Last week, my sister-in-law posted an article by one of her creative writing teachers alleging that the hot indie movie Lady Bird, directed by Greta Gerwig and starring Saoirse Ronan, is “a white-lady Real Women Have Curves”. Michelle Cruz Gonzales says that it steals the plot, some scenes, and its cinematography style from the 2002 film by directed by Patricia Cardoso and starring America Ferrara. In a follow up article, Gonzales said that Lady Bird is guilty of plagiarism because it overuses the “ideas of a source, so that those ideas make up the majority of one’s work”.
In academia, you need to cite every source you use, even if it’s only a line or a statistic. In in art and the movie industry, copyright rules follow the idea-expression divide, which means that copyright protects the story, characters, scenes, and lines of a work, but not the general idea or genre. This is an important distinction because there are only so many plots that exist, and if an idea or genre could be copyrighted that would be a severe limit on the creativity of those artists, writers, and directors who came after.
Real Women Have Curves and Lady Bird tread the same ground. They’re both stories about the relationship between strict mothers who are concerned with their daughters’ practical well-being and spirited daughters who rebel against their mothers’ control. This is a pretty well-established genre with films like Freaky Friday and Brave, and also a common situation in ordinary life. The important questions are, 1, Do they share the same story, characters, scenes, or lines? and 2, Does the stolen story, characters, scenes, or lines “make up the majority” (more than 50%) of the work?
Let’s take a look!
[warning: spoilers for both movies ahead]
Summaries
Lady Bird
Lady Bird is about a young woman in Sacramento who is bored of her hometown and wants to go to college on the East coast. She wants everyone to call her “Lady Bird” instead of her real name, Christine. Lady Bird fights a lot with her mother, Marion, who is hard on her for a number of reasons. She does some bad things: jumps out of the car, throws out her math teacher’s grade book, throws temper tantrums. Lady Bird falls in love with one sweet guy who turns out to be gay, and one hot guy that turns out to be a jerk. She tries to leave her old friend Julie behind to fit in with the popular crowd, but it doesn’t work and she goes back to being friends with Julie. She gets in to college in New York. When it’s time to leave, Marion won’t come out of the car to say goodbye. She turns around and comes back, but too late and she cries while her husband holds her. When Lady Bird arrives at her dorm, she finds letters for her that her mom threw out but her dad rescued and slipped into her luggage. Lady Bird gets too drunk at a college party, gets hospitalized, goes to church, and calls her mom to thank her for everything she’s done and tell her that Christine is a good name.
Real Women Have Curves
Real Women Have Curves is about a Latina girl named Ana who has just graduated high school. She doesn’t think she can get in to college, but she doesn’t want to work in the sweatshop like her mother and sister. Her mother, Carmen, wants her to stay home, get married, and go to work. Her mother also constantly reminds her that she’s fat and she needs to lose weight to be more attractive so she can find a husband. Her teacher helps her apply to college against her parents’ wishes. Ana starts working in the sweatshop and burns a dress while she’s ironing it. Her mom chases her down the sidewalk and gives her hell for it, then Ana helps her walk back. A privileged white boy asks Ana out. He tells her she’s beautiful and they have sex, but she’s still insecure about her body and her mother wouldn’t allow her to date him (and he’s pretty creepy), so she breaks up with him. Carmen sees Ana admiring her naked body in the mirror, intuits she’s had sex, and calls her a slut. Ana stands up for herself and says there’s more to her than her body. Ana defies her mother by eating flan, taking her shirt off on a hot day in the sweatshop, and going away to college. When Ana is leaving, Carmen won’t come out of her room. She eventually changes her mind, but it’s too late and we see Ana glaring back at her from the passenger seat of the truck. The movie ends with Ana smiling as she walks down a street in New York.
