Bone Deep: Surface and Substance in May/December
Todd Haynes | May/December | May 2023 | 117 minutes
About halfway through Todd Haynes’s May/December, Natalie Portman’s character places her hand on top of another – an X-ray image of an anonymous stranger’s hand and the bones inside. It is as if, merely by touching the facsimile of a skeleton, she might gain access to the meaning that the image implies. This moment in the film simulates May/December’s driving interest: simultaneously suggesting the presence of psychological depth and its ultimate elusiveness. The film laughs at Elizabeth, and us, for being foolish enough to believe that the snapshot of a skeleton means we should know anything about it other than the fact, not feeling, of its broken bones. In doing so, it strikes at a far-reaching faith in mimetic representation’s omniscient capacities, and the flawed logic that underlies such an enduring investment in finding a perfect match between form and feeling.
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In "Rape and the Rise of the Novel," her influential 1987 essay, Frances Ferguson aims to divorce epistemology from psychology -- to uncleave our sense that either way of knowing might map perfectly onto each other, including that the fact of an event occurring would allow us access to the psychological experiences of those involved. For Ferguson, the history of Western rape law is that of a longstanding effort to resolve the beguiling issue of comprehending the mental state of another: natural opacity assailed by means of ever-encroaching legal criteria that promise to render interiority legible. Statutory rape law, for instance, allows the underage victim's mental state to be "known" by insisting upon the impossibility of her consent, and thus her psychological status at the time of the assault. To be clear, Ferguson is not suggesting that we should do away with statutory rape law; rather she highlights the ethical overstep in claiming such knowledge of another. What she makes visible is the paradox of psychology’s centrality to rape law: convictions depend upon legally assured knowledge of psychic states (the intent to rape, the ability to consent), and yet such interiority is strewn with contradictions that elude total comprehension, whether sought through legalistic decision or fictional representation.
It’s by this logic that “the display of a mutilated body” will always trump verbal testimony in rape trials, because such a display, in its visible brutality, mitigates the latter’s ambiguity. Thus the terms of rape law, Ferguson writes, are under constant revision, through its “project of stipulating formal criteria ever more precisely” as a means to combat the “problems that can arise in the effort to identify psychological states.” The contradictions and confusions of inner states are negated by formal traditions, legal or fictional, that seemingly disambiguate and resolve those otherwise contradictory inner worlds.
How do these legalistic frameworks of consent bleed into narrative ones? What do these underlying frameworks mean for our capacity to imagine harm – its representation, its experience, and its redress? What would it mean to imagine suffering and its responses outside the paradigms upon which we rely so dearly?
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The tension between fact and feeling, between the bones and what lies beneath them, plays out in May/December through its story and genre. Loosely inspired by Mary Kay Letourneau's infamous affair with her preteen student, later marrying and having children with him, May/December replicates their dynamic as Gracie and Joe, played respectively by Julianne Moore and Charles Melton. The film opens twenty years into their relationship, when an actress, Natalie Portman’s Elizabeth, comes to study Gracie in preparation for a film retelling their story. With Elizabeth’s presence also comes the unearthing and rehashing of the tabloid affair. But Elizabeth's attempts to probe Gracie's psyche are constantly frustrated, and are more often a target for May/December’s pervasive humor, not a path to characterological insight.
On the level of genre, the film extends its director Todd Haynes’s commitment to camp and melodrama that characterize his earlier films, from Safe to Far From Heaven. Here especially, May/December exaggerates those aesthetic traditions as a particular means to refuse access to its characters’ inner lives, ultimately mimicking their conventions in the process. Dramatic chords play at the exact moments in which we would expect, but fail to find, some mechanism that could facilitate our deepening understanding of the film’s characters. The camera lingers on images—an overflowing ashtray, for one—that could be symbols for, or metonyms of, or utterly unrelated to, what remains latent in each character. In a drawn out moment early in the film, for instance, the camera lingers with Gracie, who is in the midst of orchestrating a garden party. We are briefly led to expect some telling or revelatory expression on her part as she stares into an open refrigerator, only for her to exclaim “I think we need more hot dogs” as overwrought musical chords play.
