Based on a True Story of Impostors and Lies

I have written before about Frédéric Bourdin, the Frenchman who for several months successfully passed himself off as a kidnapped American teenager, living supposedly undetected with the boy's family. Yesterday I saw the feature film based on this story, The Chameleon, which was almost exactly what I would have expected based on the story I had already read. It raised all the same questions about this story that I've read (and asked)before: how on earth could an entire family mistake a 25-year-old Frenchman for their 16-year-old relative? If they couldn't, why were they pretending to? Whose lies were worse, the impostor's or his adopted family's?

I, like the film, am pretty certain that at least some members of Nicholas Barclay's family know what happened to him, but I was surprised to see this "review" on Netflix:
This movie is based on my family and is a far cry from the truth of what really happened. Based on real life??? Not really! My family is against this movie.

The review is not signed, so we have no way to know whether it was really written by a family member, but I wonder what parts the family member objected to most. Did Bourdin resemble Nick Barclay more than the film and news article suggest? Were the family's character flaws fabricated for entertainment purposes? Despite Netflix's description of the film, it was in no way a "thriller," and exhibited few characteristics of a typically highly manipulated "Based on a True Story" film. I'd love to know what its inaccuracies are; that knowledge might give this bizarre story some closure!

On Women and Fraud (first of a potential series)

I was excited to see the title Confidence Girl as an option to watch instantly via Netflix, because I've rarely found a film in which a woman was running a con or perpetrating fraud on her own. I probably should have expected less, because despite the film's title, the titular character seems in no way to run anything and is decidedly not on her own. In fact, if anything, she is the movie's moral redemption, and her only independent actions involve giving herself up to police. We could dismiss Confidence Girl as a typically sexist 1950s Hollywood film ("she'll take you for all you've got and you'll love it!"), but I suspect ther is more to this than socially-sanctioned sexism.

In fact, I suspect there is a lot more. Though women seem to lie, cheat, and steal as much as men do, there appear to be far fewer famous female forgers (say that five times fast!) and impostors than there are male ones. I'm so far afraid to conjecture a reason for this and I don't even have stastistics to prove it, but I've been mentally developing a project (dare I say paper or even dissertation?) that will help realize some of my ideas. Stay tuned for updates!

On Evil Twins and (Un)Successful Imposture

Yesterday I somewhat unintentionally watched two films with very similar premises, about people who commit crimes against their exact doubles in order to improve their own lives in one way or another. The two films are, of course, wildly different in their respective characterization, plots, and perspectives, but they both answere the age-old question "can I replace my exact double?" with a resounding "NO!" Bette Davis thinks she is very successfully impersonating her rich twin sister though several people see right through her, and Chick's friends and acquaintances in The Man with My Face can almost immediately spot the impostor. Perhaps it's not as easy as this to spot fakers in real life, but maybe the most successful impostors are without close friends or relatives and thus have no one to give them away. Bette Davis's character in Dead Ringer is certain that she's "all alone" and the realization that she's not is both her emotional savior and legal undoing. Is the best impostor incapable of forming close relationships? Does he avoid them? Perhaps The Talented Mr. Ripley answers some of these questions, but I'll leave that for another day.

On Legends and Faking One's Death

I was drawn to this story about the possibility that Butch Cassidy faked his death and lived quietly into old age both because I love a good faked death story and because I was bombarded with postcards and historical sites referring to him on my recent trip across the country. The story claims that a biography of Butch Cassidy written in the 1930s is actually an autobiography, and that he survived a shootout in Bolivia (his supposed place of death) to live "peacefully and anonymously" in Washington state. I'm skeptical, not that he could have faked his death, but that he would change his life so drastically after twenty years of robbery and general banditry (I hope "banditry" is a word). It seems to me that a bloody death is much more likely than a peaceful machinist's existence for one of the most notorious outlaws in U.S. history.

I'm also struck by our perpetual obsession with the (fake) deaths of celebrity figures, from Butch Cassidy, to Elvis Presley, to, most recently, Jackass star Ryan Dunn. These people have taken the place of gods and kings of religion and folklore, those dead-but-not-dead leaders who live on in the promise of their eventual returns. But the return is key, because without it, the untimely, glamorous death is far better than any life beyond a fabricated demise. Perhaps Butch Cassidy didn't care about being glamorous and truly wanted a peaceful life all the time he was committing crimes, but the bullet-riddled corpse makes for a much better movie.

On Pecuniary Emulation, Product Placement, and Film

I've just seen the 2009 film The Joneses, about a marketing company that employs groups of people to act as families in order to sell everything they own, eat, and do to their well-off neighbors. The idea is nothing new, of course: I've just been re-reading The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, who in 1899 wrote that "the currently accepted legitimate end of effort becomes the achievement of a favourable comparison with other men; and therefore the repugnance to futility... coalesces with the incentive of emulation." I can almost imagine that the characters read Veblen as part of their training (which would have been nice to see in the film, perhaps).

The title of the film itself is, of course, a nod to the phrase "keeping up with the Joneses," and in some ways it does critique a society which seems to prize possessions above all else, and the costlier, the more prized. The movie does take a tragic turn as a direct result of this "pecuniary emulation" (to coin Veblen again), and certainly the satire does, at times, come through to the viewer. However, at least as much as The Joneses tried to satirize a love for things over human relationships, it also actually attempted to sell us the products supposedly being critiqued. At one point in the film, David Duchovny's "son" says "doesn't it bother you that we're lying to them?" and Duchovny replies with "I'm not lying, I LOVE this car!" The movie is ultimately little more than one big advertisement for Audi, Ethan Allen, HTC, and dozens of other products the "Joneses" are very happily consuming and selling. It seems to me that a satire would be better served by use of products that don't actually exist in real life, and that this movie is at least as insidious as its characters by pretending to make fun of what it is actually trying to sell to its viewers. I felt slight outrage (while secretly wanting an Audi for myself), and my only consolation in all of this is that the film made far less at the box office than it cost to produce.