May Day – Magical Inspiration, or Psychopathic Delusion?

 May Day – Magical Inspiration, or Psychopathic Delusion? 

May Day (2021) is a fantasy film that has a similar narrative structure to The Wizard of Oz (1939). The Wizard of Oz speaks about a woman’s fictional journey to a strange world, as does the film May Day. In this remarkable movie, I see women being empowered – they hold each other up, whisper secrets, and swim in the wild currents of the world’s oceans – which are also, metaphorically speaking, society’s currents. In my opinion, the film’s director, Karen Cinorre, used metaphor and imagery in her movie to encourage women to speak up. The film commentates on several relevant themes - capitalism, mental health, spirituality, and feminism. While the main character Ana is lured into a fictional, war-torn world after attempting suicide, I believe Cinorre has this happen to talk about mental illness. The film ends up discussing intersectionality – Ana is a woman, she is mentally ill, and she is potentially gay. I see the story teaching women and girls how to take reign of their life – and a warning against falling prey to psychopathy and unadulterated evil. 

How does the film’s themes encourage women to be powerful? Cinnore’s film offers more than encouragement – it offers a better society for an audience of girls who are questioning their sexuality. It also might be a helpful film for girls who are having problems with their body image or even battling anorexia – but it also has dark themes and should be consumed with caution. In May Day, more is done than was possible in 1939. Dorothy’s journey from Kansas to Oz and back, however, also has an inspirational story for girls. Despite pressure from society to be sexual beings, both films deliberate on feminine power in girls. Both characters – Ana and Dorothy – are young, beautiful women. 

This movie is a fantasy movie, and the criteria that allow a fantasy movie to be enjoyed is very different from some films that lean towards the normal; towards the status quo. It discusses things that are not real as a metaphor to discuss deeper issues that are very real. It is equally important to note that the director, Karen Cinorre, is female. This is an important detail because it sheds light on the context of the story – the story was created by a woman, for women. While The Wizard of Oz was written during the first wave of feminism, May Day has several new ideas to bring to today’s feminism. 

Problematically, the majority of the characters in the film are white – except for the character Bea, who I will analyze later in this essay. How does the film showcase different ways for women to reclaim our sensuality? While May Day seems to be stating that misogyny, capitalism, and war make life incredibly hard for women today, it also takes light of some issues. One issue that the film gets wrong is psychopathy – in the film, it is okay to murder male soldiers. Perhaps Ana felt hurt and felt lost. Perhaps Marsha felt more hurt, and like it was okay to murder men because her life was dramatically unfair. 

In the light of this negativity, though, May Day does a better job of fairly representing gay women. Although the sociopathy of Marsha negatively impacts the lessons she tries to impart on Ana, seeing a bunch of women shooting guns and sleeping together is representation. In film, if your identity is not represented, then you feel invisible, wiped out of existence. Seeing powerful women sleeping with other women can positively impact the minds of curious young girls. 

  The film’s main metaphor is swimming. The characters are swimming in a wild and unfriendly ocean that is very much like the just as unfriendly real world. Ana thinks she doesn’t know how to swim, which establishes this metaphor which compares Ana’s ability to swim to her ability to effectively control her own life. It also questions Ana’s confidence in herself and asks young girls what they want out of life. Are young girls able to swim, even when engulphed by violent rip tides? To return to her mundane life, swimming against these enormous waves is the only way. Navigating a hard life is one of the lessons this film offers to girls, and at this point, Ana realizes that she is unquestionably a strong swimmer. She can traverse the world’s negative political currents that she is returning to. I believe this offers girls a choice to transcend their very real problems. 

Most of the girls portrayed in May Day never question some of the senseless, psychopathic crimes they commit, and additionally, I would say they do not even question why they were sent there. Marsha exists as a girl who tells the world, very excitedly mind me, that she has no soul and doesn’t want one. Reporter Adrian Horton reflects that “there’s great potential in plumbing the tale of the Sirens for motivations masked by centuries of inattention, of attending to the scars that fester into monstrous rage,” and this is postulating that an abused woman’s rage is enough theodicy to allow unadulterated murder.  Ana, though, is the hero of the story, and the stories that we tell each other matter. I believe that if we look at the story from Ana’s point of view, then the moral given is a warning against psychopathy in abused women. The lenses of the story being told, the actresses saying the lines, often indubitably influence the thought patterns the story teaches its, often young, audience. 

Although by the end of the story, Ana disavows all murderous activity, young girls are particularly impressionable. Would a thirteen-year-old girl look at Marsha or Bea and wish they could be her? When I was a child, I watched Thirteen (2003), a movie about self-harm that led me down a rather destructive path. I believe May Day also has the potential to lead preteens down a negative path. I think that the story, then, continuously perpetuates evil and mental illness. To me, May Day seems to be saying it is okay to kill people if you are unhappy. 

