I was drawn to the title of this film. It is a true story, and it brilliantly deals with a type of psychiatric syndrome that can be defined as ” pathological falsification “, or impostor syndrome, or pathological lie (or Munchausen syndrome if it concerns the state of health).
It is a sequence of behaviors, at a certain point habitual as if they were a “point of no return”, which characterize the life of some individuals, first prone and then slaves to their tendency to lie, falsify, build cheats or put them in scene more and more complicated but also more and more unsafe or gross.
It is almost always a manifestation of bipolar disorder, probably combined with a particular ability that makes people able to act, pretend, lie without communicating embarrassment to others. A sort of natural identification, which over time creates problems of identity and pushes more and more to seek a satisfying identity different from one’s own, through the ease with which others are initially convinced. There is a series broadcast on Sky Crime and Investigation, entitled ” The Lives of Others “, in which true cases of chronic impostors are told. The best mine of cases of this kind and the judicial news, including some major trials (that of the “Mantide” Guerinoni for example, the monster of Circeo Angelo Izzo).
Another movie dealing with the syndrome and “Mr. Ripley’s Talent”, this one has the charm of telling a real case. Writer Irving tries to break through, meanwhile living beyond his means. Fascinated himself by how some individuals manage to deceive others with their skill, he decides to try his hand personally. He pretends to have a sensational book in his hand, with political and historical revelations drawn from exclusive statements by one of the most powerful men of the time, Howard Hughes, shy and eccentric.
He will go so far as to falsify his voice, his handwriting, to constantly pretend to be in a non-existent confidential contact with Hughes, or his representative, and also to appropriate material from others to publish it in his name. At the same time, he seems to lose contact with reality, and enter a paranoid dimension in which the secret services force him to collaborate with them to blackmail, with the threat of publication, the president of the United States.
Hughes eventually releases a statement in which the braggart Irving lies, while he is in the throes of a manic state, in which he is delirious and at the same time claims to have acquired the right to actually represent Hughes’ will, having impersonated him in a perfect way.
The reference to the maniacal state of the protagonist is evident right away, when his wife tells him “you told me to warn you if I saw you in high spirits” …
Some manuals of self-management of the disorder naively say just to be told by familiar if you are too “high”, with the result that such a remark is taken with irritation, or ignored with contempt.
Irving is high and goes on, of course. As the scam proceeds, the gimmicks are increasingly on the razor’s edge, and so much attention is paid to the success of the staging that Irving then forgets the trivial technical details (he gets a check for a million dollars in the name of Hughes, who obviously won’t be able to cash out).
Along with the public lie, the investigation will also reveal one, perhaps the least serious, of all the “lies”, that is the betrayal of a night with an old flame, denied to his wife as an extreme attempt to keep at least her next to him. A pathological lie does not allow physiological lies to stand, in a paradoxical corollary.
The funniest part of the film is the epilogue. Irving is jailed for fraud and serves a year and a half in prison. When he comes out he goes back to being a writer, and still publishes a book about the story of his great scam, but ends up claiming that he still has material for a book on Hughes. The fake book was a fake, but in reality there is a real one, still unpublished and in his hands. In short, he repeats the deception for which he was convicted and which he himself admitted in the end. He admits it and then returns to deny it, as if it were possible to try something in between. With the sentence granted, one can still argue the falsity for which one has been convicted … Just identify yourself sufficiently.
Pathological counterfeitersthey are so skilled in building their castles that they are easily unmasked. They are more illusionists than real falsifiers, that is, they focus on persuasive ability and on the creation of a climate in which they will not be questioned, or they will be questioned but in the wrong direction.
Their gratification comes from deceiving and also conditioning people to control them as they want, to be credible. At some point they usually try to make a profit from this, although as a rule they also get damage, precisely because they are discovered immediately after they have managed to complete the scam. The scams typically take place around “big” names or situations that are important, or that they consider important, and the identification can be such that eventually the bogus reality becomes the only one they can handle. In other words, they will also be able to retract what they have admitted in court, admit one party but continue to deny another, despite this worsening their legal or social situation.
In common contexts, one of the most common falsification syndromes, which concerns adolescents or young people, is that concerning the career of studies, awards, or one’s social position.
Often these syndromes are revealed at the moment of unmasking, because the person carries out self-damaging gestures, runs away, or enters a depressive phase. The central moment, however, is the ability to lie without anxiety, to impersonate out of the need for gratification, and irritation with others because they have not believed the lies. In fact, the pathological liar believes that he “deserves” that others believe him, because he lied well. Having created a non-existent reality well would give the right to then be able to take credit for it in real life. If this does not occur, the instinctive reaction is to relaunch the lie in an ever more adventurous way and for ever less practical purposes. In the case of the film there is a real delusional encroachment, or daydream, with identification (the thing is not fully clarified,
