But Catfish isn’t a cautionary tale about normal people being victimized by weirdos they meet on the Internet. By lowering the stakes from death or financial ruin to heartbreak, Catfish can blame the victim as well as the perpetrator. The hoaxes are so stupidly obvious from the beginning that it’s impossible to feel empathy for targets like Sunny. Who’s really “worse” in this situation: The lonely woman who pretends, poorly, to be a male model on the Internet, or the one who plows time and energy into such an obvious fraud? Catfish indicts the entire practice of online friendship as a depressing massively multiplayer online game in which the deranged entertain the deluded. Catfish is Jerry Springer for the social media age. Like the sad, bickering subjects of Springer’s show, Sunny and Jamison deserve each other.
