Positioning āOld Ageā
We now live with an ageing demographic whose impact on contemporary mainstream cinema on both sides of the Anglophone Atlantic is evident in both audience composition and in the proliferation of highly profitable and critically acclaimed films that are populated by older stars and actors and which tell stories about āold ageā. In that context, this book is concerned with āold ageā (whatever that means) at its intersection with a cinematic triadāaudience /stardom/narrative : a triad articulated through the globalised Hollywood conglomerate as it exploits the dual meanings of āsilveringāāprofit and the signs of ageing. This book asks, āHow and to what purpose is āold ageā constituted in the Hollywood conglomerateās cinematic triadā? It aims to think about the ways that the Hollywood conglomerate engages with the ageing demographic as target audiences, even as they are simultaneously positioned in the broader silvering of consumer culture; how the dynamic between silvered stars and silver audiences confounds any on- and off-screen discretions in celebrity cultureās circuitous flows of economics and meaning making; how āold ageā is cinematically represented through genre conventions and prosthetic technologies; and how the silvering of stardom is pivotal to the articulation of this nexus.
While headlines such as āGraying Audience Returns to Moviesā (Barnes and Cieply 2011) and āThe Older Audience Is Looking Better Than Everā (Elliot 2009) serve to announce the emergence of a recognisably ageing cinema audience , others such as āHow older viewers are rescuing cinemaā (Cox 2012) and āSilver screeningsā (Smith 2011) forge a connection between silver haired audiences and the silver of profits. Meanwhile, silvered appeal is similarly registered in the critical acclaim accorded at award ceremonies like the Oscars and BAFTAs to the performances of a diverse cohort of chronologically aged actors and stars, such as Clint Eastwood , Dame Judi Dench , Michael Caine , Dame Helen Mirren , Meryl Streep and Mickey Rourke, as much as to a proliferating body of films like The Queen (Frears 2006), True Grit (Coen and Coen 2010) and Mr. Holmes (Condon 2015), that feature older protagonists. This silvering of cinemaās exhibition and performance sectors is fully matched by a post-millennium surge in the production of films like Iris (Eyre 2001), Last Orders (Schepisi 2001), Somethingās Gotta Give (Meyers 2003), Mamma Mia! The Movie (Lloyd 2008), RED (Schwentke and Parisot 2010), The Expendables (Stallone 2010), The Iron Lady (Lloyd 2011), Hitchcock (Gervasi 2012), The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (Madden 2011) The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (Madden 2015), Dirty Grandpa (Mazer 2016), The Hatton Garden Job (Thomson 2017) and Going in Style (Braff 2017) that deploy a variety of established genres, biopic, action, musical and comedy, in order to focus on the pleasures and concerns of contemporary old age. The profits that accrue from some of these films at least, such as $557.8 and $192.4 million respectively earned beyond the recovery of production costs by Mamma Mia! The Movie and The Expendables (see Box Office Mojo), are not only impressive, but suggestive that their silvered appeal extends beyond the purview of the older audience sector.
Immediately, this brief mapping of the intersections between profit, audiences, stars/actors and film narratives that constitute the silvering of contemporary cinema brings into view the instability of, and slippages between, terms like āageingā, āolderā, āseniorā and āold ageā. (From here, with āold ageā established as a highly problematic term, scare quotes will no longer be used.) Pamela H. Gravagne (2013) suggests that, in part, such friability emerges in the conflict between the measurement of age through chronological linear time, and the reckonings of intergenerational cyclical time (11). But equally, slippages across the vocabulary of old age are symptomatic of attempts by public bodies, journalists, gerontologists and age scholars to avoid the pejorative connotations of decline and degeneration that all too frequently adhere to the chronological formations of ageing beloved by bureaucrats. Arguing that we are aged by the cultural attitudes and expectations that are mapped on to biological changes and/or the passage of chronological time, Margaret Morganroth Gullette (2004) observes that such mapping invariably produces a narrative of decline. As she says, āOn the calm surface, chronology is a bureaucratic convenience and a motive for annual potlatches of celebration. However, the media increasingly exploit these automatic sequences for their associated story of declineā (9). Though following Stephen Katz (1996), the media should not be particularised here since some of its bearings on old age derive from the identification and pathologisation of senescence as a distinctive category that was itself a necessary condition for the emergence of gerontology as both a medical specialism and an academic discipline. Overall, scholars like Gravagne, Gullette and Katz convincingly argue that both old age, and its attendant associations with debility and decline, are constituted through the operation of discourse and power, rather than biological changes and/or the passage of chronological time.
