I had every intention of this reflection being on the film “We Live in Public”, however, I was unable to locate that or the second movie option, “Me at the Zoo”, on the Netflix instant queue. I don’t pay the additional $8/month to receive DVD’s in the mail so I had to go with the next option in line, the documentary film “Catfish”. Catfish is about an online relationship through Facebook in which Nev, a young photographer living with his brother in New York City, is duped by a middle-aged woman in Michigan who deceives Nev into thinking she is a young attractive model. He starts picking up on signs that she is fake and they follow her trail.
As my reflection, I’d like to take a look at the public rhetoric through this giant medium of popular media, Facebook, from some of the different angles of those most strongly involved in the production of this documentary. Let us first look from the perspective of Nev, the young photographer, who was merely living his normal everyday life and found what he thought to be love. Initially Nev believed that everything he was learning about Angela’s family was true. It was when he is listening to Megan sing that he begins to realize that something does not seem quite right. Nev begins to question the reality of the popular media he had initially relied on.
Next I’d like to take a look at these concepts from the view of Angela. Here, we have a middle-aged woman who is homebound. She has given up her career and all other ambitions so that she can mother her severely retarded son. She uses the popular media outlet of Facebook to carry out all the fantasies that she has and is unable to live on the outside. Towards the end of the documentary, we learn that she created not only her fake profile but a whole “world” of profiles in which she lived through her fantasies. This realization brought me to the question of “What is real?” To Angela, it seems as though her online world became her new reality. She could finally “live” again in that world. There, she could build relationships, make friends, share experiences, make music, and cultivate feelings that would be otherwise impossible given her current state of needing to be home all day everyday with her debilitated son.
In Rhetoric in Popular Culture, by Barry S. Brummett, he states that “People live in a world of artifacts that are accessible only by perceptions” (26). This passage jumped off the page when I was reading this text, looking for connections to the film. Our two main characters here are Nev and Angela. Nev has the perception that he has cultivated an incredible relationship with a typical family in Michigan. He receives a painting from an “eight-year-old child prodigy” artist who had taken one of Nev’s photographs and turned it into a beautiful painting. This is where everything began. His perceptions only grew from here when he learned of the rest of the “family” which included Abby’s mother Angela, Angela’s husband Vince, and Abby’s older half-sister Megan. He perceives Megan as being extremely attractive due to the photographs Angela used in creating her false profile. To Nev, these false-perceptions were real to him. It can be argued that to Angela, they were real to her as well. A line towards the end of the film would argue that these perceptions are what kept her alive and kept her going each day.
While Nev is talking to Victor, Angela’s husband, towards the end of the documentary he gives a very pivotal quote and the reason for the naming of the film. Here, he states:
They used to tank cod from Alaska all the way to China. They’d keep them in vats in the ship. By the time the codfish reached China, the flesh was mush and tasteless. So this guy came up with the idea that if you put these cods in these big vats, put some catfish in with them and the catfish will keep the cod agile. And there are those people who are catfish in life. And they keep you on your toes. They keep you guessing, they keep you thinking, they keep you fresh. And I thank God for the catfish because we would be droll, boring and dull if we didn’t have somebody nipping at our fin. (Catfish 2010)
Here, we learn that Victor was aware and supportive of his wife Angela in what she was doing. She was the “catfish” in Nev’s life. She kept him agile, guessing, thinking, and effectively helped to keep him fresh. Why could we not also argue that Nev was the catfish her Angela’s life as well? Little did she know that he and his brother would make a spur-of-the-moment trip to Michigan to meet Megan and the rest of the family, “nipping at her fin”.
As pertaining to the privacy of these individuals, the only true privacy maintained was that of Angela and her family until Nev and Ariel made their journey and exposed their true identities. Up until that point, Nev had put his real self completely on the line and showed “Megan” who he really was. He developed true feelings for this false person. It is also fair to mention that the privacy of Aimee Gonzales was compromised. Aimee was the girl who Angela used the pictures of to create the false profile of Megan. For all of us, when we place ourselves “online” we are compromising our individual privacy. We live in a digital world where anything we do or say, with the help of technology, can be exposed to the whole world within seconds.
Nothing is private anymore. With the popular media medium of Facebook, false persons and even false worlds can be created. This is exactly what happened to Nev Schulman. More recently in popular media, Manti Te’o was deceived that he had a girlfriend who he loved dearly. She then died and was the inspiration behind his incredible football career. It has now been exposed that Ronaiah Tuiasosopo was the mastermind behind this hoax, who created the female alter ego and fake persona who carried on that long-distance relationship with Manti.
“Catfish” experiences like this happen every day all over the world. It is because of the wide spectrum of popular media that we are exposed to through our endless access to the internet that we are able to connect with and carry out experiences like this. Not only do we all use the internet, but most of us have ready access to it immediately through our mobile devices. Never before has a world like this with popular media driving public rhetoric been so dominant. In just a few minutes, someone can create a false world and live through it. Like in the film, Angela found refuge through the false personas that she had created, and thrived through those. She was able to entirely conceal her personal life, and only let the aspects that she was proud of, such as her art skills, shine through. In the end of the film we learn that each profile that Angela created was a different persona of her imagination. She explains that they represent real fragments of her personality that would have come to pass had she made different choices throughout her life.
Back to Rhetoric in Popular Culture, Brummett states that “texts are the ways in which we experience culture” (29). In the sense of Facebook, people are able to not only create the text, but they can create their own culture, and then live through it. This offers a very appealing possibility for someone who has messed up their own life. It offers the opportunity for them to start fresh, become beautiful, have their dream job, and control every other aspect of their newfound “life”. When one considers these possibilities, it becomes very clear why this “Catfish” problem is not only increasing, but growing into something of an epidemic. People can now live two, three, four different lives. They can escape their world and live any life that they chose. The possibilities are endless. Will any of us become a catfish or will we be the unfortunate victims of someone’s next catfish attempt? Whether we’re a cod or a catfish, either way, we will all be more agile, on our toes, kept guessing, and continuously thinking as a result.
