From Pretty Little Liars to May December: Grooming in Media

Regardless of the Academy’s voting decisions, the Best Supporting Actor winner in my heart was Charles Melton. His devastating turn in Todd Haynes’ May December as Joe-Atherton Yoo solidified his acting chops and launched him into certified Acteur territory. Atherton-Yoo’s “romance” with his school teacher, when she was 36 and he was 13, scandalized their local community but faded to tabloid memory as they married and lived together for the next 23 years. Before May December, Melton was best known for his tenure as Reggie Mantle in The CW’s Riverdale. The oft-lambasted soap opera covered time travel, teenage-run speakeasies, demonic possession, and serial killer genes. In its first season, it also delivered a plotline in which 15-year-old protagonist Archie Andrews (KJ Apa) courts his adult music teacher, Geraldine Grundy. 

Any mention of student/teacher romances in teen dramas is bound to invoke memories of #Ezria. That is, 15-year-old Aria Montgomery (Lucy Hale) and her 23-year-old high school English teacher, Ezra Fitz (Ian Harding), one of the central couples in Freeform’s Pretty Little Liars. Adapted from Sara Shepard’s series of young adult novels, the series was always clearly aimed at teenagers. The main characters were high schoolers, whose storylines were written to be consumed by an audience of children. It’s little wonder, therefore, that since the series ended, there has been a re-examining of Ezra and Aria’s relationship. 

On the show, their student-teacher dynamic is framed as a forbidden love story. The audience is meant to root for them to overcome the forces that conspire to keep them apart – i.e., statutory rape laws and Aria’s horrified parents. Ezra’s English class is frequently used as a backdrop for them to have metaphorical arguments about their relationship. Ezra develops an “us-against-the-world” mindset with Aria— secretly meeting with her, expressing his frustration with the circumstances that keep them apart, and at one point trying to switch schools for their relationship. It’s not the age gap or inherent creepiness that stops him from dating her: it’s the school district. 

Later on, it’s revealed that Ezra knew exactly who Aria was and how old she was before he met and pursued a relationship with her. It’s also revealed that Ezra had previously had a relationship with Aria’s friend Alison, who was even younger when they met (although the show asserts Alison – played by the then-13-year-old Sasha Pieterse – convincingly lied about her age). But after all that, Ezra and Aria wind up married and living happily ever after. It was a ship beloved by the fans, by design. Plenty of my friends remember thinking how romantic it was – and no wonder! Forbidden love, angst, defying all expectations to be together…it’s the bread-and-butter of teen-oriented romances. All of this makes it all the more troubling that the show used these trappings to sell this “love” story to its young audience. 

In the years since, as that audience has grown up, it’s pretty widely acknowledged how creepy “Ezria” was. Ian Harding, the actor who played Ezra, is among the most vocal Ezra-haters. It’s probably unlikely that something so blatant would be depicted on mainstream TV right now. But this kind of “taboo” (illegal) relationship continues to resurface in various forms across pop culture.

Scandals make good stories, so it’s little wonder that the media has long been fascinated by the murky world of age gaps. But when relationships between minors and adults take the spotlight, they raise a host of concerns about the depiction of grooming and abusive relationships. Art has never shied away from uncomfortable topics, nor has it failed to generate heated conversation about them. Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita, which details the relationship between a pedophile and his 12-year-old stepdaughter (whom he grooms and abuses) is widely regarded as one of the greatest works of English literature. It has also inspired outrage and furious debates over whether it promotes child abuse. Having read and studied the novel, I firmly believe it does not. But the trouble is, the novel doesn’t stand in isolation. Its themes have been constantly misappropriated from book covers to Lana del Rey or even Japanese street fashion. The psychological depth of the novel has been lost and its central character fetishized. “Lolita” has become culturally synonymous with coquettish, seductive, and tempting – the horrors of the story she belongs to have been lost. 

