The Manipulated, Fabricated, First Impression

Have you ever experienced going to a restaurant, looking over the menu to order your meal, except when your order arrives, the food looks nothing like the mouthwatering pictures displayed in the menu? Now imagine that you meet a very attractive girl, with an amazing personality that you share surprisingly a lot in common with, except she’s not the girl of your dreams, but instead she is her mother. In the movie Catfish, after reaching out to Nev through various means, Angela ultimately decides to pose as oldest daughter Meg in hopes of attracting Nev. This analysis will highlight how Angela manipulated technology, fabricated a first impression, and fulfilled her relational needs for communication all in order to pursue a relationship with Nev.

Throughout the entirety of the film Angela uses various communication channels to interact with Nev. Angela interacted with him by phone, facebook, mail, text, and ultimately face-to-face. Of the various channels Angela used to communicate with Nev, the technology driven channels were used most to mislead his perception of her identity. Angela manipulated technology by creating a false facebook page for herself and family members and text messages, posing as her older Meg so that she could get to know Nev on a more personal level.

Angela makes it a point that Nev’s perception of her is a positive one. Her deception demonstrates how primacy effect in a negative light. McGraw- Hill’s “Communication Matters”
defines primacy effect as “the tendency to emphasize the first impression over later impressions when forming a perception”. Since their first interaction, Nev’s overall first impression of Angela is that “she must be awesome because her kids are pretty awesome”. Nev conveys this comment following a phone conversation from Angela, discussing the artistic relationship that was earlier established between him and her younger daughter Abby. After seeing her profile photo on Facebook, his first physical impression of her is that she attractive. Unfortunately Nev later realizes that you can’t always trust first impressions. Once Nev meets Angela, he noticed immediately that she was not the woman in the picture. In fact Nev learned that a lot of what was posted online was not Angela’s lifestyle. But after giving her another chance to make an impression, he realizes that her personality is the only part of her identity not being misrepresented. Overall, you could see that Nev still believed that Angela was “awesome”, not because of her physical attractiveness, or because all the “cool things that her kids were doing”, rather because she was genuinely an awesome sweet, caring person, with a natural talent for painting, and facebook identity aside, his first and last impressions remained the same.

Midway through the movie you start to realize Angela’s is only trying to fulfilling her relational needs for communication. Relational needs is one of the many communicational needs that people require from others. Angela sought after Nev because they shared a common interest: art. Nev’s demonstrated his creativity in the form of photography while Angela’s was painting. Sharing that common interest served as a doorway into his life sharing things that can never be taken back. While Nev just thought that he was exchanging messages with Abby, or starting a personal relationship with Meg, he was in fact interacting with Angela, unknowingly filling her need for companionship and acting as an escape from her reality. Angela shares that her life has changed ever since she married her husband Vince and assumed a parenting roll to his mentally handicapped twin boys. She also mentions that she was a dancer growing up but regretted never pursuing the career professionally. This explains why she reached out to Nev in the first place, after seeing breathtaking photos that he published in a local New york news paper.

Overall, Nev handled being Catfished like a true sport. At anypoint, in the process of being manipulated through technology, given skewed information to draw a first impression, being used as an escape from reality, and finding out about it, he could have bowed out. Instead he was persistent in his investigation of the incident, questioned her intentions, and treated Angela like a person, and liked her as such. Just like when your less than perfect meal comes to the table, you ultimately realize your meal tastes just how you thought it would. Even though Angela was not who she portrayed herself to be physically, her personality was still the same and that seemed to have Nev less concerned with her initial deception.