Review: Catfish

A number of critical reviews on the documentary film Catfish have raised ethical concerns, questioning the film’s purported authenticity and the possibly exploitative nature of the film. More importantly, Catfish reminds viewers, regardless of the directors’ intentions, the value in real, personal human interactions and offers a tale of forgiveness, compassion, and recognition of our common nature in a digital and increasingly shallow age.

The film, of course, compels the viewer to question the value to society of “social networking” sites, such as the monstrously large and influential Facebook that, by surrounding users with interactive games, applications and unlimited numbers of virtual “friends”, has created a profound loneliness and dependency upon shallow distractions and interactions that is leading many to a more draining alienation than the one they sought to flee from in the first place.

On Facebook, friendship is reduced to its most cynical form – you are worth being someone’s friend because of someone cool you know or because you “like” a hip album, have sexy photos, or cultivated an appropriately fashionable persona – while the participant is willingly categorized, defined and limited by a variety of narrow options that ultimately comprise a user’s profile. On Facebook, everyone becomes celebrity. Although the process is corporatized, monotonous and sterile, it is marketed as special, cool and exciting. It lends users the impression that they are, in fact, doing something, when they are simply engaging in a distraction that pacifies ambition and, like an addiction, gives them a false sense of euphoria and meaning. Catfish shows that an escape into this virtual world and its inane vices can readily snowball into something simultaneously sinister and banal that is difficult to emotionally untangle oneself from.

Perhaps as depressing, Catfish reveals the desperation endemic in parts of the country largely forgotten or belittled by high culture and neglected by an economic elite that has come and gone, depleting the creative energies of entire populations, leaving communities morally and economically bankrupt. Shrouded in mythologies promoted by paid boosters, amateur historians, and politicians of hardworking and fiercely independent folk living the good life, many of these used-and-abused areas remain culturally stagnant, dependent upon selectively recycled images, aphorisms and stories from a past that often did not exist in the way commonly portrayed.

But don’t despair. Catfish ends well, for the most part.

Catfish begins with Nev, a young, hip, attractive, tech-savvy New York City photographer. Nev’s brother and a friend, both filmmakers and office mates, begin documenting Nev’s budding relationship with an eight-year old artist, Abby, from Ishpeming, a mining town in Michigan. Abby renders in oil and watercolor some of Nev’s published and unpublished photos. Nev introduces himself to her family, including the sexy and emotionally strong mother, Angela, and begins a vapidly modern romantic relationship with Megan, Abby’s older sister, through Facebook, instant messaging and, eventually, text messages and phone calls. Megan intends to buy a horse farm in Gladstone. Abby is in the process of remodeling an old building she just purchased in Ishpeming to open her own art studio. Art dealers in the Ishpeming area have gone mad over her artwork, with some pieces selling for upwards of $7,000.

Spoiler Alert!

One evening, Nev and company, tied to their computers, are requesting that Megan, a musician, sing them a song. Twenty minutes after requesting “Tennessee Stud,” Megan sends them a just-recorded file of her playing the song. The boys are impressed. However, as they view more songs posted on Megan’s Facebook page, they begin to realize the songs aren’t Megan’s but have been taken from other artists who posted on the Internet. This leads a wide-eyed Nev to believe, not only that Megan is pirating others’ music in order to impress him, but that Megan, herself, may not even exist. Perhaps, Nev speculates, he has been communicating with a man who fabricated the persona of Megan.

The trio, upon discovering that Megan and her family are likely not what they seem to be on Facebook, travels hundreds of miles to Gladstone and Ishpeming and stumble upon something both they and viewers do not anticipate. They meet Angela, a forty-something mother of Abby and caretaker of her husband’s two severely mentally handicapped boys. Nev’s story turns into one of a lonely housewife with regrets over life’s decisions and feelings of inadequacy over her artwork and intelligence. Tellingly, Angela relates to Nev that she could only connect to high culture though the Internet and latched onto his seemingly exciting big city life in order to compensate for the physical impossibility of her finding what she desires amidst the tedium of Ishpeming.

Nev is astounded that he could play the part of fool to such an extent as to fall in love with Megan, revealing more about himself through this fantasy than to real girlfriends in his past. As is common with virtual interactions, Angela and Nev found each other out of desperation. Angela, the stifled housewife living in culture-starved Ishpeming, and Nev, out of college, beset with limited, and unfulfilling work. This depressing commonality, never revealed in their roughly 1,500 virtual interactions, is what allows Nev to willingly and naively provide so much information about himself to a complete stranger and Angela to envelop herself in a complex virtual world of multiple personalities, each one representing facets of her character long suppressed or given up on. Through young Abby, Angela realizes her dream of receiving outside recognition for artwork that had been largely scoffed-at and ignored when honestly presented as produced by an adult. Through Megan, Angela is the young, sexy, talented and independent woman beginning an exciting and worldly life, even while maintaining the rural roots that urban-saturated Nev is fascinated by.

The film doesn’t end as some might want, with the reality show-like confrontation of a dangerous scam artist, slowly reeling young Nev in with sexual advances and phony pretenses until justice is finally served. In Catfish, Angela is shown to be a very real person with relatable emotions, insecurities and motivations that closely mirror those of Nev. Thus, the story doesn’t end with an arrest, fistfight or courtroom scene, but resolves itself with images of Nev, his brother and friend happily swimming and playing in Lake Superior with young Abby, while Angela watches from the beach. In fact, the film advertises, Nev remains Facebook friends with Angela, who now has a real photo of herself posted on her profile page. The film, haphazardly but thankfully, becomes a story not only of redemption, but of understanding, compassion and forgiveness.

Yet, even with this oddly personal and human denouement, the viewer is left feeling unsettled. Perhaps because this understanding of Facebook’s vacuousness and Nev and Angela’s ultimate humanity came with the realization that, while both gravitated toward the interaction for similar reasons, the directors and Nev are receiving lavish praise, fame and money for a work that has resulted in Angela remaining in a small town, with little creative outlet, a housewife. The means to turn the surreal experience into a career move were simply more available to New York Nev than Ishpeming Angela.

Depressingly, it seems, when the outside world looks in, often the mythological shroud that blankets many residents’ perceptions of Upper Peninsula culture, history and society is momentarily cracked, and an alternate view of an anemic, claustrophobic, and isolated culture and society that stifles individual creativity and self-worth is revealed that is as much a part of the Northwood’s’ landscape as its stunning natural beauty. The directors of Catfish reveal this reality, surprisingly, in an almost humble way that does not attempt to outright destroy and demean the rural American reality captured candidly on film but, instead, opens a window, however briefly, to show the commonalities between two very different personalities from dramatically different social environments caught in the anti-social and lonely world of social networking.

The directors, perhaps inadvertently, show that virtual social networking has revealed as universal the common loneliness and low self-esteem that pervades modern American society, leaving little emotional distance between a young New Yorker and a rural upper Midwestern housewife. The widespread use of Facebook has shown us that whether in the big city, or the run-down small town, American society is lacking in substance to such an extent that many are relying on the false interactions of a virtual world to feed emotional needs not met by reality.