May December, Vili Fualaau, and Losing Ownership of Your Story
Todd Haynes’ May December, one of the best films of 2023, has predictably inspired much discourse. The dark comedy-drama follows an ambitious actress as she shadows a woman who became a tabloid obsession when she ‘seduced’ a teenage boy. They’re now married and have three children, the youngest of whom are getting ready to leave the nest.
In one scene, the now adult victim tries to question the origins of their supposedly brilliant love story and is told that it was he, the child, who came onto her. It’s a bleak moment that conveys the twisted dynamics of this marriage and the reverberations of abuse. It’s also, in terms of pure dialogue, lifted from reality. As eagle-eyed viewers pointed out, this moment was taken from an interview with Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau, a formerly married couple who met when she was his 34-year-old teacher and he was 12.
The shadow of the Letourneau-Fualaau story looms over every scene of May December, a chilling reminder that the truth is often weirder and sadder than fiction. The parallels are obvious and deliberate: both Fualaau and Joe Yoo (played by Charles Melton) are Asian/Pacific Islanders, both fathered children who were born in prison, and both ended up married to their abusers for many years.
Fualaau, who is now aged 40 and about to become a grandfather, told the Hollywood Reporter that he was ‘offended by the entire project and the lack of respect given to me […] 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.’
His feelings are understandable. His story, which he has had little to no control over for the majority of his life, has been appropriated and exploited for decades. There have been dozens of cheap shock-docs on the subject. Letourneau cooperated on a 2000 TV movie adaptation of the story that many saw as overtly sympathetic to a child rapist. Many writers have taken looser inspiration from the case. Even South Park had its own take, which ended up being far more critical of proceedings than most coverage. May December is not Fualaau’s story but it’s tough to find a review that doesn’t mention his name or Letourneau’s. They are entwined and he can’t stop that.
Dramatizations and re-imaginings of real-life events are seldom concerned with total adherence to the truth. Often, that’s not what anyone involved even wants. As we’ve frequently discussed on this site, biopics are made not with a fidelity to history in mind but the careful crafting of a narrative that ultimately pleases the subject and/or their valuable estates.
But May December is not Fualaau’s story, just as it’s not the story of the depressingly large number of people who married their victims and passed their lives off as a rose-tinted love story. It’s a tangled issue, the lack of control that public figures have over how others can use their stories. Amanda Knox has been candid in discussing how vaguely fictionalized takes on her story, such as the drama Stillwater, left her feeling violated. The ripped-from-the-headlines stories on TV procedurals like the Law and Order franchise are often so ghoulishly dramatized that they turn tangled tragedies into soap opera comedies. Fualaau is no stranger to this phenomenon.
Indeed, one of the things that makes May December so good is that it’s sharply aware of the perils of turning reality into entertainment. Much of the film is spent dissecting the dehumanizing process of reducing a person’s trauma to a tatty pedestal for an actor’s monologue. Natalie Portman’s character ‘consults’ the victim but she does not care for his wellbeing. The process requires that he be nothing more than a ‘character’ for her agenda. None of this is shown to be a good thing. Charles is clearly the abused, the emotionally stunted 30-something father of three who was stripped of his ability to become his own person. And the cycle goes on, long after Portman has left to make her terrible movie. In a story about control, Charles has none, over himself or his own narrative. It’s powerful and necessary, but I see why that would sting for Fualaau.
I do wonder what May December would have been like had they made it a true adaptation of Fualaau’s story and had him act as a consultant. Is this a story he’s truly ready to confront? We’re talking about a man who must be dealing with an intense amount of trauma. He spent decades married to the woman who went to jail for child rape, raised a family with her, and worked alongside her. They were separated when she died, but he was there for her last days. Is this something he’s fully unpacked? Hell, could any victim truly be ready to deal with that, and on a film set of all places? It’s rare that the subject’s involvement in a biopic improves it. Now imagine a traumatized victim of lifelong abuse trying to figure out how far his own story can go for the big screen. Would you blame him for wanting to potentially veto scenes or dialogue that feel too confessional, or too honest about what happened to him?
You can’t stop creators from using real-life events and people as inspiration. Doing so would wipe out millennia of the cultural canon. We are, however, more aware than ever of how such work can perpetuate nasty cycles of cruelty and misinformation. Even the most recent docuseries on Fualaau and Letourneau couldn’t help but fall back on the broken notion that perhaps it was true love all along. Our stories are not always our own to tell, and that will always be a bitter pill to swallow. I hope Fualaau finds peace despite this whirlwind of renewed attention. He’s a crucial reminder that, amid the furore of creativity and artistic plundering, there are real people who can only sit on and watch as their lives are dissected for plot beats and actorly flair.
