Abuse of Weakness

Love Fraud, directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, 2020. 
The Weekly. “Connecting the World.” Episode 7, 2019.
90 Day Fiancé, 2014.
The Heiress, directed by William Weiler, 1949.
Abuse of Weakness (Abus de faiblesse), directed by Catherine Breillat, 2014. 
Criminal. “Gil from London.” Episode 20, 2014.

 
I have all of the streaming services. That’s not actually true, I do not have Disney+ because I am not an eight-year-old with a princess fetish, but otherwise, I have all of the streaming services. I have their apps downloaded on devices, so I can check first thing in the morning what may have been added to their catalogs overnight. I have a VPN so I can watch the content the streaming services are offering in other nations. I pass around my login information to friends so they, too, can take in all of the streams. If I cannot be out in the world, I will at least press my face up against my devices and watch a version of the world, a distortion and a simulation.

I can’t read books. Every time I try to read a book that is part of the cultural conversation, every time I read an opinion piece that was pretty good, every time I think a tweet is clever in a way that in the briefest of moments and in the oddest of contexts illuminates an original point of view, I take a look at its author’s social media profile and find it’s just pictures of themselves. Their view is pointed, all right, at their own selves, like a gun.

90 Day Fiance. EOnline.

So I stream instead of read. I’m not even sure how much it all costs because they all bill at different times, some monthly and some yearly. They send the receipt to my email, but I don’t even read my emails anymore, either.

A friend DMs me over Instagram to see whether or not I’ve watched Love Fraud. I have not, but I am pleased to have the slightest of excuses to watch it now, this is four hours of my life I will not have to figure out what to do with all by myself. I have to upgrade one of my streaming services in order to access the stream, which means I click a button, more money disappears out of my life, and I don’t think about it again.

It’s about a group of women in Kansas City who met a man on Tinder who seduced them very quickly, married them very quickly, and drained their bank accounts and ran up their credit cards very quickly. I, too, used to live in Kansas City! I, too, used Kansas City Tinder and got defrauded! But not by this specific guy, and only in the way that the man would say he was interesting and then he was not interesting. Still: very relatable content.

But these women, they are fed up. They make a website to warn other women away, they hire a cranky, bossy bounty hunter who sympathizes with these women and yet also seems exasperated with them — the bounty hunter does not seem like the type of woman who would be won over by a fiftysomething man with a paunch and a pouty lip and a kind of lame motorcycle with big dreams of moving to Belize or opening a restaurant in Wichita or whatever — and they try to track down their absconded husband.

Cast of Love Fraud courtesy of Showtime. IndieWire.

The documentarian wants you to know these women are very tough. This man may have been able to convince each of these women — and there are a lot of them — that they were unique, they were special, they were just what he was looking for, he may have been able to convince them to marry him despite not having met his family or any of his friends, he may have been able to convince them to sign over property, to open accounts in his name, to write checks and send wire transfers and take on debt for his sake, but these women are tough. Look, here they all are, flipping off the camera together, with big grins, after they get their husband arrested.

I get it, it’s embarrassing to admit you got fooled. That your loneliness was in such a state of exquisite torture that you can actually feel the absence of a beloved in your bed or in the passenger seat or on the other side of the kitchen table, that you can feel the stillness of your phone not buzzing with texts from someone excited to get to know you. Your longing has reached a point of constant attention directed toward a gap, a ghost, and you become so desperately in need for it to corporealize into the form of a man that you will fall for a con man, a Leo, a liar and abuser, someone already married, and other undignified things. I also know the need, when that Leo comes swinging through, for you to insist LOOK AT HOW WELL I AM DOING HOW DURABLE HOW TOUGH HOW NOT BURDENED BY AN EXTRA FIFTEEN POUNDS SINCE YOU LEFT and so on.

