A FISH TALE THAT REALLY WAS

See CATFISH. Even if it isn’t the greatest movie ever made, it’s certainly one of the greatest movie experiences I’ve had in a very long time. To discuss its plot is, in some ways, to spoil that experience. Suffice it to say that this is a documentary film following a New Yorker’s true-life interaction with an Midwestern internet penpal and her extended family. Oh yeah, and it’s one of the most neve-rackingly scary films I’ve seen in years. Light spoilers alert, so ye who tread here shall consider thineself warned.

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The proximity to the release of Sorkin’s THE SOCIAL NETWORK feels too reflexive to be coincidence; how else to explain the weird echo these films pass between them. If Facebook allows identity—in that is encourages an online, electronic, searchable simulacra—it follows, because this is the way of things, that there can be a corruption of that process. Identity can be forged; is forged. Still, this fact, to borrow a term, this inconvenient truth, remains ego-dystonic—sociologically speaking. Even though we “know” chatrooms are populated with liars, pictures are outdated, profiles are manipulatively tailored, we continue ‘believing’ in a virtual and untestable reality, and we do so almost blithely. We know but we don’t know. The internet confuses, almost magically, the credible and the veracious.

CATFISH is smart enough to glimpse the dark side of THE SOCIAL NETWORK, or a least the dark side of humanity given the resources that Facebook and its ilk have allowed. Though I suppose it is an intrinsic quality of its documentary form, I love that the movie is such a product of its time – so late 2000s. I can’t think of another film I’ve seen recently that so elegantly presents a problematic element of popular culture and, instead of shying away from or trying to explain it, allows it to just flitter away—an extinguished fire work; an ember. CATFISH doesn't seek to provide solutions, its filmmakers too enamored with their own discovery (and selves) to really care. But the "problem" at the heart of CATFISH is indeed a problem of our society, and it’s a testament of what good documentary can do: turn us towards things we had been gazing at, unknowingly, all along.

Is it manipulative? Sure. Ethically questionable? You’d be foolish to think otherwise—consent is a fiction of the industry. But CATFISH works, either as a documentary film that feels like a narrative one, or as a narrative film in “documentary style.” Though I understand it to be a documentary, to present a “reality,” it is a great test case for how reality is constructed, an expose of the apparatus of Storytelling itself. Nev and his brother create the tale they want to tell; they feed into it. Their crimes, if crimes be committed, are too messily woven into Angela’s own. Surely they stumbled upon a truly sick woman, surely they “lucked out” in the documentary sense: setting out upon a quite different story, they possess verite footage from almost the offset of this strange internet relationship. This creates a truly satisfying narrative arch. When Nev finds the postcards he mailed months ago in an abandoned mailbox supposedly belonging to Angela’a daughter, the film has a visual drama rarely seen even in scripted work. When the monster movie these filmmakers are filming actually provides a monster (in the form of two severely retarded, uncomfortable-to-watch-on-film mentally handicapped adolescents) it’s almost “too good to be true.” But there's a lot to the edit, folks. There's a lot that is what it is because CATFISH is being made. A story is assembled, not just chanced upon.

To Good To Be True. That’s certainly an idiomatic expression CATFISH wrestles with, and in that way is a comment on filmmaking itself. Maybe not just filmmaking, maybe (and I know it sound cheesy) society in general: a society of such exposure and simultaneous loneliness that middle-aged woman pretend to be sexy young girls; that the urbane—or probably just hipster—fall for the illusion; that pierced illusion (“Pierce,” the family’s surname, a delicious rhetorical petit four; one of the film’s several) someone doesn’t destroy the story but create a story in itself. Surely CATFISH the documentary about a talented eight year old artist would never play at Sundance, would never challenge audiences with as titillating ethical and psychological dimensions as CATFISH the story of the bat-shit insane. Or a society where such a basket-case, such a obviously injured subject, will so eagerly sign a release form saying show me off. Where the whole story's all right there on digital record.

When all is said and done, if we can create a persona on Facebook aren’t we creating a ‘story’ anyway? This horror film endeavors to follow the thread of one woman’s deceit, but somehow its particular horror lies not only in the extremity of this woman’s case, but in its very proximity to our lives. It is uncanny, unheimlich, in the most classically Freudian of senses; CATFISH is scary because it’s so very Heimlich , so frighteningly close to home. Its homespun, let-me-tell-you-a-story qualities distinguish it as truly original...but also strangely familiar. It could have been made by any of my (Facebook) friends. I’ll tell you this, I can’t get it out of my mind. It got to me.

But I think I Like it.