Post on 03-Apr-2023
The Politics of Aging in the May-December Romance PlotQuarterly Review of Film and Video, vol. 31, #7 (July 2014); pp. 669-678[Note that QRFV style required the naming the director before each film title.]
Timothy Shary
As with most narrative plots, romance thrives on conflict,
at least in the movies, and one of the most enduring types of
romantic conflict arises from two lovers with great age
differences. The tensions around such differences are not often
socially problematic when the partners are both in their later
years, say over 50. Yet in cases where younger people pair off
with people much older than a few years, certain concerns tend to
arise about the younger person being exploited by the elder. And
in cases where the elderly themselves pair off with people more
than 20 years younger, there is an altogether different set of
questions: How long will the older person live? Is the younger
person pursuing the older person for ulterior reasons, such as
financial gain? Does the older person have the same sexual
stamina as the younger person? And why can’t these people simply
find lovers who are closer to their own age? After all, there
just seems something taboo about cross-generational romance.
In my research on the elderly in American cinema, I examine
how characters over the age of 60 are typically represented,
although defining the age of the so-called geriatric is rather
arbitrary, and has been elongating over recent years.1 After Shary, “Politics of Aging” 1
all, in 1900 U.S. white males had a life expectancy of only 48
years at birth, and by 2000 that had risen to an astonishing 75
years.2 So certainly at the start of the 20th century, when
American cinema was just beginning, the idea of old age was quite
different from what we think of today, and ideas about how older
people live were quite different as well. There were then not
nearly as many older people in assisted care situations, not
nearly as much medication and medical attention given to the
elderly to prolong their lives, and most significantly in terms
of my research, there was not nearly as much visibility of older
characters in movies and media at large. In dealing with the
May-December romance for this essay, I am not simply defining the
two ends of the age spectrum as vaguely “young and old” but more
specifically as teens-twenties to late 30s or more, or most
specifically, an age difference between the two lovers of 20
years or greater.
Granted, the domination of youth in the film market has been
rather pronounced since the 1950s, yet despite the fact that we
now have more people alive over the age of 65 than at any time in
U.S. history, there is still a rather slight output of films
about such people.3 One report claimed that of the 100 highest-
grossing U.S. films during 2002, 8% of male characters were 60
and older, although 18% of American men at that time were 60 and
older; the statistics for female characters were even more
alarming, since women over 60 were 22% of the female population
at that time and yet only 8% of the female characters were in the
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same age range.4 At the same time, 57% of all movie patrons in
the U.S. were between the ages of 12 and 29 in 2005, even though
that age group was only 30% of the populace.5 Thus, while the
industry obliges the young with most movies, one of the reasons
behind the success of the May-December romance well may be its
ability to simultaneously cater to the interests of both young
and old, satisfying audiences at both ends of the age spectrum,
regardless of the characters’ specific ages.
Carrie Rickey provided an interesting take on how this
phenomenon works for young moviegoers:
Young girls are unformed, preliberated, they haven’t been sullied by women’s movement independence. And young boys are luscious bait for older women: boys don’t worry about older women being successful or feel competitive with them, because they grew up in a time during which women’s success was more the rule than theexception. Add the timeless inducement of youth in itsunspoiled state of grace and the prospect of a good makeout movie that will demystify the mysteries of sex,and you can pull in a broadaudience.6
Rickey calls attention to the power issue in sex comedies
that ultimately favors boys over girls: girls often become
curious and pursuant of sex, but boys are carnivorous and
assumptive about it. Girls have yet to demand the rights and
privileges of adult responsibilities that boys typically eschew,
and boys focus their sexual experiences on their own senses of
pleasure. Girls are thus intimidating enigmas to boys, since
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their needs and desires can be very abstruse. More “experienced”
older women are appealing to boys since they have passed over
issues of losing virginity and eluding parental constraints, plus
they offer the prospect of actually being better partners than
teenage girls. Yet Rickey is only partially accurate in her
claim that teen films demystify sex; on the contrary, most of
these films, especially those that use age-different partners,
depict sexuality as quite complex and often arduous, and perhaps
that further mystification– or mythologizing– of sex is what
lures young people to see these films in the first place.
