Even though we might accept the notion that a star (a TV or tabloid personality) traffics in illusion, we presume to know or understand the “real” person behind the image, the qualities that allow them to stand apart and become a singular being and not just a product for the delectation and consumption of others. Haynes is doing something extraordinarily delicate and difficult in May December, reminding viewers-with the lightest of touches-that we’re all implicated and indulgent in the processes of social, cultural, and sexual exploitation that define the modern consciousness.Ī world besotted by fame is paradoxically obsessed with reality. A virtuoso at tonal precision, Haynes has here made a film that might seem comic to one, irretrievably tragic to another, possibly within the same scene, line reading, or surprising camera gesture-appropriate for a film about the derangement of living one’s life as an idea, an outline, an empty vessel on which others project expectations and judgments that only reflect their own biases. Even like Haynes’s epochal Barbie-doll breakout Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, it feels fully absorbed in questions around stardom, without falling into any clichés around the wages of fame or the hazards of living under the camera eye. Like Safe, it’s a movie constantly reckoning with the perceived shallowness of its characters like Carol, it’s a movie about social affectation-the face put on for public approval and that which remains necessarily, frustratingly hidden. Todd Haynes, the living American filmmaker with the greatest ability to plumb the depths of his characters while standing outside of them, has created a film that engages with and thwarts its viewers’ desires, expectations, emotions, and quest for answers while never erring on the side of the overtly analytical. ![]() Love transcends age, doesn’t it? Our culture is a little too obsessed with sex and predation, right? Who are we to judge? It’s none of our business, perhaps, but at least our fascination with them isn’t lurid-it’s curious, it’s humane. They do seem happy in that big, beautiful house near the water. ![]() You really want to know about her, don’t you? And while you’re at it, it’s only fair that you’d learn a little about Joe, who must have his own desires and thoughts. Or perhaps you’re watching a movie titled May December, about an actor who has been cast as Gracie in an upcoming movie and who is, like you, trying to gain emotional access to her life. Or perhaps you’re just a viewer of a movie about her life, not prurient at all, of course, just hoping to gain some insight about what would drive an adult woman to sexually engage with-and then build a romantic life around-a child. ![]() Now do you want to know why it happened? Do you want to know more about the emotional lives of the people involved? Perhaps you’re an actor and you’d like to know something about the interior landscape of Gracie Atherton-Yoo, all the better to portray her, or an approximation of her, in an upcoming movie inspired by the affair. Now, it’s 2015, more than 20 years since the scandal erupted, and they’re still married. ![]() However, Gracie and Joe, who had been carrying on a sexual relationship, remained devoted and, by all outward evidence, in love with one another, and after she was released from jail and he was of legal age, they were wed. The dalliance with the underage boy led to Gracie’s arrest and, after a lengthy, public, and highly sensationalized trial, imprisonment for statutory rape. Do you want to know what happened? In the early nineties, Gracie Atherton, a thirty-something woman working at a pet shop in Savannah, was caught having sex with junior high-schooler Joe Yoo.
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