Wade into the Catfish pond with me

Welcome to FRIENDS ON THE INTERNET, a newsletter about Catfish: The TV Show

In which I explain why the hell I am doing this*, and why the hell I am doing it now.**

*Rewatching and writing about season 1 of Catfish: The TV Show

**During the COVID-19 pandemic

Let me start by being very honest: the last time I was this bored and lonely I was making friends on the internet.

The first friend I ever made was a girl named Rita who lived in Portugal. We started messaging each other back and forth on Tumblr when I was about fourteen or fifteen, back when Facebook was for friends and Twitter was for celebrities. At the time, IRL, I was spending all my time trying to tamp down my enthusiasm for various subjects - Glee, Harry Potter, Greek mythology, whatever - for fear of revealing the depth of my obsession. With Rita, these things were all we talked about. She was funny, and kind, her English typing laden with quirks, her smiling emoticons talismans against my most desperate feelings of freakishness. 

I have been thinking about this time in my life a lot lately - not about Rita, or the various Internet friends that followed her - but about the teenager I was, spending all my time on my bed with a face full of blue laptop light. I was prime catfish bait, not because I was unhappy (though I was) or because I was naive (though I was) but because the overwhelming sense of those years was that there was a world full of people like me, or more like me, where I could unclench and be loved, but I couldn’t reach it. I was so lonely that I would watch television shows where a group of friends go have dinner in a restaurant and cry, because it looked like paradise.

Sound familiar, or is it just me?

Since quarantine started, I’ve been watching a lot of Catfish. Why? Because I think it’s the most essential text we have on the particular loneliness of the technology generation.

This shitty year, as so much of our society’s abscesses seem to be bursting (gross, sorry) I’ve found Catfish, a formulaic and ostensibly lighthearted show, to be incredibly prescient. After all, why talk to strangers on the Internet? For me, it was because I found my physical reality to be deeply unsatisfying. And why are so many people’s physical realities unsatisfying? Because America has been falling apart for a long time. Everyone is lonely in 2020, especially as we gear up to spend holidays without family and spend our days in video meetings. But I think we’ve been lonely for a lot longer than that. 

I think loneliness is somehow essential to the way we live now, fixated as we are on privacy, independence, ownership. It’s as simple or as complicated as suburbia, as capitalism - loneliness as enforced mental state through systems of oppression, loneliness inflicted through homophobia, racism, fatphobia, poverty, stigma. On Catfish, people have all sorts of reasons for keeping the most important relationships in their life confined to chat bubbles, even as they acknowledge the desire to liberate them from those spaces. They don’t have access to a car or money for airfare, or they fear rejection based on race or sexuality or body size. Personal technology allows us to address compounding lonelinesses through its use, but solely through its use. People are making connections online, but it’s because of everything else that these connections only go so far. To put it simply: they can’t make it “real.” So how to proceed? Well, in America, you go on a reality show.

I know this all sounds a little high-minded, and I swear I’m not going to get all academic on you, but Catfish is the best evidence we’ve got that this is a country full of underserved yearners: messy, angry, skinless beings who long to be seen. 

And I don’t know about you, but that’s sort of how I’ve been feeling lately. Somewhere in eight months of  Zoom calls and writing and rewriting work emails and news stories about anti-mask protests, the outside world got a little fuzzy and theoretical. I started spending most of my time online, where the people were. Watching Catfish is my way of examining this impulse in myself and in others, and thinking more deeply about this moment we’re in as we head into what is going to be a really scary winter. (Also, it’s really funny.)

So, with all of that said, I ask you: wade into this pond with me. The water is weird, and the catfish are biting.

XOXO,

Hannah