THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS

August 29, 2012

As I was sitting in class, watching videos, sharing insights, and mulling over people and media, my professor suddenly introduced us to this movie called "Catfish." I have heard this term countless of times but I have never given it a thought. Unfortunately, the making of a movie named after it did not reach me either. Well, not until tonight.

Our class was not able to finish the movie so we were left to download and finish it on our own. When I got home, I immediately opened my laptop and started downloading via my trusted torrent site and downloader. I am determined to find out.


What happened next?

While downloading, I started searching for articles, interviews, and the characters' Facebook accounts and official websites in order to feed my curiosity about this self-proclaimed documentary. Obviously, this movie got me so perplexed and puzzled in class that I wanted to find out what really happened as soon as I could. And so the questions thrown by my professor roamed around my mind.

How much of the film is real and how much of it is fictional? Did this actually happen? 

I clearly have no answer to the question that night. All I learned that this movie came out the same year as the hit "The Social Network" and I didn't even hear any news about it. Shame on me, considering how I loved indie films like this. I must have joined the bandwagon at that time.

September 1, 2012

Finally! I had the time to sit down and watch the film. I started from the last scene we watched in class. I only watched the whole thing once. I didn't dare watch it all over again. Then I started thinking.

Catfish, the film itself, is 50 percent real and 50 percent non-fiction. I could not explain why yet.


September 4, 2012

A catfish is someone who pretends to be someone they're not using Facebook or other social media to create false identities, particularly to pursue deceptive online romances. 
- Urban Dictionary

ex. Angela is a catfish.

I have come to a deeper realization about Catfish. It's plainly a documentary film. I have no violent reactions regarding their label of being a documentary, meaning a film based on real-life experiences of people. It is basically a documentary due to their intent. They made a film to feature the life of Nev, a 24-year old photographer in New York who virtually interacted with Abby, a child prodigy; Abby's mother Angela; and Abby's sister Megan, a self-proclaimed musician and whom Nev fell inlove with through a series of Facebook messages, comments, chats, phone calls and texts. In that angle, Catfish is no doubt a documentary that is based on Nev's true-to-life experience.

However, Catfish featured a part of Nev's story when he found out that he was a victim of a hoax. At that moment when he found out that his girlfriend Megan lied to him about creating songs that was practically owned by another artist in YouTube, I knew that the film would not be 100% true any longer. Nev and his friends could have simply accepted the fact that they have been deceived by someone online. But they decided to continue filming it in order to create a great documentary, telling the tale of being a victim of a ruse through the world's most popular social networking site Facebook. They travelled several miles away to meet the Wesselman family face to face. They planned how they would approach the family, how they would film it, what kind of clothes work best to hide the camera, what to give them, etcetera, so that they could get to the bottom of it. And yes, once they have it all filmed, they broadcasted it for the whole world to see as 100% real-life experience. After Nev's eureka experience about Megan's fake identity, the fictional side of the film had just started to reach its end. It's all staged. It's all acting. 

I really have no clear distinction how much of the film was fictional and how much of the film was real. All I can perceive is that when Nev did not know anything about Abby, Angela, and Megan's true identities, the documentation can be considered as a real experience. But once Nev found out and decided to document the whole thing, he was already playing a part from a fictional movie. He was laughing at himself while he was texting Megan. He was looking dubious at Angela and his family when he met them. He seemed like a completely different person from the person he was at the beginning of the film. I'm sure everyone must have noticed that.

Catfish is a film about deception (of ourselves as well as others) and fantasy in a digital era — an era that finds us continually modifying, editing and reshaping the truth to find optimal results. The filmmakers’ fakery, then, is yet another layer of distortion, another instance of the virtual world (the film’s narrative) taking precedence over the real world. In fact, it’s about as literal as that takeover can become: Nev literally changes the coordinates of his own life, in an enormous fashion, for the sake of the digital document that is the film. -Zachary Wigon 2010

Honestly, I do not want to call it a 50 percent fictional and 50 percent real for it will totally defeat the purpose of a documentary. Any film, whether based on an entirely true story or not, undergoes a series of edits. During the editing process, some parts were included in the final cut of the film and some could have been removed. The camera could even focus on different angles that might create false meanings which are far from the truth. 

Perhaps, the question is not really about how much of the film is real or fiction but how much of fiction is within us? Or maybe the film only intends for us to focus on what was becoming unreal--that we are all existing in a virtual world where we form identities or segments of ourselves. 

We are the "you"s  in the film's tagline "Don't let anyone tell you what it is" that create the fiction and blend them with reality. We will never solve the puzzle of understanding the "it" in the tagline. 

Also, we will never fully comprehend why there is a fact and a fiction within us. But maybe we can think about this question..

How much of the fact are you willing to hide for fiction?