May December (2023)

directed by Todd Haynes

Jaylan Salah Salman

It starts with a conversation with a friend, and life stops becoming how it has always been.

Fifteen years ago or more we were a bunch of college kids. One friend knows the other and everybody starts hanging out with everybody. But even as young, susceptible adults on the verge of teenage years, we know something is wrong when our friend I tells us that he is in love with Mrs. B.

“But isn’t she like…forty?”

He shrugs and we go on with our lives. But the deep pain on his face every time he is with us has made it difficult to befriend him for a particular reason. When you are with I, it feels like someone has him on mute. It is like he has an internal gag that presses on his tongue every time a thought forms in his head, and he attempts to express himself. As young adults or teens almost entering adulthood, we didn’t pay attention to his turmoil. It wasn’t until years later we heard snippets from the chaos that ensued. Mrs. B was a divorcee, and when the truth got exposed—someone saw them together in a mall outside town—it was immediately I who was to blame. He seduced her. He led her on. Don’t all men?

We never even considered that this was a sexually perverse relationship, or that he was a victim. Why? Because he was a guy. It was like an unspoken code that it was his fault, his cross to bear. He was immediately ostracized from our future hangouts. I think it was more relief that we didn’t have to face the consequences of that scandal. Then years and different career choices separated us, and that group hasn’t really connected with each other ever since.

Flash forward to late 2023. I was watching Todd Haynes’s May December with my sister when I turned to her and said, “This Gracie Atherton character is a predator.”

Proper introductions first. Haynes directed the eccentric, dark dramedy—we’ll see about that—starring Natalie Portman as a veteran actress looking for a comeback role, meeting the woman whose life she’s about to play in her upcoming film. Julianne Moore plays said woman, whose life was turned upside down after she was caught raping—there is no better term—a 13-year-old boy, manipulating him into thinking he was having consensual sex with her.

It felt bizarre to me that people would try to come up with as many polished or less alarming descriptions to associate with Gracie Atherton. Some would call her messed up. Some struggled to see her as a groomer. Some examples in popular culture exist just like her and got away with it. Don’t we all know the famous director who dated her 18-year-old lead when she was in her forties? A rich, powerful woman and a young, vulnerable boy. A male actor who has started at an early age to—typically—support his family, only to be devoured by the likes of this female director in a merciless industry that feeds off children and teens’ bodies.

It wasn’t until I finished watching May December that I realized how Joe—the young man who was groomed by his now-wife, played brilliantly by Charles Melton—had a few lines here and there. It wasn’t the lack of dialogue but how everybody treated Joe with fear that one day he would speak, and what would come out would hurt their ears to the point of bleeding.

In a Showtime movie titled Speak, directed by Jessica Sharzer and starring Kristen Stewart, the main protagonist is silent after a boy at school rapes her, as a response to the trauma she has endured. In May December, Joe is also mostly silent, responding to events in a detached manner, his anxiety and undiagnosed PTSD preventing him from expressing himself fully, his sheltered existence within Gracie’s thorny grasp inhibiting his emotional and mental growth. He is like Tuck Everlasting, stuck near the eternal youth pond, a presence that will forever be young and taken care of. We see Gracie patting his hair and making him a sandwich or asking him to be the first judge on one of her upside-down cakes and we’re immediately uncomfortable, even if the reason behind our discomfort is uncanny and inexplicable.

This comes as no surprise how the narrative changes and twists when a man is sexually abused, even if he was a child when the trauma took place. Men always blame themselves for sexual abuse, even at ages when they didn’t realize their sexuality existed. This is where May December, a film that may or may have not deserved the hype it received, is an important piece of storytelling, if not for all the themes it presents then at least to do Joe Yoo justice. Not just him, but the real man behind the mythical (or mystical) tale that Haynes created, who sadly hasn’t been enthusiastic about the film and felt violated by it.

As someone who has met different kinds of human beings, and been exposed to men from different backgrounds and situations, and has noticed how sexual abuse hits them in all the places you would expect with an abused female, it horrified me to notice how the core message of the film was ignored in favor of its campy elements. It has stopped becoming about an abused child, enslaved and groomed into an adult life with his predator, and has instead become scenes and snippets about the kid jumping to touch the ceiling to impress a hot actress—so ‘90s—or Gracie worried about the hotdogs. Yes, May December might have some elements of dark humor. Still, it was a sexual perversion story, and a story about how men are manipulated into thinking they are not the victims so that they can retain the "boys will be boys" image and not feel less manly. Toxic masculinity as a result of a patriarchal, male-dominant society shames men into silence, so when actual children are harmed, they are cajoled into silence as well. With men, people always need evidence that an actual grooming happened, even when said men have been children when they were sexually approached or violated.

I haven’t found May December funny, and the fact that Joe's voice was on mute for almost all of the film worried and scared me. Gracie has not been an item of ridicule to me, but a cunning monster; even with the overt, tongue-in-cheek allegories to snakes and foxes, Gracie still haunts me. She is a predatory, manipulative woman who knows exactly what she wants. She lusts after a young child, and she gets him in her grasp, forever, binding him by brainwashing him into eternal submission and stealing chunks of his life to become hers, defined only through and by her existence.

Jaylan Salah Salman is an Egyptian poet, translator, and film critic at InSession Film and Geek Vibes Nation. She has published short stories, poems, and translations on many online and offline publications. You can check out her #TheJayDays reviews and vlogs on her YouTube channel.