This narrative of decline totally chimes with the constitution of the ageing population as a fiscal and emotional burden of care to be borne by the state, by families and by individuals. The underlying trends producing the ageing populationāincreased longevity and falling birth ratesāare a global phenomenon, though these are inflected through uneven distributions of wealth. As summarised in a World Health Organization (WHO) pamphlet, āThe developed world became rich and then it became old while developing countries are becoming old before they become richā (2000: 4). All too frequently, such differences are effaced in the constitution of the ageing population as a global, and hence universal, crisis. Neither the effacements nor the overarching formulation of crisis go unchallenged, as exemplified by the WHO pamphlet just quoted,
The reality is that throughout the world older people continue to contribute to society as paid and unpaid workers, as consumers, as volunteers, as contributors to the well being of their children and grandchildren. The biggest obstacles to older peopleās contributions are marginalization, exclusion, ill health and poverty (WHO 2000: 4).
Despite similar, multiple and ongoing rebuttals of the crisis of ageing paradigm, it has taken on additional traction in the West since the post-2007 global economic crisis and the losses of investments that impacted on private and public pension provision as much as care provision across state and private sectors. Where increased longevity was once a cause for celebration of the advances in medical science and improved social welfare through which it had been achieved, it now triggers cultural anxieties about the ostensible burdens and the so-called crisis of ageing.
Of course, contemporary formations of old age should not be reduced or confined to the dominant narrative of decline, vulnerability and dependency since equal weight needs to be accorded to a counter-narrative of successful or active ageing. Emerging in the late 1980s as the ageing demographic was first identified and constituted as a āproblemā, successful ageing promises to prevent, or at least forestall, the onset of decline in old age (Rowe and Kahn 1997, 1998). Articulated through discourses of ālifestyleā and āchoiceā, successful ageing has been usefully summarised by gerontologists Byrnes and Dillaway (2004) as āthe avoidance of disease or disease susceptibility, a high cognitive capacity, and active engagement with lifeā (67). Intersecting with the pathologisation of old age, successful ageing is now mobilised as a ācommon senseā alternative and remedy to the burdensome, vulnerable old age with its attendant economic and emotional costs to the state, to communities, to families and to individuals.
Picking up on this discursively produced split between successful ageing and its ostensibly burdensome other, Gilleard and Higgs (2005) mobilise ideas of third and fourth age imaginaries that they suggest are new cultural fields which can be crudely mapped as an extended middle or third age that prefigures an inevitable decline into the abjected frailties of the fourth age. Arguing that successful ageing is one amongst a ādiffuse and often contradictory set of positionsā (2) associated with retired people and older workers alike that combine to produce ideas of the third age imaginary, they add that it is āneither some anti-ageing cure-all nor a set of biological markers distinguishing those who are ageing successfully from those who are notā (2) while its āboundaries escape the confines of any specific community of interestā (3). Crucially, Gilleard and Higgs suggest that while the third age imaginary is predicated on the āindeterminacies of consumptionā and a āmarket that insidiously undermines the moral community from which alone individuals can confront the limitations of the body and the finality of lifeā, its corresponding fourth age imaginary āis deliberately and systematically emptied of all meaning beyond that of social and personal wasteā (2005: 162). This idea of the third age imaginary as a new indeterminate cultural field that is articulated through consumer culture and connected to discourses of successful ageing has especial resonances with the flows of consumer economics and ageing discourses as they intersect in the audience /stardom/narra...