Amongst the enlightened, the hip, the intelligent in contemporary society, weirdness is an object of superficial fascination. Latched onto, the weird conveys to its obsessor a feeling of uniqueness. In an age where so many people know so many things and anything unusual can become a 'phenomenon' on the internet, many are desperate to find things with the appearance of weirdness that they might distinguish themselves from the homogeneous pack. But how many can go beyond the superficial obsession with a weird object? How many can truly accept and embrace something genuinely weird? Whatever affected eccentricities and ostentatiously peculiar interests they may adapt, they don't know true weirdness nor, I think, do they really want to.
May, the anti-hero of May, is a genuinely weird person. We all meet people about whom we say, "He's weird!" or "She's pretty strange," but these are merely people who readily display more interesting points of their personality. May is genuinely weird. Her only friend is a doll, who must never, ever be removed from her glass case!; she's amused by stories of suffering animals; she finds parts of people more interesting than the wholes; she likes sticking scalpels into her fingers. These are just a few highlights.
There's really no reason for May to be so weird. What we learn of her upbringing is that her mother was extremely anal-retentive and controlling and that May's lazy eye inhibited her social life. Of course, none of these facts are sufficient to explain May. Many kids have lazy eyes, many kids are picked on for having lazy eyes, many kids have no friends, many kids have anal-retentive mothers, and a few kids even have all of the above; still they don't become as weird and creepy as May. She just is that way. If anything, her upbringing only served to enhance what was already there, including a strain of psychopathy.
At the juncture of May's life into which we enter, May's loneliness has reached a peak. At just this time she encounters a few people who think "weird is cool." Unfortunately for May and, ultimately, for them, they don't know what being weird truly is, nor are they equipped to judge it as 'cool' or otherwise. The first and most important of these is Adam, a college-age man who likes horror movies, smoking, and weird things. He seems secure, comfortable with his level of distinctiveness. May's oddness begins to draw him in, offering an exquisite alternative to the vulgar bimbo he lives with. He enjoys, or thinks he enjoys, her odd manners and interests. When foreplay takes a peculiar turn, however, he rejects her as 'too weird.' A key scene, encapsulating the film's major theme, is when May eavesdrops on Adam's conversation with a roommate: the roommate urges Adam to enjoy the weird girl, while Adam explains she's too much and he's glad he dumped her. Adam has been initiated, given a taste of the truly weird, and discovered himself just a dilettante; his roommate has yet to be so enlightened.
The second is Polly, May's co-worker at the veterinarian clinic. Polly is a punk girl whose brains have been a little scrambled by drugs but whose attraction to whatever's outside the mainstream remains. May's 'far out' ways and physical attractiveness similarly draw Polly in. Polly's case, like Adam's, is that her interest in the weird is superficial; May is a curiosity for her, not a commitment. However, Polly's case isn't so much one of being unable to handle weirdness, but one of being unaware of the dangers of weird people. One of Gary Larson's comic strips featured four pictures, a cat with back arched and claws out, a snake with rattling tale, a spiked puffer fish, and finally a man wearing a trenchcoat and innertube with a hat on his head and a gun in hand. The caption reads, "How nature says, 'Do Not Touch!'" And that is a valid concern. If human weirdness is a deviation from predictable behavioural patterns of action and reaction, then those patterns based around keystone values--like moral, legal, and self-preservatory values--can no longer be depended upon. Someone as weird as May is not necessarily as bound to morals like 'Don't murder anyone' as the rest of us.
A third person drawn to May's weirdness is a dopey punk she finds at a busstop. With his wild hair and tattoos, he seems as likely as anyone else to appreciate May for who she is. Simply discovering a cat in her freezer is too much for him, though, and he rejects her.
In inverse order May kills all of her betrayers, harvesting from them her favourite parts. While there are psychological reasons for May's doing so, stemming from her mother's comment that one can just make a best friend, it's as though Lucky McKee were punishing the characters for their affectations. They display themselves to the world as weird or connoisseurs of the weird, but anything too far outside of society's circumscribed limits they're unwilling to accommodate. The tragedy of the film is, really, that someone as interesting and complex as May ultimately can only find a friend in her own imagination.
The grotesque finale shows us a tortured artist-figure finding joy only in her own creativity. She's too creative to be friended, but creative enough to create her own friend. What makes May such a clever film is that this may just be a happy ending. McKee doesn't give us any cavalier judgments. May is our focus throughout the film; the film is titled after May; her happiness in her project, the hideous doll creature, while perhaps unsatisfactory to us, satisfies her. This happiness, after all, could be a happiness she could never have found in the anxiety-ridden friendships with other people. All of May's experience with friendship was destructive; but her relationships to her doll and her creation are constructive, positive. It is her attempts to escape rather than reconcile with loneliness brought about the film's tragedies.
The film's progress could be seen as one toward May seeing her own weirdness through others' eyes and coming to truly see and embrace herself for who she is; the progress is one of self-knowledge, hence the giving of her own eye to the creation. And May's final happiness, indeed, could be one few of us will ever find in others. In the end, we alone are best able to appreciate our own weirdness. But how many of us have learned to do so unabashedly? how many without affectation?
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