The Flavor of Pathetic

Catfish.


What to say about Catfish? This movie creeped me out for what seemed to be unintended reasons, as far as the makers were concerned. In this film we experience the blossoming of a host of relationships between a very hairy young man in his late 20's and a family of seemingly creative and exciting individuals existing thousands of miles away. The film, made by a brother and a friend of this hairy young man if I recall correctly, did a pretty heavy-handed job of landing its twist and negotiating the revelation of the truth of the facebook associations at its core.

I would have a hard time saying the following things about this movie:
1) This was a good movie
2) I would recommend that you see this film
3) I found this movie coherent and relateable

And yet, something about it did make me squirm and get uncomfortable and feel like I ought to go out and do something. Also, I feel bad "spoiling" it, because sometimes at the height of its discomfiture, the footage that finds its way into the film is potent to the tune of "the land of silence and darkness".

Historically, I have not been the sort of person who interacts or transacts socially through media in the hopes of finding novelty. I will interact with people in these contexts only insofar as it relates to things that we're doing together in three-dimensional flesh-space. These guys, and the relationship(s) they strike up on facebook are wildly divergent from my behaviors in the context of the great blue-windowed content horde that now encapsulates all the busybodies and relatives I, frankly, would rather marginalize by way of only occasional face-to-face contact. But this is their film, and these folks seem to feel like they've hit some kind of digital motherlode of cultural capital in the Michigan family they'd somehow be-faced. The story begins with a kind of zeal that suggests that we're going to see a straight rehash of "My Kid Could Paint That".

In the end, and I must refrain from describing it, these guys make a movie, and the relationships, for all we know, are dissolved. I guess my point is that mediated people are fake, especially if your imaginary for them consists entirely of facebook jetsam. While the shock of discovering deliberate misrepresentation is surely a curiosity, the question for me remains one of why these young fellows from a huge urban center don't make friends with any one of the thousands they daily pass wordlessly and without a glance.

The title of the film comes from an anecdote related by one of the characters that the filmmakers track down, and is a really janky metaphor aimed at redeeming or softening the weirdness of the character(s) who form the core of the revealed deception that is this film's major object. Catfish keep the cod sharp, we are told; thus, they keep from losing their flavor on long shipping runs. If I'm experiencing their film correctly, I take this to mean that the filmmakers have been sharpened up by an exemplary token of this variety of uncommon human. This wrap-up leads to two conclusions about the intrepid filmmakers: they are astute and conventional american-audience marketeers and/or obtuse in the extreme.