Teenage sex in movies is almost always portrayed as more
fascinating than it could ever be in real life.
The Inconsistent Patterns of Age Difference Relationships
The term “May-December romance” arises from the notion of
the younger person being in the springtime of life and the older
being at the slowly darkening and cold winter’s ending of life,
although it is of course not a phenomenon new to the 20th
century. Pairings of older men with much younger women for the
sake of (often aristocratic) procreation had been common for
centuries, since younger women generally had a higher capacity to
become pregnant and bring children to term, whereas men could
impregnate younger women at much older ages. Partly due to this
tradition, the social perception of older men loving younger
women has been generally more accepted than its inverse, although
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such age differences raise suspicious about gender power and
potentially perverse older male desire for younger female sex.
In terms of the law, until the late 19th century the minimum
age of consent for sexual intercourse in most American states was
only 10 years.7 Such acceptance of very young sexual
relationships between adults and children began to change greatly
in the 20th century, as the age of consent rose in American
states and marriage laws became more restrictive. This in itself
provided a clearer domain for the propriety of age ranges in
relationships, and with more young people attending schools
divided by similar age groups, expectations of young romance
shifted more prominently to approximately same-age relations.
Thus, the constraint on and fascination with greater age-
different relations intensified accordingly.
I have been able to identify over 50 of these stories in
U.S. films beginning in 1910 with Theodore Marston directing the
first of at least ten versions of the Charlotte Bronte classic
Jane Eyre (the most recent being 2011), in which a teenage
governess falls in love with her employer who is roughly twice
her age. Marshall Nellan’s Daddy-Long-Legs (1919) became the
first of three versions (it was remade in 1931 and 1955); more
arguably a story of affection rather than romance, D.W.
Griffith’s Broken Blossoms was released that same year. Yet these
stories were relatively uncontroversial compared to many of the
May-December plots that would become more popular after WWII.
Some movies used the contrivance to complicate other conflicts:
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the contest between a spiteful daughter and her successful mother
when the younger tries to lure away her playboy stepfather in
Michael Curtiz’s Mildred Pierce (1945); the supposed mania suffered
by a young man in Robert Aldrich’s Autumn Leaves (1956), who
marries an older woman for stability; the reckless wandering of a
teenage runaway who encounters the wise nature of an older man in
Clint Eastwood’s Breezy (1973); the doubly-problematic marriage
between real-life singer Jerry Lee Lewis and his 13-year-old
cousin in Jim McBride’s Great Balls of Fire! (1989); the unexpected
pairing of a student in Paul and Chris Weitz’s American Pie (1999)
with his friend’s mother; and the convoluted relationship between
a college professor and a peculiar younger woman in Robert
Benton’s The Human Stain (2003), which is really more about racial
relations than age difference.
However, many films took the topic with greater levity, if
only because such relationships are rare and discomforting, and
when their difference from the norm is treated without serious
consequences, audiences are better able to enjoy the disruption
of cultural mores these love affairs represent. Irving Reis’s
The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (1947) oddly employs a rather absurd
Cary Grant-Myrna Loy-Shirley Temple love triangle, one of
Temple’s few roles as a teen; Billy Wilder’s Sabrina (1954) also
draws out an unlikely triangle when an older man falls in love
with a girl smitten with his much younger brother; Stanley
Kubrick’s Lolita (1962), exploits humor so dark that the
pedophilic pursuit of a girl by her stepfather is rendered
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grandly pathetic; the Woody Allen parable Manhattan (1979)
ironically pairs him with a high schooler he uses to displace his
own descent into middle-age;8 Stanley Donen’s Blame It on Rio (1984)
is an essentially perverse tribute to married middle-age men
chasing naïve teenage girls; Ron Shelton’s slightly historical
Blaze (1989) recounts the ribald goings on between the Governor of
Louisiana and his stripper girlfriend; Christine Lahti’s My First
Mister (2001), tells a gem of a tale about a teenager falling in
love with a middle-aged man when she finds that her angst is in
many ways the same as his own– kept safe by the fact that their
relationship is never consummated; and Billy Kent’s The Oh in Ohio
(2006), presents the unlikely story of a sexually unsatisfied
young woman who achieves her first orgasm with a rather
unattractive man about thirty years older.9
Some of these films became cherished classics, and some have
faded into obscurity, but they almost all share the common
characteristic of being comical and sincere. Perhaps out of
respect, the film industry tends to handle geriatric romance in
more tender terms than romance between younger people, who are so
often portrayed as troubled and misinformed. While some elderly
characters are stereotyped as cantankerous or eccentric, when
they fall in love they are shown as having more innocent
qualities, as if the rediscovery of love brings back their own
youth– even in Donald Petrie’s Grumpy Old Men (1993) and its 1995
sequel, wherein the romances are between middle-aged women and
geriatric men. Romance for the elderly is often a form of
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rejuvenation and rediscovery, an opportunity to live longer and
fuller, whether that romance is with a younger or older person.
