Massively criticized documentary CATFISH, is a 2008 post-modern film
that, considered a hoax, follows the story of a film maker named Nev, a guy from New York who
befriends a young country girl named Abby after she emails him a painting of his work.
Nev engages a friendly online relationship with Abby's family; her older sister,
Megan, and their mother, Angela over Facebook. As he becomes more and more
romantically involved with Megan via IMs, texts, phone calls, little details
start to become twisted and introduces the implications and dangers of online
identities and the people behind them.
SOURCE: Nev on his way to hunt down fact from fiction. A review from The Independent suspicious of real and fake.
In viewing this “documentary” I felt an
array of emotions, first dark mocking humour for the good-looking guy about to
get his heart broken to the audacity of lengths people will go through to
construct false or extended identities for themselves online, to then feeling
sympathetic and sad for those same people.
SOURCE: A post modern review on the film relate-able with my reckonings
It’s definitely a rollercoaster of emotion with relatable and relevant representation of (real) characters in this film, at any time you are able to empathise and put yourself in the shoes of all involved; the protagonist, the antagonist and the anti-hero, with good fairness of depiction (once the boys had ‘figured’ out what was going on) to the characters, all but one: Little Abby. With having no thought for potential damage, the film may cause her while growing up, all involved didn’t stop to think exploiting this young girl could inevitably result in facing the fall out of her mothers fantasy life that was displayed in cinemas across the world, without being given the correct coping mechanisms to help her manage the ordeal she had no say in to begin with.
The Guardian Fact or Fiction is another review which presents issues supporting the falsities behind the documentary.
SOURCE: An idiom turned meme which is a popularized cartoon in The New Yorker, it has come to illustrate an understanding about the way privacy and anonymity work on the Internet.
