Five Cinema Hoaxes More Interesting Than A Fake Girlfriend
By Steven Pate in Arts & Entertainment on Jan 18, 2013 10:05PM
Cinema history has enjoyed enough imaginary boyfriends and fake girlfriends for Manti Te'o to program his own film festival.
Anthony Michael Hall's character from The Breakfast Club had perhaps the original "Canadian girlfriend" (He met her at Niagara Falls. You wouldn’t know her.) Napoleon Dynamite at least offered a photo of his mysterious Oklahoma girlfriend (helpfully updated for topicality). Kristen Wiig reprised Jan Brady's made-up beau George Glass in 2011's Bridesmaids. You can get an even larger assortment if you take a wider definition of "not real," taking in everything from Weird Science to Lars and the Real Girl to Ruby Sparks.
Heck, even the supposed greatest film of all time, Vertigo, is about a guy whose girlfriend turns out to have been fake. What gives? Movies depend on so much pretending and fakery that it is natural for them to take it on as a subject, and the fascination runs way beyond the invented significant other. Here are our five examples of the cinema's love of the hoax.
1. Movies as hoax-education: Catfish
Nev Schulman has been all over the news discussing the parallels between the scam that snagged him and the Te'o scandal. Schulman's movie (now spun-off as a TV show) about meeting someone online, falling in love and then discovering that person to have been a fabrication is not just the best analog for what happened to the Notre Dame star, the comparison shows Te'o's story in the most favorable light, as a lesson on the need for skepticism and an illustration of a lingering societal unease with the digital age's renegotiation of the rules of human interaction.
2. Hoax as plot device: Wag the Dog
Barry Levinson applied a lighthearted veneer of shrugging black comedy to this tale of what could only described as the most cynical hoax possible: a spin doctor's successful invention of a fake war to distract the voters from a sex scandal. It's a feel-good conspiracy movie, missing only a rousing song called "Wake up, Sheeple" on the soundtrack.
3. Hoax about a movie: 3 Men and a Baby
Whether it's a proper hoax or merely an urban legend, the story of a ghost appearing in frames of Leonard Nimoy's directorial highlight is a favorite of ours, edging out the Wizard of Oz munchkin hanging simply for the sheer randomness and persistence of it. Did the ghost of a boy who died in the film's location appear in the movie? You can have your straight dope and snopes all you want, we want to believe. Judge for yourself.
4. Film footage as incredibly brazen hoax: Alien Autopsy
An estimated 11.7 million viewers tuned into Fox one night in 1995 to watch Ray Santilli's hilariously unconvincing footage of the 1947 flying saucer crash at Roswell, New Mexico. Did the hoax work? Amazon will still take 9.99 from people who want to watch it, so the jury is still out, we guess.
5. Hoax as incredibly successful marketing ploy: The Blair Witch Project
Employing a similar "fake found footage" conceit, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez's 1999 horror film made a quarter of a billion dollars by tapping into the same desire for wanting to believe obvious hoaxes that has been a goldmine from Orson Welles' War of the Worlds broadcast to today.