“Catfish” and the New Face(book) of Love

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Author: Ian Mariani

The new movie “Catfish” has been heralded by the Financial Times as “the best Hitchcock film Hitchcock never made.” A slow-starting but eventually heart-pounding nail biter, this film has a twist ending to rival the most famous of twists. However, that is not the biggest implication this movie carries. The plot is centered around a couple’s meeting and subsequent courtship, but this film does not boast your typical boy meets girl plot line.

The two meet on Facebook, and the social networking site serves as the catalyst for their entire relationship. Before their commitment, they had never seen each other face-to-face, and yet interacted as any other couple would.

The image they held of each other is a compilation of their phone-distorted voices and the handful of profile pictures and albums publicly displayed on Facebook. They had never kissed. Never held hands. Never even seen the spark in each other’s eyes. All they had was a photo’s feeble attempt to capture their vitality in a single freeze frame. At first, many of us probably jump to “stalker” when we hear this story line. Of course, even we, the “Facebook Generation,” have an aversion to this form of relationship.

Why? Because we too find it creepy when someone we’ve never met friends us on Facebook, or when we find ourselves attempting to imagine an animated version of pictures we see on our news feeds.

Take the Occidental Class of 2014 Facebook page. When April rolled around, the group boasted around 600 members. Subtracting the RAs and organizations who joined the group to answer questions, it’s safe to say that well over the majority of the incoming freshman class was a member of that page. And, as was the norm, everyone was friending everyone, not based on compatibility with each other, only based on the presumption that these were the other kids that we would be spending the next four years with.

A select few of them would actually correspond with each other on a daily basis, building that kind of “Catfish” relationship that rested solely on the words sent and pictures shared. But that was not the weirdest part.

When August arrived and we all began our four years at Occidental, I could not go a few hours without running into someone that I was friends with on Facebook, but never actually said a single word to.

And yet with five months of them showing up on my news feed with “going to the beach…god i love summer,” I couldn’t help but feel strangely more connected to them than I would have been any other way. It was as if I had been a fly on the wall for 600 kids’ lives for the past five months.

The most strained part of this relationship was when they would finally introduce themselves with “Hey, I think we’re friends on Facebook, good to finally meet you.” Occidental’s first-year class became 600 living, breathing versions of profile pictures from the group’s discussion boards. It was an uncomfortable feeling for all of us.

But that’s all it was, just awkward. While we may feel slightly uncomfortable about the realities of the Occidental Facebook group, we do not have the same reaction we would to, say, someone standing outside our window following our lives in the same way.

Why? Because Facebook has made a certain amount of “stalking” acceptable.”Catfish,” being just a different type of romance, rather than a stalker story in the eyes of the viewer, proves that the idea of a faceless relationship is not beyond our imagination in the modern context.

Facebook stalking is perhaps a crime we all commit at some point, and so our laughter at “Catfish” is almost nervous, because we know we do it too sometimes. And the idea of a relationship based in the Internet is hardly far-fetched now. E-Harmony and other online dating sites are increasing in popularity, and even face-to-face relationships have now taken on the characteristics of being “Facebook official.” The elements of nonverbal communication, such as e-mail and Facebook, have added another dimension to dating and friendships in general. Who is to say now that a relationship is not able to have its genesis or have its life force provided by that dimension?

We should accept this new dimension of communication as an inevitable part of our relationships, just as the telephone and texting have deepened the dimension before. So why not? It’s not like they can make us any more dysfunctional then we already are.

Ian Mariani is an undeclared first-year. He can be reached at mariani@oxy.edu.

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