Friday, April 14, 2017
Defending Angela
In the documentary Catfish, we were introduced to Nev Schulman, a single millennial and photographer, who shares messages on Myspace with a young girl named Abby in another state. A large part of this contact was an exchange of pictures, beginning with photographs from Nev which were followed by paintings of the photographs from Abby. Through Abby, Nev was introduced to her mother Angela and her older sister Megan, a 19-year old singer/songwriter. Nev and Megan begin to share messages with each other and eventually form an intense romantic relationship, sharing erotic texts to each other and photoshopping themselves into pictures of each other. However, things begin to seem suspicious when Megan shares a song she claimed to have written for him and he finds another version of the same song on the internet. He then goes deeper into her page and begins to find more inconsistencies. Eventually, Nev decides to go and see for himself what was going on alongside his brother and a close friend and traveled to Michigan where Megan was supposed to live. Once they reached her place of residence they found Angela as well as her husband and two severely retarded boys. Eventually, Nev and his companions learned the true extent of Angela's misery, having sacrificed her career and dreams to care for her family and live an unfulfilled life. Given how sorrowful Angela's life was, her needing a way to escape from her reality is understandable. The true problem with her actions is the way in which she made her escape. It was certainly wrong of her to toy with the emotions and minds of people over the internet as she did, especially given how elaborate her lie was and how much effort she put into keeping it up. And given that she continued to lie about the circumstances of her charade even after she knew she had been exposed, one could easily lose sympathy for her and think she deserved the life she lived. But in reality, she was no different from any other person on the internet. Many people who are active online present a fake personality in order to curry favor from the anonymous strangers they meet. And often these people have some circumstances in their lives that they desire to escape from, making the internet a necessary outlet. So, given that Angela's circumstances were especially bad, could one blame her for making the decisions she did?
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3 comments:
Although the circumstances in Angela's life were difficult and could be considered depressing, she was still at fault for everything she did and every lie she told. She was not only pretending to be one person, but several people and people she didn't know for that matter. She used other people's pictures and pretended to be them, which is not okay.
No matter how miserable your life may be, it doesn't give you the opportunity to make someone else's as miserable as yours. Nev has to live with the fact that he was involved in a virtual affair between a married couple, one whose lives are a complete wreck. I think that if you're miserable, then you shouldn't drag someone in the middle of your miserable life.
It is understandable, but I still don't think it justifies what Angela did to Nev. Also, she basically had an online affair with her husband which is really messed up. Neither of them deserved that. Although, her life at home is a major struggle every day that doesn't make a good reason to be constantly lying and pretending to be many different people online just to make yourself happy, while she is making those around her that she is fooling miserable.
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