Tag: essay

May December and What We Mean by “Camp”

Thoughts on hot dogs, Twitter fingers, and taking abuse seriously.

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If you’ve been online the past week or so, you’ve probably seen the arguments about Todd Haynes’ May December. The film is – at its face – a story about an actress, Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) travelling to Savanah to interview and observe a woman, Gracie (Julianne Moore) who was involved in a tabloid scandal almost two decades ago. Said scandal is that she had an “affair” with a 13-year-old boy named Joe (Charles Melton, we’ll get to it), got pregnant, went to jail, and then subsequently married and had more children with him. All this is very clearly based on the Mary Kay Letourneau scandal from the 90s; lots of Cannes coverage mentioned this, as well as talking up how funny the movie was in addition to things like its psychological complexity. From the trailers and that coverage I had been eagerly awaiting it, especially curious to see multiple people I know and trust say it was one of the funniest movies of the year.

And make no mistake, Samy Burch’s screen play does make several jokes throughout. But I didn’t find it as funny as it was hyped. As I’ve said on Letterboxd and a few other places: while I laughed at things like Julianne Moore opening a fridge to a dramatic sting of music (aka, “I don’t think we have enough hot dogs”), it was frequently much more of an uncomfortable sort of laughter. Things like Elizabeth (the actress) remarking how none of the kids auditioning to play Joe in her movie are “sexy” enough, as you’ve just witnessed some VERY young boys. Or Gracie (the woman) telling her daughter how brave she was to show her arms in a dress in what must be the least subtle backhanded compliment anyone’s ever given. I found the movie to be a showcase of extreme repression and denial, where just hinting at the truth would be too much to bear psychologically.

The word that keeps popping up in all the discussion around the movie is “camp”. Now, I frankly do not have time to really get into what camp is – there’s been enough of that – but the way I see it: Katy Perry wearing a burger outfit to the Met Gala is not Camp. Katy Perry hurriedly attempting to get back into the burger outfit so that she can catch someone passing by is Camp. The word at its base implies some sort of artifice, a blowing up of things to heightened reality; the “tragically ludicrous” and “ludicrously tragic”, as it were. All this has lead to things like Netflix posting a screenshot of the two women with the opening to the Zola tweet thread, as well as numerous Letterboxd reviews about “mothering” and “slaying”. May December in that sense has become a sort of queer movie to some, something I can only describe as a “yass queen” type thing.

Buried under all of this is a central conflict: the implication of “badness” within the work. To me at least, “campy” means that you know something is bad or unintentional, and you celebrate that by pushing it up. “Camp” is not really made, it’s sort of the process that happens within some sort of failure or a general queer sensibility. Notably, Todd Haynes himself has disagreed with the label, and honestly if anyone would know it’s him. I don’t think it’s camp either. In fact, I think calling the movie “camp” or reducing it down to just a display of actresses actressing is sort of turning it into a metacommentary of sorts on the very scandal its adapting.

Charles Melton is the heart and soul of the movie as Joe. He practically steals the movie away from the two women and in a way, it’s really more about him and the ways he’s manipulated by the two of them. At the center of May December is the simple fact that a 36-year-old woman had sex with a 13-year-old boy and had his child. She did this multiple times; she convinced him they were in love, she maybe even convinced herself of it. The whole thing feels tawdry because it’s a sex and cheating scandal; it feels ridiculous because they were pet shop employees. That doesn’t mean it’s not deeply serious though. It’s more accurate to call May December a melodrama: these aspects are heightened to draw out the emotions of the situation, and draw your attention to the dark reality that everyone seems to be exploiting one way or another.

In a strange way, the reception to the movie is mirroring the tabloid scandal of years past. It’s easy to focus on the weird elements, the odd details, the way Julianne Moore says “I’m secure”. These are all great parts of the movie and it would do as big a disservice to dismiss them as insignificant. But it’s important not to lose sight of the man who never seems to fit in with the kids nor the adults. Someone was harmed both in real life and the context of the film; we should be able to look it straight on and call it for what it is. Men are often glossed over when it comes to abuse by women. Joe deserves to have the depth of his pain heard.

