Public scandals are like modern-day myths that change shape and lose fidelity the more often they are repeated. They become copies of copies, grainier yet somehow grander, wholly untethered from their time and place of origin. They are also the lifeblood of much of our current entertainment landscape, in an age when lived experience counts as valuable IP, and the truth is merely content waiting to be packaged and sold.

Todd Haynes’s superb new film May December is ostensibly based on one such scandal-turned-legend: that of Mary Kay Letourneau, the thirty-four-year-old American schoolteacher who initiated a sexual relationship with her twelve-year-old student, Vili Fualaau, in 1996, mothering two of his children and eventually marrying him after serving a seven-year prison sentence for second-degree rape. It is a horrific true story about so many lives left in ruin, but rather than join the thirty-year pile-on, May December sets its sights firmly on the institution most likely to peddle in and profit from such real-world misfortune: the entertainment industry itself.