Honest To Blog by Carina Santos Catfish (2010) D:...

Honest To Blog
by Carina Santos

Catfish (2010)
D: Henry Joost, Ariel Schulman
S: Yaniv Schulman, Ariel Schulman, Melody C. Roscher, Megan Faccio

The story behind this year’s Catfish is simple enough. A photographer from New York, Nev, meets an extraordinary Michigan family through Facebook, first conversing with an eight-year-old child prodigy, Abby Pierce, who loves to paint. In a flurry of pictures and paintings sent back and forth, he forms relations with her and her family. And then, of course, he develops feelings for Abby’s older half-sister, Megan. Megan who is beautiful, talented, sweet, and also, Megan whom he has never met.

The whole experience gets filmed by his brother, Rel, and their friend, Henry. What seems to start out like a beautifully strange connection with a surprising group of strangers sort of spirals into what a lot of online relationships turn out to be.

The legitimacy of Catfish is what is raised most often. Perhaps because it heavily deals with the determination of what is true and what is not true. Perhaps, it is also because the progression of the story is so unreal, too painful and acute, that it lies on the “too good to be true” plane. However, I’d like to think that whether it is real or not real is beside the point, because the bigger issues that surround Catfish are so much more important to reveal.

I’m of the opinion that it’s best to view the film with very little expectation, and very little knowledge of what actually unfolds. The only things you need to know, story-wise, are contained in that short, opening paragraph. To experience Catfish in the best possible way, you must go into it, virtually a clean slate, and allow yourself to discover the truths about the human condition, in the way that the filmmakers intended you to. Forget the hype, or what you’ve read, or what people have been telling you about it. Forget the stupid trailer that made it look like some sort of Blair Witch Project spin-off. Stop reading this review and start watching it right now, even. Then go back here, so that we can talk about what you have just learned about yourself and about other people.

It’s easy to dismiss the events that unravel, and it’s easy to judge everyone involved of gross perversion, craziness, exploitation, and what-have-you. It’s easy when you haven’t been to the places that they have, in terms of all-encompassing loneliness, of grief. When people need a place to escape, they tend to take the easiest way out. With the Internet, lots of possibilities are opened up.

What Catfish is is a confrontation of so many different issues that surround the human experience—the connections we make, the kind of people we make ourselves out to be—especially the issues that the people who hide behind the Internet, anonymity, and made-up personas are afraid to confront, but are deeply concerned with. The Internet becomes a vehicle for escapism, but it also grows to be a crutch that some people struggle to learn to live without. The possibilities are endless, but it doesn’t mean that you have to cross each one.

There are so many things still to be said about Catfish and what it reveals to us about how we form relationships: from what we consciously and subconsciously project to others about ourselves (I would go on about how we carefully construct our identities according to what kind of impression we want to make, but that’s another story), to how easy it is to connect with a person, to figuring out which of these connections (and which of these people, for that matter) are “real.” What do people mean by “in real life”? Where is the line drawn? Does the line even exist anymore?

Catfish opens shutters, windows, doors for these discussions and creates the space for us to really understand what it means to be a person living in these somewhat Dickensian times, the best of times/the worst of times, whether or not Catfish is real or not real.