S1E6 Kya and Alyx: I Love U On A Subatomic Level
More lies, more pop culture digressions, more importantly: romance.
Happy new year, friends on the internet!
I took a break from writing over the holidays so I could spend my days off doing jigsaw puzzles and binge watching CW shows, but now I’m back, and so far haven’t been able to avoid the rush of New Year idealism I always seem to fall victim to this time of year. I know it’s not logical to think that the calendar turning over will actually grant us all a fresh start, but I can’t help it: I’m optimistic. Like Nev in the episode “Kya and Alyx,” I have emerged from a pile of steaming disappointments believing, somehow, this time will be different. Maybe enough has finally gone wrong for the pendulum to swing back. I believe in cosmic balance, and that people are basically good. I believe.
Maybe, like Nev in the episode “Kya and Alyx,” my belief will finally pay off.
The Episode
A young woman named Kya from a place called Mexico, Missouri emails Max and Nev for help with the subject line “please help me meet someone I have catfished for eight months.” This is good stuff: Kya met Alyx on a website called Vampire Freaks dot com. Vampire Freaks dot com was Kya’s playground: she says she’d been on it since she was about 14, and had created a lot of fake profiles to cope with insecurities about how she looked. Then she started talking to Alyx, and, after the feelings became real, Kya came clean about who she actually was. The thing is, Alyx was so supportive and loving that Kya then became suspicious that he might not be telling the full truth, either. It takes one to know one!
The boys meet Kya at her Shire-like house and learn a little more about Alyx. He is from Switzerland but recently moved to California. He is 21 years old and lists his occupation as “Student/Model” (ughhhhh) and his orientation as pansexual (a term that Kya then has to explain to Max and Nev). He’s told Kya that he can’t video chat because he doesn’t have a computer of his own. Nevertheless, Nev is optimistic: “I want true love. I want wedding bells.”
Nev and Max begin the investigation process and locate the “mask,” or the true profile of the person in the pictures. “Alyx” is really Dani, a trans man who lives in California. This revelation doesn’t seem to bother Kya, who seems to be a generally unflappable and open-minded person, and who probably also realizes how hypocritical it would be of her to protest Dani’s lies.
She still wants to meet him, and so they go to California. And everything is beautiful! Kya and Dani hold hands, kiss, and roll up their jeans to wade in the ocean. It’s just like Nights in Rodanthe, only nobody dies in a flash mudslide.
Let me talk about the show Monk for a second, please
There’s an episode of Monk where Monk meets a woman whose corneas once belonged to Monk’s late wife Trudy. He sees this woman on the street and knows there’s something familiar about her, but can’t place it. After he solves the episode’s murder, he meets the woman again and notices that she has a tattoo of the date of Trudy’s death; when he asks, she explains that it’s the date she was “reborn,” that is, when she received cornea transplants that restored her sight. Recognizing that he is once again looking into Trudy’s eyes, Monk is overcome with emotion and the episode ends, causing, as many episodes of Monk do, abject pain to the viewer.
According to some science I just found, corneas are just the clear covering of the iris, and so there would be no way that Monk could recognize Trudy’s corneas in some stranger. But there is something to the idea that the love between Monk and Trudy was so complete, so essential, that any speck of that essence would be immediately identifiable. It is a statement, I think, about what it is like to have a soul mate.
So, too, is “Kya and Alyx,” in its way. There is something very pure about the way these two liars fall for each other’s truest, most basic selves after all. When Kya and Dani say that they love each other across appearances, across genders, I believe them. At one point, the viewers get a glimpse of their text exchanges and one of them has sent the other the words “I love u on a subatomic level.” I am very touched by how accurate that seems. When Kya and Dani meet, there’s visible recognition between two people who have never been in the same room before.
What’s interesting to me here is that this subatomic love doesn’t seem to erase the need for an in-person component to the relationship. Kya and Dani aren’t participating in Catfish courtly love; in fact, meeting face-to-face seems to be the thing that really cements their attraction. Dani actually says later that he doesn’t feel like their relationship actually started until they met, and that it was much harder to be apart after they had. Vampire Freaks dot com somehow managed to facilitate the best case scenario for online relationships - two people connected, plunged into emotional intimacy, and were rewarded with deep, real, offline love. Go figure.
Transphobia, “Disclosure,” and Catfish
Something that got to me in this episode is the way that Dani talks about feeling validated in his identity through his relationship with Kya. This experience is clearly a big step for him, especially as someone who has been subject to transphobic violence, like being pantsed in public (BTW, in a recent survey of trans and gender-nonconforming young people, 78% of respondents reported being bullied at school). He talks about the constant worry of “am I passing?” and “Do I look male enough today?” and gets reassurance from Kya calling him her boyfriend or using the correct pronouns. He doesn’t exactly say this, but it’s implied that’s part of the reason he used fake photos in the first place as well: just to be seen as a man.
Specifically, a cis man. While reading a bit about Catfish’s, ahem, checkered past when it comes to the trans community, I came across a series of Reddit threads from trans people who were questioning if not disclosing their transness online was itself a form of catfishing - and the responses were predictably polarized. I can’t imagine how frustrating (to say the least) it must feel to navigate these troll-infested waters, and I can imagine how someone like Dani might simply find it easier to actually catfish than to be accused of it simply for being himself.
It feels like “disclosure” is a concept most fretted over by people for whom it will never apply. For fear of becoming one of those people, I’ll just say that I like the analysis of the actress and activist Jen Richards, who says in a recent documentary:
[Disclosure] reinforces the assumption that there is a secret that is hidden and that I have a responsibility to tell others, and that presupposes that the other person might have some kind of issue or problem with what’s to be disclosed and that their feelings matter more than mine.
The early episodes of Catfish, which are so focused on themes of “uncovering the truth,” tend to flail when it comes to trans issues because they’re forced to rely on harmful narratives. If a trans person doesn’t disclose their trans identity, in this context, it’s considered a lie by omission. Worse, there’s the not-infrequent transphobic comment from one of the hosts that frames being trans as someone “pretending” to be a different gender the same way they might pretend to be blue-eyed or tattooed. Dani is misgendered a lot in this episode. To Catfish’s credit, however, this area does seem to be one where they’ve committed to doing better over the past eight seasons.
Next week: our first celebrity impersonator, kind of. Watch this space.
XOXO,
Hannah
PS, can y’all let me know what time of week you’d like to receive this email? I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I can’t seem to decide.
LOGGED OFF, or what I’m doing when I’m not watching Catfish
Reading: Suppose A Sentence by Brian Dillon (Christmas present)
(Re)watching: Mozart in the Jungle, before my Prime membership expires
New Year’s Resolutions: to drink more tea, to wear my blue light glasses, and to be patient with myself and others.