EchoBlog

While watching “Joe and Kari Ann” this week, I was reminded of a post from 2013 created by Tumblr user blink-420: a supercut of pop punk songs using the phrase “this town.” 

This supercut represents the exact kind of musical and cultural kiln in which I was fired. “This town,” for me, was Fairfax County, Virginia, a place I considered an artistic wasteland, lethally boring. My occasional salvation was to attend concerts at Jammin Java, a strip-mall music venue near the speciality shop where we bought equestrian equipment for sleepaway camp. Other times I settled for riding in the back of a friend’s older brother’s car while he tried to teach us to scream like Hawthorne Heights.

The Warped Tour of it all was just an identity I tried on, briefly, but the anger I was cultivating was real. Some people see teenagerdom as a time of transition, growth, change; I see it, primarily, as a period of immobility. A rattling of a cage. You have no money, you (mostly) can’t drive, and you spend eight hours of your day in a place where you are sometimes forced to play volleyball and sometimes denied permission to go to the bathroom. Now, of course, many of the “traditional” markers of “adulthood” are so unattainable to most people that we have created an entire generation of people who exist in a kind of sustained teenagerdom, people, basically, who feel trapped. 

That’s what I see when I look at this week’s hopeful, Joe. Joe is not a teenager, but he is young and stuck, and in a place he really hates. So he falls for a dream girl, all the more dreamy because being with her would mean freedom, would mean a completely different life. 

Alas: he never even leaves his backyard. This fucking town!

We are off to a stunning start this episode when Nev and Max receive an email from a guy named Joe who is in an online relationship with Kari Ann Peniche. Wait, wait - the Kari Ann Peniche, you say? Yes, that Kari Ann Peniche! Miss United States Teen 2003, Playboy model, former girlfriend of Nick Carter and onetime fiancee of Aaron Carter! Kari Ann Peniche! Starstruck, the boys debate the legitimacy of Joe’s story. 

Max: Big red flags here. Celebrity, beauty pageant winner, model…

Nev: You’d have to have some pretty big balls to impersonate such a public figure.

Max, gravely: But that’s what people do. 

Joe lives in Warsaw, NY (population: 5,064; “we have more cows around here than we do people”). He doesn’t own a computer with a webcam; for such modern conveniences, he has to go to a local bookstore and use their computer. That’s why, in three months of talking, he has never asked to video chat with Kari Ann. It has crossed his mind that she could be lying about who she is, but he hasn’t pressed the issue. Now, though, he’s ready to start a life with her - or at least, “move out of here and start a life somewhere else.” Max asks him what’s stopping him from doing that anyway, Kari Ann or no Kari Ann. “Money,” says Joe grimly. “Definitely money.”

Max and Nev go to Warsaw and meet Joe’s family’s horses and ride around on ATVs, and then they get to work. Joe says that he and Kari Ann started talking after he broke up with his ex-girlfriend - he wrote on Facebook that he was lonely and she messaged him in response. He suspects the connection might be through a girl he knows named Rose, who claims to know Kari Ann. This checks out: Max and Nev find pictures of Rose and Kari Ann together at a Playboy party. Other stuff checks out, too: they talk to Kari Ann’s agent; another connection confirms her phone number. Their skepticism is gradually replaced by dumbfounded glee. Could Joe actually be in a real relationship with Kari Ann Peniche? 

Kari Ann, though initially hesitant, agrees to meet up with Joe at Nev’s urging. She just happens to be in New York City, and says she’ll make the journey up to Warsaw herself. Joe, who is a pretty cool cucumber, seems excited. Nev and Max are beside themselves. The three of them wait in Joe’s driveway, trying to guess from which direction she will come. 

A car pulls up, and it’s not Kari Ann. It’s Rose. Wait, Rose? Playboy partygoer, friend of Joe? Rose, as it turns out, has been harboring feelings for Joe for a few months. She even came back to this town for him. 

“We didn’t prepare you for this,” says Max to Joe. They didn’t prepare us, either.

