Copycat: Good, Bad, or Neither?

“You’re such a copycat!”

My words, spoken, 10 years ago, in a moment of anger against my brother, demonstrates a particular attitude within our culture. I was furious that my brother would try to copy my clothing, that he would attempt to imitate me. Perhaps it was because I had taken such care in picking out my outfit that it seemed unfair that he would be able to wear it also. Perhaps I felt like less of an individual when my brother tried to blend in with me. Perhaps I was so upset because I believed that he was not being himself, was not truly becoming his own individual.

You see, society often views “copycats” in bad light. Samsung was sued and found guilty of copying Apple’s iPhone design. “Fake cultural foods” are apparently disturbing and appalling to those who know “authentic food.” (I grew up in a Chinese household, and every time we would walk by a Panda Express restaurant, my parents would shake their heads in shame.) Fake cashmere can never compare to real cashmere. But the most controversial copycats that exist are people. The media sensationalizes this. Take, for example, the many speculations about which celebrities underwent plastic surgery to attain “fake” physical features. Social media is no exception. Just note the many jokes and circulated pictures about “whitewashed” Asians, Blacks, or Hispanics (whitewashed means that they act and do everything like white people). They are “fake” white people. “Wannabes.”

Many people start campaigns or post “inspiring” messages to help people “become less fake.”   There is an entire tag about it on Tumblr:

Most notable are: “I’m one of those people who like to have fun without needing to act like somebody else while I am.”

“We live in a world full of people pretending to be something they’re not. Don’t be one of them.”

“Don’t be a fake. Because everyone likes the original.”

Why all of the campaigning? What is so bad about pretending to be something that you are not? One of the biggest reasons why people may believe this is true is because when you are pretending to be something that you are not, you are not being true to yourself.

But what does it mean to be yourself? Does it just mean to not be somebody else?

In “Passing, Natural Selection, and Love’s Failure: Ethics of Survival from Chang-rae Lee to Jacques Lacan,” Anne Cheng, a professor at Princeton University who specializes in race studies and psychoanalytic theory in 20^th century American literature, delves into the question of true vs. fake.   Authenticity vs. performance. Cheng starts off her essay by referencing Roger Caillois, a social anthropologist. Cheng writes,

“Roger Caillois studies a phenomenon that the doctrine of natural selection fails to explain: those instances of mimicry in insect and animal life where survival does not seem to be the primary objective…In doing so, his thesis unveils and critiques the utilitarianism underlying the principle of selection…By replacing the biological and pragmatic motivations for passing with instinctual and social drives, Caillois opens up a whole new dimension to the business of mimicry.” (Cheng, 554)

There are instances in the wild where an animal’s camouflage or mimicry does not aid its survival. Take, for example, this chameleon:

This colorful display does not help the chameleon stay hidden from predators.  Why does it use this disguise?

Or this fly that is camouflaged as a bee:

Clearly, its disguise as a bee did not aid in its survival, so why does it mimic bees?

    Caillois’ argument is that mimicry, the act of imitating someone or something, is not necessarily only used for staying alive. Instead, mimicry may help an animal relate to others of its kind, or it may just be something that the animal instinctually does or enjoys. Then what does it mean for humans to imitate others, to perform, if we are not using performance as a survival skill?

Anne Cheng writes,

“In addition to the euphoria of self-displacement, invisibility appears to afford all kinds of subjective realizations, from physical to moral actualization. Self-erasure and fulfillment fuse. It is through spectacularization that the self achieves invisibility…The subject effects mimicry in order to lose, rather than save, itself and, in doing so, finds itself.” (Cheng, 555)

By invisibility, Cheng is referring to a human’s camouflage- the need to blend in with the crowd. Being ordinary instead of extraordinary. It is, for those who are different from others, being “fake.” Cheng also brings up a fascinating point. The idea that someone will attempt a performance to lose himself, but by losing himself, somehow he finds himself. Let’s apply this to real life, shall we? Say we take Wenyuan, an immigrant from China. He desperately wants to forget the differences between himself and people in America. He doesn’t enjoy the fact that his eyes are different and his hair is different and his skin is different. So he changes. He puts on a mask. Dyes his hair, changes his clothes, wears colored contact lenses. Becomes friends with Americans. Many would call him a fake American. But now that he is outside of himself, he can clearly see how he was before. He can see the differences in his new life and in his old life. Without his performance, he would never have been fully aware of who he is.

Now the question to ask is, who is Wenyuan? Is he the immigrant from China pretending to be American? Is he a man looking at his own performance? Or is he the man performing? Is he the performer looking at his former self? These questions blur the line between essence and camouflage, because watching the act and doing the acting both describe a person’s being.

In lieu of this idea Cheng asserts,

“Caillois’s study suggests that subjectivity might itself be such a performance. The philosophical and political quandary posed by assimilation (and other acts of “passing”) may not be about whether it is right or wrong to act like someone else but rather about whether acting like yourself (here the idiom is itself revealing) may be fundamentally the same as acting like someone else.” (Cheng, 556)

Cheng is asserting that the question that should be posed about cases of mimicry is not whether it is okay or not okay to “be fake” but rather, whether acting like yourself is identical to mimicking someone else.

In Native Speaker, Henry Park begins a job to spy on a politician named John Kwang. When reflecting back on the experience, he says, “I will say again that none of this was my duty. My job, which I executed faithfully, was never to spy out those moments of his self-regard, it was not to peer through the crack of the door and watch as he bore off each successive visage….Through events both arbitrary and conceived it so happened that one of his faces fell away, an then another, and another until he revealed to me a final level that would not strip off. The last mask.” (Lee, 141).

This description so beautifully describes Cheng and Caillois’ argument: that being and disguise are intimately connected. John Kwang was a man that wore many masks, and in the end, when his last visage was revealed, it was still a mask. It was not his face, but a cover-up, a disguise. Camouflage. In the end, his disguise and himself were one and the same.

Another example from Native Speaker that demonstrates this point is when Henry Park is supposed to be performing as a patient for a psychiatrist. Although he has written up his pretend life and memorized it, he still cannot help himself from weaving his own life into the stories that he tells the psychiatrist. (Lee, 206-207).

It was impossible for Henry to separate his fake self from his real self. Just as it is impossible to draw a distinction between a person’s being and his disguise. So when people say, “Stop being fake, just be yourself,” is that correct? We should not treat a person’s disguise as a demeaning exercise of being inauthentic.  Nor should we treat it as a denial of self.

So you tell me, do you still think that being called a copycat is an insult, or is it just a statement of being?