Story
The two movies do have a lot of plot points in common: wanting to leave home, parents who are overly critical and controlling, applying to colleges, first sexual experiences, teenage rebellion, going to college. Most of these things, however, are common to the general high school experience, so they can’t really be said to be plagiarized, or else all movies about teenagers are plagiarized. There are also huge differences. The subplots with the boyfriends are completely different: Ana’s experience is empowering, Lady Bird’s is disappointing and humiliating. The plot with Lady Bird leaving her old friends to run with the popular crowd doesn’t happen in Real Women Have Curves. Ana’s parents expect her to work in her sister’s sweatshop after graduation, and while Lady Bird’s mother wants her to set her sights a little closer to home, there’s no such expectation of a specific thing. Ana’s story is about learning to own her body and her sexuality, and distance herself from her toxic mother. Christine’s story is about learning to be true to herself and appreciate her mother despite her prickliness (and about her mother learning to appreciate Christine despite hers). The mother has a lot less of a character arc in Real Women Have Curves than in Lady Bird. They both go to college in New York, but New York is kind of “the” city to go to when you want to escape your hometown (well, except for Hollywood).
Most of the similarities can be explained by them both being high school stories, and beyond that I think Lady Bird has enough unique plot content to be more than 50% different from Curves.
Characters
Even though they’re both spirited and rebellious teenage girls, I think that Ana and Christine are very different characters. Ana is quiet and shy unless she’s pushed. She’s smart, morally upstanding, and a bit of a stock feminist character. She wants to be seen for more than her weight and for more than her gender. Her outbursts are easily justifiable and nothing she says really feels unreasonable, unnecessary, or untrue. She reminds me of Lizzy Bennet from Pride and Prejudice: she wants to study, her mother wants her to get married and have a family.
Christine, on the other hand, is nothing but loquacious. Her big mouth gets her into trouble and starts a lot of fights. She’s less sympathetic than Ana, but more relatable. She’s pretty morally ambiguous. She often does things which are just plain wrong (like throw out the math teacher’s gradebook). She also says a lot of cringy things, like “I want to go where culture is, like New York… Or at least Connecticut or New Hampshire, where writers live in the woods.” She reminds us of ourselves in high school, with the ugly parts left in. She’s pretty close to Mary Elizabeth “Lola” Cep from Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, who is also a theater kid, wants to be famous, adopts a stage name, has a big personality, and fights with everyone all the time.
The moms are the same in their concern for their daughters’ practical well-being, but Marion is a much more sympathetic and relatable character than Carmen. Carmen is kind of a monster: she harps on her daughter’s weight all the time, which is something Ana can’t really control. Marion is more justified in bugging Lady Bird about her being lazy and ungrateful. Both love to lay on the guilt by bringing up all they sacrificed for their kids, but Marion comes off more exasperated and Carmen seems more dramatic. Carmen pretends to be sick at the beginning and pretends to be pregnant later in the film for sympathy, and which doesn’t seem like something Marion would do.
Both have older siblings whose failure made their mothers harder on their second children. Ana has her older sister Estele, who is also overweight and never got married, and Christine has Miguel, who studied mathematics at Berkeley and is working at the grocery store (at least at the beginning of the film, he gets a better job partway through).
Christine’s dad helps her apply to school. Ana’s dad’s support wavers over the film, but he’s there for her in the end. I think this is probably coincidental: lots of children go to the other parent when one parent says no. The characters themselves are pretty different: Ana’s dad is a strong provider type, Christine’s dad is supportive of her, but depressed and lacks self-esteem.
The boyfriends are obviously different, and Ana doesn’t have any friends at school to compare to Julie or Jenna.
I think each of the mothers and each of the daughters are very different from each other, but both Ana and Christine are the second child and Carmen and Marion each have stress from a first child’s failure, so that makes their mother-daughter relationships a bit more similar. I don’t think there’s any character from one movie that’s more than 50% a copy of a character from the other movie, though.
Scenes
The most damning plot point they have in common is the goodbye scene. Both moms refuse to say goodbye, then look in a mirror, change their minds, and come back, but are too late to catch their daughters before they leave. I do think it could be coincidental, since it’s not hard to imagine a critical parent being too stubborn to say goodbye to their kid as they go off to college. The different settings also suggest different things about the mothers’ problems: the car suggests that Marion’s driving too hard and fast and needs to slow down and pay attention, while the vanity mirror suggests Carmen is too narcissistic, focused on looks, and needs to step out of the way and let her daughter be herself. The endings of the scenes are also different: the scene in Lady Bird ends with a redemptive shot of Marion crying, while in Curves there is no redemption for Carmen.
