This week, we finally got around to discussing the movie everyone has been talking about: “May December,” a film “loosely inspired” by the Mary Kay Letourneau-Vili case. Directed by Todd Haynes and written by Samy Burch and Alex Mechanik, it stars Natalie Portman as Elizabeth Berry, an actress researching her role playing Gracie Atherton, a woman who became a tabloid celebrity in the ‘90s after being caught statutorily raping a 13-year-old boy who worked for her at a pet store. It’s now over 20 years later; Gracie (Julianne Moore) and the boy in question, Joe Yoo (Charles Melton), are married and soon will be sending their youngest children off to college. Elizabeth spends time with the family and gets to know their social circle in hopes of bringing something true to her performance as Gracie — a genuine insight into her psyche or the trauma that created her. Instead, boundaries get blurred, shaking the foundations of Gracie and Joe’s family.

On the podcast, we get into the gender and racial politics of the film and of how the Letourneau story was portrayed in the media at the time. We also discuss the movie’s melodramatic flourishes and daring mixture of winking humor and lurid psychodrama, the subtleties of Melton’s and Portman’s performances, and how the movie implicates the audience and artists who remain fascinated by these sensational stories.

After we recorded, a Hollywood Reporter interview with Vili Fualaau dropped in which he lashed out at “May December,” saying he is “offended by the entire project.” He also said, “If they had reached out to me, we could have worked together on a masterpiece. Instead, they chose to do a ripoff of my original story.” We did not have a chance to discuss this new turn in the public conversation around the movie, but it reframes two important elements of the movie that we did discuss: one, the way the movie examines how Joe has been repeatedly exploited — by his now-wife, then by the media, and now by Elizabeth, as she tries to mine him for details and experiences — and two, the movie’s fundamental critique of artists who try to collaborate with real-life subjects in order to evoke something true about a tabloid story like this one. Through the former lens, Fualaau’s reaction makes the movie seem like a failure on its own terms; through the latter, it’s clear that the filmmakers would never have considered “collaborating” with a real-life subject. In fact, the movie is largely about how artistically pointless and even harmful this approach would be.

Perhaps “May December” did exploit Fualaau’s story, despite all the tinkering with the superficial details of the story. Even with different names and locations, different numbers of children, different jobs, it’s undeniable that the movie lifts headlines and tabloid spreads, even an entire exchange from an interview with the couple. But the fictionalization also doesn’t seem like a fig leaf to give them some plausible deniability that it’s a biopic. Instead, the filmmakers clearly wish to make a movie that isn’t really about Fualaau and Letourneau, but about certain ideas that are provoked by considering a case like theirs. That doesn’t mean it can’t cause pain to the original victim — pain that is very valid. That pain also doesn’t mean that it was the obligation of the filmmakers was to put him in a collaborative position; they had their own, very distinct artistic project in mind.

Ultimately, as with the original movie, the whole affair leaves us feeling uncomfortable and implicated. Where does our thirst for the sensational details of a tabloid scandal ever lead us, except deeper into complicity?

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