Review: predatory insecurity in Priscilla and May December
After running around like a jackrabbit for the last couple of weeks, hopping between Washington, D.C., New York City, and Boston, I felt it was high time that I got back inside a movie theater. It occurred to me a few days ago that we’re in the throes of Oscar season, and that I have some catching up to do. My travels kept me from seeing Dicks: The Musical, which I deeply regret, and I do not intend to let any other prestige titles pass by without giving them a gander.
My parents both felt sick this past Sunday, so our planned weekly visit was scrapped in favor of healthy solitude, and a double feature: Priscilla and May December. Two movies about age gap relationships – or, more accurately, “relationships” that entail a grown adult pursuing romantic and sexual contact with a person in early adolescence.
It did not occur to me that these movies had such a similar theme until I was sitting down to view them. Once I had the thought, it prompted me to meditate on our world’s simultaneous revulsion towards and fascination with such stories. Fom Sixteen Candles to American Beauty to Call Me By Your Name, there is a longstanding cultural pull towards scenarios where we, as viewers, are encouraged to engage in voyeuristic titillation with characters who hover around (i.e., under) the age of consent.
What does it say about us as a society that we continue to embrace such stories? In daily life, we often dismiss age differences between consenting adults as “immature” and “dysfunctional,” yet, whether at the movies or watching TV, we consistently direct significant emotional energy to stories about grown people who seduce or lust after children. Granted, the two films I saw this past weekend are pointedly critical and ironic about this fascination – but their irony shouldn’t distract us from the fact that their makers are themselves clearly fascinated by the topic.
Somehow, sexual interest in underage people is still a marketable premise. On the other hand, I suspect that if, for instance, Kate Winslet and Tom Holland played a married couple on film, audiences wouldn’t quite know how to approach the situation.
Do we only know how to interpret age gaps between grown-ups as a form of sexual predation? If so, and if we consider such relationships to be “wrong” in social life – say, when someone in their forties dates someone in their twenties – then why do so many people feel comfortable binge watching shows (e.g. Euphoria, Elite, Outer Banks) that require us, as adults, to notice and even enjoy sexual behavior amongst high school students?
Obviously, this is a bigger topic than either of the films discussed here, and I don’t mean to conflate conversations about age differences in adult relationships with the kinds of abusive situations we find in these films. But the presence of these movies, and the absence of stories in our media that feature loving devotion between, say, older women and younger men, or people from different generations, is frustrating.
I think there’s much work to be done in our world to acknowledge that sexual attraction transcends age distinctions. I also believe that, if we did this work, it would help alleviate, in life and in movies, the manipulation and exploitation of underage people. After all, what does it mean to be a seventeen-year-old standing shirtless on a movie set? And what does it mean to be a fifty-year-old watching that movie, thinking to oneself, whether consciously or not, that the shirtless seventeen-year-old is attractive?
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The first title that I saw out of this illicit pair was Priscillia, a biopic about the relationship between its eponymous subject and Elvis Presley, who started dating one another when they were fourteen and twenty-four, respectively. If the latter third of the movie flounders from a tapering in focus, this is both unfortunate, and not enough to distract from all that writer-director Sofia Coppola accomplishes in its first two acts.
Priscilla is one of her most cogent works to date – a bristling study in manipulation that unpacks more of Mr. Presley’s cultural baggage in one hundred minutes than Baz Luhrmann’s biopic of last year did in just under three hours. More importantly, it gives the man’s oft-trivialized former wife, who served as an executive producer on this project, room to use her voice in reshaping our collective memory of their union.
Ms. Coppola scores more than a few feats in this outing: sumptuous production design… an inspired soundtrack of period pop hits… a mise-en-scene made up of living rooms and poolside parties that come across as at once lived-in and dreamy… and pointed visual cues that emphasize the objectification of women. Yet her depictions of Mr. and Mrs. Presely are by far the most noteworthy, and grant us magnificent insights into the couple’s life together.
Let’s take the Mister first: from the moment he appears onscreen, as played by Jacob Elordi, we notice that Elvis’ leg is twitching with anxiety. He carries this twitch through the rest of the movie – becoming still only when subdued by sleeping pills, rolling over in bed with bloodless lethargy. The twitch factors into all his body language, and echoes aspects of the Presley persona that we tend to associate with virtuosity; for instance, there’s a shot of Elvis waiting to pick Priscilla up for a date, leaning against his car on a cold winter evening. His legs are jangling. This movement immediately invites us to think of the singer’s iconic hip gyrations while performing onstage. Here, though, it occurs spontaneously, a response to both climate and constitution.
