Inventing Anna & Classism – The Core (And Missing) Lesson Of The Anna Delvey Story
Back in 2018, York Magazine Journalist Jessica Pressler published a breaking story of Anna Delvey. The original article is called “Maybe She Had So Much Money, She Just Lost Track Of It.” Jessica's press coverage was about the rise and fall of the young Russian girl who came from poverty and conned her way into the inner circle of the ‘wealthy elite’ is something you shouldn't miss.
This podcast doesn't exactly review streaming television. But for Anna Delvey, there's always room in our hearts to talk about a girl who went from trucker flannel to Alexander Wang leggings by lying her way to the top. So today, we're not judging Shonda Rhimes’s Netflix show Inventing Anna on the merits of its acting, directing, or writing; we just want to know one thing, does the show truly reveal the core of Anna’s scandal - the girl who saw American classism from the outside and gained from it, or is this just another hot take based on reality TV drama that turns life into fast fashion.
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In 2016, Anna Delvey went looking for a 25-million-dollar loan to open an art club in New York - a high-class art club that served high-class drinks and catering to social elites. So. Anna sent an innocent email to a Silicon Valley publicist, “If you think this is something you can help us with, and have anyone in mind who'd be a good culture fit for this project…”
I want to stress that phrase for a moment, “a good cultural fit," because it's important to note that Anna had many high culture friends in her pocket. As a wealthy German Harris, Anna had partied with Macauley Culkin and listened to exclusive rap albums Martin Shkreli. When she went looking for potential club locations, she reached out to Joel Cohen, the man who prosecuted The Wolf of Wall Street himself.
Joe: If you followed the story at all, this kind of felt like she was building up social leverage. In the Netflix show, there's a scene where she is applying for these loans, and they basically tell her you don't know enough people. It's not that you don't have enough credentials or money in the bank, or your portfolio doesn't look good. They told her that she needed to have people behind her.
Todd: They made it seem like this impossible task. The person who would be in charge of the real estate said they couldn't build a space for her unless he knew what kind of artist there was. And then she went to the artist, and the artist said, well, I can't really do art for you until I see what the space looks like. So, it was literally like they're doing this juggling thing that she can't win. They're passing it off because they're more interested in who they're going to work with than what they're going to work on.
Joe: We see that in film and television too, like people won't sign on to a project unless there's a director attached to it or a certain writer is part of it. While watching the movie, the whole premise of this episode, if I could throw our thesis out right away, I got the sense of when I originally read about this: Anna figured out how to make the noises to attract the Elite Class of Americans. There's this famous experiment about bird songs where these scientists took speakers and put them out in nature. They wanted to see if birds were more attracted to other birds or to the music that they made. And so, these female birds would flock to the speaker and dance in front of it and ignore all the real male birds in the forest. That speaker experiment reminds me of Anna Delvey and how she spoke to the wealthy elites, getting them to come flock to her and getting them interested. She figured something out about the American class system, and I don't think this show gets to that core. We talked about Anna and classism in our original episode (episode 26). Before that, I didn't get a sense that Americans looked at our class system often, and it wasn't visible to us all the time. After recording that episode after seeing covid, how visible is American classism to you now?
Todd: After studying it, it is in my daily thoughts, and I probably talked to one person a day about it. Can we go over the differences between the lower, the working, the middle, the upper-middle?
Joe: Absolutely. So, if you want to ruin your restaurant dining experiences, and if you want to hate Twitter from now on, continue listening for the next 30 seconds. When you look at the American class system, other countries have a visible, obvious caste. Any country that has arranged marriages is because they have a caste system. Americans like to pretend that we don't have that. Supposedly, everyone's equal, and everyone can grab their bootstraps and pull themselves up. We don't have poor people; we have people who have not yet pulled themselves up or are too lazy to do it. But we have found on this show, and modern research has revealed that it all depends on what city you're living in, and our class system is more obvious if you are in cities with lower mobility. If everyone looked this up, there is an amazing map called the Social Mobility Map or the poverty map, and it'll show you if you're living in certain cities that make it hard to set the caste system.
