The star of both Catfish and The Social Network is social media. Catfish is a documentary, directed by Henry Yoost and Ariel Schulman, about the life of Ariel’s brother Yaniv, or Nev. The Social Network is a very Hollywood production about how Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg got to be the world’s youngest billionaire at 26, the same age as Jesse Eisenberg, who portrays him.
Catfish, all grainy and lurching and awkward and handheld, tugs at your heartstrings. The Social Network, super slick and paced and mixed hot (the soundtrack is by Nine Inch Nail Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross), keeps your adrenalin going. These are very good movies.
Nev Schulman has a killer smile, likes dance, and engages online, where he falls in love with Megan, a slim, pretty woman whose image and music enthrall him. He also thinks paintings by Megan’s eight-year-old sister, Abby, are amazing. He’s touched when she sends him some.
When Nev decides to fold Megan’s music into the documentary, he figures he might as well Google the tunes – and discovers the music is lifted from others, throwing Megan, Abby and their young-looking, sensual mother, Angela, into question. So Nev and his buddies cram their gear into a station wagon and drive to Michigan to see whether Angela’s family’s for real.
There, they discover a reality far different from the virtual: Abby and Angela exist, but Megan is another story. Abby looks like the little girl on Facebook, but Angela is older, less glamorous, sick, and married to Vince, who brought two severely retarded kids to their union. Nev [pictured, left] and Angela finally engage for real, discovering new meanings of attraction in the process. We come to understand how social media like Facebook enable the creation of as many personalities as we’d like to post.
Troll the net to find the person you want to be or look like. Steal the image, rename the person and post a new version of your self for seduction and connection. It’s a weird notion akin to the avatar-based Second Life.
The lesson of Catfish (bottom feeders with a special relationship to cod) may be that social media are virtual connective tissue. But they depersonalize, too. One reason Catfish is moving is it suggests that the human touch, the one-on-one connection, holds to a truer reality. We know that, but sometimes we forget, which is why The Social Network strikes home in a different way.
WATCH: Catfish trailer
