S2E2 Anthony and Marq: Notes On Camp
Returning to Friends on the Internet, as pedantically as possible
As I write this, Catfish is approaching its 10-year anniversary. Isn’t that something?
Decades are longer than they used to be, I think. When Catfish premiered, my hair was breaking off from at-home bleach jobs and I was spending most of my free time posting poetry anonymously to my Tumblr. Barack Obama had just been reelected. The top song on the Billboard charts was Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know.” Now I am in my late twenties, the world is ending, and the song is “As It Was,” by Harry Styles, which I have not yet actually heard because I almost never listen to the radio or shop at Forever 21 these days.
Hannah, why are you returning to Friends On The Internet after all this time away, despite the newer fixations fructifying on a different Substack? It is a fair question, and to it I say, look: Elvis isn’t going anywhere. He’s dead. But Catfish! Catfish lives on, as decrepit and out of time as the British Royal Family, kept alive by a series of cursory, regulated zaps. And so, like the COVID-19 virus, my morbid interest in it persists, mutates, and dogs us into another year.
In the words of the Phantom: down once more.
The Episode
Max and Nev are in the great city of Houston, Texas this week to assist a sensitive Iraq War veteran named Anthony. Houston, I will just add, is America’s fourth-largest city. Home to more than 2.3 million people, it is the most populous city in the American South and, per its official Wikipedia page, has been described as the most racially and ethnically diverse city in the United States. It is a town full of great food and massive freeways; it has countless museums and resident companies in all the major performing arts.
Despite all this, Max and Nev appear in this episode to be staying in a wooden shack with a sign on the door that reads, in dialect, “Fishin’ Hole.”
Why??
Anyway. The buzz on Anthony is that he is a 27 year old who broke a hip, both knees, and both ankles in an explosion while deployed overseas; he shows Max and Nev his Purple Heart upon their first visit. Anthony tells the boys that he became very depressed while recovering from his injuries, because, yeah (good thing this country takes famously great care of the young people we send abroad to get blown up for no reason). However, things have begun to look up in recent months, as Anthony has been online-dating a man named Marq, a man with whom he can talk about anything, anytime, a man with whom he is deeply in love.
*Clears throat*
Here is the problem. Anthony knows that Marq is lying about something, because things have gotten a little hinky of late. He recently traveled to Mississippi to visit Marq but was stood up; Marq’s explanation was that he was carjacked and then run over by the car (Catfish Core Lie #2: a horrific car crash has derailed my life). Most damning is that an acquaintance of Anthony’s, named Robert, showed up in a photograph with “Marq,” only he claims that “Marq” is a man named Joshua. Max and Nev ask if Anthony has any reason not to trust Robert, and Anthony says that he sort of believes Robert, but also, Robert could be lying because he knows that Robert does not like him.
“But your text messages looked friendly enough,” says Nev.
“Trust me,” says Anthony darkly. Intrigue! What happened with Robert??? We never find out. We do learn that after the Robert Incident, Anthony confronted Marq, but the ensuing clash was so stressful that Anthony ultimately let the matter drop. Max and Nev pledge to discover the truth. As they get in their car to leave, Anthony, still mic’d, has some sort of meltdown. Nev goes back into the house and finds Anthony pacing in his bedroom, which is walled on three sides in mirrors, so that there are many pacing Anthonys, many placating Nevs.
“I am not this person,” Anthony says, repeatedly. “My mother taught me better than this.”
Nev calms him down, Nevishly, and he and Max get to work. They locate Joshua, the mask, a handsome party promoter who seems unsurprised that “Marq” has been using his photos, because, if I’ve learned anything from this show, it’s that this happens to hot people constantly. Joshua records a video for Anthony as proof; moving on. Max and Nev search the username from the Marq Facebook profile, clickety-clickety, they find a young man named Framel who is almost definitely behind it.
This being the sprawling, cosmopolitan metropolis of Houston, Texas, home to one of the largest LGBT communities in the United States, famed center of innovation in the fields of energy, biomedicine, and aerospace, the Catfish crew drive Anthony to a place that looks exactly like the dining hall of a sleepaway camp to tell him the news. Tears slide down Anthony’s face as he watches the video that Josh recorded for him, and as the viewer traces their downward trajectory, the eye is drawn irresistibly towards the prominent Illuminati tattoo on his throat. “I feel played,” he says, because he was. Anthony already seems done with “Marq,” but he agrees to go meet Framel in Jackson, Mississippi, for the sake of an explanation.
During the airport montage, Anthony shows the camera the fortune from his fortune cookie, which reads something like: “Failure is only the opportunity to do things more intelligently in the future.”
Catfishing as Pure Camp
The question isn’t ‘why travesty, impersonation, theatricality?’ The question is, rather, ‘when does travesty, impersonation, theatricality acquire the special flavor of Camp?
-Susan Sontag, Notes on Camp
Framel has deceived Anthony because he has low self-esteem, and because he has struggled with his mental health after the one-two punch of significant weight gain in his early teens (the result of being bedridden after a horrific accident, a theme in this episode) and realizing that he was gay. These are both frequent catalysts for catfishing, and his story contains no less pathos for that. However, para mi, what really characterizes this episode is camp.
Camp, as we all learned at the 2019 Met Gala, is a difficult thing to pin down. But the strange and specific aesthetics of “Anthony and Marq” cracked something open for me. In revisiting Sontag’s Notes on Camp, I have come to determine that
Catfish: The TV Show is genuinely campy. Catfishing, the activity, is pure Camp.
First: what is catfishing, if not “travesty, impersonation, theatricality”? Already we are off to a promising start. Per Sontag, that which elevates something to the level of Camp (gives it that “special flavor,” as it were) is usually:
Sincerity. Camp, Sontag writes, is “dead serious.” It “rests on innocence,” is even “naive.” This is true of Catfish the show (and this I credit to Nev Schulman himself) but it is especially true of the act of catfishing, which so often is borne of an emotional whim; here we don’t mean innocent as in good-hearted, but innocent in its lack of self-awareness. Even the show’s most nefarious villains lack the perspective to claim that what they are doing is only catfishing, that it is just the Internet.
Artifice. Sontag: “To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.” Framel: “I didn’t see myself as Framel. I saw myself as a fictional character that I made up.”
People who catfish play by their own moral and aesthetic rules. Love and beauty exist in direct conflict with truthfulness. The tragedies that befall them in their narratives are over-the-top (“I was carjacked and then run over by the car”); their invented life stories tend to be “art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is ‘too much’” (Sontag again). Camp is not as simple as reversing the moral or aesthetic meanings of “bad,” and “good.” It is more about playing by different rules: valuing, in other words, the intimacy obtained through the creation and performance of a new, extravagant, gorgeous self over that which is gained through straightforward means. Camp, says Sontag, sees everything in quotation marks.
So do catfish: relationships are “relationships”; real is “real,” as in, “everything was real except the pictures and the name. I love you.”
So does Catfish: The South is “The South” - not the city of Houston, but a wooden cabin, labelled “Fishin’ Hole.”
What to watch next
The Maltese Falcon (1941), which Sontag calls “the greatest Camp film ever made.”