Review on Catfish :D

The story begins as Yaniz Schulman, the main character and the overall producer of the documentary, becomes friends with an 8-year-old girl named Abby Pierce on Facebook.com. Yaniv is a photographer living in New York who works with his brother Ariel and a co-worker Henry Joost-those who have recorded everything for this documentary. Abby is a young painter in Ishpeming, Michigan who lives with her mom, Angela, dad, Vince, and an older sister called Megan Faccio. Abby and Yaniv get to know more of each other while Yaniv sends some photos that he has taken for her to paint, and she sends back her paintings for him. In this process, Yaniv also gets to know about a lot of people related to Abby on Facebook.com, including Angela, Megan and etc.

Yaniv especially makes a deeper relationship with Megan; it seems like both of them have crush on each other. Megan introduces herself as a vet and a model owning her farm. But one day, Yaniv and his friends cast a doubt on Megan when she sends him a fake singing video of herself, found on Youtube.com. They decide to dig the truth out of this whole family. On the way of going to Ishpeming, they find out Megan’s farm does not belong to her. Getting more and more suspicious, they finally arrive at the house that Abby has told them. Ringing the bell for a few times, no one answers. Some moments later, a middle-aged lady comes out and greets the company. She introduces herself as Angela, while she looks completely different from the Angela on Facebook.com. Inside her house, she lives with her husband Vince, who also looks very different from the pictures, and two handicapped sons. Although Angela keeps calling Abby and Angela through phone, they don’t answer.

After all, they drive to the beach where Abby is playing with her friend. There, Yaniv meets Abby, but she doesn’t really know who he is. She tells that she neither paints nor has met her sister Megan. That night, Megan suddenly text messages Yaniv about how she cannot come home because of her drinking problem. Now Yaniv and his party decide to ask Angela about what is really going on. The next morning, at the horseback riding place, Angela confesses how it has been all what she has made up. She has created 15 Facebook accounts with the pictures of whom she doesn’t even know, and has made contacts with Yaniv. Then, she tells her story, crying. She used to be an ambitious young girl who wanted to be painter, but the reality around her was different. She had to give up herself to raise the family. That is why she first decided to play online, making fake friends. Yaniv soothes her; Angela draws Yaniv’s face for the last time. And the movie ends.

While watching this documentary, the issue of privacy was one thing that did not get off of my mind. Although the film makers argue that the people who were in there all agreed on publishing this film, still, it seemed to have gone too far. Is it okay because Angela lied in the first place? However, the film was taken even before the producers knew the truth. Their purpose was to make a documentary on the relationship between Yaniv and Megan, if she existed. At that time, whoever Megan was, she did not know that. It would be a horror for a lot of users on Facebook.com to imagine themselves getting videotaped, and even being stalked in someplace. I know that almost everyone in the film gained something from the publication; Yaniv and his co-workers became very famous, and Angela could found her website with her artworks. But, that can’t be the justification; we can’t deny that privacy concerns still exist.

Another big issue popped up in my head was whether this documentary is really a documentary. Not many people can deny the strangeness of how the three friends could figure out all the storyline inside their car, even before Angela confessed the truth. It is also weird that they recorded the part where they first had suspicion on Megan’s song, though the documentary originally was to be a love story between them. What’s even more awkward is that they decided to visit Megan’s house to find out the “truth”, just for the fulfillment their curiosity. They must have been very passionate guys who could drive the whole day from New York to Ishpeming. My personal conclusion is like this: Yaniv did not know the whole thing at first, but he got the skim of what was going on, even before that song incident, so he decided to start recording.

The most unforgettable part was definitely “Angela”, all herself. To me, Angela is one poor victim of the society. She had a dream and the dream deferred. She wanted to be a painter, but she had two handicapped sons and a daughter to raise. She wanted to make friends and socialize, but she lacked confidence with her outlook. It is just that she was not lucky enough to get the opportunity that others were born with. Her making 15 Facebook accounts was the result of all her hopes put down. Being Megan was her last hope. As Megan, she could have her crush, call him, and eventually meet him. It is really sad to admit that it would have been impossible for her as Angela to make Yaniv come all over to Ishpeming. At the horseback riding place, where Angela told Yaniv all the truth, she was holding a blonde doll. I carefully predict that the doll was a representative of Angela, hiding her real self.

Like that doll, the title “Catfish” seems to have a deep meaning. As Vince, Angela’s husband, said, Catfish is something that was used to keep the tank agile. And there are people who work as catfish; they keep you guessing, thinking, and fresh. They can’t be the main characters of their life, but they help others become the main characters of their life. Angela is like a catfish; she was not the main for herself, but for Yaniv. Yaniv didn’t have time to be bored, because of her. In the end, Angela was not a catfish anymore. After overcoming the process of being a catfish for someone else, she found her true self.

            Overall, I really liked this film. Whatsoever it is a real documentary or not, it gives a lot of things for people to think about. There are a lot of teenagers using other people’s pictures as theirs online. They want to pretend as if they are the ones in the cool pictures so that others would think of themselves as pretties and handsome. Angela’s case is not so different from this, perhaps one step further. Although it really is a weird trend, it’s understandable for me how much they want to be like someone else so that they can socialize more easily. It’s not their fault. If you want to accuse Angela of this, you should accuse this society of "lookism" that made this lady like that in the first place. I hope we become the ones changing the view of the world, preventing the second or third Angelas as victims.