A Million Little Pieces features so many tears it should have been sold with a life preserver; inevitably, it attracted Oprah's attention. When she started promoting it to her fans in September 2005, it sold millions of additional copies. Unfortunately for Frey, its new notoriety also sparked the interest of the muckraking editors at the investigative website TheSmokingGun.com. While skeptics had pegged the book as 80-proof bullshit from the get-go, TheSmokingGun.com confirmed such suspicions with hard data. In January, after reviewing court records and interviewing multiple sources, including Frey himself, TheSmokingGun.com published an extended peek under A Million Little Pieces' dress. Among its revelations: The three months Frey said he spent in jail was closer to three hours. The cop he supposedly hit with a car insisted it never happened. Billed as an "uncommonly genuine account" of the life of an addict, A Million Little Pieces was the literary equivalent of a pair of celebrity she-male foobs.
Frey eventually added a disclaimer to the book that explains how he cosmetically enhanced his life story with "embellishments," "skewed perceptions" and "subjective truths." But if not wholly factual, A Million Little Pieces still boasts some fact-like moments, and who expects more than that these days?
Indeed, is Frey not the voice of an era? "I made other alterations in my portrayal of myself, most of which portrayed me in ways that made me tougher and more daring and more aggressive than in reality I was, or I am," he explained in his book's new disclaimer, sounding exactly like, oh, anyone who has ever created a page on MySpace.com. "People cope with adversity in many ways," he continued, and faced with the adversity of being a not-very-interesting drunk, he invented a three-fisted, Bukowski-esque past for himself. Which is what everybody does now—he just had the vision to apply his fabrications to a lucrative best-seller instead of squandering them on a Match.com profile. (Of course, maybe he did that too.)
After Frey, the fakes came fast and furious. There was Harry Whittington, the 78-year-old Texas lawyer who suddenly decided to portray himself as a small, easily flushed game-bird, only to get shot in his sharp-beaked face by Dick Cheney, who was sloshed on Dr. Pepper at the time and thus unaware of his friend's deception. There was 25-year-old male novelist JT Leroy, who turned out to be a 40-year-old woman named Laura Albert.
And then in April there was the year's most dizzying vortex of fakery, the annual White House Correspondents Dinner. Every year, the nation's top political journalists convene in Washington to shower the commander-in-chief with genuine sycophancy and fake bonhomie. They simulate guffaws at the president's wooden attempts at humor. They repeat the process as a professional comedian they've hired aims comic blanks at the president on their behalf. The president gets an opportunity to humanize himself by graciously serving as the butt of gentle jokes; the journalists curry favor with the sources they rely on; everybody wins.
This year, President Bush showed up with his own professional comedian in tow, a performer named Steve Bridges, who uses elaborate facial prostheses that make him look like Dubya's double. But while Bridges' resemblance to the president is uncanny, he doesn't actually play the real Bush; instead, he bases his character on the caricatured Bush of editorial cartoons and SNL sketches, the amiable, ditzy dolt who's a little more clever than he seems, but still not all that clever.
It's a flattering portrayal, and one that audiences love—Bridges makes more money playing trade shows and other private events than the president earns himself. His approval ratings are better, too, and no doubt that was the reason the president asked him to appear at the Correspondents Dinner. Standing behind a pair of matching lecterns, this new set of Bush twins commenced their act. Initially, the real Bush played the straight man, but halfway through the act, he started to echo Bridges' shtick, amping up his folksiness and feigning befuddlement in the face of fancy, adult-person words like "intercessional." And as the leader of the free world gamely pretended to be a guy who was pretending to be a fake version of him—got that?!?—one couldn't help but think that if he were younger and blonder, with bigger boobs, he could give American Idol's Kellie Pickler a serious run for her money. That's how good the president was at playing dumb!
