In the movie Catfish, Angela portrays herself as Megan in order to attract Nev. She disguises herself on Facebook as a way to express herself. After watching the movie, I became sympathetic for Angela. I felt that she lives a very hard life and that was in fact the only way to freely be herself. After all, she has to care for two handicap adults, as well as, take care of her eight year old daughter. I mean, who would want to be restricted in their own home all day? Honestly, I think that being Megan is what brings her happiness. Being Megan was simply like her utopia. It was her place that would help her feel that life was a little easier than it actually is.
In class, the debate arose of whether or not Angela was lying when she was pretending to be Megan. In actuality, she was indeed lying. Technically, she was pretending to be somebody that she was physically not. However, I do believe that both Megan and Angela shared many of the same characteristics. For example, Angela loved to paint and she loved music. Although Angela wanted to display her talents, she did not have the confidence to actually be herself. Therefore, she found validation and kinda hid herself in Megan. It's similar to how we tend to act. We act a certain way at different places and with different people.
For example, when we are in the presence of our parents. We act completely different than when we are with our friends. We are more reserved and less likely to use certain vocabulary around our parents. Similarly, we act different when we are Church or school than if we were at a party or even in a classroom. We also tend to be different on social media than we are in real life.
For example, although we are ourselves on instagram, we are not really portraying our actual lives. On instagram, we put the best model or representation of ourselves out for the world to see. We use filters and certain angles to show the more polished side of us. Megan was simply like an instagram version of Angela. This is in fact what Angela did. Megan was a more refined version of Angela.
So, I have a few questions for you. Is Megan really apart of Angela? Is she like Angela's alter ego? If she is Angela's redefined self, what makes Angela different from what we do today?
7 comments:
In your post, you said that you believe that Megan and Angela share a lot of the same characteristics. You said that they share painting and music, and you justified her actions by saying that she had no way to express these actions confidently. I disagree with this for the most part. A lot of people like to draw, paint, and play and listen to music. That does not, however, mean that they are the same person. There are so many different styles of art and music. My grandfather likes classical music and enjoys painting; however, a young rapper who likes to express his emotions through graffiti probably would not share many similarities with him. The internet allows us to become who we want to become. In that same sense, Angela said that she had cancer when they first met. It was not true. I can justify sympathizing with her for her home life, but I could never justify catfishing someone.
Courtney did a good job with describing and defining what the differences were between Angela and Megan, she also did a good job in describing what it was like for Angela to escape her reality as Angela and pose a different side of her that wasn't actually true and real. The ideal thing to do in this situation would've been to try to explain explain and express that Angela was going through difficult times and not try to mask who she actually was, but given the circumstances she had known I feel like we needed a good job with explaining how Angelo was able to use her art and her profile pictures as a way to escape her reality for taking care of her children. The only question that I would say's, is what was Angela thinking about when she was pursuing this. The amount of pain that Angela had to go through to try to make herself someone that she was not. Was somewhat of a challenge, but it was nonetheless a choice that she had to make. When she said in the movie that she had cancer people believed her. And I feel like Courtney was able to. And I feel like Courtney was able to capture what she was trying to convey as far as making a distinction between who Angelo was and who she pretends to be. It's no denying that if Angela had not been a real life her way through, and not this real life person one minute or even one day, and then a fictional or virtual self the next minute or day. Then things would've been different. Even so, she does a good job of trying to understand and doesn't undermine how much stress enjoy had to go Had to go through. After all, things are not always what they seem to be. You have to be cautious of who you want to be in real life, and who you want to be in a virtual reality.
At the end of your post, your comparison about Angela being Megan on Instagram was really good. I didn't think of the situation this way. This could be true because we can find out more about Angela's good side. In addition, when you said that Megan was a 'redefined' Angela was interesting because this could also be true. But, we were unable to find out because Angela unwillingly lied to Nev on just about everything.
I like that you mentioned how we are all guilty of the white lies that are associated with social media and that we try our best to portray the best version of ourselves while acting like we aren't the best and like we didn't try to make our social media selves better/cooler than we really are. I think you could have mentioned more of the alter egos that she created for herself besides Megan, but the Megan character deserves to be analyzed thoroughly in the way that you did.
I am completely in the same boat with you about feeling sympathetic for Angela. She just wanted to be loved and she wanted to be treated like a girl is in a young couple. She obviously was not getting a lot of alone time with Vince because of their two mentally handicapped sons, so she made the profile. She made it to find someone who would treat her exactly how Yaniv did, a princess. Isn't that what every girl wants out of a guy?
I think Megan is everything Angela wanted to be in life and she is portraying herself as her to feel like that part of her is alive. She is no different than any of us, we, like Angela only like to show our good much attractive side of ourselves. We are as guilty as Angela is.
Angela was trapped in this small world with being a mother of two disabled adults and having an idiot husband. Megan had escaped from this world and Angela wanted a taste of her freedom. She could not just up and leave her family behind, so she instead decided to act her out through pictures and blog posts. I do believe that this Megan was a part of Angela that never came to be.
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