The Politics of Aging in the May-December Romance Plot (2014) in the Quarterly Review of Film and ...

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

Shary, “Politics of Aging” 2

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


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


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:


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


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


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.


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


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


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


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


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


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.


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


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


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


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


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


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.


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.


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


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.


http://www.mpaa.org/

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005140.html

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.


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.


http://www.imdb.com/

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