Watching a movie may feel like a passive act, but thanks to all those nasty, horny voyeurism movies, we know that the intent behind a pair of eyeballs means everything. In film, the perspective of the audience fuses with that of the camera—the lens anticipates where we should look and where we want to look, but can also deny us gratification in playful, calculated ways. Of course, certain types of stories are more likely to attract attentive eyes than others. Topics—often taboo ones that promise scandal—become hot-button attractions: Real crime, real murder, real victims. The ubiquity of this hunger means that a filmmaker, if they’re playful and calculating enough, can anticipate where their audience’s attention will be hungrily drawn. There may be no American filmmaker working today more playful and calculating than Todd Haynes. May December takes its subject matter—a suburban family living with the suppressed trauma of a mother becoming pregnant with their first child when she was a married housewife and he was a seventh grader—from real life. Or more accurately, it imagines the lived reality of a family who experienced what was widely reported in 1997: That a teacher, Mary Kay Letourneau, was having an affair with/sexually assaulting her 12-year-old student.
Here, Gracie (Julianne Moore) has three children with Joe (Charles Melton), and actress Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) visits their Savannah home in anticipation of playing Gracie in a film. With the inclusion of Elizabeth’s narcissistic, coquettish perspective, Haynes and screenwriter Samy Burch want to center something sharp and unsettling: That our attraction to other people’s scandals should be rigorously questioned.
Throughout May December, you get the sense that Elizabeth’s film won’t be very good, or at least that her fixation with unraveling Gracie and her family extends far beyond what the role demands of her. When she justifies her interest with, “It’s a very complex and human story,” it rings hollow; when she refers to Joe’s life as a “story” (after sleeping with him), she doesn’t understand what it is about her attitude that is so upsetting to him.
May December is a film about abuse, yes, but also about trying to assess abuse through a voyeuristic lens, and how limited the results will be. Just because Gracie is an abhorrent abuser doesn’t mean that Elizabeth, her audience, nor the eager audience of Haynes and Burch’s film are entitled to know every way she’s affected and traumatized those around her—nor does it give carte blanche to all attempts to figure it out. As becomes clear by the end of the film, the only person who remains psychologically consistent through Elizabeth’s visit is Gracie. Everyone else is dangerously in flux.
A film like May December, one that implicates its audience, isn’t just concerned with condemning, analyzing or satirizing recognizable human behaviors, but also the expectations held by those looking to have their judgements confirmed and validated. These are films that challenge the comfortable ideological distance we consume media with, turning the filmmaker’s gaze on us by questioning how or why we watch.
Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon centers this idea in a poignant and show-stopping final scene. After three-plus hours spent extrapolating the racist systems that contribute to Native American genocide, the story’s loose ends are wrapped up by cutting forward a decade to the recording of “The Lucky Strike Hour,” a cigarette-sponsored radio dramatization of the murders, with all the crass, clumsy sentiment that went with the medium. Scorsese doesn’t just posit that this story of Native trauma has been owned by the FBI since the case was closed, but—with every heightened sound effect and tasteless vocal impression—makes a striking parallel to the narrativization of crimes for popular ingestion.
Should the uncomfortable details, the urgent political context of crime procedurals, really be sanded off in order for easier consumption? It calls us to question what we consider most satisfying when it comes to crime—are we in fact happy to consume the most sanitized versions? As a storyteller who more often than not draws from real life, Scorsese implicates himself along with his audience.
Ten years ago, Scorsese took the polar opposite approach to implicating his audience, undermining the glee many took at seeing fraudster and financial criminal Jordan Belfort enact violence upon his victims. As the soundtrack pumps up, as the three-hour runtime bears on, as Belfort’s drug dependency, misogynistic behavior and general distaste for his fellow humans all intensify, you keep waiting for The Wolf of Wall Street to pull back and signal, clearly and distinctly, that these were horrid men abusing the powers allocated to them by a deathly sick America.
The moment never comes, of course, and by heightening its indulgences so much (even throughout Belfort’s spousal abuse) the joke is on the audience. The point of The Wolf of Wall Street is that, at some point, you will stop laughing. Unless, that is, you’re like the real-life Jordan Belfort, who loves the movie, continuing a lifelong trend of missing the point.
The same year, Sofia Coppola dropped The Bling Ring, her take on the teenage burglars who took advantage of Beverly Hills celebrities’ lax home security (not to mention the fact that their homes are full of stuff they don’t need). Despite the souped-up soundtrack and deliciously vocal-fried Emma Watson, the film itself is surprisingly muted—well, not surprising for those familiar with Coppola’s stripped-back, delicate style.
To many, The Bling Ring was going to be a chance to look down on a vapid, self-obsessed generation who stupidly stumbled their way into crime because they were too short-sighted to think of the consequences. But Coppola, a maestro of youth-tinged girlhood empathy, saw a different story—one about the celebrity system’s weaknesses and a generation to whom branded material goods, “things,” actually meant something profound. The Bling Ring is a story of misplaced hope in self-betterment, and the audience is left with a sinking feeling that their bloodlust for vapid children being humiliated was, perhaps, misplaced.
Ultimately, though, the film that bears most similarity to May December isn’t a fictional rendition of reality. Netflix’s Casting JonBenet, the last documentary work before director Kitty Green made her fiction debut, looks at the Coloradoan community affected by the (continued) media frenzy surrounding the unsolved murder of child beauty pageant contestant JonBenét Ramsey.
The grown-ups of Boulder audition to play JonBenét’s parents in a drama that will never be made, with Green informing all participants that their auditions would be the film itself just before filming began. The participants freely give, well, everything: Theories, past traumas, reflections on the town. The unhealthy fascination with the unsolved murder of one child reflects back onto the audience; that Netflix acquired this documentary while it was pumping out increasingly faceless true-crime programming suggests they may not have read too deeply into the film’s messaging.
But even though Casting JonBenet’s subjects seem as obsessed with a tabloid-inscribed murder as the true-crime streaming masses, Green’s film cannot be simply read as a condemnation of the people testifying. Many of them feel bonded in some way to JonBenét, yes, but as a common throughline of personal trauma reveals itself, it’s clear that victims of grief, abuse and neglect have less control about what issues and strangers they feel connected to. Just like in May December, there exist in surrounding circles people who may not have been direct victims of a crime, but have had their lives defined by it.
Even if we “get” Casting JonBenet, understanding how hopelessly from the outside these subjects will always be to the case, we have to recognize that we are also coming from the outside to the residents of Boulder. How can we know what it was like to live a life in a community so unwilling thrust in the spotlight? These people have a right to answers. We don’t. Casting JonBenet may be the final word in the never-to-be-solved case, and shares its findings with May December: The closer you get to the truth of scandal, the sadder and more lost you will be.
May December has been dubbed as “camp” by some, something that perplexes Haynes. The truth of May December’s camp-ness is obviously more nuanced than a yes/no question (it’s both more and less camp than people say it is), but it indicates that some audiences’ receptiveness to turbulent, human emotional truths is outweighed by a desire to label a complex story as something they can quickly understand, and therefore exert control over.
The ironic twist in May December’s epilogue, where Elizabeth insists on more takes on the set of her clearly lackluster film, is a life sentence for all simplistic and misguided attempts at narrative voyeurism. Elizabeth’s film didn’t get any better because of her intimate insight into Gracie’s psychology, and she is now cursed with knowing how shallow and limp her artistic efforts are. Which, of course, means she should probably start practicing the Oscar speech.
Rory Doherty is a screenwriter, playwright and culture writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. You can follow his thoughts about all things stories @roryhasopinions.