How dark the con of man

Cons - long and short - are always entertaining. When noob got me the first two seasons of BBC show, Hustle, I didn't know at first how good they'd be, and took nearly a year to watch them. This summer, I finished all three seasons. The show, which features the art of the long con, is very good. After all, you, the viewer, gets conned as well, and it's always fun to find out how. Each episode is a solid hour, and it was sublime to watch these back to back, stopping only to eat, use the restroom, or get the laundry. (My brother will vouch for this.)

I did take some time off to also watch a couple of movies at the theater, and during one afternoon, I caught the trailer for The Night Listener. If you know nothing of the book or the controversy behind Anthony Godby Johnson, you'd think the film is a thriller about a mentally imbalanced woman (Toni Collette), who terrorizes a radio host (Robin Williams). I didn't, and was curious about the film because it's based on true events and a book, also titled "The Night Listener."

The controversy deals with a literary hoax or con in which someone creates a persona - often a pitiful and tragic one to elicit sympathy - and has that persona "write" a book about his or her traumatic past. The persona becomes famous, beloved, and the real person behind the hoax collects the dough and enjoys part of the fame as well. You can read about it here.

This bears a great resemblance to the JT Leroy controversy, which I did read about. Some folks even say the Godby Johnson case inspired the woman behind JT Leroy. The facade collapsed earlier this year, right around the time of the James Frey story. Here is the article that eventually led to the crumbling of the JT Leroy enterprise. More here and here.

Cons are fun when they're fiction, as in Ocean's Eleven, The Sting, and Hustle. Who doesn't enjoy watching someone else get bamboozled? Of course, it's the movies or TV, and you know no one is really at the losing end. But when it happens in real life, a lot of people get upset, especially if you were one of many who got the wool-over-the-eyes treatment. Oprah teared on her show because of Frey, columnists and readers began questioning the literary merit of Leroy's work after having embraced it when it first emerged, and movies get made about the true stories behind the hoaxes. And shocked as they may be, folks are likely to lap it up precisely because they are true stories. Perhaps the real-life events are the more alluring ones - even if we aren't laughing the way we did when Clooney pulled off his casino heist - because we never thought it'd really happen to any of us, and we're desperate to know how it happened. Call it a case of morbid curiosity or unbridled anger.

Posted by Monoceros at July 30, 2006 9:24 AM