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Emily's avatar

I have so much affection for this portrait of the young “scammer” Brandon. In those early days of the internet a lot of us were scamming, to various degrees.

There’s almost a defense posture to this denial of the interior world of a scammer or thief. I haven’t finished Inventing Anna, but I had similar disappointments around Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring. By denying any deeper motivation, The Bling Ring elides certain truths that are obvious when you’re on the outside of wealth looking in: how much waste and excess there is (which can be collected by the canny individual), and how much of wealth creation and maintenance and culture is itself a scam. And by ignoring these truths, it also erases the real reasons that people, rich or poor, scam each other: sometimes simply to be horrible, sure, but more often in a desperate attempt to achieve some fantasy version of their own life that they think will finally make them safe/okay/loved. That’s what you wrote about here, and it’s what matters, in a story about scammers. The rest is noise.

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Mary-Katherine Fleming's avatar

OMG THANK YOU. I have been scouring the internet and social looking for this commentary: “ But I am not certain the show actually…dwells in complexity so much as it muddles through actual character development.” I could spend all day unpacking Shondaland and my feelings about its expansion as opposed to evolution, and you nailed every bit of it here. Perfectly. Thank you.

Separately, I need to see Laverne Cox in more roles like this!!!! She is the only reason I stuck around past episode 2

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