Abstract
As they have developed, gender studies have become increasingly intersectional, paying attention not just to the differences between men and women but also among women and among men based on race, class, ethnicity, and/or sexuality, among other factors. Not only in the social and behavioral sciences but also in the humanities has there been an explosion of work on cultural representations of different groups of women and men in literature, art, music, and cinema. There are few fields, however, that have been less receptive to these new understandings of gender and masculinities than gerontology and aging studies. Despite the dramatic graying of the Western world, gerontology and age studies have recurrently overlooked analyses of older men, concentrating instead either on older women or on ungendered portraits of aging. As a consequence, the field has neglected the gendered aspects of aging—aging as a gendered process.
In this context, Norma Jones and Bob Batchelor’s recent anthology of Aging Heroes: Growing Old in Popular Culture (2015) is a valuable contribution, as its focus on aging male actors in contemporary (United States) popular culture brings together the traditionally separate fields of gender and gerontology studies. The text is divided into four main sections. The opening section explores images of aging heroes in film genres, ranging from westerns to science fiction. Section 2 focuses on “diversity” issues, exploring the intersections of aging with sexuality, race, and gender in cinema and comics. The next section is explicitly concerned with masculinity, analyzing depictions of aging male pilots in advertising or actors in TV series like Mad Men. The final section deals with aging men and women “on and off the screen,” exploring the “real” and “fictional” aging of actors such as Helen Mirren, Peter O’Toole, and Danny Trejo, among others.
There have been several important previous studies concerned with portrayals of older women. Yet there has not been a comparative study for aging male characters in culture. Even though scholarship has addressed cultural representations of age more generally, there is little in-depth analyses of masculinity and aging. Besides filling a critical gap, then, Aging Heroes also questions widely held assumptions about women’s and men’s aging. For example, some have argued that women novelists are more likely to depict aging women through the metaphor of ripening with age, while men tend to produce portraits of old men characterized by depression, bitterness, and decline. (This seems to be the case whether these works are fiction or nonfiction.) Yet the book calls into question whether aging is truly less an issue for men or that male-authored representations can be simply pitted against their female-authored counterparts.
Despite its many strengths, however, the book presents a number of shortcomings too. If the Introduction describes Jeff Bridges as setting “the standard for what an aging hero can be or should be” (p. xi; emphasis added; why not Clint Eastwood or John Wayne? one wonders), chapter 2, for example, on movie westerns, fails to acknowledge the evolution of actors like Clint Eastwood or James Garner from their early to later movies, positing the problematic assumption that “1990s Westerns such as Unforgiven and Maverick featured aging movie stars…in roles…similar to those they played thirty years earlier” (p. 28). Equally questionable is Norma Jones’s contention in her chapter that texts like Stallone’s The Expendables helps deconstruct, rather than perpetuate, traditional images of masculinities by focusing on aging action stars. From a gender analytical perspective, the text is also of limited value, as the topic takes center stage only in section III, even though it recurs in other chapters throughout. Even more problematic, perhaps, is the use of “popular culture” as a linking thread connecting work in this anthology. The volume discusses very different film (from “heartland” to science fiction) and literary (comics and graphic novels) genres, which undermines the volume’s overall unity at times.
Despite this, the book remains a valuable contribution to both gender and aging studies. As many writers (e.g., Philip Roth, Paul Auster, and Don DeLillo) and film directors (i.e., Clint Eastwood, Woody Allen, and David Lynch) have entered old age, older characters have become increasingly present in mainstream fiction and cinema in recent years, which makes the present study both timely and necessary. With a wide range of representations of older men available in contemporary popular culture, the critical climate does indeed seem to be ripe for a full (re)consideration of the influence on masculinity of aging in contemporary Western culture. After all, not only do social notions of masculinity affect their cultural representations, as we know. But so too do such representations affect social change, providing alternative models of aging masculinities that may challenge or reproduce social prejudices of the same.