Portrait of a thief, portrait of a lover

On Mistress America & writing about real people.

The main character of Noah Baumbach’s film Mistress America is a 18-year-old girl named Tracy (Lola Kirke) who wants to be part of her college’s prestigious literary club. She submits a first short-story that is rejected. A freshman at Barnard, her college experience thus far is not really exciting, she’s mostly seen stumbling through her classes and walking alone. She doesn’t see much and feels out-of-place. Her mother is about to marry a man whose daughter, Brooke, lives in New-York. Brooke Cardinas is played by Greta Gerwig who, like always, is superb. It is love at first sight. At least for Tracy. After her first adventurous night in New York with Brooke, Tracy starts writing a story called “Mistress America,” inspired by her encounter with her soon-to-be stepsister. 

Brooke Cardinas’ problem, as she exposed it clearly that night, is that people have a tendency to steal stuff from her. Her ex-friend Mamie-Claire stole her boyfriend, her tee-shirts idea and even her cats. She always has great ideas but never follow through (as Mamie-Claire says later in the film). I thought a lot about The Social Network (who owns ideas etc.) while watching the movie, especially during the climactic scene when Brooke discovers that Tracy has written a short-story based on her.

After watching Mistress America, I immediately recalled Toni Morrison’s Paris Review interview where, talking about crafting fictional characters, she says:

There is this feeling that artists have—photographers, more than other people, and writers—that they are acting like a succubus . . . this process of taking from something that’s alive and using it for one’s own purposes. You can do it with trees, butterflies, or human beings. Making a little life for oneself by scavenging other people’s lives is a big question, and it does have moral and ethical implications.”

I’ve accepted a long time ago that I wasn’t a good fiction writer. I’ve never been able to write about people that were just the product of my imagination. I can only write about what I’ve known and what I know now. Real people, real places, real events and situations in which I was. I felt and still feel bad about it for some reason. Not because I thought, like Morrison, that writing about others, real people, was theft but because it was an indication of my own lack of imagination and creativity and also of my dependency on “reality” (and thus laziness).

On the other hand, my phenomenology instructor said during a class that even speculative fiction was never that original and imaginative because it was always based on the real world, about real events, real people, real places. Pure imagination doesn’t exist, he said. You can only write about what already exists in the world. You can only write about what you’ve known and what you know now.

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During my two-month trial of university last year, I gave a presentation/speech on plagiarism on the internet and how social media functionalities “kill the author”, erase sources and encourage plagiarism and mimetism. It was inspired by a book on the subject written by Michel Schneider and called Voleurs de Mots (literally “Words Thieves”). In this book, the author, using a psychoanalytical approach, retraces the history of literary plagiarism and paints a sensitive portrait of the plagiarist, a tormented individual, a masked writer encircled by the voices and sentences of others, who has never encountered the widely experienced phenomenon that is the blank page (for them the page is always filled with words). It’s a book where the author approaches plagiarism as a fact of literature and that shows that a lot of great, praised writers have plagiarized, imitated, pastiched.

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I am not really possessive, but the internet definitely taught me to be more vigilant about plagiarism. Many times, I’ve been flattered when people would write something and tell me that I inspired them. I understand now, having witnessed plagiarism in various forms, why one would be suspicious of this word. Inspiration: inhaling, sucking up, taking in, borrowing, stealing. 

It’s not a coincidence that the space wherein exists the most aggressive plagiarism is also the space that produces the most virulent criticism of (cultural, intellectual) appropriation and copyright violation.

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There is a difference between plagiarism and writing about others though.

The climactic scene mentioned above is both a trial and a MFA-style critique in which Tracy’s intentions and her short-story are being judged. Everyone seems to agree: what she did was wrong. A character named Karen (played by Cindy Cheung) says that her work is all pastiche, typical of her generation and this remark deserves its own piece. Brooke is predictably livid (“You joined my life – you needed a place to go and I invited you in and then you stole my life. You’re a LEECH. A BLOODSUCKER.”)

Tracy defends herself with pretty solid arguments: most writers are inspired by real people/events and the night when they met, the events they shared didn’t belong to Brooke only.

Is it important that, in the film, Tracy is shown stealing objects twice? The film insists on that. She borrows the title “Mistress America” from Brooke’s superheroine TV show idea. She kisses another character’s boyfriend. Obviously, Tracy likes to take things from other people. So I don’t know if this is supposed to be a character trait, if Tracy is supposed to be seen as a compulsive thief, making the writing of the short-story just another one of her numerous thefts.

But I’d like to source the writing of that short-story somewhere else. I saw Mistress America as a love story between two women. And so if Tracy writes about Brooke, it is because she loves her. For some, the world tends to reduce itself to the manners, the voice, the body of the loved other. It is nearly impossible to not write about them.

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I write about others, but not everyone. I write about people who’ve left marks, who have impressed me. I write about people whose presence had effects on me, and those effects belong to me, I am allowed to write about them. Moments shared with another person belong to the both of us.

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Tracy’s problem is mild compared to mine. I don’t steal but in the presence of someone I love, I gradually turn into a mime, emulating their voice, way of laughing and manners. It’s really not calculated, and I have noticed that about myself not so long ago. I experience this more as a loss of sovereignty than anything else.

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I also think about this from Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just:

“Beauty brings copies of itself into being. It makes us draw it, take photographs of it, or describe it to other people. Sometimes it gives rise to exact replication and other times to resemblances and still other times to things whose connection to the original site of inspiration is unrecognizable.”

The person you love is always the most beautiful in the world. Again, how can Tracy not write about Brooke? I don’t think Tracy is (just) a succubus. Throughout the film she longs to be with Brooke all the time and, maybe, writing about her is just a way to extend that closeness a bit longer, to possess her at least in her writing. Reproducing the loved other in writing so as to keep of portrait of them near us for eternity.

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It’s the other way around: If I write about you, if you’re on this page, it is because I am under your grip.

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Writing about others is always writing about oneself, about what one has seen, heard, felt, touched and observed. Those personal observations belong to the writer. The thoughts ascribed to the character, even when based on a real person, belong to the writer. A writer could never steal someone’s life and put all of it on paper. Even the most sensitive, analytical, observant writer could never do it.

(to go back to the internet, that’s why a space like tumblr is dangerous and the place of so many strange events and behaviors. People tend to be highly vulnerable there, projecting their thoughts, mimicking their thoughts patterns with the help of emojis/pictures and more, reproducing the way they talk as authentically as they can and imprinting as much as they really are in their blogs. )

But even on the internet, it’s always just the tip of the iceberg, there is so much we can’t grasp and capture. A person is always so much more than what appears and what is observed.  

We don’t really need to put a copyright on our lives, unless we believe our lives are simple, small and fixed and always under our control. Some things escape us. Always remains a certain opacity and mystery, a dimension of us that no one will ever have access to.

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“You took something I said and made a tweet about it! What about that?” – Tracy, Mistress America