What else does young Ana’s story do? What moral codes does the story impart? I think the story is commentating on magic and witchcraft. In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy ends up in a strange world – she is lost and confused like many young girls are today. When Ana ends up in a completely difficult, problematic world, she barely questions her new and strange, foreign world. In The Wizard of Oz, a female witch guides Dorothy back, although she would not have been able to go on the journey without the square crow, tin man and lion – sadly, all men. In May Day, Ana is aided by three women her age along with an older woman named June. I believe June represents the intersectionality of people who can identify as female, seniors, and sapphic. Can this teach young girls to honor the wisdom of their elders?  

 While the story is saying girls don’t need men to navigate their lives, it is also suggesting that we can hone our own magic and go to a surreal, mystical world like the ones in May Day and The Wizard of Oz whenever we want. If we want to experience utopia, we can close our eyes and think of these stories – in the end, we are better off hearing them and learning lessons from them. Going into this world – from the oven, mind me – might have saved Ana’s life and motivated her to put her life back together – man or no man. Horton again comments on this: “Ana’s suicide attempt has landed her in a kind of psychotic, Edenic (minus the war) purgatory for women with unresolved trauma.” Ana was given a one-way get out of hell free path – the world she went to might have been evil, but she did make her way home relatively unscathed. 

In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy’s relationship with three men (fictional representations of male friends in her real life) is more prominent than learning how to be an independent woman.  Tomris Laffly writes that May Day is “a single-minded yet deficient metaphysical thriller that overstates its feministic intentions at every turn like a desperate SOS” (Laffly). Cinorre’s vision is for a feministic world with a priority on strong gay women to become a reality. While all the characters own their sensual, feminine power, when Ana returns to her mundane life, she inevitably realizes that she must compromise on these ideas. Although, as an autistic gay woman, I would like to navigate modern day’s increasingly heteronormative world in my own unique way, I can see – in this film and in my own experiences – that compromise is often mandatory. 

To me, it is interesting to pay attention to how women have been perceived throughout history and how this affects how both movies’ female characters are interpreted.  In the not that far off past, intelligent women were often perceived as witches and were burned at the stake. Men would – and still do - kill women who are not willing to sleep with them. Women like me who are very willing to stand up for womens’ rights were often tried as witches and then either hanged or burned. Although witchcraft is not explicitly discussed in May Day, the story nevertheless examines today’s culture’s current fascination about witchcraft and the occult. In The Wizard of Oz, two of the characters were powerful witches, and Dorothy – in my interpretation - was also branded ‘witch.’  May Day talks about this in metaphor – the way Ana weaves her way through two different worlds is inherently, in my opinion, witchcraft. If women are told we are witches because we are smart, then we should transmute and reclaim the word witch. In fact, Ana’s journey could be interpreted as astral projection to an otherworldly realm. 

The film, then, had so much neglected potential. If the characters interacted with wise dialogue and empowering scenes, then May Day would have been a unique and fair representation of people who choose witchcraft and paganism as their religion when living in a predominately Christian world. Even with the problematic annihilation of all men, this movie still successfully challenges traditional Christian thought and asks its audience to question their reality and if their judgements and actions towards other people are right. 

So, when Horton writes, “But the genuinely promising ideas are rendered with little precision and a critically misapplied focus” he is correct that the movie had many unique ideas but did not successfully – or professionally – weave those ideas together. One of those ideas was on Ana’s return to the real world – she knew her life would be filled with terrible darkness, yet she took the risk. She contemplates that while in the darkness, she would be able to see the stars. In this film, Ana inevitably realizes that it is only in darkness that she can find – and understand – her own soul. 

 Even more, the film deliberates on spirituality and witchcraft in women, all the characters monopolizing their time with star gazing, along with sensual connection to each other. Yet, there is a subconscious war that is often waged against women like Ana, making it increasingly challenging for them to learn about forms of self-empowerment. For me, that looks like stubbornly choosing to participate in both witchcraft and Christianity. It would be interesting to see a written version of this story, which – as novels tend to be when compared with films – we would be able to see Ana make diverse choices, especially if she finds no place for herself in traditional religion.  

Uniquely, the women in May Day are a lot like me- instead of sitting in pews, Marsha and Ana spend their reflecting on Mars, the god of war. In the plot, Marsha deliberates about what happens when a new and very powerful star collapses, and all the ancient, lost civilizations which were taken with them. In between the lines, I can see this film commentating on lost societies such as the Aztecs, along with native Americans who are often coerced into subjugating their sacred ways of life that often do not align with cis, white, male traditional Christian thought.  When a language is lost, a culture is lost – and this movie comments on this. What if the world Ana went to once existed as a real world that somehow died eons ago? The story is fiction – and in fiction, anything is possible. 

