Art Attack: On pretending to be someone’s dad

The Atlantic recently published an article about a new “rent-a-friend” business in Japan. The business gives you an opportunity to hire an actor to stand in as a your boyfriend or girlfriend, or even your mom or dad — whatever relationship role you need adequately filled for as long as you need.

The justification of this concept by company founder Ishii Yuichi is, interestingly, is the same exact justification used by the bad guy in “The Truman Show.” I don’t think this is necessarily that revealing. One might argue, after all, that the character Christof is not even that bad of a guy. Perhaps he has, like he claims, built a safer, realer world for Truman.

While Yuichi’s business does not involve kidnapping or the building of enormous domes, it does involve perhaps the third-most terrifying aspect of “The Truman Show” — namely, the “your-closest-loved-ones-are-actually-actors” trope. For many of the acting gigs, the clients are fully aware of the service they are purchasing. When a wife cheated on her husband, Yuichi played the man she was cheating on, just to give the husband a chance to confront him.

But it really gets murky when that “audience” is an unwitting child. Yuichi was hired to act, and is still acting, as the father to a young girl who was bullied in school for being fatherless. To this day, Yuichi says, she does not know that he is just an actor.

It is too easy and obvious to write off the “rent-a-friend” business as simply disturbing, Truman-Show-esque, blatantly absurd and wrong. Articulating the problem with Mr. Yuichi’s business is actually quite difficult, since, in a philosophical sense, he’s not wrong.

The business exists as a way to correct what Yuichi views as “unfair” about not just Japanese society, but also the world. For his first role, he played the father of a young boy who could not attend a private school simply because he did not have a father. It is in this spirit that Yuichi created the business, and I think it has to be acknowledged that this is a well-meaning spirit. There is a way to understand Yuichi’s business without characterizing him as some kind of malicious villain. Yuichi feels that the commonplace distinction between artificial and real is misguided, and I think this raises an important consideration.

People do tend to hold somewhat arbitrary distinctions between what is fake and what is real. Many seem to value the real or authentic over the fake or fraudulent. I don’t think this is philosophical mumbo-jumbo — for a lot of us, how honest we perceive someone to be correlates directly to how admirable or likable we think they are.

This mindset is something of a cultural trope, and I do think it’s basically a false dichotomy. In terms of how we see other people, we are always seeing a kind of performance, a withholding of some behaviors, an emphasis on others. But even in how we see ourselves, we portray some things more than others, hide and quiet other characteristics, no matter how objective or honest we feel we are being.

Yuichi acknowledges the genuine confusion of this dichotomy. Sometimes when he is alone, he finds himself asking, “Is this, now, the real me, or the actor?” And while this is philosophically pretty interesting, Yuichi does not seem totally consistent. When some women he pretends to date say they are in love with him and want to marry him, he reminds them: “You’re in love with an order form. It’s not me.”

Yuichi is missing one thing: his business, with the good intentions of making reality “more ideal” and “more clean” is not going to end up doing that well. While the truth will have to come out eventually, it does not render the act worthless.

However, I think Yuichi is slightly downplaying the effect of finding out if your father had actually been an actor the whole time. This is where the philosophizing about reality begins to seem irrelevant. In this case, we know exactly what is not real. Yuichi, while claiming that “the term ‘real’ is misguided,” seems to still have some notion of what feels real to him. He won’t marry the woman he pretends to date because it’s not his “real soul.” When he is acting as the father to the little girl, he doesn’t “really feel that [he] loves her.”

The question Yuichi should really be asking himself is what kind of reality is fabricated when there is not just a philosophical question about our behavior, but when there is a significant number of people who are actually fake. Behind the dad of the little girl, Yuichi implies there is a real self, his real soul, that is not present.

Yuichi’s hypocrisy is in that he openly admits to himself that he is not the girl’s real father. He knows, and she will one day know that he was just playing a role. Yuichi argues that it makes no difference. However she chooses to look back on it, the love she felt at the time was real or at least convincing. But it’s one thing to raise philosophical questions about how much of our behavior is an act, and another when we know the act was empty to begin with.