Spooktober #2: Audition

A movie about lies that is itself a big lie.

One of the most iconic images in horror cinema

Spoilers for Audition, but if you’re reading this you probably already know what’s up. Additionally: Spooktober will take the form of 4 posts about horror films I really love (because a post a day was far too ambitious). Look forward to them!

Audition is a film about deception. There’s, of course, the thrust of the inciting incident of the narrative itself: a producer holding a fake audition to find the perfect wife. More infamously, there’s the structure of the film itself: at this point it’s probably more known for starting out as a serene Japanese drama before suddenly shifting into gory horror. Takashi Miike’s breakthrough film doesn’t exactly lie to the audience, and neither does the marketing. But through near total restraint and careful pacing, Miike and screenwriter Daisuke Tengan take protagonist Aoyama’s ignorance of red flags and implant it into the audience themselves. There are signs sprinkled all throughout that things are not what they appear to be. The fatal flaw is that the characters would rather live in the lie than get off the path to ruin.

Talking about Audition is naturally a little bit hard, but at this point the ending is as infamous as Psycho‘s first grand kill. It’s essentially impossible to view it in it’s pure, first time format unless – as Mike D’Angelo suggested – you hand someone an unmarked DVD containing the film and nothing else and have them watch it right there. In broad strokes, the film is about a widowed producer, Shigeharu Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi), who – with prodding from his friend – holds a fake casting audition to find himself the perfect wife. He finds this in Asami (Eihi Shiina), who at first appears to be everything he could ask for. There’s just something “off” about her…

Having advanced knowledge actually presents quite an interesting shift in viewing – one that probably occured for all who were familiar with Miike before this film: surprise at how un-Miike like it is. Miike has of course directed over 100 films at this point, ranging from bizarre and violent to family-friendly; in the West – perhaps due to the inherent publicity from controversy over the most extreme of them – he’s famous for violence and a slightly hyper-active style. Audition, by contrast, stays almost completely rooted in a rather naturalistic and quiet mood for the first half or so. This is the key to the whole thing working, and the key to the film itself. Just after the titular audition scene, Aoyama is contacted by another worker, who reveals some mildly troubling news: he can’t seem to find any of the references Asami has left on her application. This is a rather mild slip, but Miike consciously shoots it as an omen of things to come. Time and time again, Aoyama is given an out: his friend even explicitly tells him that something about Asami unnerves him and that it would be a bad idea to continue things further.

Both Aoyama and Asami are, in some ways, lying to themselves as much as they lie to each other. Aoyama would rather believe in the non-existent perfect wife, despite the many deeply troubling signs. Asami – to a lesser extent – is willing to believe him when he says that he will love only her (it’s unclear whether she knows at this point of both his son and his dog). Seen from this angle, Aoyama’s punishment in the finale almost comes across as justified for his hubris: he’s unwilling to believe Asami is anything other than perfectly compliant and submissive, that she could ever be capable of violence until she finally turns it back on him.

Perhaps the greatest deception of all is that Audition is “torture porn”. On the one hand, it’s easy to believe given how infamous (and graphic) the finale is. Strangely enough, that finale is actually kind of bloodless if you compare it to something like Hostel, with all its guts and gore spilling across the place. It helps that Shiina underplays Asami’s psychopathy: she calmly straps herself into an apron, preparing her surgical field with deadpan efficiency. Her manner of speech is as if she’s just administering punishment, not revenge (a point for the “it’s all in his head” team). This isn’t to say there’s no blood, but rather compared to Miike’s reputation, it actually feels somewhat realistic for the actions taken. He even cuts away from the needles entering Aoyama’s eyeballs, letting us see Asami and imagine for ourselves what’s happening.

Miike has never made another film like this, though he surely has it in him from a formal perspective. What makes it so effective after all these years is the sheer nature of it as a deceptive film, tying us back to the characters themselves. We can wish all we want that it’ll end at him waking up, that someone will make different decisions, that it was all just in his head. Reality won’t let that happen, and as Aoyama does, we accept the punishment for thinking things could end any other way.