Catfish: The Creepiest Movie EVER

WARNING: SPOILERS!

The above two videos are trailers for the recent documentary film Catfish, during which the main character (Nev) and his two best friends record an internet love story with a twist. One day, out of the blue, Nev receives a Facebook friend request from a young (elementary school level) girl, Abby, who likes to paint. Her mother (Angela) also friends Nev, and they all become both Facebook and IRL (in real life) friends--Abby's mother sends Nev paintings, letters, even money. Over e-mail, G-chat, and Facebook, Nev finds himself becoming a significant part of their lives, and visa versa. Nev also becomes Facebook friends with Abby's older sister, Megan, who is close to his age. The two exchange photos, videos, sound clips, etc. and about halfway through the film, become involved in a sort of "would-be" relationship: as Nev says, if they were to meet and have the same chemistry in person as they do online, they would instantaneously be in a relationship. Nev believes that everything Abby, Megan, and Angela is telling him is real and true because he sees these characters interacting with numerous other people--family and friends--via wall posts,  tagged photos, etc. They have a real life, so they're real people.

Except, the spin is (surprise!) they're not. Nev and his friends decide to go visit Abby, Megan, and Angela--unannounced. They find their "home" abandoned, and in the second address Nev was given by Angela, they find Abby and Angela--neither of whom are who Nev expected them to be. The mother, who lives at home with her husband and his two severely handicapped sons (in addition to Abby), has been spending hours upon hours on multiple computers and cell phones creating an entire world that doesn't exist. She likes to paint, not Abby. She has fallen in love with Nev via her role-playing as Megan. She even goes as far as to lie to Nev and tell him she has cancer so he'll be sympathetic instead of angry when he finds out the truth.

How could Nev had guessed? He didn't meet one single girl through Craigslist or on Myspace, where it would be easier to spot  a fake. He met an entire family, including cousins, aunts, uncles, sons, daughters, and friends. All of these fake characters interacted with each other and with other people, creating an online world that didn't exist. This film addresses many of the topics in this section's texts: Nev fell in love over the internet, leading us to question what "mating" has become and what role touch plays in the creation of a relationship; Angela created around 20 "living" characters, showing us that a life online isn't  close to life in the "real" world; and questioning whether or not we even need physical bodies for digital and technological bodies to exist?

(This is an image that Nev photoshoped--he sent it to Megan to "make her smile.")

Was Angela crossing a line, or simply taking role-playing out of Second Life and into her "first" life? Ollivier Dyens defines what "artificial life" is, and it's scary to say that Angela's world of fake characters and manipulation doesn't seem too far from our own world of untagging and profile pictures: "A-life is also the cultural body, the human-saturated environment, the protection of endangered species, and the spread of automobiles. A-life is life that breaks away from biology, replication of culture rather than genetics. Artificial life is our extreme dependence upon electricity, our pharmaceutically maintained lifestyle, and our technologically controlled and protected existence" (94). By creating so many different people, Angela was spreading her "cultural DNA" in the same way that we do by opening up a twitter account or telling our friends to follow our Google Reader. Having so many different three-dimensional characters in a two-dimensional world made Angela extremely culturally relevant--they covered a huge range of ages, both the sexes, and many different types of personalities

It would appear to me that Angela was crossing a personal boundary...but not a cultural one. She had created artificial life and allowed it to grow and breathe without her (at one point in the film she tells Nev that the situation took control of her). Her world became, in the words of Dyens, a "living idea" (22). A "virtual being [...] is an expression of new life, a life made of signs, culture, and knowledge" (33). Angela's living idea became it's own cultural bubble--each of the characters did what a "real" person would be expected to do: listen to music, have favorite bands, like to make art, share pictures with his/her friends, respond to wall posts, comment on other people's content, etc. Her world was entirely made of signs, culture, and knowledge. And she manipulated all the signs to point to reality.

Is Angela a cyberpunk? Was Megan or Abby a cyberpunk? Dyens quotes Bruce Sterling as he says that cyberpunks are "hybrids," "brain-computer interfaces" (73). They are "a common narrative on the ride of a new type of cultural body (created and formed within computers)" (73). Each of Angela's characters was a blend of her own self (she was the one acting the parts, so there had to be at least a shred of herself in each person), what she would expect that character to do (a male persona would type differently than a female person, for instance), and a computer (each of these characters truly only existed within a computer). It seems as if this sort of interaction between a person and a computer is becoming the norm--it is not just a part of a bleak, A.I.-esque future. People around us in the normal world are creating "cultural bodies" that exist without physical bodies.

(From the film A.I.)

If someone were to take your internet presence, lift it up, and carry it over into a region of the country or world where it hadn't already reached, would it live on? Would you be able to create a following on Facebook and Twitter and Foursquare without using your physical body? The internet certainly has enough information about us to carry on without our bodies--hell, it can steal our bank account or spam our friend's e-mails. Who (or what) is more powerful here? Clearly the Internet has the power to mislead someone entirely in a way that a physical body couldn't. Our "soul abides in machines" (Dyens 95).

