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While I enjoyed the drama like a car wreck on 95, I never found Nowicki's actions to be believably altruistic. She was either fame-whoring, or she was score settling regarding something off camera. But there is no way that her actions could have done anything to help avoid any of the problems she claimed to have, and would almost certainly make them much worse.
She claimed that her friends recognized her and her bf based on details in the story. Bullshit. There are 34,000 undergrads at UMich Ann Arbor at any given time, you're telling me she's the only freshman to ever fuck a 30-something? The precise details may have been bang on, sure, but call me antisocial but there are like five people I would recognize at the level of detail we're talking about here. Her best friend may have recognized her, maybe a dozen close friends, but not everyone in Ann Arbor or something like that. There just wasn't sufficient detail to connect the fictional story to a real person based on past events!
But of course, once she chose to publicly out herself, it became known to everyone. And everyone who was aware of her relationship to her dead bf, but hadn't guessed the connection, suddenly became aware of this supposedly deeply embarrassing fact about the late man. That is much more disgusting and libelous than the original short story! That's really outing the guy! It's taking something that was maybe a problem you had with a handful of people in your immediate social circle from college, and turning it into a problem that comes up if someone googles you.
The generic-ness of the story is what gives it its power, it feels like something that happens to everyone. One can picture oneself in either role. I actually looked it up to cite a particular scene to someone recently to explain a feeling I was having.
But accepting your premise, that at some level thinly-fictionalizing someone else is wrong, where do you draw the lines?
Are memoirs ever ok? How many details does one need to change before one can write a novel? Is bitching about your wife on TheMotte ok because it's all under pseudonyms? What if she reads what a mottizen said about her and kills herself out of shame? What about twitter under a pseudonym? What about a blog under a real name? If Kulak writes a little tweetstorm about some "feminist bitch" he had to deal with, and she reads it and recognizes that it was her, is he in the wrong? What about the "blankfaces" that scott aaronson decried? Or is it the ideological agenda that makes the crime? What details is one obligated to change to conceal identity, and which are immoral to change because one is no longer telling the real story?
Under rules designed to minimize harm to subjects of stories, is literature possible? Is journalism? Is essay writing? Memoir?
If one likes books, it seems like one has to offer freedom to the author. I've no doubt that many acquaintances of Hemingway or Hunter S Thompson or Bukowski felt some kind of way about some of their characters, there's a cottage industry to identifying the "real" abc in the classics, and we all accept that as the cost of doing business.
Telling real stories truthfully is definitely fine.
Telling fiction is definitely fine.
Telling falsehoods about people that hurt their reputation is considered the tort of defamation.
The problem here is that we've got a story that's based closely enough on real events to identify the villain as a real person, but the real person isn't that villainous (and hence the reputational hit he takes is undeserved). If the story claimed to be real, then yeah, this'd be #3, no question. Completely coincidental similarities still clearly fall under #2; there's no mens rea, even a negligent one, if you didn't know a real person existed who uncannily resembled your Darth Vader (nobody knows the exact traits of everybody in the world). Here, though, we're stuck in the middle; the story is claimed to be fiction, so it's not an outright lie, but there's potential real undeserved damage to reputation that's the result of real choices on the author's part.
The obvious case here is A Few Good Men, which was closely based on a real Guantanamo Bay incident (the fenceline shooting, the requested transfer, the rag stuffed down the throat, and the hazers calling the ambulance were all lifted from the real case, which Sorkin's sister defended and told him about) but changes two major details in ways that make Dawson and Downie look worse than the people they're based on (the real hazee didn't die and the real hazers who went to trial weren't dishonorably discharged). Sorkin and the movie's production company got sued by the real hazers for defamation; WP doesn't state how it went so there was probably a settlement of some sort. Which side was in the right? You can argue either way, but I don't think it's obvious.
All the examples you give except the novel are not in this limbo; truthful memoirs/bitching/tweetstorms are #1 and are definitely fine, while false ones (because they're outright lies, having been stated to be real) are #3 and are very much not fine.
