Dysfunctional Ever After
Dysfunctional Ever After Some women strive for attention, and would pay any price to get it, but not all attention seekers do so because of personality disorders. Most sacrifice some of their personal values for the sake of attention. Therefore this usually is the result of an underlying disorder. Ariel Schulman, Henry Joost, and Yaniv Schulman, Ariel's brother, are the filmmakers that created Catfish, a documentary showing how even a seemingly normal, but troubled housewife who spent the majority of her days caring for two severely handicapped stepsons all the while creating an elaborate web of online deception until reality came crashing in (2010). In author Helen Shulman's short story, "Parents' Night," she gives readers a detailed glimpse of how far a married woman will go to seek the desired attention she craves from her not yet divorced previous husband (2008). Do they do it for the thrill, the need or are they seeking this additional attention for greater reasons? The film Catfish and the short novel, “Parents’ Night, both displayed abnormal behaviors of two seemingly normal married women. In today’s social society, who and what is real? Karen Dill, a psychologist at Fielding Graduate University in Santa Barbara says, “In real life, how close you are to someone dictates the intimacy of your disclosure. Disclosure is a choice and it is a socially meaningful one.” The filmmakers of Catfish and author Helen Schulman, both show how the rules of disclosure and exposure have changed. Angela Wesselman, the troubled housewife in Catfish, clearly shows that her disclosure was open to a certain extent, she only revealed minimum truth to Yaniv. Throughout the course of the movie she fabricates her entire relationship with Yaniv and habitually lies to her husband. She takes her tangled web of lies so far as to include her daughter, friends, both real and fictitious, and other members of her family just to continue to pursue the manipulating relationship with
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