May

May is a darkly comic modern fairytale centered on an outcast whose interests, bordering on the macabre (human anatomy and dismemberment), later becomes her ticket out of isolation and into the warm embrace of created companionship. In a film whose protagonist is one that would both disgust and garner sympathy from audiences, it is a success in exploring the Other and how, in its pursuit to become one with the One (the standard of society) is pushed to the edge of its Otherness, further reinforcing and molding itself to the claims of Otherness put on it by greater society.


It was just a painful but necessary experience to witness May, a self-affirmed introvert, attempt to get out of her shell and expose herself to the people around her, trying to ply her away from the confines of her comfort zone, only to break her heart in the end, to fully sympathize with the tragedy of her character, indeed without which we would merely laugh at her awkward behavior and would definitely judge her without batting an eye when she finally commits her great creative (in both senses of the term--creative as both aesthetically genius and formative) act of abjection.

May's killing spree of selective abjection (yup, she is one picky Frankenstein, this one) is carried out not because of a God-complex (as in Dr. Frankenstein's original motive behind "It's Alive!") but because of a deepset yearning for companionship, to end an isolation both self-imposed and asked of her by society. This difference in intent updates the original tale of the modern prometheus from the cautionary tale of man playing God to the postmodern dilemma of fragmentation and excessive individualism (one that is both internalized and imposed).