Post Modern Films

1. How is Catfish Post-
Modern?

2. What is Catfish?
• Catfish is a documentary film that follows the life of Nev Schulman and his
online relationship with a girl called Meghan.
• It is filmed and directed by his brother, Ariel Schulman.
• Megan is the older sister of ‘Abby’, an 8 year old child artist. Nev becomes
friends with Angela (Abby and Meghan’s mother) on Facebook.
• Nev finds out that Meghan and Angela have lied about Abby’s art career,
and plans to end the relationship but Ariel convinces him to stick with it for
the sake of the documentary.
• Nev and Meghan plan to meet but the night before, he receives a text from
her, informing him that she has a long-standing alcohol addiction and
cannot meet him as she has checked into rehab.
• Nev learns that ‘Meghan’ is actually Angela is real life, a 40 year old woman
living in Michigan.
• Nev also finds out that Angela has over 15 other fake Facebook accounts
all linked to her and Catfishing others.
• The ending of the documentary reveals that the girl in the pictures was
actually a photographer living in Washington DC with her husband and twp
children and had nothing to do with the Facebook account.
• It also reveals that Nev still has over 732 friends on Facebook, including
Angela.
• A spin off TV series is now a regular on MTV and a massive hit with
audiences.

3. How is Catfish Post-Modern?
• Hyper-reality – people can create personas of themselves on
social media, which is what the movie is based around.
• Blurs boundaries between Reality and Hyper-Reality – the
names of the people in the movie e.g. Nev and Ariel are also
their real life names.
• Decline of Meta Narrative – the general plot is the idea that Nev
wants to know who the girl really is, but there is not a happy
ending, the girl is not who he hoped it to be and he ends up on
his own in the end anyway.
• Combination of Genres – the trailer portrays the film as being
very thriller film like by using similar conventions such as
suspense, therefore blending more than one genre into one e.g.
Documentary/Thriller/Drama.
• Notion of Truth – the film is a documentary so everything is very
true to real life and is more fact over fiction., unlike most films.
• Copy of Copy – there is a main camera which is filming
someone who is filming Nev. Thus, showing copies of copies.

4. How is Catfish not Post-Modern?
• Style over Substance – this is not an issue for the film-makers
and the film is not about making it look really professional,
polished and finished, as the cameras are all handheld and
the film is unscripted.
• Reality and Truth – many believe the film to actually be
scripted and not true to what you are really watching,
therefore the reality of what you are watching can be
questioned.
Conclusion
• Overall, Catfish is a very post modern film, due to the amount
of conventions that it uses that relate to post modern theorists
such as Baudrillard and Strinati.