The Not So Talented Mr. Wheeler Strikes Again
Adam Wheeler is back in the news.
You'll recall Wheeler is the character actor whose greatest role was as a kinda hunky Harvard student who gained entree to the Ivy League by falsely claiming he'd attended a bunch of other elite schools, and kept up the act by aping Ivy League cliches. Just a semester short of graduating, he was caught back in '09 submitting this brilliant parody of an Ivy League resume, convicted of fraud and larceny, and given a suspended sentence.
Well, now he's going to prison for violating his probation — by putting Harvard on his resume again.
The judge in this case was so certain that Wheeler's actions were the result of mental illness — why on earth else would an otherwise seemingly intelligent person (I mean, he did attend Harvard) repeat the very behavior that had resulted in his conviction barely a year into his probation? — she sent him to Bridgewater for a forty-day psych evaluation. When he came back with a clean bill of mental health, the court really had no recourse but to enforce his sentence.
Although I'm inclined to side with the judge, compulsive or pathological lying is not identified itself as a mental disorder in the DSM-IV although it is a component of a variety of personality disorders — Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Antisocial Personality Disorder, to name a couple that probably apply here.
It may be that Wheeler's problem is more a "character flaw", as the judge was forced to call it, than a personality disorder, but there is something in Wheeler's complete physical transformation over the course of his travails that seems to argue for an evolutionary explanation as well.
A Tale of Two Wheelers.
, which outlines his theory of deceit, where he puts it in a much broader context. From the New York Times review:Trivers calls deceit a ‘deep feature’ of life, even a necessity, given genes’ brutal struggle to prevail. Anglerfish lure prey by dangling ‘bait’ in front of their jaws, edible butterflies deter predators by adopting the coloring of poisonous species. Possums play possum, cowbirds and cuckoos avoid the hassle of raising offspring by laying their eggs in other birds’ nests. Even viruses and bacteria employ subterfuge to sneak past a host’s immune systems. The complexity of organisms, Trivers suggests, stems at least in part from a primordial arms race between deceit and deceit-detection.And isn't that what we saw happening here? The humor in this whole cautionary tale (which is what it should be for institutions like Harvard) comes from the fact that Wheeler's lies were ridiculous to begin with and only got more monumentally ridiculous with time, and Harvard (and later Stanford) still bought them wholesale — hook, line and sinker. The kid was this close to getting away with it!
The fact that Wheeler exposes both the sociopathic tendencies of social climbers and the pretensions of the class to which he still obviously aspires is what makes him such a compelling (if ultimately unsympathetic) character. The Trickster, who (in this case seemingly unwittingly) shows us how our social order is in some sectors as flimsy as a house of cards.
Wheeler, with a tweak here and there, is the sort of character we root for in movies like Catch Me if You Can and I Love You Phillip Morris (and with less tweaking the sort we don't, like the much creepier Talented Mr. Ripley). The characters these movies were based on were not merely deceivers, or even master deceivers, but shape-shifters, like species we find in nature, whose survival is based on their ability to effectively deceive.
Of course most folks notice by a certain age that deceit is as common an ingredient in all social transactions as, say, high fructose corn syrup is in canned goods, but most of us don't just chug the corn syrup straight up.
Trivers' insight is that self-deception is a tool we have evolved the better to deceive others. So the question is — well, there are a couple: to what degree do the Adam Wheelers of the world come to believe their own elaborate deceptions, and are they different in kind or just in magnitude from those we all construct to get through life? That's one. The other: why are we so willing to believe them?
Oh wait, I can answer that last one. We do love a good lie. And if it reinforces our outlook — confirmation bias anyone? — so much the better.
What is poignant about Adam Wheeler is that — take another look at the deflated and defeated creature on the right above— he'll never be happy being Adam Wheeler, because there seems to be no Adam Wheeler qua Adam Wheeler.
Trivers uses the example of a moth against the bark of a tree. In nature "the deceiver is using morphology, not behavior."
What was striking to me as I followed Wheeler's story was the degree to which he physically changed in subtle but very significant ways — and not merely his mien and mood but his morphology. That the person on the left is the same as the one on the right is not a question, and yet.
Wheeler's nature is to deceive – it’s his survival that’s at stake. Perhaps he's not so different from the rest of us in this, just a little less talented.
The last point you introduce -- the change of physicality when becoming another person, has been evident in a few of the greatest actors. Most notably, Laurence Olivier could become physically unrecognizable when fully absorbed into a role. and the wonder of it was that once into the new physicality, there was never a moment of inconsistency. I was fortunate enough to see him on stage twice -- as Thomas a Becket in the play Becket and as Shylock in Merchant of Venice. The voice, walk, gestures, posture, were wholly assimilated into the man. It was an extraordinary thing to see.
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