She tattooed "MINE" across her thigh

Content Warning: Sexual Violence

At the Cannes film festival, for the premiere of The Chronology of Water, her directorial debut, Kristen Stewart wore a gorgeous, dykey white short suit with a new tattoo across her thigh: “MINE” it reads. It’s so sexy! It winks at a queer power exchange: whose is she? Who is hers? How does she belong to herself? 

I first saw Kristen Stewart on screen on a Friday night at midnight in 2008. I’ll admit, at seventeen, with all my friends, I waited in line for the opening screening of Twilight, having binged the trilogy of books in a few stay-up-till-the-wee-hours nights. Since then, the media has trained me to view Stewart as a starlet—a woman consumed (by fangs, by our gaze), not one with agency. So I’m a bit ashamed to notice my surprise when she came out swinging with sharp, angry, feminist takes that sound like jagged prose: “I’m sorry I was selfish. I wanted to have a self.”

When Chronology of Water finally made its way from Cannes to a cramped, two-night-only, sold-out screening in Seattle, I saw Stewart’s “MINE” tattoo in a new light. The tattoo isn’t just a queer seduction, but a mantra for claiming ones body, agency, lifeforce, and story from trauma, rape culture, and patriarchy. The story of the film mirrors her development as an artist—going from one whose image was stolen, to an artistic leader creating her own. With that red carpet look, debuting not just her film but her tattoo, Stewart is both seizing and surrendering control of her image, arriving as a new kind of artist. MINE is the thesis of the film. 

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Stewart has had cameras raking over her body for decades—on the big screen, by the paparazzi, on the red carpet. As a teenager, Kristen Stewart was birthed into cinematic fame in Twilight: a tale about PTSD and abuse, but one so rife with denial that there was no opportunity for healing or transformation. She was then given a tale-as-old-as-time starlet treatment: blamed and slut-shamed for an “affair” with her boss, a director almost double her age, on the set of Snow White and the Huntsman. 

Since then, she’s starred in a number of independent films: the campy, horny, gory Love Lies Bleeding; Pablo Larraín's hallucinatory Princess Diana biopic Spencer; the bizarre but compelling J.T. Leroy (opposite an excellent Laura Dern). Crucially, after many years, she also came out as queer (to much delight and little surprise from queers everywhere).

Now, we are entering into a new age of Kristen Stewart: a queer feminist director whose debut powerfully reclaims the gaze that has tried to consume her since she was a teenager. The Chronology of Water “had to be the first thing I said,” Stewart stated, “because it’s about saying things.”

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The Chronology of Water, based on Lidia Yuknavich’s 2011 memoir, is a commanding debut, featuring a shrewd cinematic eye and impressive performances. The film follows Lidia, a young woman surviving her father’s sexual abuse. Over several decades—through addiction, miscarriage, divorces, and dysfunction—she fights to recover herself. Forged in those storms, she becomes a writer and builds a life of her own choosing.   

The film begins in flashes, non-linear sequences, tight close-ups, and sharp cuts.” I thought about starting from the beginning,” says the opening voice-over. “But that’s not how I remember it. It’s all a series of fragments, repetitions, pattern formations.” For example, in an early sequence, Stewart stages a moment of abuse without showing it. Braided together, Stewart shows young Lidia throwing her notebooks on the ground and tearing a lace dress with her teeth; swimming through the water, including both underwater shots and home video footage; a line of girls’ butts in yellow racing swimsuits, receiving slaps for every pound over weigh-in. The sound of the starting gun mimics the sound of a slap. In voiceover, her father says, “faster faster.” The first half hour of the film is almost exclusively in voice-over, separating the mind from the body. The sound design is sharp and slightly exaggerated, mimicking hypervigilance.

I will confess that when seeing this in a movie theatre, at about this time, I found myself a little triggered. I looked around the room to do an orientation exercise (look for five things I can see that are red), only to realize that a dark movie theatre (the old, indie kind with uncomfortable, cramped chairs…not a recliner AMC) is an impossible place to do a nervous system grounding exercise; it’s a place designed to disorient and heighten the nervous system! I felt momentarily fearful that I was trapped. But very quickly, Stewart pushes back against trauma porn clichés, giving Lidia agency, an antidote to PTSD. 