Could it be, Coppola suddenly has us thinking, that the great singer’s “command” was based entirely on nerves? What effect might public adulation have had on such an anxious person – especially when that adulation was directed towards the physical manifestations of his insecurity?
It’s within these psychological nooks and crannies of the Presley persona that Coppola sets up shop. She prompts us to recognize that, for all his years on Priscilla, the King of Rock n’ Roll was no less a child in disposition than the girl he seduced. Much of the tension in Priscilla lies in our spectatorial navigation of this unsettling interplay between childishness and maturity; we, as the audience, are rendered complicit, both for witnessing a grown man’s courtship of a high school freshman, and for beginning to understand why they became a couple.
Though she may have been a child, there is no denying Priscilla’s own will in furthering her relationship with Elvis. Was she manipulated? Hell yes. Was she mature enough to handle what was being asked of her? Of course not. But just because she was too young to know better doesn’t mean that she didn’t know what she wanted.
The actor tasked with embodying these contradictions is Cailee Spaeny, and she is utterly convincing in a role that asks her to grow from a fourteen-year-old into a woman in her late twenties. Balancing Priscilla’s childlike naivete with a probing watchfulness, Spaeny betrays cool intelligence – at once enforcing the famed woman’s integrity and making clear how unprepared she was to be thrust into the dysfunction of Graceland. It’s one of the most impressive performances of the year.
Similarly, as her counterpart, Jacob Elordi inhabits Mr. Presley, for all his nerves, with easy, lordly calm – slinking out of a swimming pool like a praying mantis, all limbs, darting glances at his girlfriend with assured desirability. He perfectly straddles Presely’s cocksure charisma and boyish bashfulness; immersive though Austin Butler’s portrayal may have been last year, I prefer Mr. Elordi’s keen integration of personal style with lookalike posturing.
Sofia Coppola is a master at reckoning with the ingénue archetype. From The Virgin Suicides to Marie Atoinette to The Beguiled, she examines the uneasy interplay of “innocence” and agency in young women – reveling in ecstatic emotion, or desire, as a symptom of both those qualities. This means that at least the first half of Priscilla is thrilling; she charts a young girl’s trajectory from anonymous schoolgirl to ornamental child bride with piercing discernment, giving her audience, equally, a sense of how wrong it all was, and yet how bewilderingly intoxicating it must have been.
There is something surreal about watching a teenager actually being seduced by her idol. How many girls have dreamed of what, for Priscilla Presely, became reality? In Coppola’s movie, you feel the rush of that singular rocket ride she took. You are both dismayed, and delighted for her.
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I followed up this considerably provocative work with the oh-so-much-more provocative May December. A perverse comedy of manners based on the Mary Kay Letourneau case, the film opens with television star Elizabeth Berry (played by Natalie Portman) arriving in Savannah to research and interview a woman named Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore).
Twenty years earlier, Gracie went to prison for raping a twelve-year-old boy named Joe (Charles Melton), whose baby she delivered behind bars. In the years since the media circus that surrounded their case, Gracie and Joe have married and raised three children. Now, Elizabeth, who is playing Gracie in a biopic, shows up to spend several weeks with the family – asking questions, trying to find “the truth” behind the headlines.
As is to be expected, things get a little tense, and lines start to blur the more that actor and subject mingle with one another. Just how ethical is Elizabeth’s line of questioning? How ethical are any of us for probing into other people’s private lives? What do we hope to accomplish when we obsess over the taboo, if not downright abusive choices made by other people? To understand them better… or to vicariously assimilate their tawdry behavior?
This sordid study in spectatorial complicity was directed by Todd Haynes, and confirms – as if there were any remaining doubts – that he is the greatest living American filmmaker. From the harrowing sterility of a woman having an allergic reaction to her own existence in Safe, to the multi-facial “portrait” of Bob Dylan in I’m Not There… the dowdy hopefulness of a Depression-era mother providing for her sociopathic daughter in Mildred Pierce, to the artifice-shattering mid-century romance between a Manhattan socialite and a young woman in Carol… Haynes is, above all else, a master of contradictions.