Consider the stakes of romance for someone who is closer to
the end of life than the beginning. Finding a lover for the sake
of starting a family is usually not a priority of anyone over 50,
and often– although not always– finding a lover for the sake of
sexual satisfaction is not as important either. Taking into
account that 95% of Americans have already been married at least
once by the age of 55, people seeking new love after that age may
not be so inclined to marry again; considering that 85% of
American women have children by the age of 44, older single
people may not want to disrupt their children’s lives with the
appearance of a new step-parent.10 So finding new love later in
life may already be a daunting prospect, but finding love with
someone much younger or older becomes downright adventurous. And
hence, such an adventure is just right for the movies.
The Polarities of May-December Love Stories
For the sake of focus and diversity, I am only concentrating
on four films in this essay, cases that represent a range of
ages, genres, and both genders, across each decade since the
1970s. As I have suggested, there appears to be a clear division
among May-December romances: those that are ultimately redemptive
for both lovers and tend toward the comic, and those that are
destructive or exploitative, which are actually less common.
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Examples of the latter would include the Douglas Sirk tour de
force All That Heaven Allows (1955), something of a critical melodrama
in its celebration of the relationship between a virile
outdoorsman and well-off widower that nearly costs him his life;
the similarly critical José Quintero’s The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone
(1961) that brings heartbreaking punishment to an aging actress
unaware that her young beau is a gigolo; Mike Nichols’s The
Graduate (1967), which is often comical but ultimately cynical in
its fable about a recent college graduate who is unexpectedly
seduced by his neighbor, old enough to be his mother, and then
falls in love with her daughter; Jane Wagner’s universally panned
Moment by Moment (1978) featuring the awkward pairing of a middle-
age woman and teenage boy who are not only distant in age but in
class as well, dooming them to never achieve harmony; Matt
Cimber’s Butterfly (1982)– another campy tale with a confused young
woman who reveals that her sexual relationship with her father
was an orchestrated ruse; Sam Mendes’s American Beauty (1999), with
its bitter portrait of the suburban nuevo riche in which a bored
husband becomes obsessed with the high school friend of his
daughter, nearly seducing her before learning she is a virgin;
and Michael Cuesta’s L.I.E. (2001), an atypical same-sex May-
December tale that features a charismatic older man who pursues
boys and cultivates an anguished relationship with one of them.11
Also within the negative realm are two teen films from the
‘80s and ‘90s, one featuring a boy and the other a girl, although
tellingly, in both cases an older woman pays the price for the
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transgression. The protagonist in Lewis John Carlino’s Class
(1983) is Jonathan, a pre-“Brat Pack” Andrew McCarthy, who begins
a sexual relationship with a wealthy older woman named Ellen
(Jacqueline Bisset), not realizing that she is his prep school
roommate’s mother. Meanwhile, she also doesn’t know he’s a
teenager, and to her credit, she stops the affair after learning
his real age. Jonathan is shocked himself when he learns whom
he’s been sleeping with, yet Ellen nonetheless persists in
calling him and trying to entice him back into a relationship,
and as he continues to resist, she plunges into alcoholism and
later insanity.
To be sure, the friendship between Jonathan and his rich
roommate Skip (Rob Lowe) is strained, but in the end, after
viciously fighting with each other, they make amends. Jonathan’s
role in Ellen’s downfall is effectively cast aside by her son as
well as the story, which implies that Ellen’s problems were so
deeply seated that they made her susceptible to not only carrying
on such an illicit affair but allowing it to affect her so.