Riverdale makes several references to Lolita in the Season 1 story following Miss Grundy and Archie. The heart-shaped sunglasses she sports as she ogles a pair of teenage boys are even a visual nod to Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of the novel. On some level, this could be a conscious commentary. Riverdale, unlike its teen soap predecessor, Pretty Little Liars, explicitly denounces Geraldine. When her relationship with Archie is exposed, another character accuses her of statutory rape and threatens legal action. The scene in which she ogles teenagers comes right after Archie defends her and insists their feelings are real. The show makes sure to undermine his argument and prove that her behavior is part of a pattern of abuse. The visual nod to Lolita could be interpreted as a commentary on how Geraldine manipulates Archie to obscure how dangerous and abusive their relationship is. However, there’s still an element of glamorizing this relationship. The characters – both played by adults– are conventionally attractive. When we see them kiss and have sex on screen, it is framed as steamy rather than. Even though the show goes out of its way to say that the relationship is wrong, it doesn’t strip away the soapy, teen-drama patina sexiness it sells. 

Since both Riverdale and Pretty Little Liars are aimed at teenagers, it makes the ickiness of glamorizing these predatory relationships apparent. However, there is a risk that comes with attempting to block teen media from addressing these topics outright. In an interview, Ava Reid (author of Fangirlish) said, “My experiences in publishing Juniper & Thorn have taught me how deeply and mercilessly stigmatized the topic of child sexual abuse is in literature, that even in an adult horror novel replete with…ghoulish acts of violence, the depiction of sexual abuse was what ignited outrage and controversy….In YA in particular, we acknowledge how important it is for young, marginalized readers to see themselves and their experiences reflected in books. The vulnerable, courageous teenager survivors of sexual abuse deserve to see themselves reflected with humanity and nuance. Exploring the complex range of victimhood allows us to expand our empathy, and to continue creating meaningful, cathartic, boundary-pushing art.” Art exists to be challenging, to create space to explore the breadth of human experience, even – especially – the most dark, troubling ones. There has to be space for it to exist. But when aimed at an audience of children, it’s all the more important it is handled with sensitivity and awareness of its impact.

May December and Miller’s Girl are two R-rated films, released in the last year that both focus on a problematic relationship between an adult and a teen, using two different approaches. Miller’s Girl, an erotic thriller, deliberately plays with the provocative dynamic between 18-year-old Cairo Sweet (Jenna Ortega) and Jonathan Miller (Martin Freeman), her high school English teacher. (For the record, all my high school English teachers were wonderful, and I feel compelled to defend them from becoming a weird trope in these stories). Writer and Director Jade Halley Bartlett deliberately sought to create a send-up of the student-teacher trope, focusing on challenging preconceived ideas of what makes villains and victims. Despite this, it felt like the film fell short of bringing a concrete perspective to the topic. It lacked the campiness of Cruel Intentions to undercut the central dynamic with absurdity and never developed enough depth. I think, echoing Ava Reid, it’s dangerous to prevent art, especially art aimed explicitly at adults, from exploring the dark and uncomfortable. But when it’s a topic that has been depicted so poorly, and indeed so dangerously, for so long, it feels like more of a blow when the art that “goes there” is just…not very good. 

That’s why Todd Haynes’ May December, unfairly shut out of the mainstream awards cycle, felt so ingenious. Inspired by the Mary Kay Letorneau case, the film doesn’t just confront the inherent fascination with these taboo relationships but makes it a central part of its DNA. The meticulously affected performance of Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore, the editing and camerawork that makes everything look slightly exaggerated, and the soap opera score. It’s all a reminder of how cases like Letorneau’s are often reduced to tabloid fodder, dehumanizing victims in the process. May December’s ending, reveals that the movie Portman’s character has been preparing for is not, as she claimed, a sensitive, serious work. Rather, it is a soapy Lifetime-style drama that reduces Joe’s abuse to a caricature for daytime television. It’s a devastating reminder of how sickening the whole thing is: the horror of abuse and our tendency to value shock over compassion. 

As I pointed out, scandal sells. Just as the cultural fascination with stories of murder, true crime, and gore will never fade, neither will the interest in stories of sexual deviance, grooming, and abuse. What we can change is our approach to telling and receiving them. We can seek stories that view victims as humans, not spectacles. More importantly, we can focus on the horror that the prevalence of these stories exposes. Art should make us more compassionate so we can direct that compassion towards the victims of CSA and grooming. It should ensure they see their bravery and humanity reflected in concerted efforts to protect and heal them. It should prove our collective interest is in them, not just their stories.