Inventing Anna: a review of a juicy show and a rabbit hole down what’s fact and what’s fiction

in which I barely mention Anna at all, oops

Synopsis/idea: Inventing Anna is a fictionalized version of the series of events that actually happened around Anna Sorokin (Anna Delvey) and her series of defrauding banks, hotels, and acquaintances.

Warning: This will contain “spoilers”. “Spoilers” is in quotations because this also made news outlets and social media for quite a bit so if you haven’t already been spoiled, that’s also a bit of a shocker itself.

Why I watched this show

Back in the days before I turned off my Youtube recommendations, I went down the rabbit hole of suggested videos on a variety of scam-like stories. It started with cryptocurrency scams and transitioned into MLMs and finally landed in the while story that is Anna Delvey/Sorokin.

Even before the Netflix documentary came out, I’d spent over 20 hours on video essays from people reviewing the various elements of her stories. I don’t know why I was so intrigued.

Well, I can guess.

First, Youtube’s recommendation system likes to push engaging videos in their algorithm so you stay on their site as much as possible (which is why I turned them off). Second, kudos goes to video essayists who stitch together these stories with engaging storytelling. Most importantly, the story itself is really goddamn ridiculous, and I think that’s why it became as viral as it did.

So when my friends wanted to sync-watch Inventing Anna together, I was down.

Choice of storytelling viewpoint

While the video essays you can find on Youtube center Anna in the story, the Netflix story is interesting in telling it through the journalist’s eyes, Vivian Kent.

This seemed odd to me at first, when I expected that Anna would be the main character of the story and we’d see the story through her eyes. Looking back, I see why it was so important for us to slowly peel that onion alongside the journalist in her journey of uncovering different elements of the story.

In fact, seeing the story from the journalist’s point of view made me want to … buy magazines again. Maybe that was the point of this show? The angle really sold the life and commitment of this one journalist in her pursuit of uncovering the full story of Anna Delvey that this passion helped me become excited about such an outdated medium again.

It made me think about the people I’ve come across on both Medium and other platforms that spend hours on end to stitch together a story. There’s something compelling about being a writer and then getting to see other writers on screen, particularly one that gets paid a regular full-time job’s worth of money for this kind of work.

The mix between fact and fiction?

I was disappointed to find out that the journalist’s story is pretty fictionalized.

Vivian’s backstory of being thrown under the bus for creating a listicle that had false information, thrown under the bus by her own editor and ex-best friend — that wasn’t real.

The bosses at the magazine on the show also couldn’t be further from her editors in real life, Pressler says. “I think the show bosses are a stand-in for patriarchal offices in general. But this is a thing where fact is braided with fiction. (Burack, 2022)

However, Vivian’s pregnancy, which I thought was just an embellished element to give a time-limited space to the story was actually real to some extent. While Vivian’s character literally goes into labour while finalizing her final source, Jessica Pressler (the reporter who actually completed the story), finished her story at 8 months pregnant (Saini, 2022).

To me, this makes sense. I think there was a bit of horror as I watched Vivian work up until the point she was giving birth and realized that in the States, that’s just how it is. She also seems to just … get back on her feet and go back to work immediately after giving birth to the baby. Is that … is that how this works?

I honestly don’t know.

What I know is that I watched this whole show from a perspective of fiction, heeding generously the message that’s creatively presented at the opening of every episode:

This story is a work fiction, except for the parts that are fact.

The role of the lawyer (Todd Spodey) and reporter (Vivian Kent) — and my confusion

This is where the real spoilers begin, I suppose. Spoilers for the fictional aspect of the tv show.

In the show, the lawyer that helps Anna is portrayed as someone who was willing to take on this role without a real promise of payment. In the final episodes, he even destroys his marriage so that he can support Anna even when there was nothing to be done.

This is also true for Vivian Kent. At first, I really bought into this narrative of Vivian really wanting to set her career straight before the baby came. I admire someone who values her work.

But, the characterization of this journalist role is so out of balance that Vivian exists only to unearth Anna’s story, even after the story’s been published. Vivian’s character does nothing else, not even parenting. She literally ups in the middle of the night in the first month of birthing a baby to obsess over a dress for Anna to wear so she can be fashionable for court.

In general, my rule of thumb is to reserve judgment for any person in a parenting role because honestly, I wouldn’t know any better. It’s hard to be a parent and likely hardest to be that parent when your newborn baby cries every 32 seconds.

But the juxtaposition between Vivian’s almost absent role to her absolute obsession to caring for someone who really, up until the end, showed no concern for her well-being, made no sense to me.

The fact that she left her newborn to travel to Germany to chase down the “truth” of whether her father was some Russian oligarch and he turns out to just be some ordinary man with his ordinary wife and their ordinary son.

Granted, maybe those scenes were strategically not portrayed, and Vivian was doing her parenting behind the scenes. Maybe it’s there for a purpose that’s just not apparent to me because I’m so hellbent on being confused about why someone would do that. Maybe that confusion was even intentional to really illustrate how easy it was for Anna to have conned people.

And, I’m not the only one who feels this way. My post-show internet deep dive into the gifsets and liveblogs have unearthed this commonality.

One of the most absurd things about “Inventing Anna” is the way Anna’s lawyer and the journalist started to care about her so deeply. The fact that they neglected their families for Anna’s benefit is absolutely mindblowing to me. (jmmelody)

All I know is that these aspects of the side characters were written in as part of the fiction. I think that’s where I’m caught up the most. For the other things where I wondered whether it was fact or fiction, I could look it up.

