Ryan McNeil
While this post will be wickedly non-specific, I’ll echo the company line.
If you haven’t seen this film, don’t read this. Just go see the film.
If you have seen it, or are just that much of a daredevil, read on.
CATFISH is the story of New York photographer Nev Schulman. One day he is mailed a painting based on one of his published photographs. The painting is done by an 8 year old girl in Michigan named Abby Pierce. So enamoured with the painting, Nev soon reaches out to the girl and her family. In short order he finds himself as a close Facebook friend with Abby, her mother Angela, and her older sister Megan.
More than anything, CATFISH wants to challenge our perceptions. In this information age that we live in, we feel we can relate to people based on what they put online. Not so hard to understand is it? I know I feel like good friends with several of my readers, even though I’ve never been face to face with them for a single moment. We find ourselves drawn to the projection: the ideal self that one puts forward.
On the one hand, that might seem like asking for trouble. However, recall that we have entered an era where people are dropping avatars and nicknames (well, most of y’all are anyway) and instead putting our entire lives online. Being drawn to the virtual personality is indeed still a dangerous game, but in an era where we seem to want to share everything short of our Social Security number, the danger has been sufficiently watered down.
That’s not to say that the danger is gone completely. One could just fill their blog or Facebook profile with the slivers of joy they feel in their life, and all the while suppress a large amount of dark truth. There are things we don’t like about ourselves that we hide from people we interact with day after day…why would one share those secrets with any person who clicked on our profile?
The hitch is that as we draw people to our virtual personas, there seems to come an unspoken trust with it. Say for instance that my Mad Hatter visage was a complete put-on. That I wasn’t who I appear to be. Would you feel betrayed? Perhaps feel angry with me for misleading you, and perhaps with yourself for believing me? What then? Perhaps you’d be bent on digging deeper – on discovering just how deep this particular rabbit-hole goes.
We’ve all been there, found ourselves confronted with a lie and instinctually gone all Johnny-Law to get the truth. The question is, if we actually manage to get the truth – what then? What are we supposed to do with that? Will it make us sleep better somehow, holding tight to the self satisfaction that we showed the lie who was boss?
Many of us might enjoy thinking two moves ahead when it comes to personal relationships, but the fact is that sometimes we can take these self-entitled steps, and not find ourselves where we thought we’d be. Instead we find ourselves somewhere more dangerous. Somewhere sadder. Somewhere we just don’t want to be.
CATFISH doesn’t want to warn us about drowning in other people’s lives so much as it wants us to examine our own. Are we becoming too open with strangers? What’s the consequence of forsaking what’s right outside our door for the personality in the profile? Could co-exisitng with something that isn’t supposed to be there completely destroy our life, or could it in fact keep us sharp…and give us something we might not have been able to survive without?