‘May December,’ the Frog Prince, and Adultification

by Karenna Blomberg

“You are a frog and you are a man and you are a prince and you have never stopped being a little boy who nobody came looking for.”

This is a quote from a Tumblr post about an adaptation of the Frog Prince character from a horror-fantasy Dungeons and Dragons show. It has absolutely nothing to do with Todd Haynes’ May December (2023), or Charles Melton’s highly-lauded performance in it. Except that it does, because this keen observation of the frog prince does, and more importantly because I decided it does. You got it? Stick with me. 

May December borrows its plot loosely from the real-life case of Mary Kay Letourneau, a schoolteacher in the 1990s charged with initiating a relationship with her 13-year-old student and who had two of his children during her sentence. Later, Letourneau and the student, then over 18, got married. In Haynes’ fictionalization of the story, Gracie (Julianne Moore), initiates a similar relationship with her teen son’s friend, Joe Yoo (Melton). 

Twenty-odd years later, May December picks up with Joe as a nurse in his 30s, married to Gracie, their college-aged daughter living out-of-state, and their twin son and daughter preparing to graduate from high school. Their typical-seeming family is disrupted when Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), an actress about Joe’s age, begins to shadow them to prepare for her upcoming role as young Gracie in a movie. For Joe, Elizabeth’s presence reflects his relationship with Gracie in the light of adulthood, and he is somewhat unsure how to react. Joe is a rich character, haunted without fully knowing it, and so many of Melton’s acting choices—from his manner of speaking to his body language—echo those unseen burdens. 

Before playing Joe, Melton was best known for his “hunky” roles, like Reggie in Riverdale, or the boyfriend in Ariana Grande’s “break up with your girlfriend, i’m bored” music video. But his transformation for May December, while absent heavy makeup or prosthetics, is significant. Joe is the poster child for “adultification,” pushed to be ready for what he couldn’t be by adults who wanted him to be, and this is exactly how Melton plays him. He demonstrates Joe’s physical age but also shows all the ways he is still stuck in his 13-year-old self. His sagging posture and visible beer gut juxtapose with his stunted emotional performance, echoing that of a stereotypical “troubled teen.” His speech is slow but unsure and Gracie talks down to him in the same way she speaks to their kids. His acquiescent responses suggest that it’s all he knows.

Now, I’m sure you’re wondering, what the hell does this have to do with the quote about the frog prince? Thanks for your patience. 

In every version of The Frog Prince, the evil fairy curses the prince because he is selfish and thoughtless, even loveless. It implies that he brings his fate upon himself for his lack of thought—that he is monstrous, and therefore deserving of a monstrous image. Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1991) also has a witch who turns the prince into a beast because he committed a cruel and selfish act. In the original book, La Belle et la Bête by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, the prince is made into a beast after he rejects the witch’s attempts to seduce him.

None of these stories ever point out that when he is cursed, the prince is still a child. 

“You look for the eggs. Take them inside. Protect them so they have a chance to grow.”

One of Joe’s few hobbies is raising butterflies. He traces his caterpillars’ growth intently, watching them slowly evolve and spread their wings. The protective feeling Joe has over those caterpillars is an undeniable parallel to his subconscious desire to protect children in every way he wasn’t. 

Although we don’t see much of his profession—a pediatric nurse—there is one crucial scene where he and Elizabeth look at the x-rays of a child who broke his arm. “Only 13—so small,” she comments, and Joe weakly responds with a small, “Yeah.” Later in the scene, Elizabeth tells him, “I already have an idea of what it must have felt like [as Gracie] . . . sneaking around with you,” and Joe almost imperceptibly shrinks back. While other characters seem desensitized to just how young a 13-year-old is, Joe seems to constantly think about that fragility.  