Jonathan, after proving his manhood through Skip in three ways–
sexually, by sleeping with his mother; physically, by fighting
him; and intellectually, by gaining entrance to Harvard after
Skip keeps his secret of cheating on his SATs– escapes from the
entire debacle just slightly scarred, even though his sexual
conquest is destroyed.
Nick Roddick observed a similar plot trajectory: “In this
cheery tale of male bonding winning out over heterosexual
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emotional traumas and economic obstacles, Jonathan undergoes his
rites of passage and emerges apparently unscathed into a world of
wealth and fulfillment.”12 That world is built upon a
questionable equation of commerce and sexuality, since the main
obstacle is the tension over Jonathan’s working class background,
which is alleviated through his ability to deceive Skip and
exploit his mother, marking his affair not only as a sign of his
masculinity but of his upward mobility, a strikingly sexist
message in the capitalist ‘80s.
In the best-case scenarios of such films, the older women
are able to teach boys what they need, and then simply disappear
unharmed, to allow the boy to achieve his inevitable validation,
as we see in Class. This spin occurred in numerous stories of the
time, like Alan Myerson’s Private Lessons (1981), James Beshears’s
Homework (1982), Randal Kleiser’s Grandview, U.S.A. (1984), and
Harold Becker’s Vision Quest (1985). Less common, however, is any
positive depiction of a girl engaged in a relationship with an
older man, as in Ivan Passer’s Creator (1985) or Emile Ardolino’s
Dirty Dancing (1987), a condition persistent before and after the
‘80s. In all cases when girls pursue older men, the moral
dignity of the girl is much more in question than it is when boys
challenge age boundaries. This is clearly borne out in films
that have shown the harmful consequences of girls’ sexual
practices with older men, as in recent examples like Gary
Sherman’s Lisa (1990), Martha Coolidge’s Rambling Rose (1991), James
Foley’s Fear (1996), John McNaughton’s Wild Things (1998), Peter
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Bogdonovich’s The Cat’s Meow (2001), David Gordon Green’s All the Real
Girls (2003), Tony Goldwyn’s The Last Kiss (2006), Atom Egoyan’s Chloe
(2009), and of course the eponymous representation of teenage
female sexual danger that was renewed in Adrian Lyne’s doomed
1997 remake of Lolita.
Yet the best example of this dynamic is the infamous Poison
Ivy tetralogy, which started in 1992 with barely related sequels
in 1996, 1997, and 2008. Curiously, just as the explosion of
‘80s teen sex on screen coincided with the conservative Reagan
era, the supposedly more liberal ‘90s attempted to bring a
certain moral opacity to May-December teen romances by making the
girls both victims and culprits, because they have longed for the
bad boy rebel and chase him, yet reveal their vulnerability in
the pursuit. A further parallel to the booming attention
Hollywood gave to sexual but dangerous girls in the ‘90s was the
cultural obsession with Amy Fisher, the “Long Island Lolita” who
began an affair with a married older man at the age of 16 in
1991, then shot her lover’s wife in the head the next year, and
spent the rest of the decade in prison. During that time, books
and media accounts were published about the case, and no less
than three made-for-TV movies attempted to dramatize the
salacious scandal.
Thus Katt Shea Rubin’s Poison Ivy in 1992 seemed to be
released with fortuitous timing. Drew Barrymore plays the
enigmatic title character (although she is not called by name in
the film), whose lack of parental and familial belonging is meant
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to explain her ingratiating attachment to another girl and her
parents Darryl (Tom Skerritt), an alcoholic, and Georgie (Cheryl
Ladd), a hypochondriac with a dubious case of emphysema, who
finds in Ivy the confident beauty she once had. Ivy actually
brings out the neurotic longing repressed by all the members of
this dysfunctional family, until one night when she decides to
seduce Darryl: in an unsettling scene, Ivy plies the pill-popping
Georgie with alcohol until she passes out, and then leans on her
unconscious body as she invites Darryl to administer oral sex to
her. Ivy then becomes unexpectedly homicidal when she pushes
Georgie off a balcony and lies that it was a suicide. The film
concludes with Ivy’s friend then killing her in the same way, so
that Darryl’s culpability in the affair is neutralized, and Ivy
is made to bear the responsibility of her sexual excess and its
revenge as well.
