In Praise of the Cod
Catfish, 90 Day Fiance, and the people on television ruining themselves for love
Have I ever mentioned where the term “catfish” comes from? In the original documentary Catfish, Nev, Ariel, and Henry are in northern Michigan with Angela (Nev’s catfish, the woman who pretended to be Megan, who he fell in love with) and her husband Vince offers this anecdote:
They used to tank cod from Alaska all the way to China. They'd keep them in vats in the ship. By the time the codfish reached China, the flesh was mush and tasteless. So this guy came up with the idea that if you put these cods in these big vats, put some catfish in with them and the catfish will keep the cod agile. And there are those people who are catfish in life. And they keep you on your toes. They keep you guessing, they keep you thinking, they keep you fresh. And I thank god for the catfish because we would be droll, boring and dull if we didn't have somebody nipping at our fin.
I really like this quote because I think it’s very kind. He’s not necessarily excusing Angela’s deception, but he’s offering a theory about her; that she’s creative, active, unpredictable. That is part of why he loves her. That is part of love in general - accepting that the other person has the power to hurt you, staying agile.
The fact is, sometimes you’re the catfish, and sometimes you’re the cod. There is a whole ecosystem of entertainment dedicated to people who are trying their best to find love in ways that often look incredibly naive. Catfish is one example. 90 Day Fiance is another.
For the somehow uninitiated, 90 Day Fiance is a show about couples completing the US’s (very strange) K-1 visa process. Many times the couple has spent a very limited amount of time together in person before they are planning a wedding. The American partner has to deal with the skepticism and derision of their family and friends; the non-American partner has to endure isolation, homesickness, and xenophobia. If the marriages work out, the couples may pop up again on the spinoff 90 Day Fiance: Happily Ever After, and if they do not, the most memorable characters will make their return on 90 Day Fiance: The Single Life.
I think 90 Day Fiance is in many ways a kind of companion show to Catfish. I have created this handy Venn diagram to compare the two.
Sometimes I think that people who freely give themselves to risky relationships, whether with strangers online or people they may have met once or twice on vacation, and who then do everything they can to make those relationships real, are braver than the troops.
90 Day Fiance: The Single Life is a show about previous 90 Day Fiance cast members whose K-1 visa marriages did not work out for various reasons and who are now trying their hand at dating again (it is in a sense postmodern). I like The Single Life for its defiance. After all, the entertainment value in 90 Day is, in a sense, about knowing that this probably isn’t a good idea; it’s about nodding your head in agreement when someone’s family member tells them that the couple doesn’t know each other well enough to get married yet or that so-and-so won’t like living in the middle of nowhere Wisconsin when they’re from the most cosmopolitan city in Ukraine.
But we can only be smug for so long, because someone could have their ass absolutely handed to them at the end of 90 Day Fiance and then pop up on The Single Life ready to get hurt all over again.
Take Danielle Mullins, one of my favorite 90 Day-extended universe characters. Danielle is a person whose marriage to her ex-husband Mohamed seemed, based on TLC’s depiction, to be pure hell. Both of them lied to each other constantly, he had affairs, she had money trouble, and it all culminated in a tell-all episode where Mohamed said on live television that their lack of a sex life was due to the fact that - I can’t believe I’m about to type this, but it is all over the first page of Google results when you search for Danielle’s name - her vagina smelled bad. The couple divorced right after Mohamed got his visa, so we all got to be like, duh.
But now Danielle is dating again. She is on The Single Life going out to dinner with a very nice man her age named Robert and fretting over how to explain her insecurity around intimacy with him, and she has been making questionable choices about that, and yet! Danielle is dating again.
There is something I think uniquely pathetic about the archetype of the romantic patsy, especially in fiction. I think about Drew Barrymore getting egged by her prom date in Never Been Kissed, or about the character of Frances Welty in Liane Moriarty’s novel Nine Perfect Strangers, a romance novelist whose experience with a catfish makes her the laughingstock of a wellness retreat where everyone is dealing with some insecurity or other.
Being duped is embarrassing, but being duped in that way is the most foolish a person can look. I suspect it’s because we are all encouraged never to believe that we are unconditionally worthy of love, but whether they realize it or not, the people on reality television do.
After all, Catfish is a show wherein average people earnestly think that they are in relationships with international male models or celebrities. 90 Day is a universe where the soulmate of a single mom from rural Pennsylvania might just be a 21-year-old guy from Jamaica. “Why would they be interested in me?” is a question the participants never seem to be asking. We, the viewers, do it for them. It is very easy to distill the people on these shows down to the roles that the narrative has chosen for them: victim/villain, hopeful/catfish, pushy/pushover, bad liar/gullible idiot, winner/loser. It is very easy to do this to ourselves in real life, too. But in almost all cases it is some combination of inaccurate and unkind.
I don’t want to live in a world where dating is a secretly a game of who can look less stupid, and reality television consistently shows me that I don’t have to. The people who make bad choices or fall for scams, who are humiliated repeatedly and always come back for more - they are the meaty cod of life, rippled through with the flavor of experience. Escaping a nip on the fin only ensures that you arrive at your destination bland and mushy. And if they can internalize that, these strange people who climb out of their spaceships to end up on our TV, maybe we all should, too.
Blehhhhhhhh, I don’t know.
Next time: Anthony and Marq, normal format. See u then.
XOXO,
Hannah
What to watch next
The ultimate movie about love and looking foolish: Moonstruck (1978), a movie about a romance scam where nobody gets hurt: A New Leaf (1971), a movie where a character who’d otherwise be the punchline is the protagonist: Hello, My Name Is Doris (2015).