Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

I presented on Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and I'll be honest: I did not expect to like it. It's an older comedy, and I went in expecting to sit through it for the assignment. Instead, I got hooked. The movie did its job, and that is the part I keep thinking about.

The two con men are charming, funny, and confident, and somewhere in the first stretch of the film I realized I wanted them to succeed. In the context of the movie, I ended up calling them heroes. The film makes you comfortable with deception by making the deceivers likeable and the targets easy to laugh at. That is strange when you think about it, because these characters lie to people and take their money, and I (plus the rest of the class) was cheering for them anyway.

That connects directly to what we've been studying. Con artists succeed because people trust them, and people trust them because they are charming. The movie used the same tool on me. I was never conned out of money, but I was pulled into liking people I should have been suspicious of.

During my presentation, I noticed the class responding the same way. People were engaged, laughing, and interested in the characters. That told me the film's pull works on a whole room, not just on me.

The plot twist at the end was funny, and it shocked me. Even while I was watching for tricks, I got fooled. If a comedy can do that in two hours, I can see how real swindlers manage it in real life.

That is also where my enjoyment stops. Real fraud is awful. It happens to real people who lose savings, trust, and sometimes much more, and we should not be rooting for it. Movies turn con men into heroes because the victims are usually fictional and the consequences disappear when the credits roll. My takeaway is that charm is not evidence, and the more I like someone, the more carefully I should check the story they are telling me.