The most famous line in Harold Pinter’s script for the 1971 film The Go-Between is also the most famous line from the L.P. Hartley novel it adapted — its first line: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
In his beguiling and unsettling new film May December, Todd Haynes steals the music from The Go-Between. By his own account, he used Marcel Legrand’s score when he first began talking to May December’s composer Marcelo Zarvos, who mimicked Legrand’s music in the way the character of Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) mimics the character of Gracie (Julianne Moore).
May December feels like a great Claude Chabrol movie. Haynes and Chabrol have a lot in common: both highly literate, analytical filmmakers deeply committed to melodrama. (I would be shocked if Haynes didn’t at least once think of Les Biches while working on May December.) But Chabrol’s great plot obsession was murder, and there is no murder in May December. There is a crime, though, a crime in the past, and one for which the film proposes psychological and even moral complexities without ever losing the fact — and effect — of it being a crime.
But let’s go back to that one line everybody who knows The Go-Between remembers: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” There is a small but important thematic component to May December I want to tease out.
For the film overall, I recommend Sheila O’Malley’s insightful review for RogerEbert.com and Brad Hanford’s review for Slant.
I want to pick up on the end of O’Malley’s review, because she points out something many viewers will miss, especially on a first watch:
In almost every exterior scene in “May December,” even at night, a walking tour meanders by in the background, the tour guide droning on about some horrible event that happened right here in this very spot. History is all around us, but it’s just background noise. Humans cluster together to hear horror tales from long ago, relishing in others’ misfortunes. We push to the front of the crowd to get a better spot at the execution, and afterward, we move on, sated. Until next time.
The latter part is absolutely true — the film does a lot to first put us into Elizabeth’s perspective as a visitor/investigator, then to complicate it all — but there’s even more to the film’s use of history, and that’s why Hartley’s famous opening sentence seems to important to me here.
Todd Haynes was one of the poster children of the New Queer Cinema. May December has little overtly queer content, but there’s a lot going on underneath its surfaces, and part of what I see under there is a wrestling match with a part of queer history a lot of folks (understandably) don’t much like to talk about: the deep history of pederasty, a term that specifically refers to sexual relations between a man and a boy or notably younger man, but which some scholars have recently broadened to mean any significantly age-differentiated relationship between an adult and child or young adult. It’s a term that feels out-dated, dusty, archaic — and that’s important as well.
Haynes’s first feature film, Poison, drew a lot from the work of Jean Genet, a figure central to the best book I know about the queer cultural history/problem of pederasty is Kadji Amin’s Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History.
Amin identifies two conflicting tendencies in France in the late 1970s and early 1980s, tendencies that had similar expressions in other countries, including the U.S. On the one hand, there was a gay liberationist “campaign to decriminalize noncoercive adult-child sex” that “overlapped with a veritable discursive explosion — in well-regarded novels, journal special issues, and letters and editorials published in the national newspaper Libération — proclaiming pedophilia and child sexuality the last frontier of the movement for (homo)sexual liberation and the leftist cultural issue of the day” (21). There was also a more moderate push in quite a different direction: a push to identify gay rights with relationships between adults of roughly the same age. This latter idea proved politically powerful because it created a centrist position by doing two things at once: it separated the concept of gay rights from both the popular conception of queers as inevitably child molesters and it separated gay rights from the liberationists’ ideas of a utopian, noncoercive, somehow consensual love between men and boys.
Though seldom studied today, the history of pederasty and queerness is not the least bit secret. As Amin points out, for “scholars of literature, it should be striking that virtually all late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century canonical authors now remembered as ‘gay’ — including Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde (whose famous ‘love that dare not speak its name’ was pederasty), Marcel Proust, Jean Cocteau, André Gide, Jean Genet, and even James Baldwin — participated in and, in some cases, wrote about age-differentiated same-sex erotic relations” (37).