Given that you had a month to read it, I'm amazed that you didn't address most of the things I said in that post.
This case is clearly distinguishable from A Few Good Men in that the real incident was public record and would have been well known to many people, part of any background check that the Marines went through later in life, and ultimately "googleable" though this wasn't a relevant concept at the time Sorkin was writing. The Cat Person connection was too obscure to be identifiable to more than a handful of people, up until Nowicki chose to put it all out there for attention. There was no way to google some combination of "30 something guy some time in the late oughts or early teens who dated a college freshman in Ann Arbor and worked at a movie theater and was super lame" that would deliver that guy's name. To repeat myself:
The general rule of thumb is that a reasonable reader would recognize the plaintiff, not just a small handful of people who can recognize him from obscure knowledge but an identifiable community of people. This identification clearly fails on those grounds: only a small handful of people could possibly recognize these characters.
It's adorable that you assume that Kulak and Scott Aaronson are telling the truth when they rant about the awful Normies they have to interact with; let alone telling the truth as the Normies would recollect it. We'd have a real Rashomon on our hands if we ever got a hold of the people who have to interact with Scott Aaronson and they gave their side of the story as to what they think really happened there. The idea that there is an objective "truth" to get at whether someone is bad in bed or said a bad word once or was rude or didn't care that Scott Aaronson was lost is as good as a heckler's veto on fiction.
In research for another recent thread, I discovered that the writer of Sandlot was sued by Squints because he had made him look like kind of a dork at twelve years old; this despite Squints marrying the school hottie and having nine kids at the end of the film! He gave Squints the opposite of the Small Penis Rule treatment, and Squints still fucking sued!
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The Knausgaard Rule: if you're a great artist they let you do it. Grab 'em by the memoir.
If you're a hack writing discourseslop to go viral, fuck you, learn to have an imagination.
(For reference, Karl Ove Knausgaard wrote a six-volume autobiography, definitely the best book titled "My Struggle" ever written and indisputably one of the very greatest literary works of the century so far. It was extremely candid about his family, with the first volume describing cleaning out the house of his dead alcoholic hoarder father. His uncle hated this and has been very open about that. One of his exes said "it was as if he said: Now I'm going to punch you in the face. I know it's going to hurt, and I will drive you to the hospital afterwards. But I'm going to do it anyway." But Knausgaard gets to do that, because he's a great artist. She doesn't.)
To be fair, being better than the most famous book by this name is pretty easy.
I rather think that was the joke.
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I'm even more lost than before I asked.
To put it seriously, as a writer who deals with this question in my own work: if you're a great artist you can do whatever you want, your work is beyond good and evil. If you're not, write like you took a Hippocratic Oath. If you have to ask the question you're not great.
That may be - though is it? the annals of art history are riddled with self-hating geniuses who had to be physically restrained from burning their own manuscripts - but the more relevant problem seems to be false positives. Many mediocre, as-yet-unpublished artists believe themselves to be great and never question it.
I refer to something similar as "the Kubrick Principle." If your defense of a decision to break the usual rules of filmmaking boils down to "well, Stanley Kubrick got away with it," the only reasonable response is "you're not Stanley Kubrick." If you're not capable of making The Shining, you don't get to treat your actors like that. But if you are, shrug. I'm willing to accept that trade off.
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True, but I suspect geniuses consumed by self-hatred also aren't going to be agonizing too much about whether their work crosses lines in dealing with others. To think of Kafka, he doesn't air his dirty laundry like Knausgaard does, but there's a hell of a lot of his life and the lives of others in his work. But even among the self-haters, I'm sure, there's a counterexample for everything (that's why these questions about art don't have bright-line answers, only ironic heuristics).
Hey, if you can't hate yourself, who can you hate?
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This does not seem like a serious or useful standard, as even assuming there is anything like an objective standard of greatness, we don't really know if a work is great until after it is produced and read.
There is no objective standard of greatness, I know that won't suffice for mottizen autism, but I'm right, and this standard is both more serious and more useful than any attempt to pin down art like a dead beetle.
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