In Our Prime (35 page)

Other variations on the theme have waxed and waned. As baby boomers in the 1980s approached middle age, they found fresh inspiration in nostalgia. High jinks, first loves, adolescent insecurities, and post–high school panic were on display in
Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Porky's, Pretty in Pink, Risky Business, Sixteen Candles, Say Anything, Weekend at Bernie's, St. Elmo's Fire,
and
The Sure Thing
. John Hughes was the master.
The film scholar Robert Sklar
called him a “paradigm for the baby boom generation's creative influence on American movies, moving from teen subjects to even younger protagonists as its own prolonged adolescence shifted abruptly toward parenthood.”

The more solidly male boomers moved into middle age, the more fun the midlife crisis became.
Merry arrested development was the theme
of movies from
City Slickers
(1991), where Billy Crystal and his pals go West and play cowboys, to 2010's
Hot Tub Time Machine
(the title says it all). Even in more introspective films like
Sideways
(2004), which follows two disappointed middle-aged souls on a weeklong trip through California wine country, the buddies have a good measure of excellent wine, golf, and sexual antics.

Economic downturns, both in the seventies and now, have produced more sympathetic screen portraits of men thrown into a midlife crisis when they lose their jobs, or are forced to rethink their work and lifestyle,
like George Clooney in
Up in the Air
(2010). Male boomers can finally start to relax, however. The angst of midlife crises is being handed off to Generation X, as in
Greenberg
(2010) with Ben Stiller as a former musician whose primary enjoyment at 40 is writing peevish letters of complaint to businesses.

Hollywood has always offered women lessons in sexiness, but it has been more ambivalent about middle-aged women having sex. The response to female lust in midlife has swung between fear and ridicule. In the fifties and sixties, predatory older women were often viewed as deviant, even diabolical. They lured men into ruinous Faustian bargains, like Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) in
Sunset Blvd,
Gene Kelly's wealthy patron Milo Roberts (Nina Foch) in
An American in Paris,
and “2-E” or Mrs. Failenson (Patricia Neal) in
Breakfast at Tiffany's
. Science-fiction B-movies in the late fifties fed on these sexual anxieties, serving up
Attack of the 50 Foot Woman,
who cared only about getting revenge on her husband for his affair with a younger woman, and
Wasp Woman,
whose quest for eternal beauty turned her into a murderous insect. The sinister side of midlife sexuality has been a recurring theme on day- and nighttime television soap operas. Sexually driven women were usually mentally unbalanced and mightily punished as in
Fatal Attraction,
when Glenn Close's character is finally killed after wrecking a happy family and boiling a little girl's pet bunny.

Alternately, the lustful middle-aged woman has been mocked as if the combination of sexuality and midlife was by its nature laughable. The libidinous cooking show host Sue Ann Nevins in TV's
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
or the love-starved landlady Mrs. Roper in
Three's Company
were comical characters whose roots reached back to Chaucer's bawdy Wife of Bath. The type is still conspicuous on television sitcoms and in films. They are much more physically appealing, but they can still be dangerous. In the 2011 comedy
Horrible Bosses,
Jennifer Aniston plays a man-eating dentist whose constant sexual harassment of her assistant drives him to contemplate murder. In NBC's
Parks and Recreation,
Tammy (the 58-year-old Megan Mullally) is a voracious sexual piranha
who reduces her ex-husband to a beast. Reality shows reinforce a more troubling impression of older women as sexual predators, Mrs. Robinsons pumped up with breast implants and Botox. NBC's
Age of Love
pitted 40-plus women, “cougars,” against 20-something “kittens.” In 2009, Bravo introduced a variation on the theme,
Cougar,
in which twenty men in their twenties vied for the affections of a perfectly toned 40-year-old blonde.

