(As always with these entries, there may be plenty of SPOILERS.)

There’s no more recent, more obvious pairing for the excellent The Social Network than Catfish, which I saw in last fall and will be glad to have finally written about.

For all that The Social Network covers regarding the history of the site, there’s very little screen time for the site. The story doesn’t miss it: For the familiar, it’d be redundant, if not overkill; for the unfamiliar, it’s secondary and rightfully so. Catfish, however, follows a mystery that hinges on the site itself. The documentary addresses the mechanics of the site, not only informing the viewer how it connects people, but more importantly how it works, and most importantly how easily the trust between people can be formed or possibly fabricated.

Incidentally, there’s been speculation that Catfish is a fake documentary. The beats of the mystery unfold in a way that’s almost too easy, but stranger things have happened. I’m more inclined to doubt the naivete of the protagonist, Nev Schulman, and his cronies, brother Ariel and their friend and colleague Henry Joost. Nev’s phone relationship with Megan, the older sister of award-winning child artist Abby, is built on the shakiest of foundations. She has a voice, apparently, and a facebook profile, and some friends, but that’s as far up the trail as Nev goes. He seems to devote himself to a girl who, yes, is on facebook but is only on facebook. For a trio of young guys, smart enough to be smug and technologically savvy enough to make a freaking documentary, that just seems overly gullible. But I could see how a shred of truth could be exaggerated to fill up the first half of a movie. Fair enough.

What’d be really brilliant is if the creators continue to maintain that is an all-true documentary even if it is largely exaggerated, if not entirely made up. Without looking too far into it, because the ending was satisfying enough to me, it’s impossible to say one way or another. But that’d be the key message, then: If you’re to believe only what someone tells you through technology – via facebook, or via a quotes-or-not documentary – then all you have is your faith in that person’s honesty. Going further, the point of the exercise might be to make the viewer aware of the ease with which that trust is first formed, how easily disbelief is suspended. Hopefully it’s a natural, human thing to trust, rather than mistrust – that’d be a nice world to live in. Either way, both extremes seem foolish: Suspecting everything is paranoia, believing everything is lazy and can be dangerous.

If that’s not the point of Catfish, it’s certainly something to take away from the movie. In one small, other way, it’s an interesting way to look at The Social Network, a movie about real people whose actions have been dramatized, rearranged, possibly distorted or entirely misrepresented. That might be giving too much credit to Catfish, which I would say was good – 3 stars/4 (B) – though mildly irritating and frustrating in several ways. But if it stirs a debate, raises certain viable possibilities, lacking star power but succeeding by following a different tack, then the end might justify the peculiar means after all.