Review of Catfish (2010) by Shiira — 07 Oct 2010

Passing off "Hey You", an important track from the mega-selling album "Pink Floyd: The Wall" as your own original composition may seem like a foolhardy gambit now, but back in 1986, the time-frame of Noah Baumbach's "The Squid and the Whale", it was, indeed, still plausible for an audience to watch somebody make a mockery of a talent show without the slightest clue to the blatant plagiarizing going on.

That's because songs could die. No YouTube. No CD reissues. A song could be buried after its initial life cycle. Still yet, this is Pink Floyd we're talking about, so Walt Berkman(Jesse Eisenberg) should have chosen a deeper cut("Nobody Home", perhaps), but due to the pressure he was under, the almost sociopathic need to impress his pompous intellectual of a father(played by Jeff Daniels), the would-be folk troubadour had to swing for the fences and enhance the risk of getting caught red-handed.

Now that the world has been forever altered because of the Internet's advent and the deluge of information which followed, the erudite novelist's son, had he been been born to this generation, would face the dilemma of endless art, and be left with little choice but to go through the circuitous route of stealing from amateurs.

Still yet, the intellectual property of the unsigned is accredited, just like the Roger Waters-penned "Hey You", by simply performing a Google search, so Walt would be caught out, even though he'd be plundering the less-luminous catalogues of DIY artists, as Angela was, in "Catfish", when the filmmaker's subject discovers that his on-line friend(a purported singer/songwriter who sends him her musical stylings via Facebook) not only took the writing credit, but the actual songs in whole.

It's the first of many lies concocted by the rural Michigan woman, and as they pile up, "Catfish" looks headed for a violent ending, just like any other horror film shot on digital video of recent vintage.

"Catfish" has all the makings of a modern-day update of Alfred Hitchc*ck's "Psycho", once the subject and his crew learns the truth about "Megan", when they meet her intermediary, Megan, who in all likelihood, had seen Amir Bar-Lev's "My Kid Could Paint That"(or did the filmmakers see it), the REAL documentary about the child artist Maria Olmstead, since she too is the parent of a young painting child prodigy, Abby.

Whereas Rosebud was a sled, maybe "Catfish" would turn out to be the name of the murderess' weapon. A paintbrush with a sharp handle, perhaps? But no, in the granddaddy of all twists, "Catfish" goes for an anti-Shyamalan aesthetic and categorically circumvents the usual horror tropes, and aims for something a little more mature than a by-the-numbers killing spree; it aims for the human horror of an unfinished life.

In place of an insatiable bloodlust, Angela has a lust for life, not premeditated murder. Or does she? Since "Catfish" takes on the form, but not the content of a horror movie, maybe, just maybe, for a woman such as Angela, Facebook neutralizes an all-consuming drive to lash out at the real world, a world she perceives as a living hell, in which the social network functions as a preventive measure against this depressed wife and mother from murdering her husband and kids(two of whom are retarded and not her biological sons).

All those invented people she impersonates in the chat room would be scary within a filmic context that was predisposed toward the genre film. She seems relatively normal, since her fantasy life is dislocated from the corporeal world, but such "friends", the ciphers on Angela's Facebook page, are still unmistakably symptomatic of the woman possessing multiple personalities, a 21st century Sybil.

On the web, she gets to have a life(an exciting life like Megan's), but in Ishpeming, Michigan, "Megan" may look around the house, and her drab surroundings, and want to start anew, like some femme version of the character that Terry O'Quinn played in Joseph Ruben's "The Stepfather".

Although "Catfish" is, essentially, one big MacGuffin, don't overlook the potential for violence that is stemmed by the film's on-line/off-line binary.