Poison Ivy and its sequels are indicative of the perfidious
way in which more recent teen films have cast the age-difference
relationship, because they replace the girls’ victim status with
a sense of sexual authority that is, in the end, destructive to
others as well as themselves. This would be clearly seen in two
Alicia Silverstone vehicles of this period, Alan Shapiro’s The
Crush (1993) and Guy Ferland’s The Babysitter (1995), and was
demonstrated with no less pain in Mo Ogrodnik’s Ripe (1996) and
Anthony Drazan’s Hurlyburly (1998).
As previously stated, more positive depictions of May-
December romances tend to be between couples in which the younger
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partner is not so young, thereby alleviating the pedophilic
tensions of the statutory rape that takes place when adults have
sex with minors. We see this in Luis Mandoki’s White Palace
(1990), the story of 40-ish Susan Sarandon playing the working-
class lover of rich 20-something James Spader in a partial
reversal of her role 10 years earlier in Louis Malle’s Atlantic City
(1980); Kevin Rodney Sullivan’s How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1998)
likewise featuring a 40-ish woman, Angela Bassett, as a stock
broker who takes an overdue vacation to the Caribbean and falls
for exhilarating 20-something Taye Diggs; and again the Grumpy Old
Man films, with characters in their 50s and 70s.
Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude (1971) illustrates the many
advantages of a May-December relationship, in likely the most
extreme age difference of any romance ever made. The title
characters are a disenchanted 20-year-old boy with an overbearing
mother and a penchant for fake suicides, and a free-spirited and
energetic 79-year-old woman who befriends him at a random funeral
and soon comes to love him. Maude later takes Harold to her
home, an old train car that is stuffed with an incredible array
of unusual artwork, musical instruments, and vivacious décor, and
we recognize the clear contrast between these two souls: Harold
lives in an enormous house that is cold and uninviting, whereas
Maude, on the other hand, fills her home with objects of
creativity and celebration, and even then has a bigger presence
than the place itself.
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The chance connection between two people with such vast age
differences alleviates many of the otherwise sinister or
pathological concerns that would inevitably arise if a character
deliberately sought a lover so much younger or older. The film
thus handles the burgeoning romantic and sexual tension between
Harold and Maude in unsubtle ways that are also apparently meant
to alleviate the otherwise expected lack of attraction two such
people would have for each other. Harold may indeed have
virginal and Oedipal frustrations, as various therapists tell
him, but his unusual behavior is only that– unusual, not
dangerous like that of many rebellious teens. Maude, on the
other hand, routinely commits minor crimes such as stealing cars
and replanting public trees, creating a pattern of increasing
acceptance for her deviance that further allays any discomfort
about her union with such a young man.
Harold is witness to an enlightening clue about Maude’s
lifestyle when he briefly sees that she has a number tattooed on
her forearm, so he and we discover for the first time that she is
a survivor of the Holocaust. This revelation, while quick and
unspoken, speaks volumes about the celebration of life that Maude
promotes: she is happy, determined, and assured. Furthermore,
her intense appreciation of life after a time of such terror
further explains her final and very surprising decision, which is
to kill herself on her 80th birthday, that same night. She has
already intimated to Harold that 80 is the right time to go, for
she does not want to face the ravages that may arise in the days
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thereafter, and Maude makes this pronouncement the day after
consummating their relationship, as if her agenda for rescuing
Harold from his torments is now complete. He pleads with her to
not die, reminding her he loves her, to which she replies, “Go
and love some more.” Maude’s death becomes a sacrifice for the
younger character, and since she is so old and has lived a
generally fulfilling life, we are given the message that Harold
has not only learned how to live and love from her, but because
of Maude his life will now really begin.