The emergence of a healthfully sexualized woman in middle age may well be the most dramatic change in a screen character in the past thirty-five years.
For a long time
, the repressed and joyless middle-aged woman was a stock character as the title of a 1997 study on aging women in popular films illustrates: “Underrepresented, Unattractive, Unfriendly, and Unintelligent.” She has pretty much vanished from the screen. In her place, at least on television, is the beautiful, sexually charged woman in midlife bloom. Samantha Jones in
Sex and the City
is the übermodel, but she can be found in some form on nearly every network during prime time. ABC's
Desperate Housewives
has no fewer than four at a time. Unlike the predatory cougar, her carnal appetite is seen as admirable rather than fearsome.

More rare are scripts that tackle the realities of middle-aged sex.
The director Nancy Meyers recalled
that when she was writing
Something's Gotta Give
(2003), “I showed an early draft to a guy I know who is around 60. . . . There's a joke in the movie where a middle-aged man is making out with a middle-aged woman, and he says, ‘What about birth control?' And she replies, ‘Menopause.' And this guy said to me: ‘Don't mention menopause. Not sexy. Why bring it up?' I said: ‘Hey, what do you mean? This woman is 55 years old—I'm not going to write a movie about people this age and have them act like they're 32. It's part of the story.'”

Meyers, known for her privileged, upscale backdrops, is not talking about cinema verité. In
Something's Gotta Give,
Diane Keaton's successful playwright lives in a Hamptons mansion, is whisked to Paris by a handsome young cardiologist (Keanu Reeves), and is followed there by a multimillionaire entrepreneur (Jack Nicholson). The sex scenes allowed only a quick and appealing flash of flesh. It contains nothing of the bracing honesty of
Terms of Endearment
(1983), which had Jack
Nicholson (again an irrepressible aging playboy) and Shirley MacLaine display bulging bellies as they faced each other across a bed for their first sexual encounter. Here middle age could be just as passionate as youth even without a perfect body.

Like the caricatures of middle-aged women as depressed and stodgy, Stepford perfection can reverberate through the culture in a troubling way. The bombardment of images of middle-aged women with long, lustrous hair, smooth faces, and insatiable desire is strong incentive to use Botox, wrinkle cream, and hormone therapy. Absence, the more common fate of middle-aged women in Hollywood, is similarly powerful. When people over 40 are erased from cinematic tales of love, intrigue, excitement, or heroism, the tacit message is that such adventures are for another generation.

Modern screen romances match up men, no matter what their age, with nubile women. In the 2009 film
Crazy Heart,
a well-worn Jeff Bridges, 60, was paired with Maggie Gyllenhaal, 32; in
Lost in Translation
(2003), Bill Murray, then 54, had a deep connection with Scarlett Johansson, 19; and in
Entrapment
(1999), Sean Connery, then 69, teamed up with Catherine Zeta-Jones, 30. Woody Allen has repeatedly cast himself as the object of youthful desire in several of his films.

When actors and actresses are close in age, they are frequently put in different generations. At 36, Anne Bancroft was the predatory Mrs. Robinson in
The Graduate
(1967), although she was a mere six years older than Dustin Hoffman, who played the wet-behind-the-ears college graduate. In the 1962 version of
The Manchurian Candidate,
Angela Lansbury, just three years older than Laurence Harvey, played his mother.
More recently, Hope Davis, born in 1964
, said that for one movie part, she was asked to be the mother of Johnny Depp, born in 1963. “That tells you something about the absurdity of this industry and the whole age thing,” she said. She turned down the role.
As one writer suggested
, in Hollywood women seem to age in dog years—seven for every one a man experiences.

After retiring, the silent-screen star Lillian Gish recalled: “
When I first went into
the movies Lionel Barrymore played my grandfather. Later he played my father, and finally he played my husband. If he had lived, I'm
sure I would have played his mother. That's the way it is in Hollywood. The men get younger and the women get older.”

Today, middle-aged women don't even get to play middle-aged women. In the 2004 film
Alexander,
Angelina Jolie was 28 when she portrayed the mother of Colin Farrell, 27. (Val Kilmer, at 45, was the father.) Men in their 30s are credibly cast as 20-year-olds, whereas women in their 20s are pictured as middle-aged. Hollywood, of course, is in the business of fantasy. Still, a casting formula that excises middle age altogether constricts judgments of style and beauty. American films conform to a different sort of Tayloresque standardization, a uniformity that
the novelist Italo Calvino said
failed to “teach us to see real women with an eye prepared to discover unfamiliar beauty.”

