Catfish (2010)

1 year ago

Catfish (2010)

by Anais Escobar

I saw the documentary Catfish, which is just now being released, almost six weeks ago at a critics screening in New York City. The trailer and advertising feel like a horror movie and this was enough to suck me in. In hindsight, I’m not sure that the marketing does the film justice. It’s been described to those who haven’t seen it as Blair Witch-esque but the twist here isn’t a neat one.

By now you may have heard that Catfish follows a young New York City photographer named Nev Schulman who receives a painting of one of his photos in the mail. He begins a correspondence with the 8 year old Michigan girl, Abby, who painted, as well as the rest of her family. His brother Ariel and friend Henry are fascinated by this relationship via digital means and decide to make a documentary about him. Nev grows close to Abby, her mother Angela, and her older sister Megan, and all three men are intrigued by this beautiful family that seems to be more artistically talented at every turn; they even begin communicating with many of the family’s friends and neighbors via Facebook. Nev and Megan fall for each other, talking all the time, “sexting” (as news programs like to call it with great concern) and even talking on the phone regularly. Every time, Nev tries to make plans to come see Megan. However, something always comes up.

Suspicions begin to arise when Megan sends Nev and his friends a song she claims to have just recorded a few minutes before and then he finds the exact same recording on YouTube. Nev feels rightfully tricked and wants nothing to do with the rest of the project but Ariel convinces him to see the whole thing through, if only for answers (and of course, for a movie to be shown at Sundance!). He agrees and they make the trip to Michigan.

I think by now, even if you hadn’t been reading this, you could figure out that Nev did not find things as he thought they’d be when he arrived. However, he also did not find the monster the that film’s trailer seemed to promise. Instead, he found something much sadder. There was an Angela but she did not look like her photos. There was an Abby but she did not know how to paint. There may or may not have been a Megan. Nev found a very different family than the one portrayed online and an Angela at the heart of it all.

These scenes in Michigan are hard to watch. I’ve heard that some people laughed during these scenes at certain screenings, but that could not have been further from the truth at mine. I couldn’t breathe, not because I thought something bad was going to happen in a traditional cinematic sense, but because it is painful to watch someone’s lie — in a sense, someone’s whole world — fall apart. Nev, before angry and now gentle, confronts Angela about everything from Megan to the paintings. She admits that it was all her, that she created and updated over forty Facebook profiles for Abby, Megan, and their friends, that she was the one who did all the paintings, that it was her on the phone being Megan.

This is not a shock at this point in the film but it’s weighty and you can feel it stick in your throat. Angela’s real life is harder than she ever let on on Facebook. She cares for her disabled stepsons day in and day out. She paints as a release, but is unable to show the work to the world as her own, out of fear that perhaps people wouldn’t see the paintings as anything special if they were coming from a middle aged woman. They are special, though, and she is talented. Nev saw that when he thought it was Abby’s art, and saw how wonderful it was even after finding out it was actually Angela’s.

Like I said, there is no monster in this. Typical internet narratives involve the young girl meeting the 40 year old predator or those who pass themselves off as someone else in order to deceive and scam. We feel for Nev who has been lied to and led on, but there is something sadder in Angela’s creation of this whole world to escape her own. It is definitely creepy that she created this whole world for him, that she couldn’t present her art to him from the start as being hers, but like anything else in life, it’s complicated.

I was moved by late scenes in the film of Angela sketching Nev. There was an intimacy along with the obvious awkwardness. It had all been a lie but the earlier feelings were real; people had gotten emotionally involved. The truth merely shattered illusions and in some respects I don’t think anyone involved was happy about this. We see the things we want to see along with what we want others to see about us. In an age where we curate our lives digitally, choosing the things we present on Facebook, blogs, Twitter, countless other networks, can we ever know the truth about someone? Aren’t we all choosing the most flattering versions of ourselves to represent us? We untag unflattering photos, don’t share the more embarrassing or uglier details of our lives, and pick and choose what we present.

I don’t know. It troubles me that it’s so easy to lie via digital means but I think about people who know me in real life and they don’t entirely know me either. Is it just that it’s easier to lie online? I don’t believe that it is. Catfish shows how simple it is to steal content and lie but also how easy it is to find someone in the real world. It’s hard to hide behind a wall of internet anonymity when 4chan can track you down and send angry villagers to your Google Street View-found house. You can type anything into Google and there it is. There’s little privacy these days except for what goes on in our own heads; is that all we have left?

Nev is less trusting and somewhat haunted by the end of the film and who can blame him? The finished sketch Angela drew arrives at his office and he puts it back in the box, walking away from his brother’s camera. Nev’s a casualty in this situation. Some would say this is a lesson we should all (and most likely have) learned about the internet: we get burned and end up less trusting than we previously were. But this is a lesson more about life than just the internet. People have been lying and we naive ones have fallen for it and learned our lessons for ages. Now, it’s just seemingly easier to get in contact and create this illusion for a larger audience.

At the end of it all, I wish I could protect both Angela and Nev from all this. I wish I could protect Nev from getting hurt and Angela from feeling the need to do this, from now being laughed at by cruel people. In an idealistic sense, I wish that for both Angela and Nev’s sake, people didn’t have to see this film. I wish that the intimacy between them was left to them, away from prying eyes. I wish that for all of us in an unfortunately very public time.