The Nonsense in May December.
Race and gender play SUCH a pivotal role in Todd Hayne’s May December and they are communicated excellently through language, costume and character design. All of the things that are show don’t tell.
May December is a 2023 movie about an actor (Natalie Portman) following the life of Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore), a woman who had a relationship with a 13-year-old boy (Charles Melton) in 1992. Set in 2015 Savannah, they are now married with 3 children who are all off to college. What a story, what a movie.
Throughout this 2 hour movie, no one ever says it plainly: “When your mum raped Joe”. They use euphemisms, and hints, speaking around the tragedy. They say “What happened” and “the situation”. It is such a suburban way of speaking and it protects Gracie so much. In Debra Ferreday’s (2015) work, she talks about how much power language has to protect the aggressor while disempowering the attacked. And in May December, when they dance around the word “rape”, they disempower Joe whilst protecting Gracie. If the worst thing Gracie did was ‘fall in love’ with a ‘good-looking boy’ where is the harm? But if Gracie raped a seventh grader and trapped him with children for 24 years, then we begin to see the problem. Most of the reason they do not say it is because Joe is not white and Gracie is.
“I was different than boys my age” — Joe
What else is that but race? We know that Joe’s family was the only half-Korean family in town and may have even been the only people of colour in their neighbourhood in 1992. He was different because of the ideas of over-sexuality that follow men of colour. Gracie herself says ‘He was much more experienced than me” as if he was not 13 years old. With Gracie, Elizabeth and her lawyer both want to see her through the halo effect we reserve for the beautiful and white. Her lawyer claims “she was in denial and didn’t think she did anything wrong” when we know that she knew it was wrong from the love notes she sent Joe pleading him to keep it a secret. We can also assume that she targeted him. She knew of him because he was her son’s age and because of her race, with how tightly connected everyone is in this family, she probably knew that he did not have a very stable home life and with her whiteness, she knew people would not come after her. It sends ripples of disgust down my body to imagine this.
Gracie’s utilization of her race and gender is done best through the costuming. Her frilly dresses, mum jeans and blonde hair are meant to signify her youth, purity and innocence. She even puts on a lisp when she is about to be confronted with her maleficence. It actually drives you insane when you realize that she is not a helpless woman because everyone else knows it as well but no one wants to say it!!
Elizabeth asks Joe if she can come visit him at his place of work and he tells her to ask Gracie. Basically “Ask my mum if I can talk to you.” This made me realize that this tragedy is very much focused on Gracie even though she was the adult and Joe was the child. Because of her race and gender, she is made to seem more vulnerable than him. People describe them as seeming happy, which I feel is for their own sake and less for Joe’s. To protect the image of women’s purity and men’s aggressive sexuality in a traditional place like Savannah. And to really convey their complicity, Elizabeth who is new in their lives, digs even a little bit (of course she has the protection of being a celebrity and not a journalist) and reveals that they are not as happy as they look and Joe is deeply troubled.
Her lack of regret over her actions is brushed off as a “personality disorder”. What a racialised and gendered conversation. There were probably people who did not allow him the protection of youth because he was a boy. People who probably wholeheartedly thought he wanted it and good for him for getting ‘some’. We can see those types of conversations in TV and movies all the time. In How I Met Your Mother, Season 8 Episode 4 “Who Wants to Be a Godparent”, Barney is asked what he would tell young Marvin about sex when he gets older. He says he would take him to the red light district at 13. The joke there is Barney is a fiend and sex work is funny but not horror at the thought of a boy being exposed to and forced to have sex at that age. Then you bring in the racialised element of men of colour’s presumed over-sexuality and white women's purity and it’s a recipe for disaster.
May December was such a great and sickening watch. A must-watch for 2023.
If you enjoyed this, check out my analysis of GoT.
Maybe I missed something? Let me know, I am an eternal learner.
Favorite times Gracie lisped
- She had a lisp when talking about her old husband.
- She lisps when confronted with her ailing relationship with her kids especially Georgie who is the same age as her husband.
- She has a small lisp when talking to her daughter who is in a youthful white dress
