'May December' and the malice of nice white women
The perfect victim becomes predator in Todd Haynes' new film.
The exchange takes place amid the mild wooden cabinetry in the Atherton-Yoo kitchen: Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), a Hollywood actress, asks the couple to revisit the early stages of their scandalous ‘affair’ decades earlier, when Gracie (Julianne Moore), a 36-year-old wife and mother, entered into a sexual relationship with 13-year-old Joe (Charles Melton).
“Do you remember when you first met?” Elizabeth asks. Gracie claims not to remember exactly when, but she does recall learning about Joe’s family.
“They were the only Korean family in the neighborhood,” she explains.
“Half,” Joe interjects.
It’s a seemingly insignificant detail in a film that is more obviously concerned with exploring the line between fiction and reality. But it is also the only time in the entirety of May December that a character explicitly mentions the elephant in the room: that Joe and Gracie are an interracial couple in addition to their significant age gap. Joe, his father, and the Atherton-Yoo kids are the only Asian people in the film. The psychological horror of watching a pedophile like Gracie maintain her innocence, live without remorse for her actions, and convince herself that she is the victim is only compounded by the fact that she targeted one of the only non-white children in town. Gracie’s memory of Joe as the only Korean kid shows exactly how she selected her prey: a racial minority with two absent parents, someone likely to garner less sympathy because of the adultification of young men and boys of color in white society.
May December retains the racial dynamics of the real-life case on which it is based, that of Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau. Fualaau, who is of Samoan descent, was Letourneau’s student in an elementary school in a lily-white suburb of Washington state, 12 years old when their relationship commenced. As a Pacific Islander, he was an extreme minority.1 As an extreme minority, Fualaau was especially vulnerable to his decades-older white abuser.
The film is not set in Washington but in a quiet suburb in Savannah, Georgia. Director Todd Haynes locates the story amid the genteel white society of the South, lest we forget the birthplace of the Jim Crow era justification for terrorizing Black men: that white men were obliged to “defend the honor” of white women. To be sure, all of America has historically invested in narratives that portray non-white men as sexually threatening to the innocent white women, whether it was the Chinese in the 19th century or Latino and Arab men in the 20th and 21st. Yet the South has come to represent the epitome of American racism and American backwardness; that’s why aesthetics such as the Southern gothic exist. Though the kind of abuse portrayed in May December could happen anywhere––and indeed, the real story of Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau happened in the Pacific Northwest––Haynes utilizes the South’s cultural meaning as the place where men of color are the most vilified and the most unsafe.
In real life, Savannah is a majority Black city; that almost no Black people appear in the film demonstrates how far the fictional white society of May December has gone to establish and maintain their homogeneity. Gracie’s victim complex is enabled by the rest of the white society she lives in. Her white neighbors are complicit in her violence, no matter how much they personally despise her. They placate her with constant bakery orders and entertain her presence at stores and community centers rather than face her tears should they shun her. Instead, they leave Joe to deal with her in private, abandoning, ignoring, or willfully forgetting the fact of his actual victimhood in order to pacify his abuser.
May December is not so interested in interrogating Gracie’s psychology, and does not give any credence to her victim complex. She is a predator, and that is made obvious in the film through her spoken love of hunting for sport and the clear emotional manipulation in one of the film’s climactic scenes. The film is more interested in the unabashed malice of seemingly nice white women, explored through both of the film’s female leads. While Moore’s Gracie is a wolf in pastel clothing from the get-go, Portman’s Elizabeth takes time to reveal her true colors. Alternately framed as observer, savior, sleuth, and voyeur, Elizabeth’s questionable moral compass and the lengths she will go to imitate Gracie is the driving force of the film.
There are moments in which Portman’s Elizabeth does genuinely seem to sympathize with Melton’s Joe. “You’re so young,” she tells him, “You could start over.” It’s an emotionally charged moment that the film hinges on: is this the place where Joe gets free? But the film avoids casting Elizabeth in the trope of a white savior. Its final arc follows Elizabeth’s psychological spiral, distancing itself from Melton’s Joe in a perfectly unsatisfying conclusion that mirrors the way that mass media and the public treat victims of highly publicized abuse: mining them for the sensational aspect of their story, and abandoning them once the interest has passed.
There are notable differences between the racialization of Pacific Islander men and East Asian men –– stereotypes about the threat of Pacific Islander men’s virility are more on account of their size and closely tied to the casting of Native peoples as savage or primitive, while East Asian men tend to be feminized in Western culture. Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are sometimes grouped together as a single racial category, but this does not adequately capture the differences in how each group is imagined in the Western consciousness, nor the unique histories of land occupation and colonization faced by each. The film’s casting of Melton, who is of East Asian descent, may reflect the common conflation of Asian American and Pacific Islander.