Imitation of Strife

On Todd Haynes' Self-Aware, Self-Cannibalizing May December

Following a butterfly-laden credit sequence featuring oddly familiar piano music and a few flickering exterior shots of municipal buildings, May December (2023), the most recent film from Todd Haynes, settles on a shot of a rich, empty suburban home.  A black car arrives and out steps Natalie Portman’s Elizabeth who, we soon learn, is an actress visiting Savannah, Georgia to research her next role. So grand is the monument to domesticity, so draped with palm shadows and southern light, that we are immediately submerged in that atmosphere that is a key component of Haynes’ films and to the melodramatic form in general, one held between poles of security and suffocation, private acts and social forces, shiny surfaces and dark interiors.

After being briefly punctured by a couple of Elizabeth’s smart-talking Hollywood quips, this atmosphere is re-established when we cut to the home of Gracie (Julianne Moore). Gracie, Elizabeth’s “subject”, is preparing for a barbecue and panicking about the quantity of hotdogs. This amusing minor crisis brings the piano melody back which we now realise is taken directly from Joseph Losey’s 1971 film The Go-Between. The music's familiarity is jarring, emphasising its presence. Its heaviness closes down the polyvalence of what we're being shown. Like the vast majority of film music it tells us what to feel, but makes us aware that it is doing so. The constructed nature of the image is foregrounded.

Quickly, then, it becomes clear that May December continues what has become Haynes’ most successful project: creating postmodern melodramas that reconfigure familiar cinematic modes and tropes, using consciously “borrowed” filmic language. At their best, with films like Safe (1995) and Dark Waters (2019), this technique seems to hollow the melodrama (the paradigmatic form of US narrative) from within, producing forceful portraits of the corrosive and repetitive forces of contemporary capitalism and its effects on the human condition. These films disfigure the transmission of pathos central to the form, where not only the moral legibility of human actions overwhelmed by social forces seems to have been eroded, but so do our ways of telling these stories. Contemporaneity is essential to this dynamic: it is what gives all of Haynes’ recycling and re-coding its historical teeth. When this sensibility is reflected back into the eras it is repurposing, as in Carol (2015) and Far from Heaven (2002), we are left with little beyond dismal pastiche.

In the case of May December, the hollowing is constructed around a relationship between investigation, or reconstruction, and performance, imitation. Elizabeth is set to play Gracie in an “independent movie” and her search for the truth of Gracie’s life is predicated on finding a way to become her, to produce a convincing imitation. The events that have made Gracie (in)famous, a tabloid sensation, concern child sexual violence. Gracie met Joe (Charles Melton), her current husband, when she was thirty-six and he was thirteen. Her rape of Joe, first occurring in the back of the pet store where she worked, resulted in conviction. In prison she gave birth to the first of their children and over two decades later they are still together and still occasionally getting sent dog turds in the post.

The film presents a multiply-layered understanding of performance: the relationship between Joe and Gracie coupled with its transformation by the encounter with Elizabeth as well as the latter’s own attempts to “perform” as Gracie. The focus on acting of course also makes us aware of that being done by Moore, Portman, and Melton. Not only this, but there is the flicker of background veracity in the source material. A number of key events and characters in the film bear a great deal of resemblance to the case of Mary Kay Letourneau, convicted of child sex offences in Burien, Washington. The distance created by fiction is important: May December is not strictly a biopic, though Elizabeth’s film, the film-within-a-film, is.

In fact, it is this multiplication of small distances that underlies the unsettling experience of watching May December. The continual presence of artifice repeatedly stifles the pathetic identification with the narrative and its characters. To use the language of melodrama formulated by the critic Linda Williams: the dialectic of pathos and action that is the primary motive force of the genre is frustrated by the mimetic, performative nature of the plot. This frustration of the spectacular is a key tactic in Haynes: from the evacuated enclaves and medicalised spaces of suburban California in Safe to the dour, everyday frames and muted acting of Dark Waters. Here, the conscious insertion of an actor into the domestic dynamic stops it from being able to function. This is both an internal narrative device and the way our experience of the film is coded. Through these residual distances that prevent spectacular identification, May December throws into relief certain problems of our search for meaning in the present, a critique manifested as a form of self-aware, self-cannibalising melodrama.

Elizabeth uses a variety of methods to try and understand Gracie’s character: interviewing family members and friends, asking Gracie about her background, copying her make-up routine, even visiting the pet store and simulating sexual arousal. The atmosphere of the film we are watching, its uncanny distance, is also the very thing which Elizabeth is attempting to overcome in her portrayal. What she refers to as the “mechanical…or just removed” element in Gracie’s character.  Within the world of the film there is the implication that Gracie and Joe’s story might finally “make sense” if it can be turned into a movie. Indeed, the hope for transcoding themselves into the frame of a convincing fiction is a hope explicitly expressed by Joe, telling Gracie the film might make people “understand”.

