You’re Looking Very Well

In modern industrial societies emphasis and value are placed on youth, with advertising geared towards and glamorising the young. To the extent that advertising acknowledges the elderly individual at all, it attempts to make him or her appear younger. The elderly are victims of mistaken beliefs and irrational attitudes promoted largely through the various mass media. It has been claimed that the most flattering thing you can say to an older American is that he ‘doesn’t look his age’ and ‘doesn’t act his age’—as if it were the most damning thing in the world to look old. But at least many of we oldies are looking very well, as we are repeatedly told.

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Many negative but influential views about ageing continue to derive from the media, including films and TV as well as books. Simone de Beauvoir, in an important book on ageing, wrote:

It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life’s parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension. Death does away with time… I have never come across one single woman, either in life or in books, who has looked upon her own old age cheerfully.

She uses the example of Leon Trotsky to show that even the body’s signals can be ambiguous, and there is a temptation to confuse some curable diseases with irreversible old age. Trotsky dreaded growing old and he was filled with anxiety when he remembered Turgenev’s remark, one that Lenin often quoted: ‘Do you know the worst of all vices? It is being over 55.’ In 1933, when he was exactly 55 himself, he wrote a letter to his wife complaining of tiredness, lack of sleep, a failing memory; it seemed to him that his strength was going, and it worried him. ‘Can this be age that has come for good, or is it no more than a temporary, though sudden, decline that I shall recover from? We shall see.’ Sadly he called the past to mind: ‘I have a painful longing for your old photograph, the picture that shows us both when we were so young.’ He did get better, and he took up all his activities again.

John Updike, in Self-Consciousness, wrote:

As I age, I feel my head to be full of holes where once there was electricity and matter, and I wonder if, when my head is all hole, I will feel any more pain or loss than I do now. What we don’t know, we don’t know: the Stoics are right at least about this. Ignorance is a kind of bliss, and senility, like drunkenness, bothers beholders more than the bearer.

In Ageing and Society (2000) Elizabeth Markson and Carol Taylor found 3,038 American films made between 1929 and 1995 which featured male actors over 60 years of age who had been nominated at least once for an Oscar. (We are used to seeing well-known older male actors wooing women stars half their age; it’s less common—if not unknown—the other way round.) But a random sample of these films showed that whereas older men were portrayed as ‘vigorous, employed and involved in same-gender friendships and adventure whether as hero or villain’, women remained ‘peripheral to the action or were portrayed as rich dowagers, wives/mothers or lonely spinsters’. They concluded that film roles have remained remarkably static in age and gender stereotyping despite changes in society.

Well-known films featuring older heroes include Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, which makes use of reminiscence to explore the disillusionment of an elderly physician as he reflects on his life and his mortality. Driving Miss Daisy won Jessica Tandy an Oscar at the age of 80 for her portrayal of a testy Southern Jewish woman’s relationship with her chauffeur. On Golden Pond featured the veteran actors Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn as an elderly couple sorting out their relationship with an estranged child. More recently there have been films which have picked up on the theme of Alzheimer’s, notably Iris, based on the life of the writer Iris Murdoch, and Away From Her, in which Julie Christie plays a sufferer who insists on entering a rest home, which greatly upsets her husband as he cannot communicate with her or visit her for a long period of time. And most unexpectedly, a 78-year-old man, a bit grumpy but tough and kind, is the hero of the 2009 Walt Disney animated film Up. He sets out to fulfil his lifelong dream to see the wilds of South America but he isn’t alone on his journey, since an 8-year-old boy, a wilderness explorer who is trying to get a badge for assisting the elderly, has become a stowaway on the trip. They have amazing and amusing adventures, and encounter talking dogs, an evil villain and a rare bird. The boy gets his reward.

Research in the US has found that during prime-time television shows, only 3 per cent of the characters are aged 65 or older, while this age group actually accounts for 9 per cent of the American population. Older people portrayed on television are often marginalised, comical, or based on stereotypes. Fewer elderly women were shown, although the number of older women outnumbers that of older men. Television has featured the situation of older people in series such as the American The Golden Girls, which featured four older women sharing a home and earned multiple Emmy Awards, and the British series As Time Goes By, with Judi Dench and Geoffrey Palmer as a couple who meet again after a gap of 38 years. And of course there is the redoubtable figure of Agatha Christie’s sharp-witted detective Miss Marple to remind us that not all old people need be peripheral to the action. In the long-running BBC radio serial The Archers, June Spencer, at the age of 90 still playing matriarch Peggy Woolley, was involved in a storyline about the dementia of her fictional husband which echoed her own experiences with her real-life husband; and Betty Driver was at 90 still paying a role in Coronation Street. The BBC sitcom One Foot in the Grave was so popular that its main character, Victor Meldrew, has become shorthand for a constantly bitter and complaining elderly man.

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In politics, the standing of the old varies widely between different societies. Governments based on rule by the elderly—gerontocracy—have been common in Communist states, in which the length of one’s service to the Party was held to be the main qualification for leadership. In the time of the Eight Immortals of the Communist Party of China, who held much power in the 1980s, it was quipped that ‘the 80-year-olds are calling meetings of 70 -year-olds to decide which 60-year-olds should retire’. For instance, Party leader Mao Zedong was 82 when he died, while Deng Xiaoping retained a powerful influence until he was nearly 90. In the Soviet Union, gerontocracy became increasingly entrenched from the1970s, at least until March 1985, when a young, ambitious government headed by Mikhail Gorbachev took power.

The public may not always be keen on old politicians. Sir Menzies Campbell was 64 when he was elected leader of the Liberal Democrats in 2006. Cartoons in the newspapers made him old, bald, derelict, and looking 150. The media went for his age, which made him, it was claimed, unacceptable and not suitable for the job; the Financial Times said leaders had to be young. He was repeatedly asked whether he was just too old for the job. He vigorously defended the advantages of aged people and argued that their experience was very valuable, but he was forced out of office. Similarly, at 72 John McCain was regarded by many as too old to be the next US president—far too long in the tooth. Had McCain succeeded in his 2008 campaign he would, at 73, have been the oldest President in American history. Discussions about his age dogged McCain during his failed run, and people recalled that Ronald Reagan showed early signs of Alzheimer’s in his late 70s. Yet the president of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, at the age of 81, has been in power for 28 years. The economist J. K. Galbraith, at 87, was irritated by ageist remarks like a ‘Are you still working?’ And ‘Are you taking exercise?’ To those who asked such questions he wanted to reply with ‘I see that you are still rather immature.’

The young, not the old, benefited in the 60s from postwar affluence in the West. Youth began to develop its own culture and the young of the 1960s did not want to lose the benefits. Cosmetic sales to hide ageing in the USA went up some tenfold in this period. Fitness became popular and women began to refuse to accept their old-age stereotype. Advertising focused attention on the third age, and there were magazines directed to older customers, but the old were dismissed from most of public life. Roger Daltrey in the 1960s sang ‘I want to die before I get old’, and Timothy Leary advised those on the campus to ignore anyone over 30. Many of us, when looking at the old when we were young, did not believe that it would happen to us.

One attempt to produce an antidote to youth culture is The Oldie, a monthly magazine launched in 1992 by Richard Ingrams, who for 23 years was the editor of Private Eye. It carries general interest articles, humour and cartoons and is sometimes regarded as a haven for ‘grumpy old men and women’—an image it has played up to over the years with such slogans as ‘The Oldie: Buy it before you snuff it’ and its lampooning of ‘yoof culture’ and the