Catfish can't be trusted

Catfish

What to say about catfish?  A movie about love?  And how creepy it is to be mislead by an elderly woman? A movie about the pitfalls of the internet?  

It starts with the main character, Nev.  Nev meets a girl, Abby, on Facebook after she sends him a painting of one h nothing to is photos that was put into a New York City newspaper.  Nothing to be suspicious of yet right?  It’s pretty cool actually.  Someone out there, saw your work and sent a painting of it to you?  Everyone likes gifts.  Why wouldn’t Nev?  So they start talking.  Eventually, Nev gets involved with Abby’s sister Megan.  They meet through Abby.  Eventually this progresses to the point of sexting and what appears to the audience as a real relationship. 

However, as time continues on, Nev uncovers some discrepancies with Meg that wedge the sliver of suspicion.   She sends a sample of ‘her’ music to Nev, and it’s discovered that the music sent was actually taken from a YouTube video.

It turns out that everything was fabricated.  Megan wasn’t real.  Abby wasn’t actually painting the pieces that were sent to Nev.  Even Megan’s friends were all constructs.   Everything came from the mother of Megan and Abby.  Why?  Because she wanted to escape her life as an older woman taking care of her husband, two mentally challenged step-sons, her daughter and a job. 

I’m not too sure how to feel for the woman.  She manipulated Nev, exploited her daughter Abby, and probably broke a few copyright laws. However, at the same time, she really didn’t hurt anyone, and she had a fairly good reason to find some kind of escape.  So, what can you do? Nothing more than a wag of a finger, in my opinion. 

There is another larger issue at hand, however.  How much can we trust the internet?  I wrote a while back about ‘whither the individual,’ how privacy affects how we communicate on the web.  We pull back; we don’t say everything that we want for fear that someone will read it, and there will be repercussions afterwards.  I believe that Nev experienced what happens when you overextend yourself on the net.  What seemed real and intimate was actually all a farce.