Contained in a moment like this one is both a recognition of our desire for the characters’ inner recesses to be made legible and a higher-level knowledge of that desire’s futility. This effect is typical of melodrama, whose generic purpose involves bringing internal emotions to an overexposed and over-elucidated surface. But in this film, the internal emotions stay frustratingly buried, even as they tease and beckon. The camera’s gaze enacts this desire for interpretative mining as it probes for totemic objects that might help us plumb or illuminate psychological depth. But as we watch Elizabeth, playing the role of a serious actress, we see an analogous desire deferred and deferred again. Elizabeth is the figure that triangulates our gaze with the film’s– the vehicle that redirects May/December from earnest melodrama to a parody of the genre.
Early in the film, Elizabeth is invited to speak to a high school theater class at the school Joe and Gracie’s children attend. When asked by a student why she picks the roles she does, Elizabeth answers that she prioritizes roles with “complexity.” Ever the serious actor, it’s “the moral gray areas” that are interesting to her. But for Elizabeth, the presence of “complexity” is always tied to mimicry, a pleasurable but surface-level way of representing that she mistakes for embodiment. To prepare herself for that task, of ostensibly embodying complexity, Elizabeth attempts to come as close as possible to wearing Gracie’s skin. In one scene, Gracie and Elizabeth stand facing a bathroom mirror, with the camera focused on their adjacent reflections. In a distorted sort of empathetic identification, Elizabeth meticulously imitates Gracie’s makeup routine as if by looking like Gracie she might truly embody her, and newly understand this person previously separate from herself. But in a twist of that logic, Gracie begins applying the makeup to Elizabeth herself, literally taking control of Elizabeth’s means toward mimesis. Why the sudden reversal – why are Elizabeth’s attempts at finding legibility rendered so crudely graceless?
One answer is that the film is more interested in the hunger to make harm legible rather than exploring harm itself. It contends that we’ve gotten something twisted in our contemporary preoccupation with making harm so discernible and communicable and that we should take seriously making things right. The sheer presence of psychic complexity, the film makes clear, is not synonymous with knowledge. If our primary means of ethically relating to a recalcitrant psyche is still to reconstruct and then understand it, then perhaps we should find new ways.
The contemporary state of consent law is not May/December’s subject, but its frustrations, confusions, and disappointments elucidate the delirium that lies at the film’s core. The film positions the allure of psychological legibility as a false path to understanding the nature of how that person was harmed. In some sense, then, the film acts a bit like Elizabeth after all: poking at a wound that has long seemed closed, ripping apart its sutures. But whereas Elizabeth’s quest is tautological – her questions already sculpt the contours of the answers she hopes to find – the film’s way of questioning is, despite its tonal bite, more expansive, and far less concerned with reaching resolute clarity. Counterbalancing its pointed melodrama is the sense of real grief for Joe, allowing the exact object of grief to remain in its shifty, amorphous, and elusive privacy.
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In Elizabeth’s hands, the excavation of Joe’s psyche is never not enthralling. When she goes to visit the pet store where Gracie and Joe first met, her pretense of research quickly cedes to erotic curiosity. She asks the owner of the pet store (still the same man, another person seemingly arrested in time like so much else in May/December) if she can visit the storeroom where they had been found having sex, leading to Gracie’s arrest. After the owner leaves Elizabeth in the room, we see a shot of her writhing and moaning, alone. It is difficult to tell whether the ecstasy on her face is due to genuine or simulated arousal. It is as if the performance of depth is equivalent to depth itself.