Todd: Growing up in Maine, I definitely saw this. I saw that there was the super-wealthy, and then there was the middle class, and then there was a lot of poverty. Some of the riches were the rural areas too – the real, deep, generational, property-owning folks, and then there was everybody else.
Joe: The way these classes work, if you're looking at it on a scale, you've got what Americans refer to as the lower class, the working class, the middle class, the upper-middle class, and the upper class. That is how we identify ourselves, according to Gallup polls. We look at it as lower working, upper-middle, and upper. This would be called out in a social studies book loser to the lower being generationally poor, which is 10% of us. Meaning we don't work because we can't afford to start working; we are just trapped and unable to get a job. The labor class, which would be the middle and upper-middle, that's 65% of us. The gentry class would be more like people who don't work unless they land an elite job, which makes up about 23.5% of us.
Todd: What percentage of the labor class is college-educated?
Joe: In our classism episode, we talked about how education is literally what lifts you out of or signifies that you are somebody of class. I really wish I could remember it, but we had three metrics in that episode. It was something like education, opportunity, and something else, but education is middle and higher class. You can slip into the lower class with higher education, but you usually don't stay there, and you're not identified as such. Now, the people Anna targeted were almost entirely this last classification, which is the Elite Class. We simply call it the upper class in America, but we now are starting to refer to them as the top one/two percent. These are people, if they work, they are choosing to work. And when they do, they are prestige jobs.
Todd: We don't see these people on the bus. We don't see these people in our schools or in our restaurants. There are protected there.
Joe: And if they're on television, they've generally made a mistake. All these magazines and journalists had a famous realization when they were trying to track down Purdue Pharma and the Sacklers who ran it. They could not find pictures of them, and they weren't on LinkedIn or Instagram. They had really hard times tracking down the faces of people who were not already the faces of the company. The highest class is good at picking faces to represent their organization. They generally do not appear in public. They pick somebody from the Gentry who has high professional standards and accolades, and they say, you represent us now.
Todd: Like a body double. Pays pretty well, but you'll get your head chopped off eventually.
Joe: Now, when I went back and looked at our early episode about this, so much has changed in one year because of covid. Covid supercharged the visibility of these class differences. We went from no visibility to we all want to see it. I obviously don't want to make every episode about classism, but we must address it. Even more, it's hard
to get into an Anna Delvey without directly looking at classism. But ironically, Shonda Rhimes tried, it seems. She tried to get Anna’s story without really looking too closely at classism. But that is just my take. One of my big questions is how much, now that shows are coming out about it, do you see people reacting to classism? Do you think it's more visible than it used to be?
Todd: I think I think it is because social media is polarizing; it just accesses stuff. It's the $100,000 birthday parties on the low end and people who are stretching to have at least some of what those people have - whether it's a vacation or a handbag or even eating at a certain restaurant. Not only do they have to do that, but they also have to post about it to get credit for it.
Joe: I used to think of classism like a literal rags-to-riches story. All the people in my sort of fictionalized fantasy version of America, like John Rockefeller, who went from the poorest of the poor, and then by the end of their journey, they had built an Empire; they had bootstrapped their way up. I viewed it like a fantasy or a rags-to-riches tale. It seems if you are wealthy or a star, you can't say that you went from the middle to the top; you always must make up a reason why you were at the bottom. You have to have the full journey, or your narrative doesn't work. That's kind of what Shonda Rhimes does here. Not to drag us off track sharply, but when Anna gets to her montage about how she went through the classes, it really does make it seem like this fantasy rags to riches tale. It shows her in a boarding school not just blending in with the high-class girls but studying French magazine so she could outdo them, and it kind of nails her awareness of classes and where the dividing lines are, but that's about as far as it goes.