Over thirty years later, Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation
(2003) was in many ways even more reassuring about the potential
potency of a May-December romance, despite the otherwise dubious
pairing of a man in his 50s and a girl barely past 20. Other
films of this time were also less condemning than films of
previous decades: Joan Chen’s Autumn in New York (2000), Terry
Zwigoff’s Ghost World (2001), Anand Tucker’s Shopgirl (2005). Still,
in all of these films the stakes of transgression remain
inherently high, and none of the relationships last. Lost In
Translation at least allows the coupling of the older man and
younger woman to evolve without paternal condescension, and more
importantly, without a destructive consequence for either
character.
Bob (Bill Murray) is a fading actor doing an advertising
campaign in Tokyo for a Japanese liquor, and Charlotte (Scarlett
Johansson) is a newlywed whose photographer husband is on
assignment and leaves her alone much of the day and night to
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entertain herself in the desolate confines of the hotel at which
they are both lodging. Once again the characters meet by chance
rather than pursuit, although clearly each has reasons for their
interest in the other: Bob is watching his aging marriage devolve
into a series of unfulfilling duties just like his career, and
Charlotte is already dismayed by the loneliness she encounters in
her new marriage. Yet their contacts develop slowly and without
lustful impatience, as they go about exploring aspects of the
exotic high-tech city, which presents a contrasting allegory to
their current relationships, i.e., their non-committal and chance
attraction is far more exciting than the confining nature of
their marriages, much like the bright city is compared to the
dank hotel.
Yet the couple, despite obvious affection and even falling
asleep together, never become sexual, both knowing that soon they
will need to part. By keeping sex out of the equation, the older
man in this May-December romance is again relieved of any
ulterior suspicions. And the film’s wonderfully vague ending is
perhaps the best response to the turmoil that has plagued so many
female characters in these films for so long, as Bob chases down
Charlotte just as he is departing, whispers an unheard utterance
and gives her a chaste kiss, and then both walk away in the peace
of their fleeting connection. Roger Ebert eloquently commented
on this ending:
We shouldn't be allowed to hear [what Bob says to Charlotte]. It's between them, and by this point in the movie, they've become real enough to deserve their
Shary, “Politics of Aging” 17
privacy. Maybe he gave her his phone number. Or said heloved her. Or said she was a good person. Or thanked her. Or whispered, “Had we but world enough, and time..."and left her to look up the rest of it.13
In this gesture we may find some solace, for no one has
suffered, and the couple retain their unique harmony. At the
same time, this suspended closure tells us that the only way the
age-difference romance can work is if it remains unconsummated
and secret. We should perhaps hope that future films will employ
this same level of maturity in dealing with further tales of
young people and older people falling in love.
The Educational Aspect
Aside from movies about literal education through schooling,
and “wise parents” who inspire their children, these May-December
romances, like many films about older people in general, provide
a recurring image of elders teaching the young vital lessons, and
most distinctively, lessons that are not handed down in lectures
or diatribes but through actual pleasure and practice. This is
why many May-December romance movies are set when the younger
character is still close to adolescence. Vincente Minnelli’s Tea
and Sympathy (1956), for instance, was one of the first teen films
to deal, albeit implicitly, with the subject of teenage
homosexuality, in which a 17-year-old boy is “cured” of his
sexual ambiguity by an understanding older woman. And though
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released the same year as the colorful Harold and Maude, Peter
Bogdonovich’s literally black-and-white The Last Picture Show (1971),
featured a core of young people in a dying Texas town in the
early 1950s, one of whom becomes romantically involved with his
coach’s wife, in a relationship that is more emotionally vibrant
than any either of them has experienced before. Yet the ultimate
dissolution of their relationship suggests that true
understanding in all relationships is hard-fought and rarely
found, and as David Considine notes, the film “moved audiences
toward a more realistic image of both gender and age.”14 Another
realistic 1971 tale of an older woman “educating” a teenage boy
about sex and love was Robert Mulligan’s Summer of ’42, leading to
his heartbreak when she suddenly leaves town. We see this
pattern continue in such films as George Bowers’s My Tutor (1983)
with its literal taming of a horny rich kid by a patient teacher;
Alan L. Fraser’s Next Time (1998), the rare interracial May-
December romance with a white teen realizing he has much to learn
about romance and ethnicity; and Todd Williams’s The Door in the Floor
(2004), one of the few examples with a tentative outcome for the
boy, a prep school student who finds little satisfaction in
having sex with the married woman he so desires.