As such, May December stages the search for meaning as the correlate of the production of imitation: they are the same thing. The “truth” Elizabeth looks for is not truth in some historical sense but a truth that will enable her to create a convincing performance. The narrative impulse (to make legible human time) and its reduction to an object of consumption cannot be delineated. What we experience as a result is the uncanny nature of a commercial genre’s efforts to inscribe such events within a narrow horizon of moral pathos and superficial libidinal economies.

In the conversations between the two women, Elizabeth continually attempts to get Gracie to unearth memories, trying to find an anchor that will explain her actions (and so allow her to be portrayed). Gracie’s replies only make things more difficult. All memory and reflection are refused by her. She has, as Elizabeth says, “a clean slate every day”. This temporal dimension that Gracie inhabits is a kind of eternal present; a carefully constructed frame of family and home-making from which wrongdoing has been expunged. The title of the film conforms to this temporality.  May December is an indication of the age gap between Joe and her in the present when the film occurs, (otherwise it might have been called January June). Though it resists interpretation, this eternity is not immune to breakdown. When Elizabeth asks over dinner about Gracie’s relationship with her children from her first marriage, linking the present back to her crime, Gracie bristles: “It’s my understanding that the movie takes place between 1992 and 1994. So why would you need to know anything that happened after that?” Gracie’s personal eternity is one composed of a fractured series of perpetual presents, eroding the possibility of establishing history, constructing a meaningful relationship to the past.

Alongside her memorial investigations, Elizabeth slowly incorporates elements of Gracie’s appearance, gestures, and practices her speech impediment. In the process, Elizabeth becomes a ghostly stand-in of Gracie for Joe and they end up having sex; a disturbing repetition of the original violence. Elizabeth is Joe’s age but she is also the age that Gracie was when she raped Joe. That she is starting to inhabit Gracie replicates the power dynamic (as well as the racial one) of the previous crime. It is made more unsettling by the obviously damaged nature of Joe’s psyche. Emotionally stunted, awkward, lumpy, his physical handsomeness is accompanied by an infantile emotional interior. In several senses, he has been unable to move on. The prospect of an imitation of the past moment of traumatic violence, its depiction in a movie, re-inscribes that moment of violence in the present. In true postmodern style, the event occurs for the first time only as repetition. Joe’s act of breaking free from Gracie, however briefly, is through an event that replicates the violence done to him in the first place. Imitating the structure of belatedness by which trauma is coded, the event can only ever occur a second time. Again, the veil of performance prevents any release, any catharsis.

In her post-coital discussion with Joe, Elizabeth’s tendency is revealed—to narrativise is to dissolve particularity. She says, “People like Gracie...” before Joe cuts her off, “You really don’t know her.” Elizabeth counters: “Your responsibility ultimately is to yourself.” Joe, in his response, has a slip of epic, Freudian proportions: “Grace...Elizabeth. I think it's a little more complicated than that.” The line between the two women has been lost. Again, Elizabeth responds in a way that erases Joe in the service of narrative coherence: “Stories like these...” she says, causing Joe to leave but not before shouting, “This is my fucking life!” The commodification of the narrative impulse reproduces the violence of the original encounter, an act of traumatic repetition. We see this explicitly within the film when Elizabeth, after viewing the tapes of the children auditioning to be Joe, complains to the director that none of them are sexy enough. She says of Joe that he has “this quiet confidence…even as a kid, I’m sure.”

Precisely what is lost in all this, and deliberately so, is Joe’s experience. The film Elizabeth is making is not his story. Both the events of his own life and the telling of them by Hollywood deprive him of any coherent history, any understanding. When he tries to confront Gracie, very gently, about their past and suggests that he wasn’t old enough to understand what was happening, she shuts him down by going on the attack repeating “Who was the boss?” over and over. There is no space for telling open to him. The chopped up emotional registers build feeling but without any outlet.

Paradoxically, however, at the level of the film as we see it, Joe is the one character who is afforded some kind of melodramatic legibility. The possibility of identification we as the audience are afforded with Joe is one constructed through the continual erasure of this very thing within the world of the film by both Gracie and Elizabeth. Joe becomes legible for us through the denial of his story. By having this denial play out across shifting layers of performance, we experience how the story of the one abused is lost.