Todd: Key phrase there - studying. She started studying this stuff from a very young age. I have a friend. Who knows multiple professional athletes, and he told me this is kind of sits. He says when you hang out with professional athletes, they have a clean bling to them that normal people don't have. They're just blingy. So, if you grew up as an elite, wouldn't you spot someone who couldn't fit in right away?
Joe: You would think so.
Todd: I mean, even micro-wise. She studied so deeply, and she became such an expert, she had to have practice somewhere. Where did she practice? It's like the ultimate performance of studying and then performing. I mean, it's hard not to be impressed by that.
Joe: We have had many episodes where we talked about the scientific tells that you are from a lower social class. We've talked about how you're resting face will sit differently depending on how much cortisol you've had in your life. You will have different types of bags. You will have different types of voice tones. One of my favorite studies is a Stanford study about how your inflection, tone, and pace all change when you are from a higher class. Anna found a way to mask her lower-class status.
Todd: Also, when you're of higher class, you’re taught from a very young age to ask a lot of questions and question everything from police officers to school. You learn that what you have to say is important when you're an elite. They choose their words and talk slowly.
Joe: Yeah, Malcolm Gladwell covered that in a study about how people from an upper-class would ask their doctor questions, whereas people from a lower class we're taught to just listen to the authority. Speaking of flipping or changing class, did you notice they took the original journalist out of her own story and replaced her with a fictional character?
Todd: I did, but I didn't know that at the time while binge-watching the show. Weirdly, they did that, and I want to talk about it. So, at the beginning of each episode, Netflix says they put it in print: “this story is completely true, except for all the parts that are totally made up." That makes me angry because I like real documentaries, and real-life never have those clean plots. But I don't understand why not just do the true story, including the real reporter. She's the one that did the movie, right? She wrote this article and a whole bunch of press. They paint her as sort of a disgraced reporter.
Joe: That's actually true; the real reporter went through that. She really was pregnant at the time writing the article, and she really did go to the prison. Honestly, it hits so many of the same beats as to what happened in real life. I just don't understand why they replaced her with a fake character.
Todd: I found her to be very annoying, and I don’t understand why, if you're writing this movie about something that you did, why would you not want to take full credit for it?
Joe: Maybe Pressler doesn't need that kind of press. I mean, in case you're unaware of Pressler as a journalist, she also wrote ‘Hustle,' about the strippers who ran a con circle and took money from wealthy men on Wall Street. So, she is a legit, renowned journalist. Maybe she didn't want to be associated with this character forever.
Todd: Isn't that kind of interesting to get this kind of wealth as a writer from somebody else's story? She followed this and got in early. I think that's kind of neat.
Joe: I think she has a gift at spotting people who will attract the American mind. If you look at Anna Delvey, Hustlers, and some of her other subjects, they are women trying to take advantage of people who have money, but they're coming up from nothing to do it. Overall, that is a compelling narrative structure that seems to be catching.
Joe: It’s going to be weird having two older guys fawn over this, but I can't believe the girl from Ozark is Anna, and I can't believe how much she blended into that role.
Todd: Really? Yeah, it didn't seem like she was even acting. The accident was fun to listen to, and just her attitude and her confidence. She's bragging about how many languages she speaks and how many different countries she's been in. I mean, and how she defended herself - just real passionate acting.
Joe: Did you get to the part of the articles where they were talking about the real Anna Delvey and the actress who plays her doing the accent at each other?
Todd: No, I never saw that.
Joe: There's this humorous anecdote that Pressler writes about where the real Anna meets the actress who’s playing her. People were starting to question whether or not she could play it and wondering, what's this weird accent? And then they hear her visiting with Anna at like the court or the jail, and they're doing the accent back and forth at each other. And it was like, oh no, she’s got it.
Todd: Since you're not going to bring it up because you're embarrassed to, I want to talk about this fictional castaway place at this publication place. If you're no longer a great writer anymore, they send you to " Scriberia."
