S1E9 Rod and Ebony: In the Fun House
If you were watching along with me, I would be tempted to tell you to not, I repeat not, watch season one, episode nine, “Rod and Ebony.” If last episode represented the evolution of trash television into something kinder or at least subtler, this one is trash at its most irredeemable: smelly, covered in flies. Or maybe it’s just...bad TV? Max and Nev parachute into a mysterious situation. The result is a convoluted episode that feels like it’s been redacted in a dozen places.
It is also, I should say before I go further, relentlessly transphobic. Like, last-ten-minutes-of-Soapdish transphobic. This is purportedly why one cannot stream “Rod and Ebony” on the MTV website anymore (though you can still stream it on Hulu). I don’t want to give too much explicit coverage to the transphobia here, because it’s neither entertaining nor worthy of evaluation; and also because it’s not really the point. Ebony’s theoretical transness is something the show seizes upon, the way you might seize upon certain details in trying to recall the specific unreality of a dream.
To be honest with you, I have no idea what’s really going on in “Rod and Ebony.” Maybe that is ultimately the most interesting thing about it. The thing about getting to know someone by watching them on television or messaging them on the internet is that the truth of the situation is elusive, and probably unsatisfying. It’s like when someone explains that they said something hideous to you because they were drunk. Okay, but...
Maybe the Catfish crew are privy to details of Rod’s life that the viewers are not, but I suspect not. I suspect that the whole thing was just too weird from the beginning, so they did their best, which was awful.
My freshman year of college I took a class on Western Ideas that met in a basement and was taught by a fancy old professor, the kind that uses chalk. One day, he was trying to explain an Einstein theory to us, and one of my classmates raised his hand and said:
“I’m sorry, but this is incomprehensible.”
And the professor grinned, holding his chalk, and said: “Maybe it seems incomprehensible because it cannot be comprehended.”
That is exactly the kind of remark that resonates with a penny-loafered freshman pursuing a liberal arts degree, but I have to say that I do still think about it a lot. There are limits to what can be understood about the universe, and there are many more limits to what can be understood about other people. That’s probably something one should absorb fully before diving into “Rod and Ebony.”
Max and Nev are contacted by a catfish named Rod who is seeking their help to meet Ebony, a woman he has been talking to online for the past four years. Rod says he first met Ebony on a gay dating website, where he was using a fake name, KJ, and his cousin’s photos. As they grew closer, Ebony revealed to Rod that she was trans, something he accepted (though not without some reservations). Max and Nev (in 2012! Not even a decade ago!) find the idea of Rod dating a trans woman to be 1.) shocking, 2.) confusing, 3.) funny, and, 4.) apparently, so outre that this is why they want to do the episode.
The boys travel to Jackson, MS and meet Rod at his workplace, where he is in the kitchen frying cheese. They sit down at table and Rod clarifies some things: he doesn’t identify as gay, he thought the dating website where he met Ebony was for everybody. He has never dated a trans woman before, and says it would be something he’d have to get used to, but he’s open to it. Max and Nev say some ignorant shit to Rod and to each other, and then they get to work finding Ebony.
The investigation is not a huge part of the episode. The scenes where Max and Nev would ordinarily be searching photos and calling Facebook friends are largely supplanted by an unbearable segment where they force Rod to explain Ebony’s trans identity to his friend while they play basketball. The friend, glancing directly into the camera, says that he accepts the situation; Max and Nev seem surprised. (I am miserable.)
Then they take Rod to meet Ebony. She shows up to the door with a big smile and embraces Rod; she looks exactly like her photos, but comments that he looks nothing like his. Their meeting is asymmetrical. Ebony is effusive; Rod seems to shut down. He admits that he used fake photos and a fake name. These revelations upset Ebony so much that she has to take a moment to compose herself, and when she returns, she says that she lied about a few things as well.
Ebony’s Confessions
She has an 11 year old daughter.
She is not actually transgender.