Joe’s main pastime: the safeguarding of monarch butterfly eggs and caterpillars until they can transform mirrors this sense of coherence being present only through negation. Nurturing immature fragility until it blossoms presents us with a negative allegory of Gracie’s relationship to Joe, with Joe the one taking the protective role. These butterflies appear several times throughout the film, offering and re-offering themselves as images. Their obviousness is hammered home to us. Gracie calls them “his bugs” and treats them as though Joe were a child undertaking a science fair project. It is the kind of cruelty that functions only through containing an element of truth. Even Joe’s symbolic tools, his construction of an allegory for his own situation, have something immature about them.

In the end, in her search for the truth, Elizabeth fixes on one particular piece of information. She thinks, finally, that she has been given a skeleton key. Elizabeth learns from Gracie’s son (from her previous marriage) Georgie, played by Cory Michael Smith, that Gracie was abused as a child by her brothers. He learned this, he tells her, after reading Gracie’s diaries. The abuse becomes the lodestar of her reading of Gracie. She defines the present in and through that particular moment of the past and only in relation to that past moment. The abuse renders the rest of the present coherent.

The reveal which occurs during a graduation scene, piano in tow, sets this understanding into crisis. The two women meet on the playing field wearing almost identical dresses. After Elizabeth informs Gracie that she is leaving, Gracie says “I wonder if any of this will matter for your movie”. Elizabeth replies that she thinks it will. “You understand me?” Gracie retorts. “I do,” Elizabeth says, her tone at once patronising and dripping with pathos. Almost immediately, Elizabeth is undone. Gracie calmly reveals that the supposed abuse she suffered was nothing but a fabrication, one of Georgie’s disgusting jokes. The moment is catastrophic for Elizabeth, because it destroys the possibility of her performance, one she had oriented around a single moment of testimony. The generational perpetuator of abuse, a tale as old as time, is snuffed out.

The film closes with the filming of Elizabeth’s “independent movie”. It’s the seduction scene in the pet store and Elizabeth has her hair dyed blonde, sitting with a Joe played by an actor who couldn’t pass for sixteen, let alone thirteen. It’s a schlocky, daytime TV type production, a total hatchet job, complete with a live snake coiling around Elizabeth’s wrist as she lisps and purrs; a comically ham-fisted symbol. The emblem of sin par excellence, the snake closes down, even supplants, the interpretive function of the spectator viewing the images. It erases all social and historical specificities and folds them back into the natural, or the very least, the Biblical. The feeling we get then, is not simply that Elizabeth couldn’t get at the truth, but perhaps that the whole idea was fruitless from the start.

A vehicle for entertainment: truth has dissolved into sheer means. Here, the mechanism by which the lives of two people are reductively rendered into a narrative suitable for consumption is exposed to us. The use of the most facile stock-in-trade formulas and methods of construction to tell us only what we already know is supposed to be excused by some deeper emotional truth. In a reversal of the Proustian aperçu: griefs become the substitute for ideas.

The “serious biopic” that could have been would not have fared any better. In a sense, the problem that Elizabeth tries to address in May December is answered only at the meta-textual level, by the film itself: there is no way for this story to be told by Hollywood. Only by showing us this fact is the circle, paradoxically, closed. This is perhaps what is most interesting in Haynes: the commodification of the narrative impulse is shown up for its reductive search for a coherent emotional register to act as a containment field for historical events. The way Haynes conveys this is through a continual re-presentation of the constructed nature of what we are being shown, producing a kind of distanciation constructed through, and shown to be a result of, the fractured, retro-manic, enervating postmodern condition.

May December cuts off our access to aesthetic gratification through continual fractures, showing how our forms of storytelling have become imbricated with a vapid mud of psychology and moral sentiment. All telling is constitutively perjured. By “thinking with borrowed terms” Haynes produces a quasi-material atmosphere (or “feeling tone”) but one incapable of finding any abstract referent to attach itself to. The chopped up and overlaid frames and formulas keep it severed from mechanisms of satisfaction. Storytelling has nowhere to go. The idea of being able to locate the truth, to render legible some act of violence is frustrated by the very tools of the search.  A melodramatic energy suffuses the world, stifling and suffocating as ever, but every story effort to harness it, to render it legible in narrative form proves only to be another flimsy pretense, something botched together from everything gone before.

Daniel Fraser is a critic and scholar, teaching at University College Cork (UCC). His poetry, fiction, and essays have won several prizes and been published widely in print and online including: Los Angeles Review of Books, London Magazine, Aeon, Poetry London, Radical Philosophy, and Dublin Review of Books.