Yes, real Anna did hire a stylist for court fashion (Minutaguo, 2022).

No, there was no real “everyone is woke but Chase is Wake” startup; the role of Anna’s boyfriend is not currently public (Romano, 2022). (It’s a pity because the line is so cringe that it was truly hilarious).

The fiction pieces make me wonder harder about the why behind these details. I couldn’t find a why.

The spreadsheet representation we all deserved

In the show, the journalist used her baby nursery’s room wall to plot out all the elements of the story. In fact, the biggest thing I noticed is that she splurged for that fancy patterned tape (sometimes known as washi tape), most commonly associated with bullet journalling. As a stationery buff, I was impressed that she was forking over such fancy expensive tape for work. In reality, it was just for the aesthetic on TV.

But, guess what I learned, as I was digging deeper into this world of learning about what’s fiction and fact?

We, spreadsheet lovers, were robbed of the spreadsheet representation we all deserved. The real journalist behind the story used a spreadsheet to organize her data.

She also never had a mystery wall; instead she chronicled her research in a spreadsheet, but that wouldn’t have made for as compelling television. (Burack, 2022)

Pressler’s actual planning via Google docs and Excel spreadsheets wasn’t included in the series’s glittering sequence of ‘woman hard at work’. (Davies-Evitt, 2022)

At this point, you’ll realize that I don’t even mention Anna in the review of this TV show

I think part of it is because I’ve already spent my rabbit hole time prior to the tv show in familiarizing myself with the ridiculousness of the story. I know the story, to the extent that one can, from imperfect sources and video essays with imperfect narratives.

I watched this show as one might watch period dramas with references to famous historical figures. We’d never truly know what their personalities and intentions were like between the cracks of what’s documented; even what’s documented is interpreted through a lens. That’s how I watched this show.

I think that separation is important, given that this story happened to real people. There is a real Anna out there, living her life and profiting off of this story and fame. There are real victims out there, regardless of what you think about them given their media portrayal, especially through the Inventing Anna lens.

One of the fraud victims that drew fire through this show was Rachel Williams, and I’m not surprised. The show itself paints her as just as guilty as Anna herself, herself profiting off these experiences through selling books and story rights to a production company.

Williams is set to profit handsomely from the whole ordeal. She wrote a feature about her experience for Vanity Fair, which she’s now adapting into a full-length book at Simon & Schuster for $300,000. HBO paid her $35,000 to option it into a project with Lena Dunham, and she stands to make another $300,000 for it. (Shamsian, 2019)

These numbers are used as part of the court scenes to portray her as someone who has had a net positive experience from her interactions with Anna. And I personally hate it. It erases the part where she had been placed responsible for a $62,000 bill that was promised to be paid back.

To some, they stand on the side of the fence where this experience of dealing with this amount of debt itself is traumatic, and this is erased in the show. To others, they question Rachel’s integrity of agreeing to a trip where she expected to pay nothing and when something came up and neither of them could pay it, she expected Anna to pay her back in full, rather than discussing a split.

To me, the weird part of the story is when they realized neither of them could afford this trip, the assumption was that either Rachel was supposed to eat the cost and wait, or that Anna should take on the whole cost because that’s what was originally promised. If I were to place this ridiculous scenario between myself and a few friends, that we, for some reason, decided to go on at rip far beyond our budgets, our new plan moving forward is to a) put some sort of foolproof in place so we stop making foolish trip decisions and b) shouldering the cost evenly because we both went on this trip.

I’m not on either person’s side because this scenario is so far removed from my regular ol’ boring life that I wouldn’t even know how I would truly react and be in this situation. It doesn’t matter what we think we’d do in the hypothetical, even though I just walked through the hypothetical for fun. It doesn’t matter what you’d personally do in the hypothetical because it’s not up to these real people to live as we want them to.

They are not fiction. These were real experiences pitched through a lens of entertainment.

It scares me that people watching the fictional depiction of this story are directing judgments about who Rachel is, who Anna is, who any of these people are outside of the fictional realm of this story.

I’ve seen a lot of hate thrown around for Rachel Williams. I’ve also seen a lot of hate thrown around for Shonda Rhimes for this show. I don’t know how much of role Shonda actually played in the writing of this show given my assumption that this is just one of the many stories that are a part of her company. But I can’t help but notice that there’s something unifying in her writing — she always presents stories from different views, but also always gets extreme and hateful comments naming her as a bad writer for the reason that one of these perspectives is centred and does not fit with an audience member’s personal experience.

I didn’t have the words to describe my response to this until I read kestrel-of-herran’s post, summarizing the experience of the show:

the show asks you to invent anna. it gives you a stack of colourful pencils and asks you to play around. how many versions of the truth can you paint? how many versions of anna can you create? if you can only see one version of anna, you haven’t been paying attention. (source: kestrel-of-herran)

If you have the time, please click the above source and read the whole post. Whether you choose to watch the show or not, I hope you continue to think about how we’re given as stack of colourful pencils and may bias towards monotone when that monotone can limit and flatten. It’s hard to see outside of your own biases and reconsider what’s fiction, what’s fact, and what’s meaningful when everyone is always so loud.

It’s not just Anna, or Rachel, or Vivian, as their portrayal is for this show where if you only see one version, you haven’t been paying attention.

It’s much more than that.

Hi, I’m Lucy Dan 蛋小姐 (she/her/她) and you can now recommend me shows or movies to watch here!