Catfish

I've rarely found a film so gripping, absorbing, disturbing as Catfish. It's a masterpiece, a film entirely representative of its age - whatever you might think of how authentic it is. Forum-posters and bloggers have been preoccupied by the question of whether the film is a real or a fake documentary (e.g. see http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1584016/board/nest/171604160). I'm a little unmoved by accusations of fakery in relation to fiction and film, for standard 'postmodern' reasons... If this is a fake, it only reveals how all representation of reality are faked, in so far as what they depict is edited, framed, constructed, etc.

Nevertheless there is something funny about the opening of Catfish, for it seems we're suddenly plunged into a story which requires some crucial scene-setting but which is not forthcoming. It looks as if the protagonist, Nev, has started to received paintings of his photos, apparently done by an 8-year-old girl, out of the blue, and is so intrigued he follows them up. Yet my suspicion is that the seduction has in fact worked the other way around: the paintings or at least further contact with their producer were somehow invited by the film-makers. Rather than Nev (pronounced Neev or perhaps 'naive') and co being sucked in to Angela's scheme, her fantasies have made her vulnerable to theirs...

But no matter how conscious or not any of the participants were of their role in the movie, I think what makes it so powerful is its structure. The viewer is carefully presented with the kind of virtual, layered, mediated world typical of twenty-first century life, a world of google maps, youtube, and facebook, only to be suddenly confronted, without warning, with a shocking aspect of reality. This is the world of the two severely disabled brothers whom Angela cares for. Even if she or her husband Vince (who delivers a suspiciously powerful and articulate monologue at the end of the movie, explaining its title), are somehow in on the scam, the life we're given a glimpse into is starkly, uncontestably real: this, we recognise painfully, is what looking after two helpless, unfortunate beings would be like. This is the unexpected triumph of the movie: never mind its self-reflexive commentary on self-presentation in the digital age, nestling within is an unfliching, unglamourised, picture of the kind of quotidian American life which is practically invisible across cultural forms: the isolated drudgery of ordinary, blue-collar American life, a world away from the affluent, loft-dwelling universe inhabited by Nev. And the fact that the movie shows us this is perhaps the single most powerful counter to the accusations that the whole thing is staged by clever, exploitative film-makers.