Michelle Cruz Gonzales says that “the Lady Bird scene between mother and daughter in the bathroom after LB loses her virginity” was plagiarized, but that the scene in Lady Bird happened before Lady Bird lost her virginity, and it went like this according to the screenplay:
LADY BIRD: When do you think is a normal time to have sex?
MARION: (drops her mascara) You’re having sex?
LADY BIRD: No!
MARION: Uh, college is good, I think college. Use protection. Like we talked about.
LADY BIRD: Ok.
In Real Women Have Curves, that scene goes like this:
CARMEN: You tramp.
ANA: What?
CARMEN: You lost your virginity, didn’t you?
ANA: Mom, you’re imagining things.
CARMEN: I can tell! You’re not only fat, now you’re a puta!
ANA: You would say that, wouldn’t you?
CARMEN: Why didn’t you value yourself?
ANA: There’s more to me than what’s in between my legs!
They’re both scenes of mother and daughter having an awkward sex talk (a common experience for teenage girls), but the conversations go pretty differently. In Lady Bird, LB doesn’t directly tell her mother that she’s thinking of having sex soon, while in Real Women Have Curves, Ana is forced to share that information with her mother and chooses to own it. Real Women Have Curves’ conversation ends in a fight, while in Lady Bird, the discussion gets put off until later. Again, Lady Bird is more complex and relatable, while Ana is a better feminist role model.
It is interesting that both of the scenes that MCG said were copied involved mirrors—the goodbye scene in RWHC had the mother looking at her reflection in a mirror, symbolizing her vanity, while the goodbye scene in LB had the mother looking in the rearview mirror, triggering a moment of reflection. The sex talk scene in RWHC had the daughter looking in a mirror, recognizing her body as desirable (perhaps for the first time due to her mother’s constant body shaming), while the sex talk scene in LB had the mother looking in a mirror, symbolizing her self-importance and disregard for her daughter. The way both films use mirrors is kind of similar, but I think it’s different enough that I don’t think they were copied. Not to state the obvious, but mirrors are a common object in many women’s homes. Mirrors can be used in film as a visual symbol to convey many things in many ways and are a particularly potent metaphor for expressing themes pertaining to mothers, daughters, sex, and puberty.
Lines
I didn’t notice any specific lines in common. The style of the dialogue is very different between the two: Curves is often blunt and overstated, while Lady Bird is more sharp and witty. Curves is not-so-subtly pushing messages about body positivity, white privilege, and bodily autonomy, whereas Lady Bird is aiming for realism, humor, and complex characters.
Style
As for the cinematography, I don’t think setting a story in a real place and using wide shots of that place constitutes being shot in the same style, as Gonzales says. Some people would say that making a film like that isn’t so much a style as a lack of style. I’m not real well versed in film theory, but Lady Bird and Curves felt quite different to me, especially in their use of color, as Curves uses soft brown and orange tones, and Lady Bird plays with light and shadow to make things look sharp and dramatic.
Ultimately, I doubt that Lady Bird was plagiarized. That one scene with the goodbyes that Gonzales mentioned was compelling enough to make me want to investigate, but after watching Real Women Have Curves and reviewing the script for Lady Bird, I don’t think there’s enough evidence there to call it plagiarized. Both movies are based on the high school experience of the directors, and strict mothers and spirited daughters are common in both art and in real life.
Edit: I found an article that explains copyright a little better: http://www.copylaw.com/new_articles/movie_infring.html
Common plots, stereotypical characters, historical settings, and other “non-unique” elements of a work are not protected by copyright. I think most of the individual elements of Curves and Lady Bird are not terribly “unique” as they exist in many people’s lives. Taken as a whole, though, it’s more questionable, since Curves and LB have about as much in common as Oreo and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (as per my review of Oreo). That was another potential case of a white writer rewriting a more obscure story by an ethnic minority writer and having it become a hit. I don’t think in either case it can be said to “prove” plagiarism, but plagiarism is really hard to prove in a creative context.