Better that than to present these women as pathetic or silly or unlovable. At least these women actually met their men, there are women all over handing over gift cards, bank transfers, and money orders to men who say they love them and oh by the way I am very handsome and muscular and young and also in the Marines, but who are actually just guys in a Nigerian internet cafe. These women don’t get to be bosses, flipping off the camera. They have to be very sad, very sorry, very foolish. But if my husband talked about me the way the husband does on the New York Times investigation show The Weekly, the “Connecting the World” episode, pretending it was her financial profligacy that put their marriage at risk and not his little habit of punching her in the face, or if my son (a cat) talked about me the way the son of the widow on the “Gil in London” episode of the Criminal podcast talks about his mother, like she was a sad, pitiful creature who didn’t have a body capable of desire, but instead had a cat sweater permanently attached to her torso like some middle-aged doll, I would probably drain my savings and give it to the first guy who told me he wanted me urgently, too.

The Weekly: Connecting the World. NYTimes.

But it’s satisfying to watch this at home, either in a bed shared with someone who at least doesn’t humiliate you in public more than once a week or on a couch all alone while swiping past all of the dating profiles that include a car selfie, and feel pretty smug. That is of course the pleasure of watching something like 90 Day Fiancé, the couples where one person, always the non-American, is hotter or younger than the one with a green card on offer. You get to see the possible scam in motion. The minute I am sensing insincerity in a proclamation of love, I am Googling to see if there’s been an update on their marriage, to see if the hotter or younger one finally filed for divorce.

The question of “Is it me or is it my easy access to desirable material goods?” has always loomed over romantic love. “Ok, but is he here for the right reasons?” is the same question we’re meant to ask about all of the competitive love game shows like The Bachelorette, but also a film like The Heiress. Montgomery Clift’s Morris Townsend could easily fit into the row of suitors with his cheesy overtures of longing for the fidgeting, blushing, giggling, awkward Olivia de Havilland, playing the titular heiress. So in need of the only kind of real validation one can find in our secular culture (the desirable partner), she too is as easily wooed as the Bachelorette by the most stereotypical and depressing symbols of a moribund heterosexuality: scattered rose petals, champagne, and chocolates bought from the “nice” section of the CVS down the street.

The Heiress. Classic for a Reason.

But of course the darker pleasure of all of this is piercing through someone else’s inflated conception of their own selves and worth. “How could you think . . .” asks the hot young New York Times reporter with the hip glasses to the middle-aged woman whose profile pic is severely filtered. He doesn’t say “How could you think someone desirable would desire you?” but he seems to be thinking it. He probably doesn’t have to work very hard to get his dick sucked, though, and he would be what one could call a “hot commodity” on the sexual marketplace. He doesn’t understand the frustrated despair of watching your middle section grow outward, the horror of being disappointed in who your children turned out to be, the loneliness of knowing you are not likely to be looked at like that, with surprise and delight, ever again, that everyone just wishes you would stop talking so much and go back to washing the dishes silently, your tears bursting the soap bubbles filling the sink. “How could you think . . .” Well, it’s doubtful any of these women will be thinking that way ever again.

Love makes you a stranger to yourself, and the best any of us can hope for is someone good and kind willing to catch you from that existential fall. In Abuse of Weakness, based on the true story of director Catherine Breillat’s relationship with a con man, Isabelle Huppert’s Maud only has intimacy with people she pays. “Your lover,” someone says, and Maud corrects, “my assistant.” But that assistant holds her in bed after a stroke and a trauma. The rest of the people who are supposed to love her out of familial obligation or habit — a daughter, an ex-husband, her mother — sit politely nearby but otherwise scold, get exasperated and bored with her, check their phones. Vilko is magnetized to her, gets obsessed, shows up, helps her with the things she can no longer manage on her own after the stroke, opens doors and helps her down stairs. So why not pay him when he asks?

Isabelle Huppert as Maud in Abuse of Weakness. DVDBeaver.

“What was so special about him?” inquired the daughter who asked Maud to check into a nursing home for a week so she could go away for Christmas without worrying about her mother falling and breaking another arm unattended. “He showed up,” she shrugs, explaining how she no longer has any money.

The last shot of Love Fraud is of the con man, freshly out from a six-month prison sentence, in a pool with a middle-aged woman wrapped around him, bobbing in the water. Menacing music plays. Probably by now you can find this woman, financially drained and dazed, and ask her. What was so special about him? Shrug. He showed up. //

Maud, still on the ground. Slant.