Broken Butterfly

In 2004 I attended a summer camp in East LA called LAMAS, or the Los Angeles Music and Art School, located right off 3rd Street. I was around 11 or 12 years old and I remember hating my first day. Summer was in full effect and I wanted nothing more than to lay around the house reading, drawing, playing outside with my brothers or playing video games. My feelings towards the summer camp were simple, why? What made my parents think I would even want to attend? No doubt I utilized an artist’s mind and hand, but why would they assume my summer was to be designated with more schooling? My first class was music, listening and singing along to various tunes and talking about the songs we enjoyed. During this time I was going through a punk rock phase which included bands like Bad Religion, Black Flag, Alkaline Trio, Thrice, AFI, Coheed and Cambria and others. My teacher was a tall white blonde woman, who also shared a passion for these same bands. She instantly became my first romantic crush.

She was probably in her late twenties or early thirties, thin, with a sweet smile and invitingly warm eyes. They might’ve been colored but I can’t be sure. Throughout the duration of the summer camp I became attached to her, wanting to be around her every moment I got. In fact, I even ignored the romantic gestures from a fellow classmate my age to be in her line of sight, if only for a glimpse or to say hi. I had no idea what I wanted, I viewed her as something completely detached from my understanding of the natural world, for she was an adult, that special form of being allowed to do anything they wanted. My dreams in youth were the fantasies of adults. Here was a woman whose acknowledgment of me meant that I was seen, I was observed, and I carried some mass to my existence. She was a wholly undiscovered cosmos to me, one I wanted to trespass and explore. It was only me and her, exchanging words and perhaps, even in the smallest most remotest of feelings, love. Surely this is what adults felt too?

I think of this while watching Todd Haynes’ new film May December, in which actress Natalie Portman plays an actress, Elizabeth, who is researching a role for her new film concerning the taboo relationship between Julianne Moore’s character, Gracie, and her husband Joe, played impeccably by Charles Melton. The film revolves around the psychological relationship between Gracie and Elizabeth, dancing between voyeurism and deception. There is always a veil between their relationship, a stimulated kindness of masks and playthings, like dolls they dress each other up in their psychoanalytic fascinations. We as viewers peer at them from the perspective of mirrors, and their reflections, their truths, slowly filter through the veil and ugly memories dance on the walls before us like shadows. They are complete packages of complicated adult experiences, filled with delusion, masquerading, and a crisis in identity. Although, what unnerved me more than Elizabeth and Gracie, and what I don’t see as much discussed about the film, is Melton’s subdued portrayal of Joe, a performance that renders my childish dreams of adult fantasies into real nightmares.

In the film Joe’s hobby is handling the care of Monarch Butterflies to restore their population, contextualizing his status. A caterpillar feeds, much like a child feeds on knowledge and experience to inform their world, and then undergoes a complete metamorphosis, stages of life reminiscent to infancy, adolescence, and adulthood. This natural process takes time and can’t be rushed. The chrysalis that forms a protective barrier for the caterpillar is fragile and can be broken. It is a form of maturation closely linked to, and yet never achieved in, Joe’s past. He was in the seventh grade when he met Gracie, a woman of 36, similar to the age I was at LAMAS. Gracie manipulated the natural process of maturation, sped it up and dislodged Joe from his cocoon before he was ready to endure the world. We see hints of this unnatural course when Joe smokes weed with his graduating son for the first time and cannot contain his laughter nor his emotions, or when he texts another woman from his butterfly Facebook group about planning a secret rendezvous together, a fantasy that can only exist through brief exchanges, or when he engages in sex with Elizabeth and has no way of recontextualizing his experiences with Gracie. “This is just what adults do,” Elizabeth informs an incredulous Joe, who most likely lost his virginity to Gracie and never copulated with anyone else afterwards. His personality is extremely reserved, shy and lumbering, he carries no real weight to his words or his tone. Instead this heaviness is evident when he walks, for his footfalls feel dense, and his shoulders are always curved like he’s struggling to simply exist, to stay up under immense gravity. Whenever he communicates with Gracie he never really has anything to say, nothing of substance, because he is locked in the confines of a premature existence, a broken butterfly.

Joe’s horrendous misadventure into the adult realm of sex and anxiety and experience allowed for Gracie to control every facet of his maturation. She nurtured him with her psychosis and delirium, and due to this he never really existed, he never found himself and thus his voice. There is no costume for Joe, he hasn’t learned that one might be needed, therefore he is exceedingly compliant and soft spoken, there is no need for him to have ideas about life or a future because it’s been decided for him without his consent. All of the events he’s unprepared for reveal a glaring misconception of adulthood, the fantasy crumbling away as Elizabeth investigates further, until all that’s left are broken wings and the gray remnants of a chrysalis.

I found myself increasingly frustrated with his mumbling, his inability to collect his thoughts into rational queries, his lack of investigation and desire, because I still viewed him as a seventh grade boy. I look at the middle schoolers I work with currently: obsessed with image and independence, cautious of observers and painfully acute to the real world of violence, sex, and money. I look at them and wonder if they could maintain for decades a romantic commitment to an individual far beyond their comprehension they may as well be god. I think of myself, crying, and my mother asking me why I was so distressed, knowing full well I complained about the summer camp, and yet I couldn’t get the words out, something held my tongue in submission. I choked out sounds but nothing discernible. The overwhelming confusion of emotions made me curl and cringe because I couldn’t understand that things take time to grow, to mature, to be free to choose one’s life and those they decide to let in on that journey. I cried the last day of camp because I understood deep within me that I would never see her again, never hear her voice or see those eyes, and yet I was also certain that even if I’d gained those things I wouldn’t know what to do. Was I simply looking for another mother? Another caretaker and provider? What exactly was I attracted to?