Part 4
Think about Her, Spike Jonze’s 2013 film. A man falls in love with an operating system. The film asks whether love requires a physical body. Catfish asks whether love requires a real name. Both are about the same thing: the gap between the person we imagine and the person we meet. In Her, Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) falls for Samantha (Scarlett Johansson), a voice without a body. In Catfish, Brandon falls for McKenna, a girl without a face. The difference is that Samantha never pretended to be human. McKenna pretended to be someone else. But the underlying question is the same: can you love someone you’ve never truly seen?
The episode doesn’t give us an easy answer. Brandon is hurt, confused, maybe even a little intrigued. Karrueche is defensive, embarrassed, but also honest. “I didn’t lie,” she says, “other than the name and the place I lived.” She’s not wrong. She was a girl who liked him. She went to his school. She hooked up with him. The only lie was the name and the place. That’s a lie that’s almost true. And those are the most dangerous kind.
So what does Catfish really say about who we fall for? It says that we fall for the story. We fall for the version of someone that fits into our lives. We fall for the idea of a person. And sometimes, that idea is so strong that it doesn’t matter if the person is real. What matters is that the feeling is real. Karrueche’s lie was almost true. She was a girl who liked him. She went to his school. She hooked up with him. The only lie was the name and the place. And in the end, that was enough to make Brandon fall in love with her. Or at least, with McKenna.
This episode isn’t a cautionary tale about strangers on the internet. It’s a cautionary tale about people we already know. The most dangerous lies are the ones that are almost true. Karrueche’s lie was almost true. She was a girl who liked him, who went to his school, who hooked up with him. The only lie was the name and the place. And that’s what makes it so unsettling. Because it could happen to any of us. We could fall for someone we already know, someone we think we understand, only to find out they’ve been presenting a different version of themselves all along.
In the next episode, the team meets a guy who has been catfished by someone he thought was a model, only to find out it was his best friend. The question remains: when does a lie become a betrayal, and when is it just a cry for connection? That’s the question Catfish keeps asking, season after season. And it’s the question we all have to answer for ourselves.
