In Which We Do Not Bake Cookies

Grandma and the Charisma of Old Age

by SARI EDELSTEIN

Grandma
dir. Paul Weitz
78 minutes

Old ladies are having a moment. From the box-office to the bestseller list, women of a certain age are coming out of the woodwork. This is a remarkable shift for a culture that tends to ignore women over thirty. (Recall Maggie Gyllenhaal’s recent revelation about being too old, at 37, to play the love interest of a 55-year-old man.) If older women are typically rendered invisible and expected to practice what critic Kathleen Woodward calls the “pedagogy of mortification,” then this is certainly a moment of unusual prominence. From this summer’s Blythe Danner vehicle I’ll See You in My Dreams to the biopic Iris to the documentary Advanced Style, it has never been so cool, so interesting, to be an “older” woman.  

One easy way to explain this trend is to read it as consolatory cinema for Baby Boomers, who have long grumbled about becoming seniors, extended midlife into the sixties, and even coined the term “new old age” to evade the prior terms of growing old.  And yet, even if we can attribute this trend to a market eager to see themselves – and their age category – in appealing ways, these films nonetheless do some important cultural work; they ask us to reimagine growing older in creative ways and to see maturity as complex, fraught, and individual.  

The new film Grandma is a strident critique of longstanding assumptions about old age. Grandma explodes the connotations attached to the cultural position of the grandmother. Played by Lily Tomlin, the eponymous grandma is Elle, an adjunct professor and lesbian poet, à la Eileen Myles. She wears a faded jean jacket and sneakers, drives her late partner’s antique car, and generally exudes an iconoclastic, devil-may-care attitude. In the film’s first scene, she ends a relationship with a much younger woman, underscoring the point that advanced age does not negate sexual desirability.  

The plot is set in motion when her teenage granddaughter, Sage, shows up asking for money to pay for an abortion. Their names themselves are a cheeky reversal of age norms as well; the grandparent is not the Sage, but rather “Elle,” or “her,” the focus of our attention and the film’s subject. Elle has no savings and has cut up her credit cards, so they embark on a kind of lesbian-feminist quest narrative, driving the beat-up car to cafés and tattoo parlors, asking old friends and lovers to provide cash.

Typically, what drives a film is young romance, but Grandma quickly reveals its primary interest in Elle’s private life. Very early on, it is clear that the dalliance between Sage and her thuggish boyfriend is cliché, shallow, and unworthy of further attention. Instead, it is Elle’s relationships that take center stage: her grief over the death of her long-term partner, her ambivalence about a new relationship, even her apparently impulsive, brief first marriage to a man. Where older women have long been marginalized as sources of humor or wisdom, Grandma sidelines the younger characters, foregrounding Elle’s personal life as the more compelling. Indeed, the movie manages to call our attention to the sex life of a seventy-year-old woman even though it seems to be premised around a sexually active woman fifty years younger.

When old friends and lovers prove too impoverished or stingy to provide the needed funds, Elle and Sage have no choice but to ask Elle’s middle-aged mother/Sage’s estranged daughter (Marcia Gay Harden) for the money. A corporate type, she is walking at a treadmill desk and wearing a magenta skirt suit when Elle and Sage find her. The film seems to scoff at her conventionality. In fact, if Grandma liberates old women from tired stereotypes, it tends to reify other age categories in predictable ways: adolescence and middle age are rendered familiar and one-note.  

The film’s feminist message extends beyond its mere act of making an old woman an appealing protagonist. It also offers an extended discussion, almost a tutorial, on abortion. After encountering violent protesters outside the clinic, Elle asks whether the procedure will involve a D&C, the doctor explains that she will use a vacuum because “we’re not in the dark ages anymore.” This scene is not only medically frank, but it highlights that abortions can take place in modern, clean facilities with kind doctors. We have, in other words, moved beyond the dangerous operation that Elle endured in her youth, and the film clearly wants to ensure that we continue to make such abortions available to women who need them.   