Another way of saying this is that he is the quintessential queer artist. He is able to bridge gaps between how a human society formally presents itself, and how it actually lives. His is a powerful, discerning intelligence – which, happily, is accompanied by a wicked sense of humor.
It is this humor that inflects May December with all kinds of hysterical discombobulations. Overall, Haynes composes the work in a jarringly minor key: colors are muted, flat, and cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt embraces Atlanta’s sultry, bleached natural lighting to produce a soft, almost gauzy atmosphere. Similarly, interactions between characters are largely civil: Gracie says daft, banal things to her actor-interrogator (“First you organize your ferns, and then you choose your focus flower”) before, at Elizabeth’s prompting, she charges into highly sensitive fields of conversation that threaten to disturb, or excavate the neat balance of her life.
And just then, once Haynes has established a subdued tone, he’ll offer contrast – a burst of orchestral music, say, or a tertiary character’s compulsive flare of suppressed hostility, or the lush indigo-blue of a wall of fish tanks in the back room of a pet store. He is constantly wresting his audience towards and away from the melodramatic heart that beats beneath his movie’s surface. Even when Haynes isn’t being overt, garishness suffuses every frame.
Part of what makes Todd Haynes such an exciting filmmaker is that he is a postmodern disciple of great, old-school “women’s picture” directors like Douglas Sirk and Vincente Minnelli. His movies echo the gaudy hyper-emotion of Tea and Sympathy and Imitation of Life, but in a quiet way. In May December, Haynes depicts a ripe scenario of disquieting psycho-sexual manipulation, yet largely deprives it of saturation. He delivers the ostentatious, like Minnelli, and hints at opprobrium, like Sirk, by withholding these very things.
And it is via this withholding that Haynes invites his audience to consider that which is inexcusable. He doesn’t show terrible things so much as he draws out the latent psychological behavior – namely, speculation and fantasy – that fuels terrible news stories. May December brings to the fore the kinds of voyeuristic mind games most onlookers play when confronted with scandal. It makes us look at our own perverse fascination with other people’s bad behavior.
Of course, Todd Haynes isn’t the only person who made this movie. Its whip-smart screenplay was penned by Samy Burch — who, with this debut feature, proves herself a towering talent and must be given everything she needs or wants in order to continue writing. Similarly, Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman are two of the most robustly qualified actors working today; their pairing here, on such effusively campy terrain, is not unlike that which found Bibi Andersson leaving out shards of broken glass for Liv Ullmann to step on in Persona, or a wheelchair-bound Joan Crawford buckling under the brash haughtiness of Bette Davis’ tyrannical “caregiving” in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
These two stars are demure titans, respectable goddesses – Haynes’ equivalences for Jane Wyman or Deborah Kerr. They are contemporary screen legends whose presences in May December are at once indebted to, and transcend their skill as performers.
A great theme in Burch’s script is the confluence of cultural texts (i.e. archetypes, taboos) in public figures. This is true of characters like Gracie and Elizabeth, for sure, but it’s also true of the women who play them – Portman in particular, whose in-character quips about infidelity sting with particular sharpness in the wake of recent public awareness of her marital troubles. Moore is less identifiable for her private life, but her long list of roles that verge on psychological instability (including her past collaborations with Haynes, e.g. Safe and Far From Heaven) means that viewers who are familiar with her body of work watch Gracie’s movements with ravenous curiosity: when is she going to break? Is she about to make out with Elizabeth? What is she planning to do with that gun?
As the movie goes on, the two lead performers seem to only further exaggerate their characters: Moore lends Gracie even more distressing or pathetic attributes (her lisp becomes lispier to the point where it’s almost comical), and as Elizabeth adopts more of Gracie’s mannerisms, Portman’s vocal affectations veer more and more towards the voice she used while playing Jacqueline Kennedy. Each of Moore’s and Portman’s choices contribute to Haynes’ relish for the heightened gesture of melodrama. They at once convey something beyond personality, and yet represent a hyper-distillation of what it feels like to be a person.
It’s also worth mentioning the work of Charles Melton. Hardly the most expressive of actors (one is tempted to place him in a lineage of wooden, Hollywood-melodrama heartthrobs like Rock Hudson and John Gavin), it would’ve been easy for the younger actor to be overwhelmed by Mme Moore and Portman. Yet Haynes is tactful: he recognizes the differences in gravitas between his stars, and stages this disparity to the lesser party’s benefit.
