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Con artist?

2. Con artists are greedy hucksters who sell us dreams that never come true. But Americans have a soft spot for them. Witness the current success of “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “American Hustle,” films that celebrate (sort of) the art of the grift. Somehow, living through two bubbles in which plenty of investors and homeowners were suckered by sugarplum visions hasn’t dampened our appetite for watching spectacles like Christian Bale duping almost everyone he encounters, including F.B.I. agents, and Leonardo DiCaprio hypnotizing a mark into buying worthless stock.

It has ever been thus. The phrase “confidence man” was popularized in an 1849 New York Herald article detailing the arrest of William Thompson, a man of “genteel appearance” who for months had been approaching strangers on the street and somehow persuading them to trust him with their watches until the next day. (Needless to say, they never got the watches back.) Almost immediately, a play titled “The Confidence Man” débuted; Thompson was soon bragging that he was “a great man in the eyes of the world.” In the decades that followed, the con artist became a classic American antihero. The curious thing, as the University of Pennsylvania historian Walter McDougall writes, is that, “far from despising flimflam artists as parasites or worse, American popular culture habitually celebrates rascals as comedic figures.” Think of the movies of W. C. Fields and the Marx Brothers; think of “The Sting” and “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.” Even bleaker depictions, like David Mamet’s, get us to admire the dexterity with which con artists persuade people to part with their money.