Before meeting Rod, she identified as a lesbian and dated exclusively women for 15 years.
Because the episode’s theme wouldn’t work otherwise, everyone focuses in on #2. They call it for the day, and as Rod buckles his seatbelt, Max and Nev ask him how he feels about the fact that Ebony is not actually trans. They ask him if it’s possible that he is disappointed. He takes a deep breath and says that there’s something he hasn’t told them.
Rod’s Confessions
Ebony has been sending him a few hundred dollars a month and paying his phone bill.
He is not sure he would have kept up the relationship at its current level of intensity were it not for the financial help.
Max and Nev argue about this amongst themselves. Max doesn’t buy it, because he’s still convinced that Rod is secretly gay. Nev seems like he wants to pack it all in and go home. The next day, the three guys return to Ebony’s house, and Rod tells her that he sees her as a friend, nothing more - but that he let her believe that he was in love with her because she was sending him money. Ebony is outraged.
“What did you expect to get from this confession?” she yells. “You pissed on everything!”
I find this apt. Rod, to me, seems confused, rueful, humiliated; this seems to be a last-ditch attempt to undo it all. He is metaphorically pissing on the image we’ve built of him over the past twenty minutes. Nev, however, convinces Ebony to forgive Rod, pointing out that Rod is clearly at a low point in his life (that much is clear, even if we don’t know why) and the two decide to remain friends.
Like I said: I don’t really know what’s going on here.
I have a guess, and it’s this: Rod was on the dating site as a tourist; with the fake photos and name, he could explore the space without feeling too vulnerable. Ebony was on the site to meet a friend - preferably, she says, a gay man so that there would be no chance of romance. The two met, started talking, and once she realized she was attracted to Rod, Ebony lied and said that she was trans in order to keep the attention of someone she thought was gay (wrongheadedly, because TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN). Rod was surprised (or maybe not surprised) to find himself not dissuaded by this, and the money didn’t hurt, either. But, when they met, it got too real, it became terrifying.
Was Rod questioning his own sexuality, and that’s what drove him to an LGBT dating website? Was he perhaps seeking out trans women to date, and that’s why he seemed to shut down when Ebony revealed that she was cis, or was it just the fact of the lie? Could it be that Rod chose to obscure some of his motivations, or frame events in a certain way, because he knew he was appearing on television? Is he confused and upset, or is he lying? Could he be all of the above? I just don’t know.
The writer Heather Havrilesky, in her advice column Ask Polly once wrote that “trying to engage with liars is like trying to live inside a fun house, where the walls and floors move and there’s a new hall of mirrors around every corner.” I like this image, because that is how hard it is to find your footing when the truth is in question. Many other people have said, more eloquently than I ever could, that the whole world sort of feels like a fun house now: we can no longer all agree that the Earth is round or that vaccines work or that prominent politicians are generally bad people but probably not reptilian criminal masterminds. It is scary, and also nauseating.
The walls and floors are moving in this episode of Catfish, but it’s hard to say who’s moving them. How do you know if someone is a liar, or just lying to themselves? Isn’t there something of the fun house in all interpersonal relationships, wherein the ultimate frustration is the inability to see inside someone else’s head? Maybe Rod and Ebony are incomprehensible because they cannot be comprehended. Not by each other, possibly not by themselves, and certainly not by me, watching them in bed with a bowl of ramen noodles in my lap.
Look: we all do weird, desperate, unknowable things, especially when we are alone. After all, the insides of our heads are weird, desperate, unknowable places. If there’s anything truly special about Catfish, I think it might be that it suggests that you don’t have to understand somebody to empathize with them.
Maybe that’s not very satisfying, but it’s what I’ve got.
XOXO,
Hannah
Reading: Alissa Bennett’s (really good) zine series Dead Is Better
Listening to: The Reply All series about the implosion of Bon Appetit
Fantasizing about: an apartment where the radiators aren’t so loud they drown out my TV. Is that possible in New York?
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