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.

Internet Cross-Dressing, or, The Altruistic Impersonator

Many of you may have seen this story about a blogger who recently revealed that she was not, after all, a gay Syrian woman who went missing, but a heterosexual American man who had been impersonating one online for several years. The actual blogger, Tom MacMaster, confessed to his deception only after the story of Amina Arraf fell to pieces under outside scrutiny (including that of the State Department), saying:

I never expected this level of attention. While the narrative voıce may have been fictional, the facts on thıs blog are true and not mısleading as to the situation on the ground. I do not believe that I have harmed anyone — I feel that I have created an important voice for issues that I feel strongly about.

I'm reminded both of Greg Mortenson's story and that of teen prostitute JT LeRoy/housewife Laura Albert, and I wonder how many more stories like this there are. MacMaster claims he wanted to bring important social issues to light, but something about his "six-month friendship" with a woman with whom he "exchanged some 500 emails" and several photographs suggests more selfish motives. Other than a picture of MacMaster and his wife vacationing in Damascus, there is no mention in the article of his level of knowledge about Syria or oppressed homosexuals, and I wonder where he got the material for his blog. I also suspect that "Amina" went missing just as her followers started to become suspicious of her existence, but I begin to conjecture.

Perhaps the blog "Gay Girl in Damascus" raised positive awareness about a real issue, and maybe no real harm was done, but I see the time and resources spent looking for an imaginary missing person as depleting resources for real rescues of and aid to real people. It's probably true that gay people are arrested in Damascus all the time, so shouldn't we help them instead of playing at being one of them?

On The Forged Gift

Recently a member posted this link on the Gaddis listserv, asking the group whether the story might be the "most Gaddis-like" yet. The story involves an impostor Jesuit priest who has been donating forged artworks to American museums and institutions for the past 20 years. Like The Recognitions, we have here an impostor, forged art, and apparent disinterest of the forger in monetary gain; furthermore, like those in the novel, the people who have discovered the forgeries cannot imagine an act of this type of deception without monetary gain as its end. The article makes a point to say that the impostor "pays for his own hotels and airfare while traveling, but gets wined and dined by the institutions because he has told everyone that he has many more works in his collection." The curators are the Recktall Brown of real life, judging all value in terms of money. I'm sure Derrida would have much to say about this false gift-giving (but I'm still reading Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, so you'll have to conjecture on your own).

But the problem here is that we know nothing about this impostor. Readers of The Recognitions can (at least sometimes) understand Wyatt Gwyon's motives because he tells us what they are. We can conjecture that this false Jesuit will reveal himself eventually, but he has spent twenty years not revealing himself. It is difficult to even guess at his motives. If he is caught, what will his charge be? The article mentions that museums have been "a little bit embarrassed" that they were taken in by the forgeries, but have they lost anything other than pride? A few dinner dates? I hope the federal authorities do catch this forger, if only so I may better understand him.

Altruistic (or Nepotistic) Fraud?

The man pictured above, Raphael Golb, is on trial for forgery he allegedly committed in an attempt to validate his father's scholarship on the Dead Sea Scrolls. This article discusses some of the details of the case, including Golb's creation of email accounts in the names of prominent Dead Sea Scroll scholars who disagreed with his father's findings. Golb claims that his father's research was stolen years ago, and that his fraud was an attempt to shed light on someone else's plagiarism, but the story sounds increasingly outlandish as one reads about it. If you felt that someone stole from your father, would you go to any lengths to expose the theft, even to the point of committing crimes yourself? Would you create 70 email accounts in the names of your father's detractors in an attempt to (falsely) restore his scholarly reputation? I hate to be a cynic, but I feel that there's more going on here than simple familial love. It almost seems as though Golb feels he owes his father something, and will even break the law to restore a (perhaps) broken relationship with him. I wonder if this will do it.