Catfish

Another recent movie whose plot centers on Facebook is Catfish. The basic set up of the story is a twenty-something New York photographer named Yaniv Schulman (Nev, pronounced “neeve,” for short), who has a photo of his painted by Abby, an eight-year-old girl from Michigan. The girl contacts Nev, who develops a relationship with her family through e-mails, phone calls, and Facebook. Over time, Nev becomes particularly close to Megan, Abby’s older sister. But as they get closer, and Nev becomes more interested in taking the relationship from the virtual into the real world, he develops suspicions about whether Megan’s Facebook identity truly represents who she is. I won’t spoil the twists and turns the movie takes from there because I don’t want to spoil them for a first time viewer. The major theme of the film is identity and how we can forge new identities in a way that would have been difficult or impossible without our current technology, like Facebook.

There are several aspects of the film that sucked me in. One is simply the idea of relationships flowering via Facebook and how we can get to know people in a different way through this technology. I have friends whom I know in real life whom I’ve learned much more about through Facebook. I even have one set of friends whom I haven’t seen in years and whose courtship I watched unfold via Facebook. We aren’t close enough that I’ve sought out all the details of how they got together, but I enjoyed reading posts from each of them and piecing together the puzzle pieces as they moved from separate cities to the same city and then eventually announced their engagement, marriage, pregnancy, and the birth of their first child. It’s probably been close to fifteen years since I’ve actually spoken to either of them, but I feel like I am connected to them still through their online personas.

But do I really know about my friends’ lives? Maybe not. And how easy would it be to update one’s status with false information? I could easily tell my old friends from Arizona that I’m living in Paris right now or that I’m married with children or any number of untrue things. And who would doubt me?

As I watched Catfish, I pondered these things and thought how I must recommend this movie to my friends because it touches on some significant issues of our time. But I also thought as I watched the movie that it is not a great film as far as the quality of filmmaking goes. It is a low-budget, independent film, so I didn’t expect the same high gloss that I got from The Social Network. I was fine with the low-resolution images and shaky camera work. And, in fact, the film presents itself as a documentary, so the quality of filmmaking is completely justified as part of the movie itself. But then once I finished watching the movie, I looked up more about it and was surprised and a bit discouraged by what I read online.

I took the movie to be a fake documentary, like This is Spinal Tap or The Office. I thought it was an easy way to make a movie with a low budget. But what I discovered with some Googling is that the filmmakers insist that the movie is authentic. They admit to recreating a few close up images of computer screens, but insist that the story itself is completely true. This I find difficult to accept. And I’m not alone. Evidently, immediately after the film’s screening at the Sundance Film Festival, accusations began about its falsehood. There is ongoing debate about how much of the film is real and how much was staged, whether the filmmakers knew the truth early on and manipulated the situation for the sake of an interesting film or whether Nev was simply a love struck naïf (I actually wondered if Yaniv Schulman genuinely goes by Nev or if Nev was his persona for the film to underscore his naiveté). This controversy surprised me because I simply assumed early on that the movie was entirely fictional.

The filmmakers have defended their product with the claim that if Catfish is a hoax then Nev must be the greatest actor since Marlon Brando to pull off such a convincing performance, and they must be the greatest screenwriters in Hollywood to concoct such a convincing storyline. But the truth is that neither of those is true. In fact, as I was watching the film, I thought that Nev was not an especially adept actor as he often seemed to be “acting” the way a lot of people do in low budget indies. He seemed to be a little better than the guys in Clerks, but certainly didn’t achieve the believability of Brando. And the story has some interesting twists, but it also feels very plotted, very structured. The twists occur in all the right places. There’s the classic three-act film structure in place, so, no, these guys aren’t the greatest writers in Hollywood.

But the controversy about the reality of the film further underscores its themes about reality and identity, so that’s interesting, right? I don’t know. I find myself kind of annoyed by it. If the film is good enough on its merits as a film, it shouldn’t matter whether it is a real documentary or a work of fiction. I am reminded of similar controversies in the book world, James Frey, for instance, or the young adult anonymous diary Go Ask Alice. The question in my mind with such works is whether we would accept them and think them of quality if they were presented to us honestly. I have not read Frey’s book, but my understanding is that his book was not good enough to stand up as a quality novel, so it was only through trickery, passing the story off as true, that he achieved success with it. I enjoyed Go Ask Alice when I was a kid, but thinking back on it now, I can see that it is fairly unrealistic and probably would not hold up except as an overly moralistic and didactic children’s book if it weren’t presented as true. So what about Catfish?

I watched it thinking it was a fictional story, and I liked it just fine. But as I think back on it, pondering this question of whether it is real or not, I find more problems with it than I might have if I had simply accepted it as fiction to start with. The story feels maybe too plotted; the acting is somewhat too stilted. If judged on the standards of every movie out there, it isn’t a great work. If judged on the standards of a documentary, maybe it does hold more weight if it’s all true. But if judged on the standards of an independent film, made by filmmakers who felt they had a story to tell and wanted to find a way within their limited means to tell that story, I think it holds up. It’s a shame that the filmmakers don’t have the confidence to accept their creation for what it is.

Or maybe I’m wrong and they’re telling the truth that it’s authentic. I suspect that in the coming years, people will look back on this film as a small example of a hoax, along with Frey and Alice. Maybe now that the movie has gone through its theatrical release, they will admit that it was all a promotional stunt like the claims that The Blair Witch Project was real. I hope so because I think the question of its authenticity is distracting and the movie is worth considering on its own merits, even though they have their limitations.