bolster her theory about Anna truly embodying the American dream at its core, this being the primary reason why Anna came to New York in the first place. As Anna puts it from a hospital bed in Cedars Sinai, that reason is “to not let anyone define you by your past. To show them the bright future you’re building.” Even when that brightness is so overtly dimmed by reality. Specifically the reality of one’s station in life. This, of course, is meant to buttress Inventing Anna’s thesis about America encapsulating the continued ideal for “being whoever you want to be.” Being a country that doesn’t care about titles or old-world class the same way European countries, such as Germany or Britain, do. As fucking if. America is not the rumored sanctuary for those who have the chutzpah and “can-do” attitude to achieve “whatever” they want. It still very much cares about the class you were born into. Where your money “comes from.” Especially on the stodgy East Coast, which so loves to think of itself as “European.” “Better” than the rest of the U.S. in that and so many other senses. Again: As. Fucking. If.
The lengthy final episode (coming in at a movie-esque runtime of one hour and twenty-two minutes) puts Anna’s lawyer, Todd Spodek (Arian Moayed), to the ultimate test as he tries to defend his client the best way he knows how, despite her not wanting him to paint her as some kind of incompetent twit who didn’t have the savvy to know what she was doing when she pursued funds for the Anna Delvey Foundation. Called “Dangerously Close” a.k.a. “Todd,” episode nine brings it all full-circle in terms of elucidating that the effectiveness of a con is based on whether or not someone can see through you. Just as the jury sees through what Todd is saying about Anna not coming “dangerously close” to intent with (and succeeding at) her crimes.
Anna knew, better than most, that people can never see through you if you yourself believe in the lies you’re telling. This links back rather noticeably to Guillermo del Toro’s recent masterpiece and remake, Nightmare Alley, specifically its “protagonist,” Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper). As he inserts himself among carnies (the way Anna inserts herself among the “glitterati”) like Pete Krumbein (David Strathairn), who becomes instrumental in furthering Stanton’s already unscrupulous nature, he begins to believe in all the bullshit he’s spouting to audiences. And he has to have more of it “at the ready”…which is why Stanton tries to discreetly steal Pete’s book of cons, so to speak (he pretends to be clairvoyant to audiences using a series of signals with his assistant and wife, Zeena [Toni Collette]), while he’s passed out. Alas, Pete catches him in the act. This gives him the chance to explain to Stanton what “shuteye” is: “when a man believes his own lies, starts believing that he has the power, he’s got shuteye. Because now he believes it’s all true. And people get hurt.” Yes, that describes Anna and those around her to a tee, even prompting Todd to finally rage at her after she pushes him too far with her insults and delusions, “Do you believe your lies? Are they for me or for you? Must be you!”
Despite its very overt and over-the-top attempts to “vindicate” Anna as some kind of girlboss “made for New York” (vomit) just doing whatever it took to get what she wanted done, maybe the one thing Inventing Anna really does emphasize is that when you reach for the stars whilst in the gutter, you’ll always end up sinking even lower. It’s not about social mobility, but the idea that no one can ever really hide their class. Not even in a “level playing field” like the U.S. Although some might see Anna’s increased fame after this series as “ascension” beyond what she could have dreamed of, it’s unlikely that her reputation will ever evolve past this period in her life. Not that it should matter to her, for it’s highly plausible that she still has a strong case of shuteye.
