Catfish and Catch Me if You Can

Jesse Thompson

Catfish and Catch Me if You Can

----------------------------------------------------WARNING SPOILERS AHEAD-------------------------------

            The film Catch Me if You Can is based on the life of Frank Abagnale Jr., played by Leonardo DiCaprio. Before Frank was 19 he successfully posed as a pilot for Pan American World Airways, a doctor with a degree from Harvard Medical School at a hospital in Georgia and an attorney at law after passing the bar exam in Louisiana attorney. He conned millions of dollars through taking on these guises and extensive elaborate check forgery. After finally being caught in France, and serving part of his sentence in prison after being extradited to the US, Frank was recruited by the FBI because of his knowledge of check forging. Many of the safety features that are found today's high measure secure checks utilize technology that was developed by Frank for top banks and Fortune 500 companies.

            After his mother leaves his father, Frank runs away from home and his check forging spree starts in full swing after he discovers ways to create a false persona as an airline pilot. The uniform lends a certain status of respectability to Frank that lets him get away with much more fooling the trusting bank and hotel clerks. Frank wants to experience life right away. He's smooth, quick thinking and always on the move like his hero from the comic books he reads, the Flash. For awhile Frank enjoys the lavish lifestyle he can achieve with his frauds, he buys the exact suit worn in the movie and a fancy European sports car after he is nicknamed the James Bond of the sky by the Newspapers for his exploits. Frank is lonely however, and his greatest wish is for his family to be reunited and be able to provide all the nice things his father once had before the IRS took them away and his mother later walked out as a result. He ends up connecting on a personal level with the FBI agent assigned to capture him, Carl Handratty.

            At one point in the film, when Frank is in Louisiana to ask the nurse he met as a Doctor, Brenda's father for her hand in marriage he makes a full confession to the father that he is not a doctor, not a lawyer, not a Lutheran, just a boy that's in love with is daughter. Frank gets away with telling this other father figure of his false identities by wrapping the confession in an appeal to the father's romantic sensibilities in asking permission to marry his daughter and how to go about taking the bar exam for lawyers in Louisiana.
            Frank's loneliness and previous personal connection with the FBI agent Carl Handratty leads him to feeds that relationship with calls on Christmas eve to Carl's office where he unwittingly divulges up too much information that helps the FBI get closer to determining his locations and identity as a minor. When Frank is feeling fed up with being chased all the time, he calls Carl one last time to ask him to give up, and he unfortunately lets out the information that he is getting married soon. Carl then uses this information to cross check all engagement announcements in the Louisiana area. Since Frank met Brenda as Dr. Frank Conners, he must still go by that same alter ego to get married, and that's what leads the FBI right to his doorstep for his engagement party.  

                         When his father asks him on a number of occasions, "Where you going tonight Frank? Somewhere exotic?" Frank doesn't know the answer. He's running away from everything, his broken family and the criminal consequences of his actions. Frank doesn't commit his crimes to simply further his own life ambitions, but out of these desires to make up for his father not being able to live up to the successful meme as told in story of the two mice. Frank father's theme for his own life when he was successful that was ingrained in a young Frank was; "Two little mice fell in a bucket of cream. The first mouse quickly gave up and drowned. The second mouse wouldn't quit. He struggled so hard that he eventually churned the cream into butter and crawled out. Gentlemen, as of this moment, I'm that second mouse." Frank made the promise to himself that he wouldn't accept his relegated station in life and leapt at the chances to play as a successful man that others would look up too, but he does it for the wrong reasons, and winds up unhappy and lonely and half mad even with millions of dollars when agent Handratty finally catches up with him.

            The second film, the documentary Catfish, focuses on Nev Shulman, a mid twenty something photographer living in New York who becomes 21st century technology pen pals with an 8 year girl Abby from Michigan and her family after she is inspired to do a painting of a photograph he had published in a magazine and send it to him. As times passes, Nev continues to receive paintings, some also based off his photographs from the prodigious young artist and he connects with the other members of her family, their circle of online friends and begins to develop a long distance flirtative romance with her 19 year old half sister Megan. What Nev comes to find out is that neither Abby nor her sister Megan are who he thought he was carrying on communication with but are personas created by the mother Angela who is living out personal fantasies this way to make up for areas in her life that are lacking. Nev begins to uncover the truth after Angela stretches the lies to include that "Megan" is recording songs by request for Nev and his friends that they find are in fact just lifted off Youtube that she is passing off as her own original work. With the help of search engines and a bit of detective work over the phone, more holes begin to show in the lives that the mother had crafted for her kids and family to be grander and larger than they exist in real life.

            Frank's quote from Catch Me if You Can of "People only know what they/you tell them" rings true for the characters in both films and certainly a sound life lesson for anyone wishing to get away with a little extra by building up and falsifying their image whether they are a young man playing at being an adult and cunningly defrauding banks or a middle age women pretending to be a talented young painting prodigy and an attractive young singer and dancer leading a young gullible filmmaker along into long distance relationship. The culprits of deception in both films couldn't stop the lies they had built and are found out by letting too much information from their own lives slip into the false persona's they use to fool others. Both characters in the films are using these false persona's to escape in some manner in hopes of supplementing their regrets of the past and current lives that lack in different ways. Frank at the end wishes for the entire affair to be over and finds a new live on the other end of the law working for the FBI. Angela, who knew that she couldn't keep up the ruse with Nev forever once the lies became more and more complex as Nev became closer to "Megan", seemed at the end of the movie to be relieved to be found out and exposed and it is good she is embracing her desire to paint, not as Abby the prodigy, but as herself and that's a positive outcome.