Joe: I love that word so much. I'll simply say that the guy that writes for Freakonomics met that place. He doesn't refer to it as Scriberia, but he talks about how he worked for a couple of large magazines and newspapers before founding Freakonomics. He was a journalist, and he said he quit journalism because he ran into the journalist who had stuck around more than 20 years. The Union protected them, and they could not be fired. And so, they were sent to a writer’s hole where they just put out puff pieces and nonsense until they retired. That led him away from journalism.
Todd: It makes sense in your career - if you're a hot writer and write some really good stuff, you get a bigger desk or a better window. But there's a lot of energy here and was made to do the bootstrap.
Joe: In these articles, they talked about meeting the real Scriberia. It is a resting place for over-the-hill writers who just want to coast. But they were also saying a couple of award-winning journalists are sitting there who are just killing time. Now, we are going to keep this section as a smaller piece of the podcast because we really aren't a review podcast. We don't usually do movies about documentaries. With that said, Rotten Tomatoes has about 60% for critics, but it's way lower for audiences. The audience is put it about 33% percent right now. So why do you think audiences aren't attracted to the show?
Todd: I don't know. I think it's got the con artist thing. It's got New York Soho, trips to Morocco, jet planes, etc. They do a hell of a job with tension in it. You can start to feel your heart pound.
Joe: Yeah, the whole show, if you sum up the energy, it's like having a credit card get turned down. I think that Anna's arrogance, especially in the opening narrative, might turn some people away because she's not a likable character. But she was never intended to be.
Todd: Now, Anna is an attractive woman, but when I first heard the story, I thought I thought she'd be really good-looking to be able to pull this off - like model gorgeous to pull this off. And then I thought, well, maybe billionaires don't look that way. So that's how she fits in right away by looking very average.
Joe: Yeah, she just looked averaged and well dressed. Something I want to point out is the tension in the first episode or two. I really got hooked because it takes you through this journalist's story and the whole first episode is the journalist describing the stakes. It is her reputation at stake being rejected by her manager. It makes us want to hear more, and when it finally teases us where she meets Anna, we still don't get the story.
Todd: And that's not a new plot. The journalist who was told by their boss to drop the story - that's about as old as it gets.
Joe: I think that the beginning and end of the show were the strongest parts. In episode two, it reminded me a bit of The Great Gatsby. When The Great Gatsby opens with all these people talking about Gatsby, but you don't meet him yet. And I think that was a really good way to build it up. It showed a smart progression, and it built up this lore about Anna.
Todd: And many of Anna's con artist tricks were having other people talking about her. You're not getting on stage and putting on a pitch; It's almost the opposite where she was being a jerk. And that's part of the whole image.
Joe: Right. And we've talked about that aloofness and reserving yourself is attractive; It makes people curious. When you watched the show, who did you feel Anna actually hurt? Because there are a lot of scenes where it shows the wealthy people she scammed. But it felt like most of these wealthy people were connected enough. I mean, they even have a scene where Anna went shopping using a wealthy woman’s dime, and the woman said she had connections. Even more, all the money was refunded back to her. So, who did Anna hurt because that does come up?
Todd: I don't think she heard anybody, and that one you're talking about where she's just swiped this woman’s American Express card, she put $400K on it. And this woman being who she was and friends with the CEO of American Express, wouldn't hear of her having to pay those charges - They raised $400K in debt instead of making that woman pay for it back. So that's a sign of a different social class. Now, I do think she hurt a lot of people's feelings. I think she talked down to many people, and I think she bullied a lot of people. I'm sure there was a lot more fallout from this than they put on the show.
Joe: I think so too. And there were so many mentions of wealthy people who did not come forward to report her. That's how her scam basically worked is a lot of these people didn't want to go to the cops. They didn't want to report her scamming them because they felt foolish for having fallen for it. All these wealthy people feared they weren't deserving of what they had. So, when Anna walked out with $400K, they would just quietly recoup their losses because they maybe didn't want to go to the police out of image/ego.
