Julia Garner in Inventing Anna, ‘One Dollar’ in Sakawa, author Marlowe Granados. Images: Netflix/IMDb/Flying Books
In June 2018, the New York Times announced the arrival of ‘The Summer of Scam’. Kicked off by Jessica Pressler’s hit article in New York Magazine on the fake heiress Anna Delvey, those heady months saw a deluge of both stories about scammers and thinkpieces examining their relevance to the cultural moment. Marie Claire suggested the obsession was ‘a winking protest of the status quo’ in order to ‘nod at glaring societal unfairness in a way that’s a little more nuanced than just ‘eat the rich’’. In Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, writer Jia Tolentino described the con as the ‘definitive millennial ethos’. Most agreed there was a shared catharsis in reimagining the abstract and increasingly avant-garde world of financial subordination through the antihero narrative arc; follow the plucky protagonist and you’ll find the real perpetrator, with global capitalism emerging as something we might successfully subvert.
While the intellectual-property-to-Netflix-series pipeline moves fast, a media industry predicated on locating the correct moral position on cultural moments (‘takes’) moves faster. Since the Summer Of Scam’s initial rise, the mood has shifted from earnestness to derision. Shows about grifters are ‘the year’s most boring premise’, Stuart Heritage argued recently in The Guardian. Meanwhile, Vox, the ideological home of the professional-managerial class, has called the recent Netflix series Inventing Anna, based on Pressler’s article, a ‘quasi-feminist, girlboss-adjacent revenge fantasy’. Despite the show’s awkward and meandering attempt to position Delvey as an antiheroine for women in finance—as if the problem with the free market is sexism alone—even the series’ creators also attempt to court the cringe by acknowledging the limits of their own attempt at subversion. ‘[It’s] something about class, social mobility, identity under capitalism, I dunno…’ reflects the series’ fictionalised Pressler stand-in months after publishing her viral article on Delvey.
As streaming platforms extend the Summer of Scam through an endless string of productions—The Tinder Swindler, The Dropout, Worst Roommate Ever—the real scam is beginning to feel like the enduring promise that within this deluge of content we might find any sort of subversion. Agonisingly, works that do clearly offer a critique of capitalism often become enveloped by the eerie flexibility of corporate liberalism. When Bong Joon-ho was asked why he thought his 2019 Oscar-winning film Parasite resonated so deeply across the world, he replied, ‘there is no borderline between countries now because we all live in the same country, it’s called capitalism.’ Meanwhile, neoliberalism’s biggest proponents, from Elon Musk to Barack Obama, have publicly, unabashedly, praised the film.
Inventing Anna awkwardly attempts to position Delvey as an antiheroine for women in finance—as if the problem with the free market is sexism alone.
Yet even within the awkward paradox of criticising something while embedded within it, and decisively outside the neatly defined narrative arc typical of an IP-to-Netflix adaption, and somewhere between the Summer of Scam’s appraisal as ‘a winking protest of the status quo’ and the irony-poisoned, eye-rolling reception of its recent resurgence, there is still a critique of capitalism—albeit a passive one—to be found in the art of the scam. This emerges in at least two contrasting ways in contemporary film and literature. First, in foregrounding the scam-as-work—a method of continued endurance in response to increasing precarity—and second, in depicting grifting the rich as a sort of improvised alternative to formal work detached from neoliberal fantasies of upwards mobility.
Encapsulating the latter, Canadian author Marlowe Granados’ 2021 novel Happy Hour follows two early-twenties women through a stretched-out New York summer in direct pursuit of pleasure. The novel’s dismissal of the promise of a ‘good life’ predicated on upwards mobility and identity-via-work is revolutionary enough, in the age of hustle culture, to be taken on by radical publisher Verso Books—even as Vox declares the girlboss to be officially over. ‘On Tuesday we attended a photography show and met plenty of people,’ recounts the narrator, Isa.
Everyone kept asking us what we were doing in New York, what we were working on, and what our general story was. When Gala told them we were doing ‘absolutely nothing,’ she was met with raised eyebrows. They would add, ‘Do you have internships at magazines?’ No one seemed to understand what Gala was saying, and I thought perhaps she wasn’t enunciating to their liking. I know she sometimes warbles. So I repeated emphatically, ‘Nothing! Nothing at all!’
‘Ultimately, the book is very anti-work,’ Granados tells Nylon. ‘They’re just going around and to me, that’s what New York is and should be instead of this very capitalist going, going, going all the time. It’s more about the idea of the possibility.’ The financial precarity of Isa and Gala’s daily life is mediated by odd cash-in-hand jobs and underpinned by the comforting knowledge that drinks, food and cab rides can almost always be procured for free. In Happy Hour, the scam is subtle, embedded in the everyday and dependent on an enduring social disconcertion towards young women who have mastered the art of charm. Instead of cleanly subverting the neoliberal archetype of entrepreneurial subjectivity, the women’s casual grifting is indeed enterprising, grounded in a relaxed approach to risk and an endless capacity to Win Friends And Influence People. What imbues their grift, and indeed the story itself, with capitalist critique is how it unfolds without an attachment to neoliberal fantasy. Rather than entrepreneurs looking to secure for themselves the upward mobility promised by the American Dream, Isa and Gala are more improvisers, scavenging together the best possible moods and materials out of the present moment.
There is a critique of capitalism—albeit a passive one—in foregrounding the scam-as-work, a method of continued endurance in response to increasing precarity, and detached from neoliberal fantasies of upwards mobility.
