FILMS HAVE LONG LEGITIMIZED PAIRINGS OF OLDERMEN AND YOUNGER WOMEN,
BUT THEY'RE FULL OF WARNINGS WHEN THE SITUATION IS REVERSED.
How old should lovers be? In the movies, male stars in their 50s,
like Harrison Ford and Michael Douglas, are pairing with women in their
20s like Anne Heche ,and Gwyneth Paltrow. Men in their 60s, like Jack
Nicholson and Robert Redford, are romancing women in their 30s like Helen
Hunt and Kristin Scott Thomas. And 73-year-old Paul Newman is romping
with that goddess of sensuality, 52-year-old Susan Sarandon.
It's a long-standing film tradition. At 45, Humphrey Bogart was
clinching with 19-year-old Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not; at 55,
he was partnering Audrey Hepburn, 25, in Sabrina. Clark Gable was 33
years older than Sophia Loren when they romped together in It Started in
Naples.
Such May-December liaisons seem to have two functions, both
unsettling. The first is to send a message to viewers that it is a
dangerous world out there in which young damsels in distress need a man,
even sometimes a very old man, to keep them safely rescued. Second, when
men in the audience see men on the screen winning victories over other
men and rescuing women, it gives them an ego boost and even raises their
testosterone levels. Men feel more heroic in the company of women who are
smaller, weaker, poorer, dumber, more troubled, and, above all, younger
than they are.
Romance between old men and young women has been so commonplace
on-screen that the age difference often passes without comment. Recently,
however, more women in the audience are looking with repulsion on these
geriatric child-molesters. They long instead for celebratory and
inspiring tales of sexy older women.
Unfortunately, such films have been few and far between. The most
recent, now available on video, is How Stella Got Her Groove Back, the
sumptuous romance of a 40-year-old woman and 20-year-old man. No American
film since 1973's Forty Carats has made a December-May pairing look so
easy, so joyous and so optimistic. The amazingly fit Angela Bassett plays
Stella, Taye Diggs her young lover Winston. Both actors boast faces
sculpted by the gods and minted in gyms, and the couplings of these two
perfect bodies in a Jamaican paradise are stupefyingly beautiful.
Unhappily, from time to time the lovers must come up for conversation,
and they can't seem to talk about much except their age
difference.
Film romances always revolve around a couples efforts to overcome
obstacles to their coupling. In Stella, there aren't many. Bassett is a
hotshot stockbroker with a drop-dead house and wardrobe, an impeccably
adjusted 11-year-old son, a supportive ex-husband and a nurturing family
and cadre of friends. Diggs is an island prince whose main problem is
deciding whether to go to medical school or to wash dishes for a
living.
We learn that studly young lovers make great nannies. On the
downside, they eat dry Froot Loops in bed, prefer Disney flicks to
weepies and shy away from noisy emotional processing of the sorts of
worries that keep middle-aged single mothers awake at night.
Stella's biggest problem is that her friends and family worry about
the risk an older woman takes when she hooks her life to a man who could
so easily find a younger woman. They psychologize over what could be
wrong with a man who would mate with a woman his mother's age rather than
one his daughter's or granddaughter's.
In the real world, and in my office, there are a lot of such
relationships. Of course, it is easier to create a lasting, equal
relationship with a partner of your own generation, but overall, the old
gals and young guys I see are doing OK. They're doing it without much
support from the movies, though, and movies are very important in shaping
our mythology about relationships.
While films accept and thus normalize matings between old men and
young women, they find the older woman-younger man relationship alarming.
Movies involving such pairs are often cautionary tales for young men,
warning them that taking up with an older woman is dangerous to their
emotional and even physical, health.
Movie myths about sexy older women take four forms, corresponding
to the four archetypes of femininity: the Warrior, the Queen, the Wise
Woman or Witch, and the Lover. Real women obviously embody all four. But
in the movies, one myth always predominates.
The older woman may be an Amazon who uses her fierceness to slay
her own dragons and prove that she doesn't need a man. Stella is such a
warrior, as is Margo Channing (Bette Davis) in All About: Eve and Susan
Sarandon's sassy waitress in White Palace. Tine Warrior has been
fire-hardened by men past and has learned to handle life on her own. Sine
is terrified of putting her life in the hands of someone who might betray
her or try to control her. A young man may be seeking an equal partner,
while the Warrior, at a different stage of life, may not be ready to take
the risk.
When the older woman is a Warrior, the young man is warned: You may
love her and she may enjoy you, but she is so distrustful of men and so
insecure about the age difference between you that she may have to prove
to herself constantly that she can get along without you. Expect to be
tested and distrusted from here on out. Your love may never be
enough.
