There’s a documentary on Netflix called Unknown Number: The High School Catfish, about a 15 year-old girl who starts getting absolutely horrible, menacing texts from numbers she doesn’t recognize. No one else recognizes them, either, because they’re from a text app that seems to be designed for exactly this type of thing. Why do they exist? Why would I want a randomly generated phone number for text messages? I cannot think of even 1 time I thought, “I wish I had a different number to text ____.”

I guess it’s pretty much like the Ashley Madison website. These sites & apps are for what they’re for, with no pretense or apologies. Ashley Madison’s business model is infidelity, period. Text apps are for catfishing. I don’t need burner accounts or phones, and I don’t need a super secret special number because I don’t mind if you see that it is from me, Chad. Maybe you do. But if you do, maybe you can also not use it to send abusive texts to your children? (I recognize I just gave away the reveal in the film, but it was bound to happen. My mom spoiled it for me, too.)

Anyway. The doc wasn’t great. At least, that is to say, I didn’t really care for it. It was so provocative you couldn’t look away, like the junkyard fire I saw 2 days ago. But the best documentaries paint pictures and tell stories to ask questions we don’t necessarily want to ask. People are almost never monsters. We hear their stories and end up understanding, even if we don’t like them. We see the tiny, incremental steps it took to cross the lines they crossed. They become more than the caricatures we see in headlines and click bait, they’re complicated & nuanced. We see ourselves in them.

After enough exposure, the judgment begins to be siphoned out of our hearts. Slowly. But if they are human beings, like us, then what? If we can forgive them, give grace to others, allow them to fall and be redeemed, then maybe we can be forgiven, redeemed, too. Maybe we shouldn’t be defined by the worst things we’ve done. Maybe we shouldn’t define others by the worst things they’ve done.

That’s what I love about documentaries.

This one had a villain. She did the thing, barely took responsibility, continued to lie, pretend, cried, thought she had been punished too harshly, and at the end, we didn’t understand. They didn’t ask the questions that would’ve invited her into the introspection that might have given depth. We didn’t, couldn’t, see ourselves.

[I do not blame the filmmaker, Skye Borgman, who has made many films that are brilliant. She deserves all of the awards she’s won. This makes me wonder if she simply couldn’t impel this woman to walk through the door out of villainous caricature. Maybe she did ask all of the right questions, but the answers gave so little, all that was left was the shocking story itself.]

Scooby Doo and other cartoons (and cartoon’y movies) have good guys and bad guys, but it’s hardly ever that defined in real life. When it is, it’s jarring and uncomfortable. They are usually great characteristics for documentaries – jarring and uncomfortable – but for different reasons altogether. I was happy when it ended.

Then, next time I turned on the tv, I could get back to rewatching Fisk.