“Inventing Anna”: Flipping Vice to Virtue
I must have been living under a rock the past few years because before the Netflix series Inventing Anna dropped, I had never heard of Anna Sorokin, or her alter ego Anna Delvey. Having just finished bingeing the series, I have to ask, “WTF were the producers, directors, and most of all the writers, thinking?” Somehow they managed to take the story of a young woman who through a mix of bullying and charm managed to con a bunch of high society folks and two banks out of $275,000 in cash and much more in support of her lifestyle. She is a narcissist at the least, a sociopath at the worst, and she went to prison for two years (of a 4–12 year sentence) for her financial crimes. So there’s that, you know, the judicial system working.
But in the fictionalized series, the audience’s intermediaries and guides to the story, Anna’s lawyer, a reporter, and two not-high-society friends (not the friend who she tricked into putting a $60K hotel bill on her work credit card), seem to think Anna got an unfair shake. She was just trying to gain access to a world to which there is no access but money and connections. She was brilliantly working the connections, faking the rich girl part until she could make it, and she got so close. The system is rigged, Anna is brilliant and ambitious and hard-working, she could make things happen if just given the chance, and screw those rich people anyway. A girl with a dream arrives in New York, and almost realizes her dream.
Her dream? Most of all, to become famous. But also to build, at a specific Manhattan location, the most exclusive, most hip, most glorious social club for rich people in all of New York. Named after herself, the Anna Delvey Foundation, natch.
The dream is as corrupt as the dreamer. What she wants — to take money from people who have lots of it and give it to herself — is stupid and selfish. The club (the name “foundation” also an ironic twist on our times, like the corrupt Trump Foundation) is a way for very rich people to throw money at themselves and each other to prove that money itself makes people important. To cast Anna Sorokin as an example of the American Dream, to pretend that she would have done anything but continue to suck up resources from banks and connections and “friends” and have nothing to show for it at the end but bankruptcy or ill-gotten gains, is ridiculous. To see any virtue in this woman’s story is appalling.
We have developed a knack, however, for turning vice into virtue. This whole thing reminds me of a story from years back, the flip side of the Anna Sorokin story, extreme frugality. It started with a segment on PBS’ The News Hour in 2018. It introduced me to a man who blogs as “Mr. Money Mustache” and who with his family and friends in Colorado began, as he says, “[living] a frugal yet Badass life of leisure.” Don’t get him wrong — the blog and his program is about getting and being rich. It’s about retiring at 35 by living a very frugal life. It was immediately apparent to me the guy was a freakin’ parasite. He was living off his community, taking and putting nothing back. He was not in any way “productive,” though he spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about exactly what he said he was free from: money. How to not spend it. This is parsimony, which is a vice, not frugality, a virtue. Many vices are virtues taken to an extreme. Ambition is a virtue until you find yourself driven to cut other people off at the knees, steal, and lie to get what you’re after. Living off of others, strategically taking advantage of every credit card game and getting everything you can for free, then making passive income off the advice of extreme frugality on your blog? That’s not a virtue. That’s gaming the system. And it’s not freedom, either.
It’s a bad system! Yes! Late-stage capitalism combined with technology — Lord help us as the cryptocurrency revolution begins to take hold, especially with the younger generation. But we’ve replaced our values of community and care with wealth and power, and that’s not in any way good. Let’s fight a narrative that tells us something different.