In art, it’s almost impossible to tell if two works are similar because an idea was stolen, unconsciously appropriated, or coincidentally invented. For something to be considered plagiarism in art, it would have to be pretty blatant: a unique plot, a unique scene, a unique line taken with minimal or no changes. “Mother and daughter fight, then daughter goes to college” is not a unique plot; it happens to lots of people. It doesn’t have any gimmick like Freaky Friday’s body-switching. Both Curves and LB are distinctive for their lack of gimmick, for their lack of grand spectacle. I think that’s both their greatest strength and their greatest weakness, because they’re just pure experience, which can be a little boring, but I think there is great meaning in nuance and I would like to see more “pure experience” movies, especially those featuring mothers and daughters, and not have creators be too worried about whether it’s been done before, because everyone’s experience is different and I believe (I could be wrong) as long as it comes from you, it brings something new to the table.
When I watched Lady Bird, I was expecting something funny and off-beat like Little Miss Sunshine or Napoleon Dynamite based on how funny the trailers were, but the trailers kind of spoiled the funniest lines of the movie, which I think is why people were disappointed with it and felt they had seen it before. The best part of teen movies, in my opinion, are the funny, quotable lines, of which Curves had none (that I can remember) and Lady Bird had, like, 3, and 2 of those 3 were spoiled in the trailers. If Curves is largely ignored and Lady Bird misses out on awards, I think the lack of unique, funny lines is the reason. Curves shouldn’t be ignored because it has great things to teach young girls about autonomy, and Lady Bird is great because it is more even-handed between parent and child than any other teen movie that I can think of, but to really be remembered, I think you need a “Fuck me gently with a chainsaw!” or “Tina, you fat lard, come get some dinner!”
I also thought of some other teen movies that Lady Bird borrows bits from: the perfect Christian boyfriend who turns out to be gay (Saved), the auditorium scene where the main character logically proves a guest speaker wrong (Donnie Darko, Saved), the unlikely candidate for class president (Napoleon Dynamite), the too-hot-for-this-town drama queen (Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen), the plot where the main character breaks into the popular group then finds out they are jerks and goes back to their old friends (Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, Mean Girls).
I don’t think this proves that Greta Gerwig just stuck a bunch of high school movie tropes she liked together. Artists absorb things and add tropes to their toolbox as they encounter new experiences, and that comes out in their work. Using a trope is technically plagiarism because you didn’t think of that idea, but writing a story without using any tropes and having it be comprehensible to the average viewer, especially in a short and popular format like a movie, would be very difficult. Being an artist is about skillfully using tropes in service of your vision/theme/the story you want to tell. It’s great if you can think of 100% original ideas, but taking old things and putting a new spin on them, or combining things in ways other people haven’t done before is also a valid form of creation.
For instance, Mean Girls and Heathers have almost the same plot, but Heathers is much darker and Mean Girls is more upbeat. Tina Fey, who directed Mean Girls, said it was based on a book, Queen Bees and Wannabes, but people who saw Heathers probably recognized it as similar. But really, it doesn’t matter, because I love both, I watch them for different reasons, and I want to live in a world where both can exist.
Maybe I’m just greedy for content to consume, maybe I’m worried that when I (finally, someday) publish something I might get accused of “copying” the idea of something I never heard of, maybe I’m just a white woman defending another white woman in a tribal way, maybe I’m part of the soulless white hegemony hungry for culture to appropriate, but if a white woman can make a movie about her own life, the epitome of “staying in your lane”, and still get accused of racism and cultural appropriation, can white creatives ever hope to avoid accusations of racism?
Maybe the answer to that is no, actually, and white creatives just need to grow a thick skin. Critics have always been, and they’ll always be. As far as I know, Greta Gerwig hasn’t responded to accusations that she copied her movie. Perhaps the best response is to sit back and let the critics rant. The criticism may have deterred some people from watching Lady Bird, but it’s still a financial and (mostly) critical success.
So, was Lady Bird plagiarized? The similarities are vague enough I think it’s subjective. I think not, others think so. The only person who would really know is Gerwig herself, whether she’s seen Real Women Have Curves or not and whether she thought about it while making her movie. To write something like “Lady Bird was plagiarized” is a bold statement verging on libel. I think it would have been wiser for Michelle Cruz Gonzales to hedge a bit and say something like “Lady Bird is a rip-off.” Just because a work is similar to another doesn’t mean it was actively or even subconsciously copied and throwing accusations around about famous people could get you in trouble.
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