Todd: We can understand somebody not freaking out over losing a million dollars there. That's nothing to them. Right? The reputation and looking stupid in front of their friends are worth way more than that. That's bad for their business. So, I can see them just saying keep the money because they want to settle this out of court. They didn't want to go to court because they didn't want to embarrass themselves. And Anna said, no, I want the attention. I want to be famous because that's more important to her going to jail.
Joe: She's got no more social capital to lose. So why not go for the notoriety? And all these people she scammed, that is what they lost in the end. They were losing social capital. Maybe that's the real genius; maybe that's the aloofness, the technical details of what she did. Her speaking all those languages, her tricking people working at a fashion magazine – maybe all of that was the easy part. Maybe convincing people not to turn her in to preserve their social capital was the real genius move.
Todd: One thing that they missed in the show that kind of bothered me because I could see it from the first time that we started following the story - there was a part at the end where she went away to rehab after she tried to commit suicide/for her drinking problem. She was an obvious drinker and druggie, and I think it would have been a better story overall if they focused on her addiction and partying side.
Joe: I think they left many personalities on the table that they did not cover because they wanted to make the whole thing like The Great Gatsby effect. They show us what Anna's childhood looked like and where she came from, but they never really get to the personality. I do remember our episode about celebrity insulation and the idea that the more wealth we get, the more inclined we are to buffer ourselves to justify our good fortunes.
Todd: Oh, yeah, let's change our narrative as we go.
Joe: We talked about a famous Monopoly study where people would get extra cash and extra dice rolls. And when they won the game in the study, they would blame their own cleverness to justify it. They started out with more, but the longer they played, the more they came up with reasons they were winning regardless of the head start.
Todd: Then you got our one of our favorite presidents, FDR, who was a terrible student and somehow got into Harvard with no problems. He never took a test or went to class yet graduated with gentlemen grades.
Joe: Yeah, I guess that's the ultimate message I was looking for in the show. I mean, they call out classism so many times in the show without exploring it or talking about how these people's narratives affected their wealth. I guess I wanted to see more about the inner workings of how Anna's trick went. It's like showing somebody a magic trick - I'm going to make this bouquet of flowers appear, but you will never actually see how the trick works itself. That's kind of what the show felt like to me, and I think that's why it is sitting at 33%.
Todd: I spent ten hours of my life watching that show and about ten hours studying for this podcast, but I took something away from it, and it boils down to a quote in the movie. Anna says, “If I can learn everything, I can have everything.”
Final Thoughts
In the eighth episode of Inventing Anna, Vivian, the fictional journalist, complains to her husband about the Anna buzz on TV. News anchors, influencers, and commentators are chiming in about Anna and making jokes. But we got a sense of how shallow their comments are because they are missing the bigger picture. Specifically, they're missing what an entire scam revealed about the elite class in America.
Vivian says to her husband, “Anna Delvey is not a take; she is not a meme." Vivian's husband looks confused. His wife worked herself to the bone for the story. Her water broke while she was writing it. He asked, “So what is the real story?” She responded, “Something about class, social mobility, identity under capitalism…I don't know.” The show creators seem to be calling out their own blind spots or admitting that they left behind the central message. Because the bulk of the runtime isn’t about that. Instead, the lens focuses more on female oppression in the workplace, with montages of Anna's genius sprinkled in. It seems to avoid looking too closely at the cultural impact or ad Vox Magazine put it, Anna is a lazy girl boss in a revenge fantasy.
Netflix and Shonda put out a show about handbags and designer dresses built over a scaffold of real-life events. They introduced a cast of characters obsessed with Anna, but they don't make us obsessed with Anna. They took a young woman who found a hack into the American upper-class soul, and they converted it to a rags-to-riches story. Inventing Anna does come off as a docudrama with lots of class, but they forgot the classism.