In its last section, “Joe and Kari Ann” takes a strange turn into the unknown. By now, we can recognize a Joe from previous episodes: a small town hopeful who falls into an online relationship out of dissatisfaction with his surroundings. What we have not encountered thus far is a Rose, who is neither a shrinking violet nor a villain, and who is so helpless when it comes to accounting for her own behavior (or altering it) that the scenes where she is asked to try are painful to watch.

Rose does have feelings for Joe, but she seems alienated from them, unsure if they’re the primary motivator. It seems just as accurate when she says that she catfishes for entertainment, an explanation that provokes outrage:

Nev: It’s an unusual way to start relationships.

Max: Nev is being very nice. It’s incredibly selfish, and you’re being irresponsible. You’re manipulating people’s emotions, leading them on, and you’re lying to them. It’s a messed up way of entertaining yourself...Joe thought he was about to start a whole new life.

Max and Nev are still struggling to define an answer for the “how bad is catfishing” question, but it’s clear that Rose’s excuse is not an acceptable one. In the moral world of the show, to catfish for entertainment is “selfish, “irresponsible” - people’s feelings are at stake! - worse than if you’re doing it out of, say, crippling insecurity. But why? After all, we “entertain” ourselves in similar but more sanctioned ways all the time (mindlessly accruing matches on Tinder comes to mind). 

I also think this stance invalidates how desperate the circumstances of chronic boredom can feel. Bored young people have been considered a threat to societal order ever since the concept of teenagerhood was invented (it is the machine against which “this town” pop punk music tends to rage), but maybe we underestimate how painful boredom can be for adults, too. Maybe, too, we underestimate the sheer number of people in this world who are bored out of their right minds. Too often, I think, boredom is associated with leisure, and therefore privilege. But I would argue that true boredom often has little to do with free time. 

There are a lot of people on Catfish over the years whose first and best explanation for their actions is that there’s simply nothing else to do. They work repetitive, pointless jobs; they live in small, stifling communities; they, for financial or emotional reasons, are powerless to change their situations. I’m also confused by Max’s comment that part of the heartbreak Rose has wrought is that she’s taken Joe’s chance at starting a new life. Rose used Joe to escape her boredom, too; but in a way, wasn’t Joe doing the same thing to “Kari Ann”?

Rose can’t explain to the hosts’ satisfaction how it all got started, but she shuts down entirely when the boys suggest she deactivate the profiles. When Nev asks her point blank if she’d rather have a real relationship with someone she cares about or her fake profiles, she is unable to answer. She can’t, she says, she’s not ready, she can’t give them up...as I said, it’s painful. “I don’t know what happened to me,” she says dully, in a rare moment of introspection. “Over the years it has affected me...I’ve gotten other people into it, my friends. I feel addicted.” She needs the entertainment it provides. 

Can you get addicted to catfishing? Theories seem to be mounting that social media, on some level, is addictive; ditto video games; catfishing is kind of a combination of both. I think it’s an interesting way to look at Rose, because she doesn’t really fit neatly into any of the catfish categories that Nev identifies in his book (or that I can identify from repeated viewings). She’s not so in love with Joe that she’s afraid of revealing her true self for fear of losing him; she doesn’t seem to have significant issues with her own appearance; she’s not out for revenge. She just can’t stop. The prospect of facing down so much boredom is too awful for her to consider.

I really wonder how we all will have essentially changed post-pandemic, once things are more or less “back to normal.” The endless bizarre combination of trauma, cabin fever, and anger feels like it will bear interesting fruit once we have to more regularly confront our fellow beings again. Will we be able to fully absorb their humanity? Or will they provide relief, mainly, as sources of entertainment?

For now, I suppose, we’ll have to take comfort in the harmless diversions, as Joe does at the end of this episode, when he has Max and Nev drive alongside his ATV so he can see how fast it goes.

Next time: we head back to the state of Michigan, aka the hottest of Catfish hotspots, with Tyler and Amanda. Until then! 

XOXO,

Hannah

Reading: Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes’ Hollywood by Karina Longworth

Watching (and adoring): Pretend It’s A City on Netflix

Little things bringing me comfort: Yoga with Adriene, Phish Food ice cream, and a new, blank journal

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