Double Life

            In the movie Catfish, a man named Nev comes into contact with an 8 year old girl named Abby that is an amazing artist. After she sends him some of her artwork, Nev gets in touch with her family, mostly through Facebook. He builds a relationship with this family, but most importantly with Abby’s sister Meghan. Nev invests himself with this girl but things start to not add up so he plans a surprise visit. He ends up discovering that the Meghan he was intimately talking to does not exist and it was the mother who he was talking to the entire time. Also Abby was not an artist, that too was the mother’s artwork. Nev then proceeds to try to understand why she did it.

It is easy for people to get caught up in the online world because it is not face to face contact. You can be whoever you want to be online and act however you want to online. Many people create fake profiles and meet long-distance people online since there is usually such a small chance of actually meeting personally. In terms of why the mother Angela did this I am sure the mother did not intend to hurt Nev the way she did. But with her restrictive world of taking care of her disabled step-sons, Facebook is a way for her to live someone else’s life while also having her artwork secretly recognized. She spoke of wanting to do so much more with her life but her lifestyle ultimately pitted her against family or her dream she wished to pursue. As a loving mother, she chose family but part of her wanted some sort of freedom, which is why she probably created her multiple profiles. I have watched many episodes of the TV show Catfish which is based off the movie and many people who catfish others struggle in their personal lives. Whether they feel like social outcasts or they, like Angela, are limited in their personal lives, many catfishers are addicted to being someone besides themselves. It is morally wrong what catfishers do to other people, especially when it comes to long-distance online relationships. But many struggle to see the errors in their way because they are consumed with the alternate lives they live through. Thankfully Nev has stopped many catfishers from continuing to harm their victims, but in the expansive world of technology and social media we have today, it is impossible to end the practice.