On Silver Hair and Silver Screens
Back in the winter, I attended a talk by historian Shelley Rice on how different photo-centred artists depict their relationship with age, called Frozen Reflections or Creative Evolutions? Notes on Women, Imaging and Ageing. At the end, an audience member posed a question about how the most terrifying scene in The Shining (1980) is supposed to be that of the beautiful woman in room 237 that, spoiler alert, rapidly ages and grotesquely decomposes in a matter of seconds. Is female aging really supposed to be that vexing? This question made me want to hone in exclusively on the complicated relationship between aging women and cinema, and it has been lurking at the back of my mind since.
Much in line with the question of The Shining, now-passed film visionary and icon Agnès Varda said in an interview at 90: “I am still alive, I am still curious. I am not a piece of rotting flesh.” Why is the movie world so quick to practically paint older women as mummified antiquities? Even the Lindsay-Lohan-starring teen comedy Freaky Friday (2003) pokes at this concept when the main character wakes up in the body of her mother, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, and immediately shrieks, “Oh, I’m like the crypt keeper!” Bearing in mind that Curtis was only 43 years old when this was filmed, it does not warrant such a dramatic response, even if intended to be humorous. Younger women and older women in Hollywood are two sides of the same coin after all, and what the latter experiences, the former will eventually experience.
At one point in The Gleaners and I (2000), Varda turns the camera to herself and explores her changing skin. While the camera immortalises and magnifies any wrinkles and grey hairs, Varda still chooses to zoom closely into her hands on her camcorder. It is clear: she was not afraid to question the strange stigma of aging on camera. Why can it not be seen as a neutral process? As she comes to terms with herself, she documents it on camera. Why can women not use film as a way of chronicling their changes and curiosity, a learning process, rather than shying away and doing nothing at all?
Hollywood ageism is no novelty. In fact, women who do not reach fame before 40 often find their window of opportunity completely closed. Out of the few leading roles, most go to whoever made a name for themselves while young, and they are often limited to mother figures and the like. Meanwhile, male actors get to age naturally, instead often labelled as “silver-haired foxes” while still frequently cast as the main romantic interest. Oftentimes, actresses may find themselves stuck in the in-betweens: too old to play a love interest, too young to play a mother. A 2016 study by USC’s Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism found that, of the 11,306 speaking characters evaluated, women over the age of 40 formed only 21.4% of female roles, while men over 40 formed a huge 78.6%. Because of this, on top of all the Dorian Gray-esque attempts at unnaturally preventing age’s toll on the body, hiding your age and having a different, fabricated Hollywood age is not so much of a rare occurrence. In Hollywood, age is a currency.
The movie world is a world of false dichotomies and archetypes. Simone de Beauvoir wrote about how women have always been depicted in myths under contrasting mythologised forms, all somehow seen as mutually exclusive: the mother, the temptress, and so on. The movie world seems to take this a step further by tying it to a woman’s age. Either a woman is young, whether it be the zealous and glamorous queen bee or the girl next door, or a woman is old, whether it be the nurturing, good wife or the cold-blooded businesswoman. Once again, one can be a mother but not a love interest.
However, age does not exist as a young versus old binary. Aging is constant. We’re all aging and changing everyday, and it should be seen as a sign of endurance and growth – not deterioration or whatever agenda Hollywood pushes onto us. At its most elemental, an aged body is a body that did what bodies are supposed to do: stay alive. The film industry should be making use of its lasting influence and power to celebrate rather than ignore older women. They are neither beautiful nor ugly – in fact, beauty and age really don’t have much to do with each other when isolated from media-influenced societal standards. They just are. And as humans, we write stories about what is, do we not?