The lessons learned for girls in such scenarios are again
more often problematic, examples of which have included Elia
Kazan’s Baby Doll (1956)– about a teenage bride who acts like a
child as a perverse turn-on for her repressed older husband; Noel
Black’s Pretty Poison (1968)– the dangerous adventure of a girl
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infatuated by a mental patient; Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976)
and Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby (1978)– each featuring a teenage
prostitute who is duped into the job, the former by her
lugubrious pimp before he is brutally murdered and the latter by
her venal mother before she realizes her folly; Daniel Petrie’s
Square Dance (1987)– with a girl who tries to reach a mentally
retarded man through religion only to find him with a woman his
age; and Alexander Payne’s Election (1999)– in which an
overachieving high schooler sleeps with her math teacher and
unwittingly, if indifferently, activates a sequence of disastrous
difficulties for everyone around her.
Needless to say, the assumption is that younger people
benefit far more from their relationships with older people than
vice versa, for the reasons detailed before, and for the
“learning” they enjoy as a benefit of the romance. Yet many of
the lessons learned by the younger are bittersweet, often ending
in anguish not experienced in the typical pedagogical
arrangement. There is a distinct aspect of “tough love” in many
of these relationships, and very rarely any notion of “living
happily ever after.” Rather, in the end, the young endure damage
far more often that delight: boys tend to fall in love despite
anticipating merely sexual conquest, only to find that love
truncated or unrequited, while girls more often begin by falling
in love and inevitably face the practical and moral complications
of a “true romance” with an older man.
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Still, the majority of May-December romance movies are
difficult to criticize as exploitative or sinister, because on
some level both lovers’ lives are more complete as a result of
their relationship. They may not last forever, and there is
foreseeable pain, yet these portraits of love tend to be more
accurate and sincere than the delusional romances that are
promoted through movies with lovers closer in age– think about
almost every romance popular with young people over the past few
generations, e.g., Randal Kleiser’s Grease (1978), John Hughes’s
Sixteen Candles (1984), Rob Reiner’s The Princess Bride (1987) and When
Harry Met Sally (1989), Harold Ramis’s Groundhog Day (1993), Cameron
Crowe’s Jerry Maquire (1996), Bobby and Peter Farrelly’s There’s
Something About Mary (1998), Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love
(2002), David Dobkin’s Wedding Crashers (2005), Judd Apatow’s
Knocked Up (2007), Will Gluck’s Easy A (2010), etc.15
The young in May-December stories are brought to confront
their issues about sex (and sometimes virginity), romantic
longevity, parental influence, and their naiveté in life. The
old are given the opportunity to enjoy youthful exuberance again,
as well as to share their experience and knowledge with someone
who is likely to be affected by it. Indeed, many real-life
romances would be quite fortunate if the lovers’ lives were as
fulfilled in their relationships as are those of the characters
in the symbiotic and inexplicable experience of a May-December
romance.
Shary, “Politics of Aging” 21
Notes:
1. While “youth” is a difficult age to define, there are at
least some markers in American society that provide some
guidance, the most determinate of which is “teenager” which is
clearly someone between 13 and 19. The term “minor” usually
refers to people under 18, except for alcohol consumption, which
applies to those under 21. “Adolescence” is more ambiguous,
arguably starting anywhere around 10 and ending around 20, and
the “age of consent” for legal sexual practices varies from state
to state, ranging from 14 to 18. Thus, I tend to use “young” as
a term for characters from 12 into their early 20s (considering
that most U.S. students do not finish college until then).
The older population needs some markers for social purposes
as well, such as retirement, Social Security income, and health
guidance, but the range of “old” is even wider than “youth.” For
statistical and aid purposes, the United Nations defines the
older population as “60+” while the World Health Organization
sets the age of an older person as 50 or over. Retirement as
determined by companies has a very wide range, with ages ranging
from 55 to 75, and the AARP– formerly known as the American
Association of Retired Persons but now simply an organization for
older Americans– allows membership at age 50. Full retirement
benefits from Social Security for someone born in 1937 and prior
is 65, yet for someone born in 1960 or later the age is now 67–
demonstrating how even the federal government changes the older
Shary, “Politics of Aging” 22
age range. Thus, I consider the “elderly” as characters 60 and
over, and use the term interchangeably with “geriatric.”
