When disturbing acts of manipulation or cruelty appear in documentaries, viewers often search for a simple explanation. One explanation is psychological: the person must be mentally unstable. Another explanation is moral: the person knowingly chose to harm others. Yet many real cases resist this clean distinction. Individuals who commit harmful acts rarely see themselves as villains. Instead, they construct narratives that justify their behavior. They portray themselves as victims, defenders, truth-tellers, or heroes correcting an injustice.
The documentaries The Perfect Neighbor and High School Catfish explore this unsettling dynamic. In both films, individuals escalate conflict through patterns of deception, resentment, and obsessive grievance. At times their behavior appears irrational or emotionally unstable. At other moments their actions seem deliberate, strategic, and calculated. What makes these stories disturbing is not simply the harm they cause, but the way the individuals involved interpret their own actions. Each person constructs a story that makes their behavior appear reasonable—even righteous—from their own perspective.
These documentaries raise an important question about human behavior:
How do people justify cruelty to themselves?
Psychologists often describe this process as moral disengagement—the ability to harm others while preserving the belief that one is still a good or justified person. People may blame the victim, exaggerate their grievances, reinterpret their actions as self-defense, or frame themselves as the victim of a hostile world. Or they may see themselves as heroes in their own drama. Some people commit harmful acts while believing they are the morally righteous or aggrieved protagonist in a moral drama. Both documentaries actually illustrate that pattern remarkably well. When these narratives take hold, the line between psychological instability and moral wrongdoing becomes difficult to distinguish.
Essay Task
Write a 1,000-word comparative argumentative essay analyzing how The Perfect Neighbor and High School Catfish portray the stories people tell themselves to justify harmful behavior.
Your essay should develop a thesis that addresses this question:
Do the individuals in these documentaries appear primarily mentally unstable, morally responsible for their actions, or trapped inside narratives that allow them to see cruelty as justified?
Thesis Requirement
Your introduction must include a thesis that:
- Takes a clear position on the role of self-justifying narratives in the documentaries.
- Maps the major reasons that will organize your body paragraphs.
Example thesis with mapping:
The destructive behavior portrayed in The Perfect Neighbor and High School Catfish becomes understandable when we examine the self-justifying narratives constructed by the individuals involved: each person frames themselves as a victim of injustice, interprets retaliation as moral correction, and gradually loses the ability to see their actions from the perspective of others.
Mapping components:
- victim narratives
- retaliation framed as justice
- loss of empathy or perspective
Each of these becomes a body paragraph.
Essay Requirements
Your essay must include:
• a clear thesis with mapping components
• comparison of both documentaries throughout the essay
• analysis of specific moments from the films
• a counterargument that challenges your interpretation
• a rebuttal defending your position
• a concluding paragraph reflecting on what these documentaries reveal about human moral reasoning
Possible Directions for Your Argument
You might argue that:
• people justify cruelty by constructing victim narratives
• resentment allows individuals to reinterpret retaliation as justice
• deception becomes easier when someone believes they are morally right
• psychological instability intensifies but does not fully explain destructive behavior
• the documentaries reveal how ordinary people can become morally dangerous when they stop questioning their own stories
Cinemorphosis 
Leave a comment