Femininity as an enabling alibi
In Netflix's 'May December,' marriage and motherhood are used as cover for abuse.
In the opening scenes of Netflix’s May December, we’re met with the very picture of feminine domesticity. Gracie, played by Julianne Moore, is in her kitchen wearing a fluttery blouse while smoothing the icing on a white layer cake in preparation for a Memorial Day barbecue at her house. She cautions her husband Joe about his beer intake and yells at her kids as they run recklessly through the house. “Honestly,” she sighs, exasperated.
Then Gracie opens the fridge while the film’s melodramatic soundtrack swells. The camera zooms in on her face. As the movie’s screenplay reads, “Suddenly a dark cloud overtakes Gracie’s expression, like something very terrible has just occurred to her." Indeed.
“I don’t think we have enough hot dogs,” she says.
It’s a phenomenal laugh line. I guffawed the first time I watched it. Hot dogs. It seems a campy take on the false problems of the privileged American middle-class. But that is before you learn that Gracie isn’t just preparing for a Memorial Day barbecue, she’s anxiously awaiting the arrival of Elizabeth (played by Natalie Portman), a movie star who is going to portray her in a movie adaptation of her life. The actress requires some intimate face-time with her in order to fully inhabit the role, which is a disturbing one: decades earlier, Gracie, then a 36-year-old white woman, sexually abused Joe, then 13, her co-worker at a local pet shop, and the son of the only Korean family in town.
Now, Joe, played by Charles Melton, is her 36-year-old husband and the father of her children.
The right number of hot dogs matters to Gracie for the same reason that the layer cake, fluttery blouse, and maternal admonishments matter. There is a fragile veneer of domesticity that is barely holding her world together. Gracie’s family—with the man she abused when he was a minor—is her ultimate defense, and not just because she uses it to validate her delusional “love story.” Marriage and motherhood are a woman’s strongest claims toward purity and innocence, especially when she is white. In May December, these roles give Gracie protective cover, but they’re also the means by which she inflicts abuse. Femininity is her enabling alibi.
The film, by the delightful oddball Todd Haynes, is loosely based on the story of Mary Kay Letourneau, a teacher who pled guilty in 1997 to raping a 12-year-old child, Vili Fualaau, who she later married. It’s clear that Letourneau’s relationship to feminine domesticity was an inspiration to Moore in her portrayal of Gracie. "I did do a lot of reading about the case and I looked at some documentary footage, and I think what really struck me when I was watching it was how beautiful she was, how dedicated she was to her children, how very feminine she seemed and her fragility," she told TODAY. “Those, to me, seemed to be the really salient points of what she was presenting to the world.”
Of course, they are salient points because feminine stereotypes appear at odds with predatory behavior. Note that Moore says Letourneau’s femininity was key to how she presented to the world, not necessarily to who she was. This hints at a question running throughout the film: Is Gracie’s femininity an authentic expression or an act of subterfuge?
The film’s sartorial choices strongly reflect Moore’s real-life inspiration. Gracie is outfitted in floral dresses, flowing blouses, and a pastel palette. April Napier, the film’s costume designer, tells Refinery29 that Moore “wanted her character to be very princess-like and very contained and very kind of perfect, her femininity.” Some of the wardrobe choices are pulled directly from the tabloids: Hannah Bonner notes that both Gracie and the real-life Letourneau “wear white sweatshirts in their police photos, comely and placid.” Bonner observes that both women, real and fictional, “exude archetypal femininity: pink lipstick, perfect hair.”
Elizabeth zeroes in on these details as she attempts to get inside Gracie’s head. In one scene, Gracie demonstrates her makeup routine for Elizabeth as they stand side-by-side, looking in the mirror. The actress takes studious notes on exactly which products Gracie uses and how she applies them. It’s reminiscent of a little girl watching her mom getting ready in the morning—a lesson in how to be a woman. In Elizabeth’s case, she’s learning how to become Gracie, a woman whose femininity appears to contradict her monstrousness.
That enigma drives Elizabeth in her character study; it’s an equation that she is trying to solve. Mother or monster? There’s a moment, early on, where she looks through some home photographs that Gracie has shared with her. She stops on a decades-ago image of Gracie lovingly holding her newborn, fathered by Joe. Elizabeth seems to bask in the romance of Gracie’s maternal glow—then she realizes that the photograph is folded in half to conceal the full image. There are shackles around her ankles. She is in prison for sexually abusing a child—and she is holding the baby that resulted from that abuse. She is a mother and a monster. The image is so unbearably fraught that it causes Elizabeth to have an asthma attack.
While it’s clear that Gracie’s motherhood helps to positively manage other people’s perceptions of her, it’s also a site of gendered violence. As her teenage daughter tries on dresses for her high school graduation ceremony, Gracie conceals her cruelty in praise: “I want to commend you for being so brave in showing your arms like that… just not caring about these unrealistic beauty standards.” Her other daughter, visiting home from college, reminds Gracie that she gave her a scale wrapped in a bow for her high school graduation present. “I got you that scale… as a tradition, because that’s what my mother got me when I graduated from high school,” Gracie says. “You try going through life without a scale and see how that goes.”
