Stitched Back Together: How Lucky McKee’s ‘May’ Saved My Life
Matt Konopka
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Take a seat, friend. I want to tell you about the time Lucky McKee’s May saved my life.
For those of you that haven’t seen this masterpiece, McKee’s painful film tells the story of a friendless woman named May (Angela Bettis), who falls for bad boy filmmaker, Adam (Jeremy Sisto). May’s a strange cat and fears he won’t like her, but Adam assures her he likes weird…until she imitates his gory zombie romance short by biting his lip and rubbing the blood on herself. Not that weird. Crushed, May tries making new friends, only to have her heart ripped out of her chest again. And again. And again. Until she decides, if she can’t find a friend, she’ll make one, with a little help from her sewing kit and a few spare body parts.
“Nobody likes to be alone.”
Like May, I was pretty lonely growing up. We moved away from the neighborhood kids I played with when I was in second grade. Around the same time, I developed a bad case of Rosacea (redness of the face). You wouldn’t think a little rosiness would matter much, but kids are cruel, and my imperfection made me an easy target for bullies. First came the name-calling. Then the pushing. Until everyone at my new school treated my cheeks like they were radioactive. My confidence became as thin as a sewing needle. I struggled to make new friends. Eventually, I felt worthless.
My family would’ve told me I mattered, but I didn’t tell them what I was going through (I should have). The darkness which first began spreading as a kid became so voracious, that after an awful breakup with the first person I ever loved, the already small candlelight inside me gave its last breath, and went out. I figured no one would ever want to be with me again. What can I say? We’re stupid when we’re young. After over a decade of being an outcast, that was the last straw for me. I began contemplating taking my own life. Came close a few times. Can even recall the phantom touch of the blade against my wrist before my sister (thankfully) came home and called out to me one day, oblivious to what I’d been about to do.
And then I saw May.
“I need a real friend. Someone I can hold.”
McKee’s film hooked me from the very first seconds, in which the director taps into the agony of loneliness by opening with a gruesome image of the poor girl screeching. The pain of my isolation screamed inside me like that, rattling the bones in my feet all the way up to my skull where it echoed deep within my mind. There was no one around to hear it. Just me, the dark, and a suffering that wouldn’t stay quiet.
We learn a troubled childhood has brought May to this place. I had stood where she stands as a little girl, kids laughing at her lazy eye…the way they laughed at my cherry-red cheeks. An all-too-distant mother gives May a doll named Suzie to be her friend. McKee uses Suzie to represent the way we seclude ourselves when we feel unwanted. Suzie remains in her box, while May keeps her heart in her own fragile, glass case. I didn’t have a Suzie, but I did have models of my favorite monsters that I painted. The Wolf Man. The Creature. Frankenstein’s Monster. They understood what it was like to be exiled more than most could.
A life of isolation leaves May socially awkward by the time we meet her as an adult. May stares instead of answering questions. She almost always says the wrong thing. She watches Adam for hours at a café before resting her face on his hand once he passes out. It’s that last bit where we get our first real taste of just how strange May is. It’s also the first of many moments in the film I started to tear up.
See, for most people, the horror of May is the uncomfortable nature of the character. McKee and Bettis do a superb job of bringing to life a person that makes viewers squirm. But I noticed something else. Throughout the entire film, May only wants someone to “see” her. And I did. I saw a lonely individual who wanted nothing more in the world than to be touched. To be held. To be loved.
I saw me.
“I am weird.”
May’s actions are wrong—don’t stalk your crushes—but they’re also a physical manifestation of unfathomable loneliness that’s difficult to put into words. I couldn’t say how I was feeling when I found myself at my lowest point, but I saw it on screen in this awkward weirdo. Her discomfort. Her fumbling for something to say. The giddy joy she feels when Adam so much as talks to her. I cheered for her with every bit of progress she made with him. Sure, she was weird, but he liked weird. God, the elated flush that came into my red cheeks when Adam says that. Those words validate who May is. He’s telling her that it’s okay to be herself. That’s all any of us can ever ask for. What I had always dreamed of. It’s a beautiful scene…until it isn’t.
There’s an irony in Adam asking May if she’s seen the movie Trauma, because she doesn’t need to. She’s lived it. When your life feels as hollow as a porcelain doll, friendly faces appear just as fake. It takes courage to trust that they’re real, because each disappointment has a greater chance of shattering you to pieces. I couldn’t hate Adam for abandoning May. She scares him and at least he’s honest with her. But damn it, if the choked agony of her devastation didn’t leave me heartbroken as well.
May deserved to be loved. We all do. So what if she was weird? McKee hadn’t just made an effectively disturbing movie. He sculpted May into a monument to the pain of being alone. Movies like this are special because they allow others to put themselves in the shoes of the outcast and for a brief 90 minutes, see those people for the person they are beyond the strangeness. As for us weirdos? We get to be reminded we’re not alone.
“If you can’t find a friend, make one.”
On the way to a grotesque yet touching finish, McKee seems to imply an important lesson that I’d never really considered until watching May on that life-changing night. No one is perfect. May’s quest to find a flawless person is hopeless from the beginning because that person doesn’t exist. She only sees people in parts, since that’s all they’ve ever seen of her. I wasn’t perfect either, but that was okay. As the receptionist at May’s vet, Polly (Angela Farris) says, “It’s the imperfections that make you special.”
May is so focused on finding perfection in a friend, as I was, that she doesn’t recognize the people taking an interest in her. Those like Polly, they’re just out of her narrow focus of sight. And that’s when it hit me. Perhaps, like May, I was only seeing the bad parts in not just other people, but myself, as well. If I only opened my eyes a little more, I’d see that others did care about me. I’d see that I did matter.
On the surface, movies are meant to entertain. Yet underneath, they’re a valuable, personal connection. They have the power to reach inside us. Open us up. Show us something we didn’t know was there. I don’t know if it was fate, or luck, or just good old-fashioned coincidence, but something changed in me that night. And as I sat there, tear-stricken eyes watching while May cuddled her creation “Amy”, I decided I was going to live. There were others out there like me. Like May. And I wanted to be around so I could return the favor that Lucky McKee and Angela Bettis had done for me by letting them know that they weren’t alone. I liked weird, too. For the first time in my life, I liked me.
May stitched my heart back together that night. Of course, working my way out of that dark place wasn’t as simple as watching a movie. If only it were that easy. It took work, a lot of work, but Lucky McKee’s film inspired me to do it. So, here’s to 20 years of this wonderful movie, and the friendship I found in a sweet woman who just wanted a friend.
Categorized:Editorials