And yet, the film nonetheless restrains itself from being exact about what the psychic consequences of his relationship with Gracie are for Joe. This restraint acts to shield, or protect, Gracie and Joe’s inner lives, consequently revealing the fallacies of Elizabeth’s acting philosophy. Late in the film, Elizabeth reads a letter that Gracie wrote to preteen Joe in the beginning of their affair. Elizabeth’s pleasure is sheer and exuberant at having exposed something real because salacious, or salacious because real, but it’s not a sentiment shared by the viewer. For us, or at least for me, the letter is disturbing, heartbreaking, and only serves to cement the abyss of understanding between Joe and the audience. In this moment, the film alienates Elizabeth, as if expelling her from the triangulation in which she was previously a participant. We cannot participate in Elizabeth’s pleasure at having “revealed” something, just as May/December’s gaze cannot share in Elizabeth’s twisted delight in finding a memento from Gracie and Joe’s early relationship. In witness of Gracie’s desire put down in writing, it’s impossible to deny the relationship’s unthinkable imbalances. This is in part because of how garish Elizabeth’s dramatic reading of Gracie’s letter is is at this moment: her charade’s grotesqueness makes vivid its ethical vacancy. In rendering Elizabeth, and her pleasure, so obviously deformed, the film makes her into a particularly monstrous figurehead for an even wider cultural impulse to psychologize every aberrance, to assign exacting, demystifying vocabulary to all the ways in which a person can be hurt.
It would be a very different kind of film, to say the least, if May/December were to invest itself in clearly articulating what Gracie has done to Joe: a courtroom drama, perhaps, in which Joe breaks down on the witness stand; a feel-good story by the end of which Joe manages to leave; a world where the presence of harm can always be redeemed if not erased by its assured repair. As a trauma plot—one in which the delayed revelation of a latent wound provides the total explanation for some character’s behavior—May/December doesn’t deliver.
As the film progresses, in fact, we begin to feel as if it is not despite the fact Joe has been so wounded, but instead because of the extent of his wounds, that he resists legibility. Late in the film, at his children’s high school graduation, he sees clearly in front of him what he never had and never will; he recognizes their lives will develop to stages beyond his own. In writing this, I too can only gesture toward the forms of his emotions, a provisional profile at best. I am reminded of the same sensation that I have when I attempt to enumerate the harms I myself have experienced: of there being some cipher inside of me that only becomes more elusive the closer I seem to get to it. If only finding the right word for a wound could make that wound heal.
For his part, Joe demonstrates a particular limit case; his losses are ones that exceed our existing terminology for harm or trauma. Instead, we get long, extended shots of his vacant stare that continuously emphasize the film’s distance from his interiority. In doing so, May/December obliquely suggests that a particular kind of hubris informs our belief in fitting words to wound. Words cannot describe, let alone relive, Joe’s experience. These are feelings that can only be recognized, counterintuitively, once we abandon rather than embrace the usual vocabularies through which we articulate suffering.
We most frequently catch glimpses of Joe through metaphor, that poetic device being a way to signal both language’s limitations and its capaciousness at once. The obvious metaphor is in Joe’s hobby of guiding butterflies through metamorphosis, from caterpillars to their final form. Joe, too, still seeks his own metamorphosis, but has instead been fixed in time by Gracie. In taking the indirect, metaphorical path to representing Joe’s condition, the film avoids the risk of corrupting it with explicit exposition. It also extends Joe a sort of generosity in refusing to do more than sketch the contours of his pain. Perhaps the very process of metamorphosis, in which matter is never lost but merely converted into a new shape, is doubly significant here: Joe’s state of being has been and will be reconstructed again and again, even as its internal nature remains withheld from the viewer.
Perhaps, too, the timing of the film’s narrative, in the present of Joe’s adulthood, is an implicit recognition of the false finality of a trial, verdict, and sentencing. Having happened years ago and yet continually re-represented by tabloids and now by film, the judicial process must have failed to answer the question on Elizabeth’s and our minds: the exact significance of what Gracie did to Joe. Interestingly, Elizabeth’s form of questioning mimics that of a legal process; both function as a kind of hall of mirrors consisting of terminology and imperfect questions that go on spiraling and spiraling, forever sidestepping the very answers they seek. Like Ferguson says of psychological novels tasked with the representation of interiority, they are “haunted by the specter of psychology, in which mental states do not so much appear as register the improbability of their appearing.”
Returning to Joe at his children’s graduation, he is visually and physically separated from everyone else, blocked from the surrounding crowd by a fence. It is here and only here as he is separated – protected – by onlookers, that his emotions from so long ago seem to finally arise into feeling. It is no coincidence that Joe’s buried emotions don’t surface until the film’s final moments, his eyes filling with tears, his submerged feelings surfacing. In refusing to close Joe’s wound by naming it, an opening begins where the film ends.