It’s time to review the latest Netflix sensation, as I do every so often (see my last one on the dull Beckett). Up to bat is the documentary that’s been all the buzz for the past few weeks: The Tinder Swindler.
To me, this movie belongs to a sort of trilogy of Netflix documentaries that also includes Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened (2019) and The Inventor: Out For Blood in Silicon Valley (2019). Each is about scams and, especially, the scammers: Who are they? Where did they come from? How did they pull the wool over everyone’s eyes?
And each consists primarily of rattled bystanders and victims recounting how smooth sociopaths (Billy Macfarland in Fyre, Elizabeth Holmes in The Inventor, and Simon Leviev in The Tinder Swindler) cashed in by exploiting absurdities in our image-obsessed culture.
The key to all these documentaries’ success is that we inevitably root for the scammer. Their charisma attracts us just as it attracts their victims, and their success compels our admiration. By extension, the victims receive our contempt. And it’s fun to be contemptuous of Macfarland’s and Holmes’ victims, since they’re such big shots. After all, few of us could afford a luxury Caribbean music festival or invest in a Silicon Valley startup, so watching people who do have that kind of clout get taken for a ride is ready-made schadenfreude.
But in The Tinder Swindler, the swindled are ordinary people, posing a moral conundrum. And we fail the conundrum: we still root for the swindler; the effect of the movie is still undeniably schadenfreude. Resist it we may, but truly, no viewer can help getting a thrill from a close up of the $250,000 “loan,” which, we know by this point, is actually a down payment on another woman’s dream date. In fact, our smiles are already cracking when a doomed victim’s opening narration extols the wondrous virtues of love. It doesn’t matter that Leviev, a dweeby-looking would-be aristocrat, is the least likable scammer in the trilogy: like MacFarland and Holmes, he’s the protagonist by virtue of the stunned plebeians he leaves in his wake.
This may be why the predominant reaction to this movie online has been frustration and even anger directed toward the women. What were they thinking? How could they have been so stupid? We attack them because their errors have made us root against the common interest, against love. Morally, we want to side with them, but we can’t: like Trump, we like people who weren’t captured. I’ve noticed that most viewers have scrambled to distance themselves from the defrauded women in some supposedly crucial way, for example pointing out the privilege in being able to cough up so much dough, or cursing the gold-digging ways of women, or criticizing users of shallow dating apps, or sighing at women’s typical naivety in romance (surely no man in the era of OnlyFans would ever be sapped of his savings by an illusory romantic connection!).
I amiably grant these viewers their solace in whatever distinction they make between themselves and the Tinder Swindled. True, these women had affluence to burn. True, dollar signs were in their eyes anyway when they boarded a man’s caviar-equipped private jet.
But whatever defense you might justifiably summon to grapple with this documentary’s success in amusing you with the ruin of people who might be your neighbors, I maintain that the engaging quality of The Tinder Swindler, heightened in comparison to its Netflix predecessors, owes to its relative small scale, to its relatability. Indeed, with each successive documentary, our fascination with scams is gradually shedding its disguise to reveal its true self: fascination with our own individual stupidity.
Yes, a current of self-loathing runs beneath the popularity of these documentaries, and it’s getting closer to the surface. Closer, actually, to the aesthetic of horror movies, in that the entertainment doesn’t come from the victims’ demises, but rather from the exciting possibility of our own. Michael Myers doesn’t hunt down Wall Street fat cats, and neither does Simon Leviev. The next Netflix swindler might just be coming for you!
Am I saying that we subconsciously want to be taken for a ride, that we want to be swindled? Of course not. But…wouldn’t it be wild if we were? (And if we were, wouldn’t we totally deserve it, too?)
– Jim Andersen
For more Netflix reviews, see my review of I Care a Lot.
You must be logged in to post a comment.