Grandma ends with Elle walking, alone, at night, down a poorly lit urban street, exactly the kind of place where grandmas traditionally fear to tread. Like the film’s candid discussion of abortion, this final scene also upends the tacit rules that have elided and restricted the representation of female experience. And this scene emblematizes the film’s overall project: it enables us to envision old women beyond familiar, circumscribed scenarios, offering us instead a road story that resists closure, holding open multiple paths and possibilities for how to negotiate advanced age. Grandma is not really about family; it is definitely not about domesticity; and the only cookies in sight are store-bought.

Sari Edelstein is the senior contributor to This Recording. She teaches American literature at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. She doesn't tumbl or tweet.

"Fener" - Beirut (mp3)

In Which Birdman Makes An Ingenious Move

Birdman, Black Swan and Gender Performance Anxiety

by SARI EDELSTEIN

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu
119 minutes

Alexander Iñárritu’s new film Birdman opens with a sustained view of the back of Michael Keaton’s body, clothed only in white jockey shorts, asking us to scrutinize the physical tolls of aging – the sagging, the balding, the spots.  Yet we can’t help but notice that he is levitating feet above the ground, the first indication that he retains the afterglow of great powers. Keaton plays Riggan Thomson, a middle-aged Hollywood movie star, who writes, acts, and directs in an adaptation of Raymond Carver’s work on the Broadway stage.  

The film derives an extra punch from Keaton’s star-text: his status as the Batman of the 1980s and his subsequent disappearance from the Hollywood scene. In Birdman, Riggan is literally haunted by the character, Birdman, that made him famous; this superhero-cum-alter ego dwells in his dressing room and unconscious, reminding him of his glory days and scoffing at his turn to the theater. Riggan yearns to make good art in a world that only seems to reward cheap exhibitionism.

With his enormous feathery black wings, Birdman offers an unexpected visual echo of Natalie Portman’s nightmarish black swan in the 2010 film of that name.

Like her avian vision, Riggan’s Birdman is ominous and omnipresent, pecking at him with insults and reminders of how he has fallen from big box office stardom. Both films reveal the porous boundary between self and role that characterizes immersive performance. And like Black Swan, Birdman examines the emotional and physical costs of performance, especially the relentless self-scrutiny it inspires. 

Whereas the self-destructive consequences of the female beauty standard are coming to be widely acknowledged, Birdman’s study of aging male celebrity reveals that no one is immune from the ravages of our culture of images. The film constantly dwells on male anatomy, making an equation between cultural relevance and masculine potency.

Edward Norton stars in Riggan’s play and serves as a reminder of Riggan’s own aging body. He proudly displays an erection on stage, a feat that he can apparently only accomplish in that venue. The alter-ego Birdman equates Riggan’s move away from the big screen with irrelevance and failure. Urging him to return to his superhero franchise, he tells Riggan, “Sixty is the new thirty.” We might read this as Hollywood’s injunction to the stars it creates: sixty must be the new thirty; there is no room for older people. Renee Zellweger’s surgically altered face is a case in point, but Birdman reminds us that this is true for male bodies as well.

Birdman juxtaposes multiple media forms, including high and low literature, the theater, and the superhero franchise, in order to reflect on the fate of American entertainment. But even as Birdman laments the decline of serious art, it is an experimental, new kind of film that doesn’t resort to older techniques. Indeed, the entire film appears as one long continuous shot without a cut.

This ingenious formal move emphasizes the extent to which the characters are always on stage, always performing, and the distinction between representation and reality erodes. Birdman transforms the well-trodden narrative of the old, white man in decline into a truly original statement on the state of celebrity and age in contemporary culture.

Sari Edelstein is the senior contributor to This Recording. She teaches American literature at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. She doesn't tumbl or tweet. She last wrote in these pages about Richard Linklater's Boyhood. Experience our mobile site at thisrecording.wordpress.com.

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In Which Boyhood Keeps Us In A State Of Perpetual Anxiety

Familiar Story

by SARI EDELSTEIN

Boyhood
dir. Richard Linklater
165 minutes

Critics are swooning over Richard Linklater’s new film Boyhood, most notably because it took twelve years to film – see, for instance, Dana Stevens' rave. Linklater has claimed it was the longest shoot in film history. But this cinematic accomplishment does not serve a particularly novel take on adolescence or aging; instead, it offers a familiar story of coming-of-age as masculine disenchantment and growing older as decline.