As Granados reminds us, Happy Hour’s protagonists’ approach to the grift is ‘anti-work’; its passive critique of capitalism is found in casting away any finite future imagined through the lens of neoliberal fantasy in favour of feeling out more possible pleasures. However, there’s an equally enduring, if not stronger, critique of capitalism in stories of the grift-as-work, where life unfolding outside neoliberalism’s good life promises is less an aesthetic choice than an unavoidable reality. Ben Asamoah’s 2018 documentary Sakawa traces such a milieu; the film follows a group of young Ghanaians living in poverty who practice the art of Sakawa—catfishing wealthy Westerners on dating apps into sending money. Rather than feeling explicitly illicit, the mechanics behind the romance scam reflect the daily grind of office work; the labour is admin heavy, client-focused and exhausting, minus, of course, any semblance of the job security found in more formal economies. Inside a cramped house, the workers tap away on cell phones and laptops, stopping only to make and answer client calls, the men donning coy, high-pitched voices. These scenes are juxtaposed with documentation of the mountains of e-waste surrounding the workers’ village, making clear the contrast between the worker’s living conditions and those of their wealthy western ‘clients’, and reifying how, as ethnographer Silvia Lindtner writes, ‘the neoliberal doctrine of inevitability is already being challenged, on a daily basis, by those excluded from living its seemingly utopian promise’. While Happy Hour’s Isa and Gala’s response to precarity is to opt out of the promise of upwards mobility in pursuit of pleasure, the workers in Sakawa, excluded by such a promise to begin with, broker their own false promises as a means of survival. In documenting a baseline of endurance under capitalism that is both devoid of fantasy even while explicitly dealing in it, the film muddies the distinction between honest and dishonest work under global capitalism.
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Thinking through questions of honest and dishonest work is where we might find a passive critique of capitalism in stories of grifting. However, stories that best depict such contested entanglements rarely fold so neatly into the moral obviousness favoured by much contemporary storytelling. That so much Summer of Scam content favours the narrative arc of the anti-hero appears as the source of both its initial celebration and its eventual rejection. ‘Somewhere along the line, they got busted, which makes cheering them on a little less guilt-inducing,’ reflects the Marie Claire author who likened scamming as a ‘nod at glaring societal unfairness in a way that’s a little more nuanced than just ‘eat the rich’. Whereas four years later, Vox argues that Inventing Anna paints Delvey as too much of a victim in a failed attempt to float the quasi-feminist angle of ‘misunderstood famous woman’, and that instead, the series wants to ‘gaslight, gatekeep, and girlboss the art of grifting’ (that Vox comfortably adopts this angle off the back of a long history working with Goldman Sachs is just another testament to the elasticity of corporate liberalism.)
While Happy Hour’s response to precarity is to opt out of the promise of upward mobility, the workers in Sakawa, excluded by such a promise to begin with, broker their own false promises as a means of survival.
‘A lot of industry people said when reading the novel that there wasn’t enough for them to latch onto, there wasn’t a lot of plot, they didn’t feel very much for the girls’, Granados tells The Editorial Magazine. ‘I knew that people would want something concrete to happen to them so that they could learn.’ Stories like Happy Hour explore the possibility of a sort of solidarity that comes from ‘having adventures and being in the impasse together’, where, as Granados suggests, people might see ‘there is a radical nature in not having Isa and Gala be punished’. Meanwhile, works like Sakawa extend the question of punishment to rethink the validity of the crime by contextualising so-called illicit economies within the clear inequalities shaped by an apparently ‘licit’, liberal free market.
In his recent piece for The Guardian, Stuart Heritage suggests the popularity of scamming stories is ‘all down to true crime run-off.’ Ignoring how the extended Summer of Scam’s allure might reflect a collective detaching from capitalism’s fraying fantasies, he instead argues, ‘Now that murder is passé, it’s time for murky financial dealings to have a moment in the spotlight.’ In assuming a narrative’s form is fixed while the substance is flexible, yet usually derivative of what has been successful for the market, writers like Heritage—who in 2020 authored a book called Bedtime Stories for Worried Liberals (seriously)—reify contemporary culture’s attachment to liberal heroic storytelling.
It is clear the problems caused by capitalism, often so embedded in ordinary life, cannot be contained in a liberal narrative arc, resolved neatly by a protagonist and wrapped up in a clear moral lesson.
While ‘the fad for grifter shows is annoying,’ reflects Heritage, ‘give it a couple of years and it will seem like heaven compared to all the true crime shows about petty shoplifting we’ll have to sit through.’ While this might sound like hell to an author of a collection in which ‘Fairy Godmothers look a lot like Barack Obama’, a broader cultural engagement with the everyday violence of precarity might lessen the tendency to moralise personal experiences of survival. Instead, it might contribute to the crucial archive of stories that embrace the ethical ambiguity underpinning their subjects’ ongoingness, offering a passive critique of capitalism in their refusal to search for a resolution within a liberal heroic framework.
It is clear the problems caused by capitalism, often so embedded in ordinary life, cannot be contained in a liberal narrative arc, resolved neatly by a protagonist and wrapped up in a clear moral lesson. Instead, works like Happy Hour and Sakawa contribute to an alternative archive that documents endurance within an unresolved, increasingly ordinary kind of crisis.
Inventing Anna is available on Netflix. Sakawa is available to stream in full on YouTube. Happy Hour is available now from your local independent bookseller.
This essay was a runner-up in the 2022 KYD New Critic Award.