“For me, it’s much less about the things that happened to Lidia and much more about how she reorients those things and writes them down,” Stewart says in a New York Times interview with David Marchese, who comes off as particularly mediocre; Stewart runs intellectual circles around him. He launched his interview saying that the story “involves a lot of heavy stuff,” immediately foregrounding the trauma plot. In his second question, he asks her to “make concrete” the ways she resonated with Lidia’s experience, a question fishing for her trauma, too. She rejects the question: “As soon as you start making those things specific, you completely dilute the point…if you pick this woman apart, you’re not giving this woman a chance to be as genius as she is.” Stewart begins the film with picked-apart narratives, dissociated and disorienting images. But the film is a project of weaving them back together, creating integrity.

“Fuck you motherfucker,” Lidia screams at her dad, confronting him for the first time. The film cuts to her masturbating against her doorframe, trying to block out thoughts of her father. “Motherfucker,” she says as she comes. She pulls her hand out of her pants, and it’s soaking wet. “'I didn’t know a girl body could do that. Shoot cum.” At this moment, Paris Hurley’s song “MINE” pumps in as a flurry of images crash across the screen: packing her flask in her trunk for college, drawing a smiley face on a fogged-up plane window, enthusiastically eating a burger in the cafeteria, swimming (both for races and naked, with booze, at night), partying, kissing a girl, fucking on a balcony. Lidia has left home, and for the first time, she has agency. Stewart scores the film’s “call to adventure” with MINE: Her body, her sexuality, her story belongs to her and no one else for the first time. 

It takes a long time for her to be able to use that agency to build the life she wants. She spends years of her life in addiction and in marriages where she is cruel, or he is cruel. But ultimately, it becomes a story of integration and orientation. Over the course of the film, the fragments remain, but the cuts become less sharp and jarring, the pace becomes steadier. At the end of the film, Lidia has one final scene with her father. He has lost his memory and many of his faculties, making him no longer such a real-time threat. Before this final moment with him, Lidia and her husband share a sweet, brief scene. Lidia thanks him for driving her dad and managing his transition into a care facility. He says, “You never have to say thank you to me.” She nods as if this is something he’s said to her before, as if he is intimately attuned to her healing process; he’s reminding her that she can receive his care (I recognize this pattern, with María and me. When one of us is crying, we compulsively apologize. The other says, “You never have to apologize,” even though we know she can’t help it. I imagine we’ll repeat this forever). It’s clear from this exchange that Lidia is safe and cared for. She spends a few moments with her dad. It is clearly not easy: tears well, and rage is nearby. But the camera is steady, and the cuts are slow. No fragments or images from before or after burst in. She stays in the room, in the moment, in her body. 

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After seeing the film, the MINE tattoo was all the more stunning to me: not just a queer seduction, but a mantra, carved into her thigh. At the premiere of her film, she wore a Chanel short suit that would reveal and display her tattoo. Was this a side commentary on the film the audience was about to see? Was this an act of PR savvy? Was she playing the image-management game that women are often forced to learn (because if they don’t, the press fills the void with misogyny)?

Many celebrities exploit their media image for reputation management or cynical personal gain, but they can also use their public image to support aesthetic or political goals. One famous example is Princess Diana, who Stewart portrayed in the biopic Stewart. In 1987, Princess Diana did a photo op in the AIDS wing of a hospital. She is shaking the hand of a man with his back to the camera¹ . At this point in the epidemic, the stigma and misinformation around HIV were so intense that people refused to touch people with the virus. The man in the picture was the only person in the ward who was willing to be photographed—and only then, the back of his head—because all the patients were so afraid of how they would be treated for being HIV positive. In LIFE magazine, Diana showed up and shook the hand of this man. She also brought her children, the royal children. Diana clearly understood the thousand words of this picture: with that one image, she slashed misinformation, demonstrating that people with AIDS are not pariahs. She turned the camera strategically, and through her gaze, beloved by the public, she reminded her audience that these dying people are human.

But can a woman really seize and dominate those cameras, or does the house always win? Tabloid cameras ultimately killed Diana. Spencer features a sequence when, during a Christmas day photo op, the cameras flash in a dizzying cacophony, foreshadowing Diana’s ultimate death. Stewart, under a black mesh veil, poses for the cameras, giving them her ‘good side’. But she begins to hyperventilate slightly and tear up as a horde of men yell at her and snap photos. Stewart told The Telegraph that she feels “haunted” by Diana after playing her, haunted by a woman whose image was so fiercely extracted that it killed her. 

