The Cultural Moment of "Catfish"

Following up on the post about "I'm Not Here" yesterday, I want to bring up the other documentary of dubious authenticity currently making its way through indie theaters. This is "Catfish," the purported tale of an internet romance that isn't what it seems. The recent ads I've seen for the film are seriously misleading, in that they suggest that this is a horror movie, which it isn't. I haven't seen "Catfish" yet, but I had the film spoiled for me in some detail. I think it fair to warn potential viewers that the tension and the thrills alluded to by the trailer and TV commercials are strictly in the realm of straight drama. No bloodbath for you gore-lovers. It's not that kind of film.

I'm going to get into some serious spoilers in the rest of this post, so please stop reading now if you have any intention of seeing the film without knowing the ending, because it's difficult to talk about "Catfish" without giving away the central mystery.

Anyone who has been on social networking sites, and anyone who has participated in any online social activities period, knows that the Internet lets users take advantage of their anonymity to create new identities and augment their existing ones. This can be taken to elaborate extremes, which I've seen first hand. I count myself a member of several media fandoms that see a lot of wild personality types, and witnessed the uncovering of several amazing, convoluted ruses perpetrated by users upon other members of their online social groups. Faking one's death to foster sympathy or evade blame is a common one. Creating imaginary people is popular too.

The simplest example of anonymity abuse is someone representing themselves as someone else. I don't mean identity theft, but rather the practice of assuming a different gender, a different ethnicity, a different age, or being from different circumstances than in reality. These fantasy personae are easy to create and seem harmless at first, even expected to some extent. One of the unwritten laws of the Internet is to avoid giving out personal information. However, a false identity can have serious real-world consequences. The suicide of Megan Meier after being bullied by an ex-friend's mother in the guise of a teenage boy is the most notorious example. There have been plenty of other cases where people were bilked out of funds, sent on wild goose chases, or simply emotionally victimized by people who were representing themselves as something very different from the truth.

Related to this kind of online fabrication is the creation of the manufactured ally, or the "sockpuppet," where someone creates two distinct identities and represents them as different people, usually to help bolster arguments or to be used for self-promotion. But a sockpuppet can take on a life of its own or turn into an army. I've seen cases where single users were running multiple sockpuppets with incredibly detailed personal histories and complex relationships, all totally imaginary. Thanks to Photoshop and IP address anonymizers, it's easier to be a fake person than ever. Online conversations involving a crowd of different avatars could actually be taking place between only two people. It's alarming, infuriating, and you have to marvel that anyone could keep it all straight.

The independently produced "Catfish" is a cautionary tale that deals with the outing of one of these serial prevaricators. Using a documentary format (the filmmakers insist everything is real, but I'm skeptical), it chronicles the romance that develops between our naive hero and a young woman after he interacts with her and various members of her family online. However, parts of the girl's story don't add up, so the guy and his friends decide to confront her about the inconsistencies after tracking down a physical address. The truth turns out to be far different from what the filmmakers - and the audience - are lead to expect.

"Catfish" deserves kudos for being one of the first films to really delve into this subject matter and to portray the perpetrator in a fairly sympathetic light. Up until now, anonymous ne'er-do-wells on the Internet have generally been viewed by Hollywood as cold, amoral creatures operating out of malice, when the motivations of the actual people behind them can be quite complex. Of all the sockpuppeteers and hoaxers I ever ran across in media fandom, there wasn't a one I didn't end up feeling sorry for once their real-world circumstances were revealed. Some were too young or inexperienced with online socializing to realize the harm they were causing, some were playing out fantasies of how they wanted their lives to be, and some just unwittingly let small wrongs snowball into chaos. Real sociopaths and troublemakers were the rare cases.

As for the film, judgment of its merits must wait until I've actually viewed it, but I suspect it'll very much a product of its time and may not be able to retain its ability to surprise in the future. As the age of social networking rolls on, more and more people will come across these sockpuppet situations, until discovering a single user masquerading as a whole family will be viewed as a commonplace annoyance instead of some alien Internet phenomena. "Catfish" may not be so much a cautionary tale as much as a harbinger of an inevitable change in our basic social interactions - all thanks to the Internet.