The Correspondents Dinner crowd loved his performance, but was less impressed with the evening's headliner, Stephen Colbert. On The Colbert Report, his satirical news show on Comedy Central, Colbert presents himself as a conservative firebrand in the vein of Fox News' Bill O'Reilly, so it made a certain sense to have him as the Correspondents Dinner's marquee act: Who better to gently tweak a president who fakes himself than a fake Republican shill? Alas, while O'Reilly likes to characterize himself as a news media outsider even though he's worked in the business for more than three decades, Colbert was the real deal, an actor/comedian with no traditional journalism background and few if any ties to the elite news media. And either no one thought to explain to him that his true function that evening was to flatter the president, or he just didn't bother to do it. Instead, he stuck with his usual MO of stinging back-handed praise. As his monologue progressed, his tribute to the president grew increasingly insincere, but not in the expected manner. And if criticizing the president to his face weren't bad enough, Colbert's jabs at the press were even less collegial. Instead of keeping it fake, he was way, way too real for the room.
A few weeks after the president's performance, O.J. Simpson tried using humor to goose his approval ratings, too. In May, a one-hour pay-per-view special called Juiced hit digital cable. In it, Simpson adopted various disguises and personas (Elvis impersonator, not-creepy nonmurderer), then hammed it up for the hidden cameras while playing Punk'd-style pranks on his unwitting victims. "You got Juiced!" he shouted at the end of each segment. As catchphrases go, it didn't quite rival Fonzie's "Aaaay!" or Joey Tribbiani's "How you doing?"—but at least it was step up from simply chopping people's heads off. Still, Juiced was grim stuff, O.J.'s sad plea to America to end his pop-culture exile, to see him as the B-movie doofus he'd once been. Enough time had passed, he seemed to be saying, and he wanted his old life back. America wasn't buying it, though, and it didn't matter what disguises Simpson used to hide himself. As a Jheri-curled rapper with gold fronts, he looked creepy and sociopathic. As an old, bald white guy, he looked creepy and sociopathic. O.J. the throat-slasher has forever replaced O.J. the cut-up: Innocence is a very hard quality to fake.
The Internet phenomenon known as Lonelygirl15 almost managed to pull that off, though, at least for a few weeks. When she posted her first video clip on YouTube.com in mid-June, it neatly displayed every hallmark of video-blogger authenticity. Bored teenager punctuating a meandering bedroom monologue with serial "um"s and nervous giggles? Check. Gratuitous facial gymnastics? Check. Hijacked pop song playing in the background? Check.
But while Lonelygirl15 was relatively convincing—and certainly charming—in her portrayal of the sheltered ingenue-next-door, her videos were all so meticulously, economically "real" they were immediately suspicious. Could you really hit every YouTube convention the way Lonelygirl15 did without careful planning and skillful editing? And, really, if some video Dr. Frankenstein wanted to create the perfect YouTube monster, who would he create? Hey, how about a lonely girl? A bored, 16-year-old home-schooler whose self-deprecating dorkiness made her appealingly accessible? Who actually answered the lame comments you left on her web page even though she was almost as hot as a genuine celebrity?
By late summer, amateur Internet sleuths and professional journalists alike were working to solve the mystery. Was Lonelygirl15 really who she claimed to be, or just another fake? A blog called "Top of the Tube" was the first to provide the answer: The person known as Lonelygirl15 was in fact one Jessica Rose, an aspiring actress living in Los Angeles. The clips had been scripted and shot by two young filmmakers represented by one of Hollywood's most powerful talent agents. Rose was 19, not 16, and a native of New Zealand. Everything about Lonelygirl15, including her American accent, was fake.
All over Hollywood, one imagines, giant sighs of relief could be heard. YouTube.com had launched as a place where amateur auteurs could congregate without Hollywood's looming presence. Millions flocked to it, and not just to watch pirated sitcoms. They were watching each other; the vibe there was informal, intimate, anti-professional.
But as gonzo pornographers have known for years, those qualities are easy to simulate. And minus the money shots, Lonelygirl15's creators followed their template exactly: Hire a fresh-faced 19-year-old. Set up a camera in her bedroom. Film the various modes of scripted "spontaneity" that ensue in a deliberately amateurish style. Voila, you've got a new art-form, buddy porn. Here, the intimacy was emotional, not sexual, and in the sex-drenched, anonymous world of the Internet, simulated friendship was the real growth market.
