Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2010/12/16/catfish_film_review/
Catfish: A fanfare for Facebook fakery
This shit just got real. Or did it?
Posted in Bootnotes, 16th December 2010 13:52 GMT
Film review - contains spoilers Facebook is brimful of hot girls who are usually neither of those things: scammers, hustlers and freelance scumbags who don lovely online masks to get close to you and take you for all you're worth, or if you're lucky, just make you look really stupid. Not all of the masks hide your standard con-people, however – some of them are the finely-crafted work of lonely fantasists who might gain access not to your bank account, but to your head, your heart and your life.
Catfish is a documentary about a Facebook-based relationship that isn't what it appears to be, which may not itself be what it appears to be. If the makers had wanted to go for a less enigmatic title, and if Streep and Baldwin hadn't got there first, they could have done worse than It's Complicated.
(For those for whom the element of surprise is everything, although we really think there's more to life (and film) than that, here's an extended spoiler warning – this review contains quite a number of things that happen in the film which you may not want to know before seeing it, although it is so extraordinarily surprise-ful that we can't spoil the half of it.)
A couple of years ago, 24-year-old New York photographer Nev Schulman struck up a Facebook friendship with eight-year-old Michigan girl Abby, who had sent him a painting of one of his own photographs. He soon became friendly with Abby's mother Angela, and as the contact increased and the paintings kept coming, Nev's brother Ariel and his mate Henry Joost started filming to document the internet-based friendship. Then Nev was friended by Abby's 19-year-old half-sister Megan and a bunch of her mates, and things got a lot more interesting.
Catfish is immediately established as a documentary about right now – the process of becoming friends with people on Facebook, and then friends with their friends, the exchanging of messages and the tagging of pictures bounces across the screen in a swift clicky-dance of pixellated interaction. It's more graceful and less irritating than you'd think. It's only online nattering, but as the messages heap up and the pictures proliferate, the slow build of emotional investment is as plain to see on screen as it would be in any romantic drama.
As you watch Nev – preposterously good-looking, well-adjusted, but a little too trusting – get to know these people, the foreboding rumbles audibly. When Nev breezily says: "She seems normal", the rumble grows; when he twigs that the gorgeous Megan isn't the talented singer she claims to be, it swells to an Inception-grade trombone-parp.
Soon the three young guys, disturbed but giddy, are dismantling an impressive edifice of untruths with the help of the very tools that built it. The vertiginous swooping from the outer reaches of Google Earth to an enigmatic smudge of a human figure in a front yard is brilliantly dramatic – not least because it illustrates how the stalked can become the stalker – and the internet willingly feeds the filmmakers the information and clues they need to find the truth. They start to lie and construct in turn, fabricating to get the facts – faking to the fakers. They find, and gently ambush, Angela at her home in Michigan, but the whole truth is still many miles away.
The documentary is often hilarious, with a sheepish Nev reading out the "juicy stuff" he and Megan texted to each other, even as he remains in the dark as to who Megan really is. You start to doubt everything, and you're often rewarded as another falsehood satisfyingly bites the dust. And then it becomes rather less hilarious. Remove the scampering enthusiasm and intrigue, chip away the many layers of finely-worked horseshit, and this is a modern human tragedy.
It should show you that anyone can come to believe things that are false, and sneering at the credulous is often misplaced – Nev is young, but he's not the kind of hopelessly naive dope who buys magic beans. "I wasn't fooled," says Nev, reasonably, "They just told me things I didn't care to question." Why would you not take people at face value, within reason, even when you've only met them online and spoken to them on the phone?
Just as most conspiracy theories would require a cast of thousands of co-ordinated evil geniuses to hold any water at all, reflexively attributing quirks of human behaviour and twists and turns of relationships to the machinations of a puppet-master is absurd and paranoid. Angela turns out to be a brilliant one, an essentially benign manipulator driven by desperation for a sense of fulfilment rather than by a desire for the power that comes from mastering the dark art of headfuckery. Nev trusts in Angela and Abby and Megan, not realising that Angela has snapped Occam's Razor into several pieces.
Casey Affleck likes this
It's obvious by the end that Angela is the real victim of her own creative scheme, and only a serious brute could find no sympathy for her. Nev is miraculously gentle and considerate to the woman who deceived him and others who have cause to expect a lot more from her. He smiles his way through it all, but it becomes clear towards the end that he's shellshocked.
The film raises a lot of the old questions about online identity and safety and how vulnerable we are to anyone else with an internet connection, although its events are outlandishly unlikely. It's oddly reassuring to that end – if you questioned everything about everyone, you couldn't function as a social animal. Also, it ought to show you that not everyone who lies to you means you harm.
Of course, Catfish also raises questions about itself. Inevitably, there have been widespread and noisy mutterings about the validity of the doc itself. Casey Affleck and Joaquin Phoenix's actor-meltdown caper I'm Still Here, which was only revealed as a big put-on after a year or so of Phoenix acting mad in public and everyone involved swearing up and down it was for real, hasn't done the concept of telling the truth many favours. Much more of that malarkey, and all documentaries and factual programming may have been sucked into a cynicism black hole in which no insistence of honesty could survive.
This is a film about being duped – so how far does it take that? Is the whole thing a falsehood wrapped in a cinematic scam, puffed up into one big smug meta-comment on dupe-dom? It's produced by the people behind Capturing the Freidmans – another documentary that started off being about nothing in particular before something wildly extraordinary conveniently revealed itself.
That's before you even address the ethics of exposing Angela's antics – and her family – to the world. The film was made with her consent, and she has said that she supports it – in fact, she says that she got into all this hoping that a film was being made as events unfolded. But can you trust anything she says?
If it is a hoax, it's a preternaturally brilliant one – and overall, it has the ring of truth, even after it's spent an hour and a half kicking the fragile concept of that all around the room. It's about the mutability and malleability of reality, and the absolute truth of it all becomes almost irrelevant because it's impossible to reach. Of course people like Angela exist, and the internet has enabled them to pursue and enact fantasies – ensnaring others as they go – in ways that they couldn't easily have done before. There are still some things that you couldn't make up, and you might as well believe decency and honesty are still real – even when you're dealing with Facebook and filmmakers.
Even afterwards, though, the sense that everything you know might be wrong lingers like an undeletable wall post. You don't know what to believe any more, and start considering the possibilities of some or all of the players being sophisticated androids, or that Angela has made up your entire existence down to the cinema seat your possibly imaginary arse is occupying. In any case, you're more likely to hesitate to add that beautiful girl who sent you that lovely message yesterday.
Catfish is in UK cinemas on 17 December. ®