Nominally about the boyhood of its protagonist, Mason Evans (Ellar Coltrane), Boyhood is actually about the effects of time more broadly, as it portrays the same actors over the course of twelve years. Thus, the film’s central subject is aging, and how years look. We see how twelve years register on the faces and bodies of the young actor as well as on the more familiar Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette, who play his parents.

The landscape of rural Texas – its canyons and vast expanses – affirm the power of time to change its subjects, to work deep ravines and crevasses into the earth. But while time renders the natural world ever more beautiful and mysterious, the film works hard to show that age has the opposite effect on people. According to this film, aging is not about progress or improvement, nor is it about the acquisition of wisdom. According to Boyhood, life involves nothing but a progressive winnowing away of idealism.

Though the hard-working mother of two, Olivia (Patricia Arquette), achieves some version of success (home ownership, graduate degree), she can’t find a decent husband or a modicum of financial stability. Moreover, the tenderness we witness with her children in the early scenes of the film dissolves into power struggles, nagging, and alienation.

Mason’s father, played by Ethan Hawke, is perhaps the only sympathetic man in the film, though he begins as a clichéd deadbeat dad. While he is absent for much of their childhood, he comes to desire true intimacy with his children. By contrast, Mason’s two stepfathers represent more conventional versions of “manhood," associated with alcoholism, violence, and emotional frigidity.

Boyhood dwells on the vapidity of traditional rites of passages; birthdays and graduations are rendered empty performances. When he turns fifteen, Mason is given a gun, a bible, and a suit and tie, the paraphernalia of the normative Southern man he is supposed to be. In one of the final scenes, his mother breaks down as her son leaves for college and sums up the film’s bleak view of aging when she semi-comically announces, “You know what’s next? My funeral!” Thus, far from celebration, rites of passage merely bring her closer to death. And Mason keeps viewers in a state of perpetual anxiety (avoiding car accidents, abuse, and injury by a hair’s breadth), as if to remind us that growing up is simply about not dying.

In this sense, Boyhood shares a sensibility with last summer’s sleeper coming-of-age film The Way, Way Back, which also rendered adulthood as an undesirable achievement. In that film, fourteen-year-old Duncan begrudgingly endures a summer vacation with his mother and her hostile boyfriend, Trent, at a beach house in a small New England town. To escape the claustrophobic climate of the beach cottage, Duncan finds refuge at a nearby waterpark whose loopy slides and swimming pools signal the film’s refusal to adhere to conventional ideas about linear development.

Where Boyhood portrays coming-of-age as disillusionment and fails to represent any alternative to the adulthood of the prior generation, The Way, Way Back challenges reigning ideas about how individuals experience the effects of time. In the film’s final scene, Duncan’s mother joins him in the “way, way back” of the family’s wood-paneled station wage, aligning herself with her son and his “backwards” way of seeing the world.

The movie thus ends in the same place it began; Duncan has not outgrown this childish status but has come to embrace it, reclaiming the lowest position on the hierarchy as a badge of honor and a preferable perspective. The Way, Way Back reminds us that growing older does not require one to conform to a life course rooted in stages and in the gradual assumption of normative gender roles.

Boyhood, on the contrary, is about the relentless stampede of years and their predictable and grim effects on individuals. Like the HBO television series Girls, Linklater’s movie makes a claim to universality with its title. But this boyhood is specific; it is a white, middle-class, Texan boyhood. In one scene, Olivia casually suggests to a young Latino landscaper that he go to college. To her surprise, the nameless character crosses her path years later at a restaurant; he has attended college and tells her, “You changed my life.” This surprising scene, strangely sentimental in the context of this cynical film, hints at the other boyhoods that might be imagined. Where Mason refuses to embrace the capitalist dictum that his parents, teachers, and supervisors relentlessly proffer, this young man seems to have wholly embraced the promise of the American dream. In a way, then, the movie acknowledges the specificity of version of boyhood it presents and implies that perhaps Mason’s anomie is itself a privilege.

Sari Edelstein is a contributor to This Recording. She teaches American literature at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. She doesn't tumbl or tweet. This is her first appearance in these pages.

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