May December.
I saw the trailer for May December because I was looking for a movie that my boyfriend and I could watch at The Belcourt Theatre in Nashville. It’s this indie theatre close to my grandma’s house, where I’ve gone with my sisters to see Marcel the Shell (I wept) and, back in 2015, the A24 movie Room (starring a very indie and talented Brie Larson). Both were better than I’d anticipated, Room especially because I remember we didn’t know that much about it going in—we’d been bored, wanted to see a movie, and here was this one.
I scrolled down Belcourt’s list of movies now and was intrigued by May December because I didn’t really understand what it was about right away. When I watched the trailer, I was further drawn in by how messy it was and how taboo and how meta. The film seems to ask without asking, Why do we treat women pedophiles differently than we treat men? And maybe it doesn’t ask (but I was wondering), Why do we treat Black and Brown* people like they’re older than they are and White people like they’re younger?
May December is about a thirty-six-year-old White woman who was caught having sex with a thirteen-year-old Asian boy, who—in one of the most interesting scenes of the film—she insists pursued her, romanced her, in a sense trapped her, instead of the other way around. The film takes place twenty-odd years afterward when the two are married with three children—the boy now a thirty-something man and the woman almost sixty. The movie looks at the situation peripherally, the plot focused a bit more on a young actor who will be playing the White woman in a movie—she has come to study them because she wants to get it right. The White woman she’s studying is both ashamed and stubbornly not so, continually insisting— in how she acts and what she says—that she didn’t do anything wrong.
I like May December for how it both doesn’t question whether or not this whole situation is fucked up (it clearly is), but also lets the characters show you themselves how wrong it is instead of having the message overlayed onto them. The more the White woman insists that everything is copacetic, the more you understand her embarrassment, and more evident than that is the way the boy-turned-man has the trauma of then and now laced into everything he does. He is a child still—caught in who he was before all of this happened. He harvests caterpillars into butterflies and is awkward to talk to and he has all of these kids, but they too seem to not see him as an adult or as an authority. The logic of the film’s world—at least according to the White woman and their life together—insists that he wanted all of this, but through his body language and his stuckness and his emotional confusion, you can see the harm done. In America’s legal system, where White people are innocent, even when they are very guilty, and Black and Brown people are in the wrong, even if they are children—somehow still old enough to know better, to be criminally at fault— it feels important that this film very quietly unravels that logic, that this Brown boy eventually begins to understand that what happened to him was not okay (to say the least).
Even though May December is more about how we can hardly capture the nuance of a thing in movies or in tabloids, how the specificities of even a very clearly bad thing are hard, if not impossible, to represent, I was more interested in the boy-turned-man (played brilliantly by Charles Melton). I want more stories about Black and Brown people—kids especially—who are allowed to linger in their not-okayness. Not plunged into their trauma, not made into objects of violence or pity, not blamed (or their culture blamed) for their circumstances but allowed to realize that they are hurt, that they are living in a system that has chosen—yet again—to not protect them. (The woman that this film is based on only got three months in prison for what she did, and only after she was caught doing it again did she go for longer — then just seven years, after which, she married him.) I want more movies where Black and Brown people are allowed to realize that they’re hurt and are able to go somewhere new, somewhere different, begin to heal.
*I’m capitalizing Brown because I understand it, like Black or White, to be an idea we’ve made up to justify and continue recognizing Whiteness. I personally don’t like the label Brown for everyone in this world who isn’t Black or White (just as Black—or previously Negro—seems like a sloppy way to categorize everyone in the world who is not fully White or “Brown”). Even though I love the culture, race—unlike ethnicity—seems like sort of a lazy way to understand people.
Image: Netflix
