Cat­fish

‘Not based on a true sto­ry, not inspired by real events, just true,’ boasts the tagline. It’s a bold rejec­tion of the increas­ing­ly per­sis­tent accu­sa­tions that Cat­fish is a fake. This film has received months of fes­ti­val buzz. What, peo­ple have asked, is this film? Is it doc­u­men­tary or fic­tion? Is it real or a hoax? The film­mak­ers, broth­ers Nev and Ariel Schul­man and their friend Hen­ry Joost, have cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly denied any charges of fraud­u­lent film­mak­ing. But, in a sense, the ques­tion of whether Cat­fish is script­ed or not is moot – it is a swamp of ethics anyway.

2010 has marked the con­ver­gence between what we know as the inter­net and what we under­stand to be the cin­e­ma as a plat­form and venue. Cat­fish, in some ways, is at the apex of that. Shot in the moment with pock­et cam­corders and with­out a script in sight, the film focus­es on the rela­tion­ship between New York pho­tog­ra­ph­er Nev and Megan, a flir­ta­tious rur­al girl from Michi­gan. One hitch – their only point of con­tact is Facebook.

Through the social net­work, Nev meets Megan’s Mum, broth­er and 15 oth­er of her friends and fam­i­ly. He learns about her life, her job, her inter­ests, her sex­u­al pref­er­ences. He emo­tion­al­ly invests in pic­tures and words. And then, inevitably, the cracks begin to appear. Megan, it seems, is not every­thing that she says she is. Intrigued, the boys set off to dis­cov­er the truth behind the com­put­er screen. Watch­ing Nev begin to come to terms with the idea that all might not be as it appears in his strange real­i­ty of social media is unde­ni­ably allur­ing. As he pre­pares to meet Megan in the flesh and blood, as he ner­vous­ly approach­es her house, the film’s lack of com­po­si­tion cre­ates an almost Hitch­cock­ian suspense.

But here, as the door opens and Megan is shown, Cat­fish morphs into some­thing else entire­ly. For most of the film, Nev is only notable for his Janet Leigh pro­por­tions of gulli­bil­i­ty, and whilst it would be churl­ish to expand on the res­o­nance of what he finds, he dis­plays a lot of strength and integri­ty when faced with a real­i­ty very dif­fer­ent to his expectations.

Nev, Ariel and Hen­ry are the prin­ci­pal actors in the film, with the lat­ter pair act­ing as co-direc­tors. We see them, but also hear them from behind the cam­era, encour­ag­ing each oth­er. It’s a chal­leng­ing state of affairs for a 90-minute fea­ture film. The for­mal fathers of cin­e­ma, one imag­ines, are rotat­ing in their graves like rotis­serie chick­ens receiv­ing a good basting.

But this pur­pose­ful­ly uncon­struct­ed, almost brash famil­iar­i­ty has a lin­eage. It belongs to the same fam­i­ly as Shirley Clarke’s doc­u­men­tary Por­trait of Jason, in which an aging, Afro-Caribbean hus­tler from the wrong side of New York is exhort­ed to tell to the cam­era his most inti­mate feel­ings and bar­ing vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties. The dif­fer­ence is – Jason was filmed in one evening, Cat­fish over the course of a year. Infer­ence asks how con­sid­ered this path of dis­cov­ery tru­ly was for Nev, Hen­ry and Ariel. The film as a whole shifts a gear on its reveal, gain­ing sen­si­tiv­i­ty and some sym­pa­thy; it has lit­tle choice but to. Nev­er­the­less, the queasy sense of voyeurism when watch­ing these scenes is almost overpowering.

And this begs ques­tions. Did the film­mak­ers have a right to doc­u­ment the real­i­ty they found? How much did they manip­u­late it with dra­mat­ic con­ven­tions like, for exam­ple, edit­ing? The sub­jects who become key cogs in the film’s machi­na­tions were asked to sign release forms before the film could be released. They have been absent from pub­lic view since. Only one inter­view was grant­ed (for the ABC pro­gramme 20/20), and the word ​‘schiz­o­phre­nia’ was used in the course of it. Should this real­i­ty have been redact­ed or, as with Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, did the com­pelling nature of the truth revealed act as jus­ti­fi­ca­tion in itself?

Cat­fish has mar­ket­ed itself as the sequel to Para­nor­mal Activ­i­ty with a bit of Web 2.0 com­men­tary thrown in, but its more than that. We nev­er see the moment when con­sent was agreed between the film­mak­ers and their dis­cov­ery, and we are left to assume it exist­ed. It rais­es gen­uine con­cerns about how we use the word ​‘truth’ in the cin­e­ma, and about whether, with so much media con­stant­ly sur­round­ing us and CCTV adorn­ing our streets, it is still pos­si­ble to exploit with the camera.