How To Look Good Naked

Lifetime's show How to Look Good Naked (HTLGN) is a show that "teaches women of all shapes and sizes to go from self-loathing to self-loving without resorting to interventions like extreme dieting or cosmetic surgery" (Lifetime). Instead of working to change bodies, HTLGN focuses on changing minds. The participant is given new undergarments, new clothes, a new hairstyle, and new makeup techniques--all to help properly dress her body type. At the end of the show, the women have a full-on 'Hollywood' photo shoot--wearing nothing but a sheet. In the American version (I'm not sure how the British version ends), the final photo is blown up and displayed on a building, and the women feel great about it! They have a new-found confidence and are completely comfortable with their previously hated and distorted body.

Does it ever work that way? Can women really be convinced they're beautiful and have great bodies simply by putting on a new bra? As Naomi Wolf points out in The Beauty Myth, all women, regardless of their beauty, believe that "the ideal [is] someone tall, thin, white, and blonde, a face without pores, asymmetry, or flaws, someone wholly 'perfect,' and someone whom they felt, in one way or another, they were not" (Wolf 1). Regardless of how beautiful a woman is, she never feels it. It seems out of this world that in the amount of time that it takes to film an hour television show, a woman can completely turn her views of herself around. But it certainly seems like a good idea, considering how many women can't begin this process of finding self-love on their own.

In the clip below, a participant is shown how distorted her body image is. However, to do this, the host has her judge other women based on how large or small they are in comparison.

While the participant ends up feeling better about herself, what about the other women? They were selected simply because they tummies bigger than the show's target. The 'good' intention of making one woman have a more positive body image is overshadowed by the undermining of the other women's self-confidence. Wolf titled her book The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women, and HTLGN is a clear demonstration of this. As the host points out, the larger women are curvaceous and soft, and as the street surveys point out, many men appreciate this body type. (And, as a side note, the street survey definitely highlights the idea that the "beauty myth is not about women at all. It is about men's institutions and institutional power" [Wolf 13].) Perhaps they are among the women who "have a sense of a measure of freedom to dress up or down, put on lipstick or take it off, flaunt themselves or wear sweats--even--even, sometimes to gain or lose weight--without fearing that their value as a woman or their seriousness as a person is at stake" (Wolf 8). But here is a male host telling them that they are all inches larger than this woman who can't stand the way she looks, and they were chosen for this segment because they are attractive, but also because they are 'heavy.' How are they supposed to take that? It's a completely backhanded compliment. And they're receiving it in their underwear!

This idea of celebrating bodies at the same time as rejecting them is much more common than it appears. The term "plus-size model" feels as if the fashion industry (and magazines, television, etc.) is saying: "You're beautiful despite your size" instead of "You're beautiful." Period. End of story. The focus is constantly on the body shape of these women, which makes it seem that they are the exception instead of the norm. And are they even "normal sized"? A plus-sized model is used so a magazine/newspaper/etc. can boast that they are using "real women," but the average woman in America, aged twenty or older, "is 5'3" tall, weighs 164.7 pounds, and has a 37.6 inch waist" and wears a size 14 (Watson).  By comparison, "the average model is 5'11" tall and weighs 117 pounds," and a plus-size model might be, for example, 5'9" and a size 12 (Watson). Things such as Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty (which we've seen a few times in class, CFRB) are making steps in the right direction, but we're still not there.

These women, from CFRB, are definitely a part of a diverse group of body shapes and skin tones. Some have tattoos, others freckles, and others wrinkles. By putting together a large group instead of one woman, CFRB is doing a better job of making women with real bodies appear as the norm. Glamour Magazine stepped on board with this idea of "real" or "normal" beauty in October 2009 by placing an image of a "normal," non-model in their magazine. They drew no extra attention to the shape or size of this woman--she was simply there, looking beautiful.

So why aren't we "there yet," as I stated above the CFRB image? On a supplemental article on Glamour's website, user "abby95" brought up that it is not enough to feature different body shapes. It is not enough to show women who are "average" sized. It is not enough to call these women beautiful because they are curvy. She writes: "I find it funny that although we have all this hype about how we shouldn't think we're fat and about eating disorders and so on. What about the women with bad skin? Braces? Bad hair? Scars? Major cellulite? Stretch marks? Where are they? Sure, these women are plus-size models (read: most of them average), but its not exactly helping the self-esteem of those who have other body image issues. We're practically ignoring everything except the fight of the "fatness" body image" ("Supermodels"). There is much more at stake than diet and exercise. Women put on makeup because they feel they have to--to look "normal." Foundation and concealer aren't accessories (I consider lipstick and eyeshadow to be more accessory-like), they are things we use to attempt to fix a beauty standard of smooth, blemish-free skin. Maybe mousse or hair gel are "hair accessories," but what happens when a woman with curly hair goes product-free? The standard of female beauty goes so much beyond fat and thin, and the media has yet to embrace all of these aspects.

Outside Sources:
"How to Look Good Naked." MyLifetime.com. AETN, Web. <http://www.mylifetime.com/shows/how-to-look-good-naked>. 

Watson, Bruce. "Glamour's risky gamble on full-sized female models." Daily Finance 11 Oct. 2009: Web. <http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/glamours-risky-gamble-on-full-sized-female-models/19190929/>

"Supermodels Who Aren’t Superthin: Meet the Women Who Proudly Bared it All ." Glamour.com. Conde Nast, Oct. 2009. Web. <http://www.glamour.com/health-fitness/2009/10/supermodels-who-arent-superthin#slide=1>.