Review of Catch Me If You Can (2002)
One of the addicts in A Scanner Darkly (1977) tells a story about an unnamed man who “pushed a broom at Disneyland” and made up a story about himself being a successful impostor, without ever pretending to be anything else. “He made a lot of bread that way,” concludes the addict, that is without having to do all the work of a real impostor, impersonating more people.
Science journalist Alan C. Logan looked into the stories told by Frank W. Abagnale Jr. and found that Abagnale is like the guy from Disneyland: A famous impostor, but one who’d impersonated an impostor by lying about having impersonated a bunch of other people along the way. The story behind the movie is therefore fake, in that the conman conned people into thinking he was a conman. It’s a good movie though, because it illustrates what is evidently a common fantasy in the US: Faking it.