I believe that May Day is also commenting on the problematic idea where some feminists think we need to completely emancipate ourselves from men. This is displayed in May Day when Marsha, in a very militaristic way, encourages Ana to shoot any male soldier on the island dead. I perceive this as a metaphor for feminism going too far. While it is true that women have been told that we don’t have a place in the world without relying on men, luring men to their deaths like sirens is assuredly not the solution. 

Throughout the film, Marsha tries to teach Ana to be heroic. Nevertheless, Ana changes by the end of the film and realizes that such heroic behavior could also be perceived as psychopathy. I wonder if Marsha’s inherent psychopathy helps her get by in an admittable harsh world. She asks Ana to hurt men instead of hurting herself. A philosopher, Machiavelli, writes “you will realize there are ways of behaving that are supposed to be virtuous, but would lead to your downfall, and others that are supposed to be wicked, but will lead to your welfare and peace of mind” (Flescher, page 39). Are Marsha’s actions evil? While May Day’s free spirited, anarchistic women ride motorcycles, swim, and murder male soldiers, they are flipping the switch on gender roles. They teach women that we should stand up for ourselves – even if that involves selfish and potentially evil actions; necessary, to stay afloat. 

While the women lure men to their deaths like sirens, Marsha tries to teach Ana how to love herself and to be powerful. The movie implicitly talks about women as feminine psychopaths - is that the only way for us to survive the patriarchy? In his critique on May Day, Tomris Laffly comments that Ana and her friends became “a troop of female soldiers resembling the Greek mythology sirens” (Laffey). I think that becoming a soldier is the first step to becoming a better person. 

Marsha, the leader of feminist sirens, teaches Ana how to be strong.  Marsha helps Ana overcome toxic misogyny and over-bearing capitalism. Feminism teaches women that we do not need men to survive - we are enough on our own. The homoerotic undertones throughout the film implies that women can love other women. Marsha killed her supposed husband to live in a world where women sleep together in a bunk during a fictional version of World War Two. When Ana’s dream man enters the world, the women kill him too. They tell him what a similar man told Ana in the beginning of the story: “You have to clean yourself up. We have to look at that face.” (Cinnore). Men do this to women all the time.  We are critiqued by men at every corner, which becomes a double standard when men are not treated in a similar manner. 

Truly, Laffly writes that “we aren’t given any well-realized emotional connection to the rightfully uprising women we follow, beyond the knowledge that they’ve been screwed over by patriarchy.” Cinorre’s film proposes a revolution – and it asks all women to participate. Notwithstanding, Ana also realizes that she doesn’t have to hate men to be a feminist. Marsha's troop of murderers have fun luring men to their death. Destroying men, though, is not the way towards healing the world of the hegemony of patriarchy. Marsha is lopsided in that way, though – she thinks that hurting men is the first step towards making things better for everyone. 

Realizing that she is not that kind of person – she is not a murderer – is the epiphany that inevitably draws Ana back to the real world. The other characters, true to feminist themes, end up helping Ana go back. Other women empower Ana – in her character, the text encourages women to build each other up instead of tearing each other down. 

May Day also contemplates war and its impact on us. Marsha tells Ana that she has subconsciously been in a war her whole life. While Ana’s dream ridden hallucination is set in World War Two, the theme of war and murder also discusses the subtle wars that all women face. Are we pretty enough? Are our behaviors acceptable enough for modern culture? Women must fight the current that leads us to become objects. Anti-war sentiments bleed into the movie, using the theme of war as a metaphor to discuss subconscious assaults towards all women in today’s time. Learning how to fight a physical war, including becoming a sniper, teaches Ana how to heal and empower herself when she returns to the real world.  

Where in the beginning of the movie Ana lived in her car and was treated terribly at her workplace, by the end of the movie she climbs on stage and sings with a man, to earn money. She is participating in the script - now that she has been on a magical journey and back, she is well equipped to swim the currents of her low-paying job. However, Ana did not forget the feminist lessons she learned during her fantasy. She gets on stage and performs as she is asked to, while remaining true to herself and her newly acquired book of moral codes.  

Although I concede that May Day has several plot holes, it also does a good job on commentating on women, teaching us how to break free from the system.  From capitalism to religion, there will always be something in the way. Returning to the swimming metaphor, women must learn how to navigate these metaphorical currents that make our lives harder than necessary. Instead of panicking like Ana does in the beginning of the movie, we must calm down during the rip tide. No matter what people are telling us when things are going in such a tumultuous way, we are empowered to take care of our mental health. While some of the characters suggest militaristic feminism, the main character wants to embrace her sensual femininity. This is perfect – while the movie may send a dangerous message to young teenagers, it is still unquestionably empowering. 

