Extremely well said. I think that this series should have Broken Aesop listed as one of the tropes.
Through almost the entire series, we’re shown what a sociopath Anna is (brilliantly acted) only to see our protagonist Vivian and Anna\'s \"friends\", really gaslit victims, and even the “Sciberians” all rally to Anna’s cause and somehow the audience is supposed to feel the same way. But how could we?
Rachel, who was absolutely victimized in real life, is successfully excoriated by Anna\'s lawyer as a hanger on and opportunist and once again we\'re supposed to share that assessment, even after having been shown a heart-wrenching portrayal of Anna’s devious behavior at the hotel and Rachel’s highly relatable panic.
Appalling. Just what was Rhymes trying to do here? We should root for Anna because… something something elitism, something something it’s a man’s world and it’s not fair? Seriously? Recall that we were also shown our newly minted feminist antihero Anna repaying the generosity of her female mentor by robbing her of $400,000.
What a waste of brilliant acting talent. This could have been a very different and much more edifying and illuminating story if told properly: How a con artist successfully put one over not only on a lot of savvy, wealthy and well-connected professionals who really should have known better, but also any number of ordinary people drawn in by her audacious charade and ended up with her celebrity and popularity intact despite being convicted for fraud.
Leave a Comment:
Please Uninvent Anna
I can kind of understand how Inventing Anna came about. Netflix discovered a couple of years back with Tiger King that they can hook and audience with true stories about captivatingly awful people. Inventing Anna is another attempt at the same thing, trading the Florida backwoods for the high rises of Manhattan Island, and trading the "documentary" label for "a completely true story, except for the parts that aren't".
The reason for the cheeky disclaimer in Inventing Anna is because, well, the true story just isn't quite as captivating as what the show needs it to be. Anna Delvey is a physchopathic con artist who deftly lied her way into the big leagues, and who ultimately couldn't stay one step ahead of her creditors and the cops. The show needed her to be more interesting than the subject of a single article, so it has to try and spice up Anna's life, along with the various people she ripped off. Unfortunately the show doesn't manage it. Episodes feel repetitive, with our journalist protagonist interviewing one rich idiot after the next about how Anna tricked them. A couple of these misadventures are gripping, but they're all doing the same thing.
"She's not a psychopath" says our protagonist, in the hopes to convince the audience there is more of a mystery to Anna to solve. But that's clearly not true. She is psychopathic and you can tell it from the first episode we meet her. It is in fact a very realistic and convincing depiction of a psychopath; note worthy for a piece of television, but also not interesting enough to captivate us for nine episodes. Anna is such an arsehole there's no emotional connection we can share with her. We just feel contempt for her and nothing else. At least with the Tiger King, who also was thoroughly unsympathetic, he was doing something weird and wacky every episode.
The length of Inventing Anna is its biggest flaw. The story lends itself to a good movie, or a tight mini series, but certainly not a series this long. Worse still, the whole framing aspect of the show, that of a heavily pregnant journalist having two weeks to investigate and pen an article about Anna Delvey, ends after episode seven. It comes to a clean narrative conclusion, and just when the story feels like it is ending, we then have to see the journalist exhaustively research yet more of Anna's past, and then see a full blown trial afterwards.
The show is further soured by the fact that one of the biggest benefactors of it is the real life Anna Delvey, who was paid a fortune for this story, coming to her just as she is stepping out of prison. It's kind of goulish how society obsesses over unpleasant people who thoroughly ruin the lives of others; not only does this show have no self-reflection about that, it goes out of its way to encourage more people to stare at this individual, and to reward an egomaniac criminal with yet more attention and money.