Cecilia Mejia
English 114
Professor Strimel
5 June 2018
Angela’s Excuse
As much as the audience would like to villainize the conniving character, Angela, in Catfish, her radical behavior boils down to human nature’s basic needs. Angela creates an extensive facade of a perfect Facebook family. She pretends to be an in-shape dancer mom to two talented daughters. Abby is a little girl with spectacular painting abilities. Meghan owns her own horse farm and sings. Nev, a young man in New York City gets caught in her web of lies. The family routinely sends Nev care packages, and it is not long until he falls into an online relationship with the oldest daughter. For eight months, Nev and Meghan exchange over thousands of text messages, the girl promising her virtue to him. Nev catches onto the holes in the families stories and his friends travel cross country to find out the truth. Angela lied about what her and her husband looked like, and tries to excuse her appearance on a made up case of cancer. Abby is not the real artist and Meghan is not real in the scenario. Angela had created over a dozen fake Facebook accounts just to maintain a virtual relationship with Nev, under false pretenses. The audience generally takes to the idea that Angela’s behavior is manipulative and inexcusable. But based on Maslow's hierarchy of needs and her self-serving bias, Angela’s actions are quite explainable.
According to the textbook, Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham created the concept called the Johari window. It allows for a visual portrayal of the four separate parts of a person’s self. There is the open area that are personality characteristics known by the self and audience. These traits are common like your name, interests, education and petty details about yourself. In the hidden area, the flawed characteristics that you may know about yourself is tucked away from everyone else. These hidden details about yourself can be insecurities or past burdens. The third being the blind area where the audience may learn more about yourself that could have been missed. The unknown area is the forth and consist of the personality traits that are not known by either yourself or other people. In the open area, known to Nev and Angela is their interest in art. The hidden flaws that Angela keeps secret is what she really looks like and who the memebers of her family are. The blind area, where Nev sees her for who she truly is, is during the scene after Nev finds out the truth but can still commend her for being a capable mother. The unknown area that the audience can believe was unknown to both the characters is the importance of having this sense of belonging and intimacy, and how that need can drive you to find love in the most uncommon places.
Abraham Maslow created the esteemed, hierarchy of needs, a five tier model comprised of basic, psychological and self-fulfilment needs.The movie depicts Angela satisfies the layers of needs by creating idealistic characters based on her real personality. On the first level, there is the need to maintain a physiological comfortability, food, water, warmth and sleep. Following, are safety needs, finding security and consistency in life. The next two tiers are the psychological needs, finding a sense of belonging and love in intimate relationships and among friend. Esteem needs is a sense of accomplishment. Self-fulfilment being the epitome of self actualization which is the idea that one can reach their full potential. It becomes evident, once actually seeing Angela’s real life, that she has become deprived of her psychological and self-fulfillment needs. She felt stuck in a marriage, taking care of kids from her husbands previous wife. She felt as though her art did not have the same value and authenticity as it would have being produced by a little girl. Abby was a way for her to find accomplishment with her art. The made up character, Meghan operates in the same capacity, trying to find love in intimate relationships. Angela made loving promises to Nev, betraying him in the most profound way possible. Angela began feeling unloved in her current living conditions and seeked an emotional attachment to someone. The last tier of needs, considered to be the most unattainable for Angela, is self actualization, which could never blossom in such lies and deceit to oneself.
Angela’s lies can also be explained through the concept of self-fulfilling prophecy. Angela was seeking a specific type of relationship with Nev and manipulated the entire course of eight months to acquire her need for intimacy. Towards the end of the movie, Angela says she realizes how the feelings and communications have developed and realized that she could potentially hurt him but things had moved too fast. She found herself in a lie that she found no end in, then responds with adding more lies to the situation. For months, she gained the attention she felt deprived of at home. She tells Nev that she never had to worry about her husband Vince answering the phone because he would never bother to answer for her. Her life was overwhelming and she wanted to feel relief in the metaphorical arms of someone who saw her for the young artistic potential to love deeply. Angela wanted to be seen to badly, Nev ended up seeing right through her.
Catfish was a insightful documentary into the boy who fell for the lie and the woman who set the trap. Nev was a single guy who got wrapped up in the lies that she uses as a blanket to find comfort in her disatisfying life. Angela’s web of lies was elaborate but came from a very primal instinct native to humans. Everyone searches to find intimacy and love, it was just the case that love seemed unattainable being who she really was. Similar to how people dress up really nice for their first date and act like perfect human beings to sell ourselves to the other person, we are all just looking for comfort