But if Lonelygirl15 was Friends 2.0, more relatable and responsive than Chandler and the Central Perk gang, lonesome fraud Borat Sagdiyev took his quest for friendship even further than she did: He made house calls, then gave his newfound pals starring roles in his movie.
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan was a hidden-camera extravaganza that didn't bother to hide the cameras, a fake so spectacularly phony that blind Martians should have been able to spot it from their backyard patios. Never mind that Sacha Baron Cohen's horny Kazakh journalist had appeared on HBO for two seasons. If you'd ever seen Groucho Marx's mustache or wild-and-crazy brothers George and Yortuk Festrunk swinging with big-breasted models at the American fox bar, or Yakov Smirnov kissing the Statue of Liberty's ass, then Borat was instantly recognizable to you, a character as old as vaudevillian dialect humor, the zany immigrant with an eye for the ladies and a perpetual hard-on for the land of the free's star-spangled bounty.
Thanks to the surfeit of prank shows, though, no one's on the lookout for an obvious hoax anymore. Instead, Punk'd and its brethren have taught people to search for subtler clues—a malfunctioning metal detector, an unusually pushy waitress. Borat seemed too fake to be fake, and in a nation where 60 percent of the people believe in aliens, that was enough to fool some of the people all of the time, or at least long enough to get the footage he needed.
But while Borat is an amusing, occasionally hilarious showcase for Sacha Baron Cohen's social-engineering skills and naked-wrestling prowess, what did this supposedly subversive journey across our fruited plains really teach us about America? That feminists are humorless, gays are horny, black dudes talk funny, drunken frat guys hate women and redneck coots are homophobic? In case you've never listened to Rush Limbaugh or Air America, consider yourself culturally learned. Ultimately, however, Cohen and Borat director Larry Charles pulled off a pretty neat trick. Building improvisational set-pieces around untrained, unwitting performers, they somehow managed to create a movie that was every bit as formulaic and nuance-free as a mediocre network sitcom. Thanks to its relentless raunch and unabashed portrayal of Borat's merry misogyny and anti-Semitism, Borat: Cultural Learnings ... seemed daring and edgy, but underneath its bawdy, transgressive surface, it was just like the grizzly bear that Borat and his sidekick Azamat lugged around in their ice-cream truck: good for some shit jokes, but thoroughly tame, the year's most beautiful fake.
There's an asterisk to that title, though, and you can thank Rupert Murdoch for that. Undaunted by the public's indifference to Juiced, O.J. Simpson resurfaced in November. Having realized that few people were ever going to accept his claims of innocence, he devised the fairly novel strategy of "faking" guilt. In a book entitled If I Did It, he planned to describe how he would have killed his ex-wife Nicole and her friend Ron Goldman, had he actually done so. In other words, O.J. was the anti-Frey. The latter made up stories and passed them off as true; the former appeared to hope he could pass off truth as fiction. The backlash against O.J. materialized much faster than the one against Frey had, especially after Fox announced that it would broadcast two hour-long interviews with Simpson to promote the book. (Fox and HarperCollins, the book's publisher, are both owned by Murdoch's News Corporation.) Outraged citizens swore they wouldn't read the book, nor patronize any bookstore or Internet retailer that carried it. Bill O'Reilly, who also works for Murdoch at Fox News, promised to boycott any advertiser who bought air time during the two Fox specials.
For a few fleeting days, America hummed with moral certitude. It had finally taken a stand; there were some things that could not be tolerated, even in the name of free speech. A message would be sent to the tabloid jackals. The public was sick of lurid sensationalism, anything-for-a-buck spectacle, real-life murder as entertainment. The jackals and their conspirators would be held accountable.
Then, Rupert Murdoch stepped in and spoiled all the fun. He cancelled the Fox specials. He ordered the destruction of every copy of If I Did It. Suddenly, there was no book to ignore, no advertisers to boycott, and we were left to wonder: Face to face with If I Did It at Barnes and Noble, skipping past the TV special on our way to the latest episode of Deal or No Deal, would we have been strong enough to resist O.J.'s sociopathic grin, his creepy grandstanding, the water-cooler conversations his book would prompt? Or had we simply been faking it?