While the history is unsettling, it is not outside of understanding. In heteronormative society, most queers are born into hostile, ignorant, and/or uncomprehending families and they grow up alone. All the rituals of society are built for heterosexuality. Who else can help queer people into queer society and culture except other, older, more experienced queers?
For a long time in the popular, heterosexual imagination, homosexuality and what we now call pedophilia were barely differentiated, so it makes sense that some activists would work from the assumption that gay liberation meant pedophile liberation. It’s difficult for us now to quite understand how deeply related those two abject figures (the homosexual and the pedophile) were in the culture. (Amin has a lot to say about the history, and he complicates the idea of “the pedophile” as a pre-1980s figure, but that topic is complex and needs much more space than I can devote to it here.) The very serious and influential public service announcements, documentaries, psychological studies, etc. that all treated homosexuality and pedophilia as basically the same seem to us today (I hope) hilariously anachronistic … but they were real, and had powerful effects.
The political insight of the gay reformers (rather than gay liberationists) of the late ’70s was to recognize that moving gay rights toward “normality” meant doing everything possible to separate the figure of “the homosexual” from the figure of “the pedophile”. Despite conservative resistance and backlash, that has largely been a successful endeavor, and has been important to the mainstream gay rights movement’s successes. Indeed, the conservative resistance and backlash recognizes that success — it is no coincidence that the majority of right-wing homophobia, transphobia, and paranoia then and now relies on “save the children” propaganda. Right-wing conspiratorial delusions are currently obsessed with pedophilia, with real political and social consequences.
Those of us who grew up after the first successes of the gay reform movement, and who have an idea of consent as tied to particular interpretations of power, can find it difficult to understand or sympathize with the position of older liberationists who hold onto a utopian idea of pederastic mentorship and/or who may look back fondly to their own childhood experiences with older men. (I have at least 2 older friends who say their young experiences are ones they are grateful for, experiences they do not consider traumatic or scarring, and I believe they are sincere in that feeling. If we are to believe people’s own intepretations of their feelings and experiences — and I think we should, generally — then I must accept this is true for them, and I must do so without condescension and without assuming they suffer from some sort of false consciousness.)
Kadji Amin makes the point that while Queer Studies as an academic and political movement tends to valorize the transgressive, outré, and anti-normative, it primarily does so when something is not only interpreted as transgressive, outré, and anti-normative but also as politically useful (as in: bringing more power and autonomy to queer people) and when it has a sense of futurity. Queer Studies’ long-held commitment to the recovery of lost histories is selective — it is a commitment to a recovery of histories that serve our current priorities. Pederasty is neither politically useful nor infused with a sense of future potential. The word itself feels like a relic of gas-lit parlors. Pederasty, then, is not only consigned to the past, but to a past that does not seem worth recovering or even investigating. What could we possibly do with it except disavow it?
The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.
The genius of May December is to recognize the life-inhibiting, destructive force of a sexual relationship between an adult and a child while also recognizing the fact that some of those relationships produce complicated feelings, not all of them negative (which adds to the difficulty). It also recognizes that such relationships are not so far beyond the pale as to be outside of other exploitative, manipulative, destructive behaviors. Gracie’s fraught relationships with her children are barely explained but highly evocative. She is a woman who has produced quite a few children and who seems to have a troubled (even ruined) relationship with each of them. Her overprotectiveness and judgmentalism suggest that some part of herself recognizes that her marriage — and her youngest three children’s existence — is based on her taking advantage of a child. Or it may be that her relationship with Joe eroticized the role of caretaker and protector (one of the first interactions we see between them is her scolding him for opening a second beer at a cookout), and she has no ability to see her children as making their way toward adulthood, even as their very existence results from her treating a child as an adult. All of her children are now older than Joe was when Gracie began her relationship with him, yet her relationship with the twins, who are now about to graduate from high school, is critical, scolding, controlling. She sincerely believes the 13-year-old Joe was the aggressor in their relationship, someone with, she declares, more sexual experience than herself, someone who knew exactly what he was doing — a sense of authority she does not allow their children who are now about five years older than Joe was then.