Stewart clearly understands the power of celebrity image, but she clearly also understands, through Diana’s eyes and her own, that attempting to win that patriarchal game will only burn her up. Instead, she’s like water: she’s subverting the images projected onto her through submission. In the NYT interview, Stewart says, “I don’t fixate on how things are going to land on other people because I’m not smart enough,” rejecting image-management “savvy” as one of her skills. “Some people are mastermind, crazy, control freaks….and I just don’t have that. Ultimately, I think those people are probably going to die young. I think it would take years off your life to try to think in those terms.” When Marchese asks what she has learned from becoming “a character in the tabloids,” she responds, “Who you think you are has nothing to do with what other people think you are, and no one’s wrong.” Stewart is acknowledging that part of claiming oneself as MINE is relinquishing control of what others think. “You must slide,” she says.

Stewart is clearly interested in submission and how it can serve an artist. In a viral part of the interview, Stewart says, “Performance is inherently vulnerable and therefore quite embarrassing and unmasculine. There’s no bravado in suggesting that you’re a mouthpiece for someone else’s ideas. It’s inherently submissive.” She takes aim at male “method” actors, arguing that they use that self-aggrandizing technique to maintain a kind of defensive control. She is instead interested in how submission can guide her as an artist. 

She stages this in a particularly moving scene in the film: Lidia sits on her hands, in a chair, halfway down a long, thin room, with light streaming through curtains onto the wood floor. Fifteen feet away from her, a dominatrix (strikingly played by former Sonic Youth frontwoman Kim Gordon) sits behind a desk flipping through her manuscript pages.“What do you know about pain, Lidia?” she asks. “I know that it matters to me,” Lidia responds, as the screen flashes to an image of her mother’s scars. “I’m going to take care of you,” Gordon says. The camera then shows Lidia tied up in bondage. Gordon makes Lidia say what she wants, calling her “angel,” before she hits her, then gently caresses her. “Take it somewhere. Take the pain somewhere.” The screen flashes to her sitting in a clawfoot tub with Gordon tending to her, echoing shots of Lidia tending to her sister in the tub after being abused. “I am proud of you,” Gordon says. This scene is a crucial turning point in Lidia turning toward her writing. Shortly thereafter, to her (shitty) second husband, Lidia says my favorite lines of the film: “I don’t want to fuck, I want to read. I don’t want to drink, I want to write.” Lidia’s experience submitting, “taking the pain somewhere,” letting herself be cared for, helps her heal and helps her write. 

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Making art, painfully, thrillingly, requires both agency and surrender. Birthing Chronology of Water was a long, hard labor for Stewart. She wrote the script eight years before shooting it. Funding fell apart over and over. She called making the film her “greatest wound.” “It hurt so fucking bad,” she said, of the problems that besieged the process: losing actors and department heads, terrible weather, interns in Poland experimenting with her film. “The movie was terrorized. It was really treated like a woman. It was really pissed upon. I really thought the movie was dying every day that I was making it.” She said she “was convinced that [she] ruined it.”

But then, she made her way to “the safe harbor of the edit,” where she began to see the film anew. “I started opening all of these presents I didn’t know were given to me. I planted all of these seeds in these people and they bloomed like a motherfucker.” This film asked her to fight—for funding, through (literal storms), against the patriarchal grammar of cinema. It asked her to summon “fucking volition.” But it also asked her to surrender to the creative process, to let it give her unexpected gifts, to “slide,” to “take the pain somewhere.” 

I imagine Stewart getting ready for the premiere at Cannes—donning her socks and strappy sandals, pulling those white silk shorts up her legs, revealing that oh-so-sexy tattoo. I imagine her chaotic and nervous; she said she finished the film “five minutes” before the screening. To get it into Cannes, she said her team “threw it under a closed fucking door.” I no longer see her as the untouchable, inhuman starlet I was trained to see. Instead, she’s a fellow artist, vulnerable and terrified to share work, but doing it anyway, claiming her art, her body, her image, as mine.

1  This analysis owes a debt of gratitude to Michael Hobbes and Sarah Marshall’s EXCELLENT podcast series on Princess Di.