In Catfish (2010), three young men (Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, the filmmakers, and Nev Schulman, Ariel's brother) set out on a road trip to meet a woman that they know only from her phone calls, text messages, and Facebook profile. During the film, the men joke about how it feels to get one's SAT scores back and that one of them wears an orthodontic retainer: they never seemed to have matured beyond the high school level. Is video documentation inherently exploitative or genuinely truth-telling? Two central characters, Angela and Nev, reveal their secrets as the film progresses. Angela's gentle visual portrayal, in natural light and close up, makes her deceit more ambiguous (first still). Nev's credibility is perhaps undermined by the constant gaze of the camera (second still).
