Something fishy this way comes!

Catfish. A term that we all know well these days, and if you don’t you’ve probably been living under a rock. Catfishing has become a part of everyday life because of social media. People are able to hide behind a username and pictures that are covered in filters or not even them at all. It’s hard to discern who and what’s real and fake nowadays. The movie Catfish (along with the TV show) takes it to a whole new level. This movie follows Nev Schulman and his online encounter with a young painter, Abby, and her family. As he begins to connect more and more with the family, and especially the older sister of the young painter, Nev, with his brother and their friend, start to find inconsistencies with the stories of the members of the family. Before I talk more about what he finds out, I think we should talk about how he felt in the beginning and how it compares to Herzog and Plato’s works.

In Herzog’s work, he tells the story of taking two men from a small village to a neighboring city to claim rights to their land. These men have never been outside their village, let alone to a city like Lima. They went to a restaurant on the coast and instead of ordering meals they waded into the ocean with awe on their faces. They’d never seen a body of water so large! They’d only ever heard stories about it, and to prove those stories true to their families and friends they filled an emptied bottle of wine with the salty sea water to take home with them. This awe, to me, is exactly what Nev felt when he first began his correspondence with Abby and her family. He was so taken with her paintings of the pictures that he’d taken that he didn’t really think about who she might actually be. Yes, he’d seen pictures and videos of her, but he’d never met her in person. This also kind of lines up with Plato and his prisoners in the cave. They’ve been in this cave for so long that they don’t know anything about the outside world until they’re released, then they’re afraid of it because it has overloaded their senses.

Nev, like Plato’s prisoners and Herzog’s travel companions, was struck with an experience that could only be explained through documentation of the event when he was, for lack of better terms, “released” from his state of awe of Abby and her family. He and his brother and friend decided to stop by and visit the family after they had found too much evidence of something being fishy (see what I did there ;) ). Come to find out, the only person that was actually real in the situation was Angela, the so-called mother of Abby. She was behind everything Nev saw and everyone he talked to, because she was them. She’d made all the profiles, calls, emails and text messages.

This movie really hits home how important it is to be careful with encounters on social media. Personally, I take this assignment as word of caution. Don’t talk to people over social media unless you’ve met them at least a couple times in real life. I don’t want to be another Nev Schulman. 

"Something Smells Fishy...." By KishiFishy 

https://kishifishy.deviantart.com/art/Something-Smells-Fishy-105480561