A more complete consideration of these issues can be found
in: Hajime Orimo, “Reviewing the Definition of ‘Elderly’,”
Geriatrics & Gerontology International, vol. 6, #3 (2006): 149-158.
2. In 1900 the average U.S. while male had a life expectancy at
birth of only 48 years, and for black males the age was a
woefully low 33 years. By 2000, the age for white and black
males had risen to an astonishing 75 years. See The Information
Please Database, Pearson, accessed June 15, 2012,
www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005140.html,.
3. In 2010, the estimated portion of the U.S. population aged
65 and older was 13%; in 1900 that portion was 4.1%. Emily
Brandon, “65-and-Older Population Soars,” U.S. News and World Report,
Jan. 9. 2012, 17.
4. Martha Lauzen and David Dozier, “Maintaining the Double
Standard: Portrayals of Age and Gender in Popular Films,” Sex
Roles, vol. 52, #7-8 (2005): 437-446.
5. MPAA Worldwide Market Research and Analysis, “2005 U.S.
Movie Attendance Study,” Motion Picture Association of America, accessed
Jan. 27, 2007, www.mpaa.org.
6. Carrie Rickey, review of Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Village Voice,
Sept. 14, 1982: 48.
7. Morton Keller, Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth Century
America (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 1977), 465.
Shary, “Politics of Aging” 23
8. Joe Queenan offers a humorous and detailed comparison of the
film Manhattan and other May-December romances to Woody’s Allen’s
personal life in the early ‘90s, when he left his long-term
partner Mia Farrow for her adopted teenage daughter (his
stepdaughter), leading to an enormous amount of ironic
controversy for the director. “Baby Love,” Movieline, Oct. 2002:
41-44, 93.
9. There are at least two May-December romance films that I
have not mentioned, for reasons of irrelevance: Don Henderson’s
Weekend with the Babysitter (1970), a forgettable exploitation piece
that is unavailable for viewing, and Amy Heckerling’s I Could Never
Be Your Woman (2007)– a direct-to-DVD production that, despite a
well-known director and cast, garnered very little attention.
There may be more examples out there, and I invite suggestions
for future research.
10. These statistics are from the Statistical Abstract of the United
States 2011, prepared by the Chief of the Bureau of Statistics,
Treasury Department (Washington, D.C.: U.S. G.P.O.).
11. L.I.E. is different from films like Todd Solondz’z
Happiness (1998) and Greg Araki’s Mysterious Skin (2004), in which
older men do have sexual relations with boys, but the
relationships are essentially unromantic.
12. Nick Roddick, review of Class, Monthly Film Bulletin, Oct.
1983: 273.
13. Roger Ebert, review of Lost in Translation, Chicago Sun Times,
Sept. 12, 2003: G7.
Shary, “Politics of Aging” 24
14. David Considine, The Cinema of Adolescence (Jefferson, N.C.:
McFarland, 1985), 258.
15. All of these romance movies received over 50,000 votes
by viewers on the Internet Movie Database rating them 7 out of 10
or higher; only .03% of all movies (695) have ratings of 7 or
higher with over 50,000 votes out of 216,000 movies in the
survey. Accessed June 3, 2010, www.imdb.com.
Timothy Shary has been a professor of film studies at Clark
University and the University of Oklahoma from 1997 to 2011,
having earned his Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts in
1998. He is the author of Generation Multiplex: The Image of Youth in
Contemporary American Cinema (University of Texas, 2002) and Teen
Movies: American Youth on Screen (Wallflower Press, 2005), co-editor
with Alexandra Seibel of Youth Culture in Global Cinema (University of
Texas Press, 2007), and editor of Millennial Masculinity: Men in
Contemporary American Cinema (Wayne State University Press, 2012).
His research on the representational politics of age and gender
has been published in many anthologies, and his essays and
reviews have also been appeared in journals such as Men and
Masculinities, Film Quarterly, Sight and Sound, The Journal of Film and Video, Film
Criticism, The Journal of Popular Film and Television, Wide Angle, and The Journal of
Popular Culture.
Shary, “Politics of Aging” 25