Catfish

“Catfish” is the first social networking documentary I have ever seen and I thought it as really good. I know what the main character was basically going through because I feel like I can relate to him in so many different ways. I’m sure anyone who is more familiar with another through Facebook, Myspace, or any other social media site gets skeptical once in a while. In the documentary, the main character meets a little girl who appears to be a prodigious painter at her young age. Through her, he ends up meeting her mother and falls in love with her sister as well. The story takes somewhat of an aspiring turn once he begins to consider the fact that none of these people may actually exist. This was when my attention was at its fullest.

The little girl got in touch with the main character when he discovered one of his paintings and found out her age. He thought he found the next Shirley Temple and decided to have a film crew follow him in his journey of discovering her talents. In the process of trying to get in touch with her, the main character was in constant contact with her mother and often wondered why her daughter was never around. He was in touch with the entire family via social networking sites.

He also became close with the brother of the young artist and became aware that he was a musician in a band. The little girl would send the main character some of his music and he got excited because of how legitimate it sounded. It wasn’t until he met her sister when he became truly happy. The sister and the main character fell in love rather fast and always texted and wrote on each other’s wall. As time advanced with this young couple, he noticed a couple of things just were not right.

One evening, she began sending music to the main character and he realized that she was sending him songs that were already recorded by preexisting artists. He started to question her about it and never really got a straight answer. He then decided to drive to their home and got the entire story. What he realized was basically that the mother made up the fact that her daughter was a great painter and the daughter he fell in love with doesn’t even exist. She seems like a pathological liar.

I have dealt with something fairly similar in this situation. When I first started to record music I had a bunch of buddies who were very interested in helping me out. One of them was not musically incline so he told us of his friend who passed away who was a musical genius. Every time we talked about him he claimed that he was too upset to talk about it. He would show us music that was written by other artists, and claimed that he was a personal hero of his. We began to get a little skeptical and couldn’t find any information about this person. Not a single scrap of Internet information, and for a musician on the rise it seems a little bit farfetched to not have any Internet advertisement. We eventually became so convinced that we began writing songs about the subject matter and became fascinated.

We never did call him out on it but we still are not one hundred percent convinced whether this person was real or not. What the mother and my friend have in common is that they believe they are not good enough to be honest. They need to come up with an alter ego or imaginary friend that connects them to someone they want to be with. My friend wanted to relate to the rest of his friends and so he invented a link to us. The mother wanted her own art to get recognized so she pretended her daughter created all of those brilliant paintings.

Its funny how today there is new ways to stalk someone or find out about him or her. The democratized media allows anyone to publish their work of art and lie about every detail. The mother lied about the majority of her made-up daughters friends. She created over ten different alias and characters that played a very important role in her little scheme.

In conclusion, it seems that anyone can be a superman when they are really a Clarke Kent. The suit that changes who they are would be the Internet and social networking websites. It is very important to remember to be careful when meeting people through social networks. Just because you are conversing miles away through screens doesn’t mean that you are safe from anyone.