Male stars are also routinely subjected to airbrushing and Botoxing. Hugh Grant, 49, gave an unintentional peek at the contrast between life and Hollywood art when he stood in front of a blown-up publicity shot from the 2010 movie
Did You Hear About the Morgans?
The enlarged picture showed a slimmed-down, line-free face, while that of the flesh-and-blood Grant, still handsome, revealed the realistic signposts of middle age. Even so, men are permitted to age on-screen in a way that women are not. They can play heroes, villains, and everymen as well as romantic leads well into their 60s. (“Sean Connery is 300 years old and he's still a stud,” an aging actress tells her plastic surgeon in the 1996 film
The First Wives Club
.)
A tiny clutch of privileged actresses
like Keaton in
Something's Gotta Give
(2003), Meryl Streep in
Mama Mia!
and
It's Complicated
(2009), and Julia Roberts in
Larry Crowne
(2011) get to play desirable, funny, smart women in their middle years without being reduced to cougars.
The available parts are still
nowhere near the numbers and range of those available to men. Researchers studying the “double jeopardy” of age and gender bias found that “youth was the most powerful criterion for women who won the Best Actress award, while middle age was the best predictor for male Best Actor winners.”

During the ten years it
took Helen Hunt to produce
Then She Found Me
(2007), she remembers being bluntly told: “We're not going to make it because it's about a woman who is 40.”

Geena Davis, a glamour girl
when she entered the business in the
late 1970s, found herself in the unaccustomed position of promoting a film,
Accidents Happen,
without a distributor. “I know I've never done any independent film before,” the 53-year-old actress said in 2009, “but there aren't that many other scripts out there with great parts for women my age.”

When she started in Hollywood, Davis said, “I thought, this is a new era, and I won't have to worry” about parts disappearing for middle-aged women. “It will all be fixed by the time I'm 40! And of course, it wasn't. All of us female actors think we can just keep going and going. . . . You wake up one day and you're flabbergasted to find out . . . so, this has happened to me.”

Hollywood had typically been more cruel than kind to women in their middle years.

Paul Schulze as Eddie and Edie Falco as Jackie Peyton in
Nurse Jackie

Middle age is a wonderful country
, all the things you thought would never happen are happening.

—John Updike,
Rabbit at Rest
(1981)

T
he Midlife Industrial Complex is a formidable force in our culture, a vast network of interests intent on reinforcing deep-grained associations of middle age with insecurity and disappointment. Combating them is difficult. Midlife drags around a weight of past insults, expectations, and discrimination. The very words are bathed in negative
connotations. Nonetheless, there are encouraging signs that more positive messages about midlife are penetrating the culture. Even within the fortress of the Midlife Industrial Complex, an expanded conception of midlife is gaining traction on television, in advertising, and among businesses.

NBC Universal had a new character to introduce to reporters, advertisers, and ad buyers who attended a breakfast in December 2010: the alpha boomer, a member of the 55- to 64-year-old demographic, who number 35 million and spend more than $1.8 trillion annually.
Clicking through slides filled with pie charts, graphs
, and survey data, NBC executives explained that contrary to conventional wisdom, this slice of the population had the second-highest median income (after the beta boomers, those between 45 and 54 years old), frequently switched brands, and was annoyed that advertisers were ignoring them. They spent more on luxury cars, travel, dining, home furnishings and improvements, large appliances, cosmetics and beauty products compared with those between 18 and 49. They also owned more second homes. They adapted to technology like DVRs, broadband, high definition, and the Internet at the same rate as 18- to 34-year-olds, the delicious candy center of television demographics. And in the previous three months, they had spent thirty percent more on electronics and forty-nine percent more on online purchases than a typical Generation Y (born in the early 1980s through 2001) consumer. Like Rip Van Winkle waking from a twenty-year sleep, NBC had discovered that the alpha boomer was in fact the alpha consumer.