When Scout Tafoya suggests that the movie is “an easy way to say you’re changing the paradigm of gender representation, but really you’re just using someone else’s car to drive somewhere new” (Tafoya) he is correct that May Day reverses gender roles. I think the film also asks all of us to reflect on our preconceived, socially constructed notions of gender, and consider discarding them. While Tafoya thinks that this flip is unimaginative, I think it is central as a device to talk about feminism and what it is like to be a woman in the 21st century.  

 Listen to the words Marsha seductively whispers to Ana as she is swimming back to the real world. “It’s over, Ana. You can break free. Good girl” (Cinorre). This is a message for women that our darkness and suffering, perpetrated by men dehumanizing us, is finally over. We can retake our lives and participate in the real world. A lesson to take away from May Day is how to cope with mental health conditions such as panic disorders while in an over-bearing capitalist society. The problems women with mental health conditions face can be as overbearing as Ana’s fantasy world or Dorothy’s time in Oz. Learning how to get back to reality and how to stay grounded in it is key. 

Finally, it is important to discuss one of the main themes of May Day: good versus evil. Marsha tells Ana that soon she will not even dream and become demonic like the other women in this unreal world. They tell the audience that being an unfeeling, dreamless being is a good thing; that it is better than being a feminine being with intuition, compassion, and empathy. Here I cite Marsha deliberately tossing out her soul just because she felt like it. Is May Day’s magical otherworld a demonic world, punishment for young girls who self-harm? Yes, Ana is ultimately allowed to return to the real world, very alive and without any bandages or scars.  Even so, the movie comments on the idea of wrestling with darkness and ultimately choosing good over evil. Additionally, I see a somewhat dystopian story in the film - it is commenting on the direction our culture is currently heading. Today’s government and society often over-corrects issues concerning race, gender, and class. If we go too far with our desire to make our culture perfect, our society will become dystopian and excessively controlled. 

  One question this movie made me ask is this: how can we stay calm in a rip tide, especially when the riptide is society itself? While I would warn against teenage girls watching this fantasy movie, I do think it has positive memorandums that adult women can take. 

Finally, there is one more problematic structure in the film that warrants a discussion. This film might be sending a racist message because of Cinorre’s one Asian character. Her name is Bea, and sadly, she is portrayed as someone always falling prey to nightmares. Bea was characterized as a quirky character, which is troublesome because she was the film’s only Asian character. I believe this adds racist undertones to the story that could have been fixed by fully developing Bea’s character. 

Film critique Laffly examines Ana’s mental state when he writes “So what could Ana do, if not dream big and often in her own head, both during the day and in her sleep? The problem is, those dreams sometimes prove to veer into nightmares for Ana, so life-like in feeling that you know it’s just a matter of time for her to find herself in an actual one in the real world” (Laffly). While he is correct that nightmares are set up for women by our current political system, we all still must be held accountable to morality. 

In the end, this story used a common literary device where the main character is sent into a fantasy world and then must find her way home. Interestingly, in many of these stories the main character is female. From The Wizard of Oz’s Dorothy to Alice in Wonderland’s Alice, so many fictional women are being sent into an unreal delusionary world. What does this tell us about feminism today? I think Horton is correct in positing that “there’s potential in Mayday’s vision of healing as otherworldly journey” - and that is why I watch fantasy films in the first place; it is cathartic. In the beginning of May Day, Ana was a damsel in distress. When she returns home, she is an empowered woman. She is intelligent, and if she lived in the 17th century, she might have been considered a witch. With her newfound morals, she refers to her recent travails as she navigates capitalism and spirituality. She is not okay, but she will learn how to be. 

Works Cited 

Cinorre, Karen, director. May Day.  Film published in 2021. Accessed on Hulu. 

Fleming, Victor. Vidor, King, directors. The Wizard of Oz. Film published in 1939. Accessed on YouTube.  

 Flescher, Andrew Michael. Moral Evil. Georgetown University Press. Published in 2013. 

Horton, Adrian. “May Day review – female-led action fantasy opts for style over substance.” The Guardian. 31 January 2021. Mayday review – female-led action fantasy opts for style over substance | Sundance 2021 | The Guardian 

Laffly, Tomris. “May Day.” Ebert Digital LLC. 1 October 2021.  Mayday movie review & film summary (2021) | Roger Ebert 

Tafoya, Scout. Zoelen, Kaj Van “May Day: Is one idea good enough?” Frameland. February 2021. Frameland » Mayday: Is One Idea Good Enough?Frameland