Deception

In the movie Catfish we’re introduced to a guy named Nev. He starts an Internet correspondence with a little girl named Abby who paints. The movie begins with his brother and friend wanting to make a documentary about his odd relationship with this child prodigy.
Abby sends him her paintings and they communicate through email regularly. Nev eventually reaches out to Abby’s family, who welcomes him into their lives. First her mother Angela, then her father and her older sister Megan. They all add each other on Facebook and quickly become “Internet aware” of each other’s doings. Soon Nev starts to fall for Abby’s beautiful older sister Megan, who sings and lives on a farm not too far from her family in another part of Michigan. She’s pretty dreamy in that “perfectly crafted Facebook page” way. They start flirting over Facebook messages, then it moved to text, then they started calling each other and talking about getting more serious once they met. They’re basically Internet boyfriend/girlfriend. One night Nev discovers that Megan is posting rare acoustic versions of other singers on her FB wall and pretending it’s her and it clicks that there might be something wrong. By the end of the night, he’s figured out that this family has been lying about so many of the important details of their lives. Nev and his friends can’t find anything on these people that they’ve claimed is true about them so the three of them decide to drive to Michigan to figure out what is real and get an ending for their film. We soon find out that Megan is not real. Angela is Angela, Abby, Megan, her husband’s online persona, Megan’s male friends, their sisters and their friends. Angela created an entire world so that she could have a chance to interact with a handsome young man who appreciated every aspect of her personality that she’d put into each of these characters. And the fact that she would go through all of this blows my mind. Like she was deceiving him into believing that she was someone else. Could you imagine how much time and effort this took her. Not only that but even after she was caught she continued to lie. Angela said she actually knew the girl in her pictures but she really didn’t. She even went as far as saying that she was sick with uterine cancer. Personally I feel like this film was a beautiful depiction of the complicated emotions and scenarios that this technology has brought into our lives. It’s a tribute to those who have mastered the art of producing feelings from illusions.