Week #8 2020: Chameleon Street
“The con is in the DNA of this country, which was founded on the idea that it is good, important, and even noble to see an opportunity to profit and take whatever you can. The story is as old as the first Thanksgiving. Both the con man and his target want to take advantage of a situation; the difference between them is that the con man succeeds.” Jia Tolentino, ‘The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams’, from Trick Mirror
When Chameleon Street (1989, Wendell B. Harris Jr.) starts, William Douglas Street (played by the director) is a hyperarticulate layabout, convinced he is too good for his surroundings, but failing even at assisting in his father’s burglar alarm business. His wife demands material success and he has just the way to get it. In the course of the film, he fraudulently poses as a surgeon, French exchange student, Time magazine lead reporter, star baseball player, an attorney, an epileptic and also as a version of Jean Cocteau’s Beast (the latter as sanctioned masquerade). It’s all based on direct testimony of the life of the real Doug Street, with some characters playing themselves. The film debuted in 1989. In 2015, Street was convicted again, having added several more personas to his repertoire, a 45 year career career in grifting.
Confidence men have a long history on screen. Just like being in on a heist, we like to see the magician’s trick from the inside, the glass divide of the film screen keeping us from being conned ourselves, letting other suckers take the hit. But Chameleon Street is not about a Teflon devious genius, up there on the tightrope, his every scheme a Steven Soderbergh-style piece of clockwork (Soderbergh himself was part of the jury that gave Chameleon Street the Sundance Grand Jury prize, along with Alfre Woodard and Armond White). Doug Street is fairly bad at cons. He seems so astonished that his plans come off – that power and prestige can be donned as easily as a baseball cap – that the mask slips. A spelling error in an application, the arrival of a truly fluent French speaker and the police are there, the gig is up. Although he is supposed to have performed thirty six successful hysterectomies when posing as a surgeon, the con is often not thought out beyond the ground floor. He almost never gains much from the cons. It feels like he’s just trying to provoke systems, to be a fly in the ointment for the sake of it. Just like a hacker who wants to make clear how easily exploited systems are, how complacent people are, he claims for himself the absolute ease that comes with privilege: decide you want to do something, and you can have it, no inherent skill needed. Looking at our current leadership, it’s easy to see private school as an extended exercise at successful con artistry (one I personally benefited from, debate competitions and all).
As unsuccessful as Street is, that’s not to say that Harris plays him as a foolish charlatan. There’s something profoundly unsettling about Harris’s smirk and leer, a vanity that seems to suggest that whatever hand he’s showing, there’s another card up his sleeve. At the same time, there’s barely restrained anger, somewhere between Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman and Tom Noonan’s Francis Dollarhyde. He rocks back and forth in his work van – ‘THIS IS BORING’ – outraged he must work for a living. Not willing to admit the contagion of mediocrity around him, he uses a Walkman to fend off the outside world (‘I listen to the classics: Vivaldi, Hendrix, Debussy, Sly Stone, Sex Pistols, Ipso Facto…’). Seeing charm and contempt so close together is deeply unsettling. One of the film’s leitmotifs is of wearing sunglasses and taking them off, a kind of unmasking. When Harris accepted his Sundance prize, carrying on his character’s tic, he confessed, "I want to show you half a second of what's really going on,"... he took off his glasses, gave an open-mouthed, wide-eyed look of panic, then calmly replaced the glasses and his demeanor.” After watching him in the film, it’d be easy to believe there’d be gnashing teeth (like Sandman’s Corinthian) behind those glasses rather than panic.
Society (especially ‘80s society) demands success. But he’s shut off from the means to get it, reduced to selling his blood. Street therefore retreats into a fantasy of superiority, wheedling his way into the lives of legitimately exceptional Black superstars like Willie Horton or Paula McGee. Like Parasite’s Choi – who plans, once successful, to go back to college to legitimately get his spoofed degree – Street’s attorney defended his actions, saying that the reason he used an assumed alias "was to get a job. When you have his kind of [criminal] record, his kind of history – the chance of getting a job was nil." Is Street the hungry man who steals a loaf of bread? Or is that just a convenient argument for a sick mind?
Even after being highly lauded at Sundance right in the middle of the independent goldrush that followed sex, lies and videotape, Chameleon Street was barely released and he’s yet to direct another film. It’s tempting to see Wendell B. Harris’s disappearance as the kind of con Doug Street would love to pull. Get in, make one amazing film, then get out, leaving everyone impressed by the beautiful audacity of his grift. But in reality (as Harris goes into detail in this excellent article), it’s the reason you’d expect that there's yet to be a follow up (race). We rarely want to talk about why careers end, sputter or fail, but it’s at least as revealing as why certain things are sensationally popular; an anti-zeitgeist if you will. The three most-buzzed about titles at Sundance in 1990 were Charles Burnett’s To Sleep with Anger (another tale of a Black trickster), Kid ‘n’ Play’s House Party and Chameleon Street. The New York Times (in a statement that depressingly could have been ripped out of an article about Moonlight, post-Oscar win) said that “if there was a statement implicit in the awards this year, it was the diversity and growing strength of black film makers.” Just like a con, a brilliant awards upset (like Parasite, like Moonlight) has audacity and surprise in it. But, soon enough, the contingent interlopers are ejected, and it’s business as usual, back to Green Book or Darkest Hour.
Ultimately, Chameleon Street resists easy reading because Street himself has the imp of the perverse written through him like a stick of rock. We can look to sophisticated racial arguments about his particular brand of grifting, but there’s something deeper, darker and more bizarre at play here, something as old and unsettling as Loki, Anansi or Coyote. The film ends with the parable of the scorpion and the frog, told by different people and rapidly intercut between their faces and voices, giving an uncanny feeling of shapeshifting. Why does he do the things he does? The real life Street, in what passes for candour from such a prolific liar, chillingly said, “The nightmare part of it is there is no me, no Doug Street in the picture. I’m the sum of my parts, but all my parts are somebody else. Where’s me, man?” Or, as the fable has it, ‘I couldn't help it. It’s in my nature.’
This week’s recommendations
Six Degrees of Separation, another story of a Black con artist. Will Smith was once eyed up as the lead in Warner Brothers mooted remake of Chameleon Street. He had to wait three years for this film and his turn playing the White establishment, in the shape of a superb Stockard Channing and Donald Sutherland.
‘Too Much Time’ by Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band.
A little bit of vegan miso mushrooms won’t hurt.