It should come as no surprise that Hollywood movies do little justice to the realities of aging. Their portrayal of aging women is often tragic, with female characters betrayed by accelerated maturity or mired in plots of decline. Aging male characters, often paired with far younger women, suffer from a coercive virility whose age-resistant armor is hardly dented by their gray hair, wrinkles, and sagging flesh. Non-white and non-heterosexual characters are marginalized to background roles whose aging is either naturalized or invisible.
These are some of the main themes of Sally Chivers’ The Silvering Screen, a book shaped by the premise that, despite the growing aging population and salience of “boomer” culture, Hollywood remains committed to ageist universalizing stories that dramatize loss. Further, as Chivers asserts, we should not mistake the emergence of more movies about aging to mean better movies about aging. Chivers treats cinematic aging with a deeper theoretical and critical interpretation than found in most texts on images of aging, while providing an engaging and accessible overview of selected popular films. She argues that the “silvering screen” is an ideological spectacle whose narratives of aging and disability represent our cultural and economic anxieties about impending demographic changes in an aging society.
Following the introduction, the book’s first chapter ambitiously tackles the conceptually and politically fraught relationship between gerontological and disability studies. Disability studies’ criticality and gerontology’s focus on old age are not mutually shared as perspectives or as research objectives. Thus, Chivers looks to film as a common frontier between age and disability in order to deconstruct our cultural imagination about what later life means today. In addition, she embraces and ‘highlights the contributions of feminism, gay/lesbian studies, the humanities, the sociology of the body, and inequality studies of race and class. My only quibble here is that she over-represents social gerontology in terms of “successful aging” models, whose shortcomings are widely criticized within gerontology as well. Chapter 2 is about Hollywood’s chilling horror movie, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), where the real fright is the sight of Joan Crawford and Bette Davis looking and acting “old” (with Crawford also confined to a wheelchair). As in the earlier film Sunset Boulevard (1950), here the scandal of stars appearing past their prime is cast as a psychotic misrecognition of who they really are, while the triple threat of being older, female, and disabled is construed as sufficiently grotesque to make the audience squirm.
In chapter 3, Chivers moves on to three films that deal with cognitive disabilities under variously dramatic conditions, Pauline and Paulette (2001), A Song for Martin (2001), and The Savages (2007). All are sad films about losses that unravel relationships and families along with the social fabric of everyday life itself. As Chivers says, “cognitive disability symbolizes the overall horror that is assumed to be part of the aging process” (p. 73). To add to their overall horror, the films’ singular vision of caregiving is one of dreaded burden.
Chapter 4 targets films about the silver screen’s dedication to heteronormative, spousal monogamy, which tumbles into crisis when challenged by aging and disability. Indeed, the familiar narrative about infidelity and domestic life gains extra momentum in films such as Iris (2001) and Away from Her (2006) precisely because the work of care as a component of spousal commitment is so problematized. In Iris, the relationship between past and present life is contrasted as calamitous, while in Away from Her the axis between spousal love and social order is thrown so far out of orbit that only the intervention of the care institution can right it. In these films, the tension between aging disablement and heterosexuality is also a story about gender roles and their culturally assigned emotions, which, as exposed by Chivers, become fascinating subplots of their own. However, at this point in the book it’s reasonable to ask if Chivers’ proposal outlined in the book’s introduction for a joining-of-hands model – combining disability, feminist, gerontological, and cinematic studies – is fully deployed in her substantive chapters. The lively micro-detail Chivers uses to describe her selected films is not always aligned to this model, often favoring one component of it or another, thus losing theoretical power in some of the film analyses.
Chapters 5 and 6 are about aging men and Hollywood’s overcompensation of its stars’ fading bodies with ageless masculinity. Chapter 5 argues that Paul Newman and Clint Eastwood, in several of their later movies, play rebellious individualists embattled and oppressed by the mundane routines of American society. However, unlike female actors, these guys retain their positive valence as they continue to work into old age because they represent white male America where patriarchy, racism, and power come together on the silvering screen in sympathetic ways. In Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992) and Gran Torino (2009), the aging vigilante incensed by the corruption of American values becomes the champion of the underdog, whereby gun violence takes the place of youthful vigour. Chivers claims that, unlike the vision of decay that accompanies movies about women, in male-starring movies masculinity becomes a bulwark against decay.
Although Newman’s and Eastwood’s comedies are not considered by Chivers – and I couldn’t help but wonder what she would make of Eastwood’s Space Cowboys (2000) – in chapter 6 on Jack Nicholson she links comedy to heroic virility. In films such as As Good as It Gets (1997) and Something’s Gotta Give (2003), Nicholson portrays the lovable, irascible, and often irresponsible womanizer who, while struggling with the frailties of the male libido, shores up the image of female desperation and passivity. In these films, the audience can be reassured that the status of white straight men can be maintained even as they experience age-related challenges such as sexual dysfunction, retirement, loss of a spouse, and, as in Nicholson’s The Bucket List (2007), the prospect of death itself. Although Morgan Freeman has played several roles in Eastwood’s and Nicholson’s films, Chivers explains that his role as a supporting “other” is usually limited to commentator as a “background force” behind the main plot (p. 137).
More could be said here about Freeman and perhaps other non-white aging actors, yet more, too, could be said about female actors, such as Helen Mirren, who do break boundaries of gender and power in their depiction of aging characters. Such a desire for more discussion points to the inspiration the Silvering Screen delivers and to its careful elaboration of cinema about aging. Indeed, the book’s 25-page “Filmography” is an essential resource of films about aging which undoubtedly will be consulted by readers and researchers from across multiple sub-fields.
In the book’s articulate conclusion, Chivers insightfully observes the relationship between aging actors and their equally aging roles, and between the silvering screen and the political economic social systems from which it draws its references. But we are left with the question of how social inequality and critical images of aging can make their way into popular film as part of a wider conversation on disability and age studies. On the one hand, it is up to Hollywood to make better and less predictable movies about aging, but it also up to us as viewing audience to demand that our chances of growing older on the silvering screen are represented by more than just pity, comedy, derision, decline, sadness, and horror.
