The woMan Behind The Mask

While watching the documentary Catfish, I found myself wondering how much of social media is actually a lie? We have this story of a young man, Nev, who ends up having a relationship with who he thinks is a little girl who paints. Because she is a minor, he ends up having a relationship with her mom and someone who he thinks is her big sister. The relationship with each of these people continues to grow, especially his relationship with the sister, Megan. He then ends up coming to conclusions that Meg isn’t who he thinks she is. He starts to catch her in her lies that she is a singer and musician. He then takes it upon himself to travel to where it is that Meg says she lives and when he gets there, everything he sent her was still in the mailbox, which helped him know that she wasn’t who she said she was. He finally goes to the house of Abby and Angela to see if any of the people he had been talking to were even real. Well, they were real, but they looked nothing like their social media selves. Angela and her husband Vince looked totally different from what social media said they looked like and there was still no Meg. After sitting around the house with Angela, Nev learns that “the man behind all of the masks” was actually Angela. Why would she do such a thing? Well, we see that Angela is a forty-year old woman who doesn’t have the ideal life that she would like to have. She poses as her daughter Abby because she knows that her paintings aren’t good enough to sell and they are good enough from the hands of a little girl. We also see that Angela and her husband aren’t the best couple. Vince doesn’t seem to have it all and Angela is obviously missing something from him. She is also taking care of Vince’s twin boys who happen to be handicapped. She faces a lot in her everyday life. She is lonely and doesn’t seem to have anyone to talk to. She created the many different profiles to show parts of who she wishes she could be. The rest of the profiles were cover-ups to make the other profiles seem as real as possible. She poses as Abby to get her paintings to sell and she poses as Meg to get the ideal relationship that she would like to have, but she knows she can’t have that in real life. She knows what she is doing isn’t the “right” thing to do, but she got carried away. She uses her children as a means to create a life that she wants to have. Why would one go to the extreme to manipulate someone? That’s something we’ll never know. We see how far things can go from behind a screen, but we also do these same things in real life. In different settings, we are different parts of ourselves. So the real question is, how wrong is Angela?