Gracie moves unsettlingly between feminine roles, seeming to choose whichever one suits her current aims. At one point, the two women bake together and Gracie holds Elizabeth’s hand, like a mother with a young child, to show her how to spread the batter for a cake. She nods approvingly as Elizabeth carefully adds cherries to the batter, heeding her caution around the importance of it looking nice. She is a good mom, a domestic goddess, a woman in charge of her domain. A moment later, seemingly out of nowhere, Gracie suddenly seems to embody a naive young girl. “You know, Joe’s been with more women than I have men,” she says. “Nobody seems to remember that. I’d only been with Tom [her ex-husband], but Joe had been with two girls before me.”
She notes that his dad was often away, so Joe had to grow up fast and become “the man of the house.” Gracie adds that she, by contrast, is “very sheltered.” (Similarly, in a later scene, she tells Elizabeth, “I am naive. I always have been.”) Then she shows Elizabeth a card written in a child’s handwriting: it’s a poem Joe wrote for her, as part of a school assignment, when she was 36 and he was 13. “Peace is sitting on a lake in the summertime/Peace is a coca cola on a hot summer day/Peace is being with you,” it reads. It’s the kind of poem that a child brings home to his mom, but Gracie presents it as a charming bit of romance.
It’s clear that many people in Gracie’s life buy into her narrative of innocence. Her former lawyer describes her as having been “head over heels,” “starry eyed,” and at the mercy of “a good-looking kid.” From this perspective, history is disturbingly revised: Instead of a victim of sexual abuse, Joe, then 13, is rendered as the perpetrator. He’s implicitly cast as guilty for growing up too fast, having past sexual experience, and being “a good-looking kid.” It isn’t just gender but also race that is key to this reversal: Gracie’s whiteness allows her the veneer of feminine “goodness.” Joe, on the other hand, is exoticized and objectified as an Asian American man. As Candice Frederick writes in the Huffington Post, this film portrays “the weaponization of white female sexuality.” In a chilling scene toward the end of the film, Gracie outright casts Joe as the abuser, in a moment reminiscent of a real-life interview with Letourneau and Fualaau. “You seduced me,” she insists. “Who was the boss? Who was in charge?”
As Elizabeth gradually absorbs the nuances of Gracie’s mannerisms, even taking on her lisp, she also adopts this “up is down” abuser perspective. After reviewing videos of the 13-year-old boys auditioning to be her co-star in the movie adaption of Gracie’s life, Elizabeth tells her agent, “The kids, they’re cute but not, like, sexy enough. You’ve seen him… he’s got this quiet confidence, even as a kid I’m sure.” Like Gracie, she implicates Joe in his own abuse, which excuses her own increasingly predatory behavior toward him.
Throughout May December, Elizabeth’s search for the “real” Gracie requires her to uncover the “truth” of her feminine self-presentation. What kind of a mother is she, exactly? What kind of wife? As viewers, we’re invited to consider whether the various facets of her femininity are authentic expressions, part of her own self-justification, or calculated attempts at manipulating outside opinion. This assessment risks turning into a false moral proxy, as though authentic femininity could soften the impact of Gracie’s abuse or change its meaning. That is absurd—and yet both femininity and authenticity are often treated as stand-ins for women’s goodness. As
has written, in everything from beauty to motherhood, there is a tyranny of “naturalness.” Women are urged to strive for unattainable standards while also not appearing to try too hard, “lest our goodness reveal itself as anything less than natural.” Lest we reveal ourselves as bad.Notions of feminine goodness are typically used to control women. By the end of May December, it’s clear that Gracie uses them to control others. While feminine authenticity would hardly be exonerating, her calculated inauthenticity is further indicting.
Ultimately—SPOILERS AHEAD—Joe confronts Gracie about her abuse. “What if I wasn’t ready to be making those kinds of decisions?” he asks her. “What if I was too young?” He has finally recognized the fraud of their “love story,” the utter flimsiness of her alibi. It’s only then, after Gracie learns that her marriage is falling apart, that we see her without feminine armor. She wears jeans, a t-shirt, and an army jacket to go hunting for quail, a hobby she’s had since childhood. Her fluttery blouses and layer cakes are gone. She is no longer the good hostess worrying over having enough hot dogs for the barbecue; she is the provider literally hunting for meat. Instead of a quail, she spots a fox, an animal associated with cunning and deception. They stare at each other like kindred creatures. She doesn’t shoot.
Back at home, her kids ask Joe where she is. “I dunno,” he says. “Maybe she had a beauty parlor appointment.”
Absolutely exquisite. I just restacked it with a comment. These are perhaps THE most effective intraspecies predators on the planet. Brian Klaas writes about the biology of deceit beautifully. I think we all could use more literacy around these topics. Thank you for adding to the conversation.
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