Thus, Melton is pitch-perfect as Joe – who is, heartbreakingly, still an innocent. He’s still the shy, insecure twelve-year-old he was when Gracie seduced him. Melton utilizes his own emotional stiffness to embody the character’s hunched insularity, his stuttering lack of confidence. It’s a portrayal that’s at once crushing and hilarious; there’s something deliciously sardonic about a six-foot-one Adonis playing a hangdog man-child with absolutely zero game. Ironically, it is Melton’s unique inability to “go big” that makes him ideal casting, just as Moore’s and Portman’s textured expansiveness makes them ideal for their roles.
Of course, I realize that I’m attributing much of the success of Mr. Melton’s performance to the man who hired him. If I give Todd Haynes the lion’s share of credit in my evaluation of May December, it’s because, over the course of his forty-year career, he has always exhibited unparalleled creative authority. He knows what he’s doing, and it shows up onscreen.
“Insecure people are very dangerous,” Gracie muses to Elizabeth in one of the movie’s final scenes. May December is a masterpiece because it refuses to let either its characters or its audience off the hook. It shines a glaring light on the insidious cultural codependency between politeness and scandal – the harmful lack of self-awareness that prompts people to act out, or to judge those who do.
We are all dangerous to one another so long as we refuse to take responsibility for our troubled souls. Our world’s functionality, or dysfunctionality, hinges on our inability to do so.
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Holding these movies beside one another is to confront a fascinating set of nuances in how two filmmakers differently approach the subject of statutory rape. A major distinction between Ms. Coppola and Mr. Haynes’ work is the fact that Priscilla dramatizes the “courtship,” or seduction, itself, whereas May December deals with the fallout of that process. And upon reflection, I realize that Coppola’s movie, for all that it does to emphasize Elvis’ creepy choices, actually permits a more flexible evaluation of predatory behavior than does Haynes.’
I think this has something to do with the fact that Ms. Presley was involved in Priscilla’s production, and that it is her fourteen-year-old perspective which is centered onscreen. In contrast, we do not witness Joe’s twelve-year-old experience in May December – and in that regard, I think Todd Haynes proves himself the more responsible filmmaker. In truth, we have no business watching what went on between twenty-four-year-old Elvis and fourteen-year-old Priscilla; indulging in that girl’s vantage point, revealing though it may be, does skew our perspective. It leaves room for those of us in the audience to be impressed, or even swayed by her memory of things, which is inevitably filtered through a lens of adolescent romanticism.
Furthermore, Coppola’s indulgence in acts of predation speaks to an even more insidious issue that underlies both films. Namely, it is striking that a grown man’s seduction of a girl is something that, in a commercial movie theater, we are permitted to see, whereas a grown woman’s seduction of a boy remains hidden, out of sight. This distinction is an expression of patriarchy – that even when our movies claim to condemn or dissect predatory behavior, they cannot help but think of rape perpetuated by men as “relatable,” whereas the actions of women rapists are, well, obviously evil, and must be kept at arm’s length.
All of these nuances point to Haynes as a stronger, or more self-aware artist. I interpret his abstention from depicting Gracie’s rape of Joe not as a figment of patriarchal thinking, but as evidence of his feminism. Rather, it is Ms. Coppola who must reckon with the possibility that her work unconsciously validates or reinforces a patriarchal understanding of sexuality.
So much of a filmmaker’s politics comes down to what they choose to put onscreen. Both Priscilla and May December find time to acknowledge that, yes, adolescents want to have sex, and that a victim of statutory rape may in fact desire to be with their seducer. But only one of these films makes that point by allowing the victim to articulate it for himself, after the fact. In other words, we don’t have to see an underage person go through their seduction in order to understand that they wanted it to happen.
Watching, in my opinion, is as much an expression of sexuality as taking someone to bed. If filmmakers and those of us who go to see movies were honest with ourselves about the things we’re (un)interested in depicting, or watching, we’d be far more conscientious about the content that we allow into our movies. Priscilla and May December jab us in the ribs, encouraging makers and spectators alike to notice this reality.
They spur us into watching more critically, and accepting responsibility for the things we choose to look at.
