As you can see I’ve been having some trouble
maintaining the old blog in recent months. You know how it goes – work,
extra-curriculars, TV, drinking, etc. But fortunately, some months ago I wrote
a review of the movie Catfish that I never got around to posting. So, in a
blatant effort to capitalize on all the #catfish chat that’s happening in the
social media sphere, here it is now! Thank you Manti Te’o for helping me to blog with
minimal effort.
No no no. Not that kind of catfish.
There are many reasons why I’m thankful every day
that I reached adulthood before Facebook came around. Why? Think back to all
the stupid things you said and did before you fully developed a sense of what
is “socially acceptable.” Now imagine that stupidity preserved for the rest of
your life in a public online forum. Maybe even beyond your life – what happens
to Facebook profiles after the user dies, anyway?
The Internet can lull people into a false sense of
security. It puts enough of a buffer between them and reality to make them say and
do things they wouldn’t in real life. And once something is said or done
online, it can’t be unsaid. That’s why I’m glad that as a socially awkward kid
I didn’t have the opportunity to create any fake online personas. Still, I can
certainly imagine having the compulsion to do so.
A strong grip on reality helps most people keep their
Facebook profiles more or less representative of who they actually are. But
what if that reality is so far from the life you want that you feel compelled
to create an online alter ego? Someone to live through vicariously; someone
beautiful, smart and successful – everything you feel you’re not? You can be
anyone, so why be you?
Catfish tells the
story of a good-intentioned young fella who “meets” a young lady online. He
gets to know her and her family, speaking to them regularly online and on the
phone. But when he attempts to meet the family in person, things quickly get
weird. It’s a fable for the digital age – a high-tech retelling of age-old
mantras: tell the truth and just be yourself. Tell lies and you’ll get caught.
Wikipedia
and other sources suggest that Catfish
is a staged documentary—that very little of the film is truth; or at least, the
filmmakers did not experience the events as they unfolded. But it’s so easy to
suspend disbelief in a film like this, that it’s a little disappointing to
think that it’s not all real—it’s probably similar to the feeling the movie’s
Angela got when she signed out of her 15 Facebook profiles and turned off her
computer each night to face with the soul-crushing blandness that was her life.
But for three young, technologically-savvy people to
set off on a cross-country trek to meet total strangers without Googling them
first was a major plot hole. You have to really
want to suspend disbelief to go along with that – just like someone clings to a
fantasy as it unravels around them, hmmmm?
The character of Angela—insofar as she appears in the
film—is a sad case, but understandably. I hope she got some kind of therapy,
because what she does in the movie sounds like it came straight off the pages
of the DSM.
Usually, when one thinks of online identity fraud, one thinks of stolen credit
card numbers, or pedophiles trawling the Internet for victims. You don’t think
of the fraud as being a victim herself.
That’s one of the reasons Catfish may be worth checking out. Just be sure you bring along a
healthy skepticism… be sure to bring that to any online romances as well. Whether
or not the film is true to life isn’t the point—the point is that it easily
could be.
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