Later, Joe and Elizabeth have sex, and as they lie in bed, Joe is the most relaxed we get to see him. Elizabeth is possibly the first person in a long time who seeks to hear Joe’s perspective and even encourages him to leave Gracie, “You’re so young . . . you can still start over.” Melton’s face betrays that this is the first time he’s ever heard these words, and he takes them to heart. But his night with Elizabeth does not heal him of his trauma. As the two talk, Elizabeth refers to Joe and Gracie’s relationship as “stories like these…” to which Joe immediately takes offense: “This isn’t a story! This is my f–king life!” She, too, sees him more as an abstract creature than a man. 

Another theme woven throughout the fabric of May December is how devastating a life at the center of a media frenzy can be. While never a narrative focal point, it’s strongly implied that the scrutiny Joe and Gracie were under when she was first arrested was disruptive. A lot of what does come up centers on Gracie—placing a critical eye on how media often sensationalizes attention-seekers like her. But from the very first scene—where Gracie receives a box of feces from a “hater,” per se, and hands it off to Joe as she entertains Elizabeth—there is an unspoken understanding that the media attention makes Gracie feel much bigger and makes Joe feel smaller. 

Much of the film’s focus, both diegetically and non-diegetically, is on Gracie, but Melton’s performance demands that we ask what happened between Joe’s teenage years and when we see him. He was dehumanized by the tabloids—seen as secondary to Gracie, who was the real story; the predator. Was he the prey? Elizabeth sure seems to think so. He thought that being with Gracie was his choice, and there was nothing more to it. 

“What if I wasn’t old enough to be making those kinds of decisions?”

Part of Joe’s arc explores consensual relationships with women his own age for the first time. One is a fellow butterfly enthusiast we never see but with whom he talks over text. These scenes, although devoid of dialogue, are oddly tense. His shoulders are raised. His jaw is tight. The guilt Joe feels for “betraying” Gracie in this moment, as well as the desperate longing for a sense of real, normal love, run through Melton’s taut body language. 

And then there’s Elizabeth. The more that she resembles Gracie, the tenser Joe gets. She doesn’t treat him like a child the way Gracie does, but she also doesn’t treat him like a human. She observes him like a curious scientist—a research subject that she’s grown fond of. Having sex with him seems to be a part of the experiment, a way to get into the “character” of Gracie. Knowing that Elizabeth only gets close to Joe as a means to literally re-enact his most traumatic moments begs the question if her “saving” him was just another form of abuse. While in most retellings of The Frog Prince, the princess saves the frog with a kiss (or occasionally by quite literally sharing a bed with him), in the original version, she throws the frog against the wall in frustration because he’s so strangely inhuman. 

In arguably the most impactful scene of the film, Joe tearfully confesses to Gracie that he feels that what she did to him was wrong, finally suggesting that just maybe, 13 was too young to be propositioned by 36. Maybe, she and the whole world saw him as less than human. And like the evil fairy tells the young prince, Gracie says it is his fault. For “seducing” her. “Who was in charge?” she asks, and it’s much easier for her to say it was the child now that he looks like a man. 

Then, in a scene that Melton described as “release” for Joe, he watches his kids graduate high school. Maybe they’re imperfect, but they are kids in the way 18-year-olds are kids, and adults in the way they are meant to be adults. Joe watches the graduation from just beyond the seating area, behind a chain link fence. Melton’s face contorts from pride to pain to relief as Joe cries at the realization that with no one left that he has a duty to protect, something is over. 

As Melton’s heavy sobs show, there is so much more than just Gracie that Joe wanted to be free of: it was also the responsibility to a wife who groomed him and to children he neither consented to nor was ready for. The years of harassment from the press who saw him either as a voiceless victim or a creature—an endangered caterpillar or a cursed frog. The years of believing his humanity could only be returned to him by someone believing he is worthy of love, and the years he waited in vain for that someone to come, only for them to echo the same abuse. Before the graduation scene, Joe is everything but himself:  a frog, a man, a prince. He is still a little boy.

After that moment? You can see it on Melton’s face. He’s finally Joe.