By making the adult-child relationship a heterosexual one, there is a procreative element, and procreation is, in Queer Studies, a key to futurity. (Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive is a famous and controversial text arguing against the queer orientation toward futurity.) The heterosexuality and procreation add an extra complexity, too, because we must reflect on the inescapable fact that the world wishes these children did not exist.
Making the adult-child relationship heterosexual opens complications without those complications strengthening homophobia. Setting the crime about 25 years in the past brings forth extra layers of complication, narrative reflection, and emotional force within the narrative. There are no flashbacks, no cinematic representations of the past, there is only what the characters say about it. Joe, late in the film, tries to get Gracie to talk with him about what they did, saying he’s not sure he trusts how he remembers it, but she won’t go there. (The past is a foreign country…) The distance in time allows the implications of the story to disperse in various directions, keeping the question of the relationship between Gracie and Joe central without it completely overshadowing other questions and implications. Hence the film’s richness.
There is much to praise beyond what I’ve written here — I’ve gone on at length about something (the queer/pederasty angle) that is really a thematic footnote, maybe not even conscious or in any way intended on the filmmakers’ part. (But we should never underestimate Todd Haynes.)
Other viewers can go into more depth on the film’s obvious strengths, particularly its performances, but I’ll make a few notes on those here. Charles Melton’s performance as Joe is, rightly, being lauded — the film would be a shallow, offensive failure if he were less skilled at literally embodying the contradictory feelings of a character who both had his young adulthood stolen and is trapped in a kind of adolescent identity. There are a couple moments where he gets to glimpse what has happened to himself, moments utterly heartbreaking. It’s an appealing performance, one that leads us to feel that we have a pretty good sense of him, but I felt on reflection that this was no less a habitual role Joe plays than the role of the naive woman that Gracie plays. There are secrets Joe never gives away. (The most suggestive secret is whatever is implied by the texts he exchanges with a person who is not clearly revealed to us.) Julianne Moore is of course one of the great actors of her generation, and she gives Gracie more depth than many people would be able to, but the radical thing about her character is her fundamental simplicity. We get hints, especially at the end, that this simplicity is a well-maintained suit of armor she wears, but I have trouble imagining Gracie as a highly complex personality in the same way I imagine Joe and Elizabeth to be.
Natalie Portman’s performance as Elizabeth is astonishing — astonishing first in its apparent blandness, then astonishing in the depths it suggests. In the first half hour or so of the movie, Elizabeth is basically our surrogate, investigating a story we know nothing about. Bit by bit, though, we see she is someone who probably doesn’t have an uncomplicated relationship anywhere in her life. Her desires are powerful but also at least partially mysterious even to herself. Does she know what she’s trying to learn, what she’s trying to explore, what she’s attracted to, what she’s trying to perform? Does she have any sense of the damage she herself is causing? Will she produce anything other than exploitation?
The scene of Elizabeth performing a monologue in a mirror (a monologue that is from a love letter Gracie sent to Joe when he was still a child) is as chilling as anything I’ve seen in a horror movie. Portman performs as Gracie, but does so with great nuance — we watch an actor portraying an actor learning to inhabit a new character. And we know that new character as, at base, an actor — Julianne Moore — playing her. It lends an extra uncanniness to the moment that we know there is no Gracie, that Gracie is a construction by Julianne Moore. We know that Natalie Portman is playing a character named Elizabeth imitating a character named Gracie played by Julianne Moore. (And in a mirror no less!) The levels of reality and unreality there are vertiginous, but what I found so eerie was that the levels didn’t matter. I couldn’t help but think that if it were possible for one person to steal another’s soul, this is what it would look and sound like.
It’s a haunting film and only grows more haunting as I continue to think about it. I will be curious to see what a second viewing will reveal.
