May December and Toxic Empathy

I watched May December on Netflix, the new movie where Julianne Moore plays Gracie, a former teacher who had sex with her 7th grade student, and Natalie Portman plays Elizabeth Berry, an actress doing research for a role where she will be playing her. I had heard a lot about it on social media but didn’t really know what to expect. It ended up, in my view at least, being one of the most effective critiques of 2010s progressive neoliberal feminism, fake empathy, and the elite use of “story” and “narrative” as a kind of propaganda tool. These are some of my favorite points to critique about the 2010s—if you’ve been reading my stuff for a while, you probably know that.

Elizabeth is starring as Gracie in an upcoming movie about her life. Elizabeth seeks to understand and empathize with Gracie, the criminal, but there’s no attempt to understand the actual victim of Gracie’s crime, Joe, Gracie’s former student, who she now lives with. They have three kids who are graduating from high school, and they don’t look all that much younger than Joe.

Joe seems to spend his time grilling burgers and hot dogs and drinking too many beers (Gracie sharply reminds him he’s already on his second beer of the day in one early scene). He works as an X-Ray technician and they have a decent house, and they. But it becomes clear Joe never really was allowed to process what happened to him.

When Elizabeth first arrives, she thanks Gracie for allowing her to stay with her for a few days. Gracie says she just wants her to “tell the story right.” And Elizabeth heartily agrees, telling Gracie that she wants her to “feel seen and known.” It’s all about creating an empathetic portrayal of Gracie—who, it bears repeating, is a criminal, who has no repentance for her crime, and who is living with her victim, who has clear signs of trauma. If anyone should have had a movie made about their “story,” it should be Joe—he was in 7th grade when his teacher seduced him, but his story is not regarded as important. All that matters is making sure that the criminal feels seen, that her story is heard, that she is empowered. In this I think we can see a clear tendency of 2010s progressive neoliberal feminism—empowerment of women’s worst tendencies, celebrating them for being awful; the COO of Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg, was lauded as the real power behind Facebook during the time when it was involved in horrific crimes, and she gets treated as some kind of powerful, aspirational feminist icon; Elizabeth Holmes, a fraudulent con artist who was treated as the next Steve Jobs, and who, after her crimes were revealed, still had movies and films made about her; and of course Hillary Clinton, as soulless and power-hungry of a person as anyone has ever lived, who celebrated invading Libya and joked about slaughtering its leader, among countless other horrible things—and she is and always will be celebrated as a Yaas Queen leader by most of the establishment media. (These are just a few examples off the top of my head—I’m sure you could add many, many more—but I don’t want to get sidetracked!).

In another early scene, Elizabeth is talking to Rhonda, one of Gracie’s friends (maybe her only one?). Rhonda says that things have finally seemed to settle down for Gracie and Joe, and that making a movie will disrupt that. Elizabeth replies that it’s a “very complex and human story,” to justify the disruption that making a movie about them will cause. But the story isn’t complex and human—it’s straightforward and inhuman, it’s a criminal with a severe personality disorder who did an awful thing, never apologized for it, and never gave her victim the time or space to process what happened. There’s nothing complex or human about Gracie. She’s simple and evil. The complex human story would be on the part of Joe, but that isn’t Elizabeth’s intention. She treats Joe as just a supporting character in the real story, which is Gracie’s, and making sure that her story gets told.

And why is it so important for Gracie’s story to get told? What would be the benefit of telling Gracie’s story? I suppose the idea is that Gracie is somehow misunderstood, that the tabloids presented a caricatured version of her to the public, etc.—and that there’s more to her than that. But as the film goes on, we see that there really isn’t more to her than that—she is as she seems. In fact, the more you see of her, the worse she seems. In a revealing scene towards the end of the movie, Joe tries to talk to her, and tell her that maybe what they did way back when he was in 7th grade, wasn’t a great thing, and that he wasn’t ready, and was too young for it. She is immediately dismissive of this, and more than that, she tells him that he was the one who was in charge, that he was the boss—even though he was in 7th grade, and she was in her 30s.

But the real reason that Elizabeth is so keen to tell Gracie’s story is because she personally gets off on it. Literally, she gets an erotic charge from stepping into her shoes and retracing her steps. Joe was working part-time at a pet store when he was a kid, and Gracie would meet him there for sex (because she was married, and he was…a kid, so they didn’t have a lot of options). Apparently, they had sex in a back-room area, and Elizabeth visits it, and starts writhing around on the floor, having some kind of bizarre orgasmic experience triggered simply by being in that place where they had sex. There are a few other instances of this, but it all leads up to the real thing—after gaining Joe’s trust and sparking a relationship with him where he opens up to her, and confides in her, she kisses him. She tells him that he can do anything he wants, and gives him encouraging words, sensing how vulnerable he is, and how his development has been so stunted. So they kiss some more and end up having sex in her hotel room. After it’s over, they keep talking, and Joe shares some of his insecurities, and Elizabeth says “that’s common in someone with your story” and he immediately snaps and says “it’s not a story! It’s my life!” Then it quickly becomes clear that the sex meant nothing to Elizabeth—and it probably meant a lot to Joe, since he had only ever slept with Gracie since he was in 7th grade. Joe says something like “What was this?” referring to the sex they just had, and Elizabeth coldly and matter of factly says “This is just what grown-ups do.” A pretty exact recreation of what Gracie did to him. She stepped into Gracie’s shoes literally, traumatizing Joe again, in the same way. This triggers him into having something of a breakdown, and trying to talk to Gracie about his feelings, which she is not open to whatsoever, of course. Elizabeth got what she wanted—she literally got off on it. It was all some kind of bizarre erotic conquest for her, just as it was for Gracie. But it’s all wrapped up in the guise of having empathy for Gracie, and of telling her story. But we shouldn’t have empathy for criminals with personality disorders like Gracie—and “telling the story” is often a way of obscuring the truth, rather than revealing it. And turning everything into a story has a corrosive effect on real life—Joe was trying to live a real life, and have a real moment with Elizabeth, but he was just a character in her research for the story she was telling. And Elizabeth feels like what she’s doing is okay, because she has this veil of empathy for Gracie as a rationalization for all of it. But it’s all fake.

The movie is one of the better depictions of this trend of toxic empathy and the mixing in of story with life that I’ve seen, and how women have increasingly used these things to wreak havoc—and not only do they have no repercussions, they are celebrated in the culture. Scary stuff.