In some subtle and psychologically astute films, the older woman is the Queen who gives a young man access to her power and resources. In the Oedipal horror story Sunset Boulevard, struggling writer William Holden wanders into the bizarrely cloistered world of aged movie star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), who offers him luxury, comfort and introductions to the right people in exchange for a little love and attention. But there's a price to be paid: she'll kill him if he tries to leave.
The Lion in Winter is another such cautionary saga, based on the real history of Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine (played here by Katharine Hepburn), the richest, most famous and powerful woman of the 12th century. She marries the 11-years-younger Henry Plantagenet (Peter O'Toole), uses her power to make him King Henry II of England and bears him several children. It is not a peaceable union: the pair fight incessantly over his infidelities and the royal succession. When she poisons his mistress and rouses their sons into revolution against him, he has her locked up. But she triumphs in the end by outliving him.
Men who want to take advantage of the Queenly powers of older women may find it is not so easy to leave. The Queen is not your momma who gives you her warm milk for free. If you enter her sphere, you get all she's got, but she gets all you've got, too.
Sometimes, older women turn out to be the Witch, fed up with pampering men, and looking for revenge. The Witch may exploit a young man's innocence and relative weakness for her own purposes. In Bullets Over Broadway, Dianne Wiest's aging actress romances young writer John Cusack for a bigger part in his play. In To Die For, Nicole Kidman's TV weatherwoman wants Joaquin Phoenix's dull and homely high-schooler to knock off her husband.
In Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Martha (Elizabeth Taylor) seduces Nick (George Segal) merely to make her husband jealous, and then proceeds to make Nick feel like a flop in bed. With a single sex act, she wins victories over two men, turning both into houseboys.
Most famously, Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft) picks Dustin Hoffman's virginal recent Graduate to be her private stud rather than her prospective son-in-law. The message: Witches have higher priorities than a young man's comfort or self esteem.
Films about sexy Witches tell young men: Some women play games that can make you impotent metaphorically, or even literally What does she want? You're not cute enough for her to want you that much. She must be up to something.
Older women who mate with younger men in the movies are most likely to fall into the Lover category. Obviously, older women are the best, most experienced and least selfish Lovers. This is the only movie myth with a benign outlook, relatively speaking. Older women have their own reasons for providing sexual initiation, but they are not likely to expect lifetime support and protection in exchange.
In Never on Sunday, introducing virginal boys to the joys of sex was always a holiday for the Piraeus prostitute of Melina Mercouri. In lea and Sympathy, Deborah Kerr's faculty wife is just trying to save an adolescent virgin (John Kerr, no relation to Deborah) from homosexuality. In Summer of '42, Jennifer O'Neill's 22-year-old wife learns she's been widowed by the war and gets through the night with a 16-year-old boy (Gary Grimes), who remains forever grateful. The Last Picture Show offers a similar motive: the neglected middle-aged coach's wife (Cloris Leachman) and an orphaned high-school student (Timothy Bottoms) go through their loveless sexual mechanics to find mutual comfort in a dying town. These relationships only work in the short run.
Matings between women who have been around and boys who have not are generally portrayed as acts of generosity and mercy, rather than as child molesting. As long as the older women don't expect the liaison to be permanent, they won't frighten boys who want to be sexual but aren't ready yet to be grown-up.
But such relationships still come with a mythic warning for younger men attracted to older Lovers: It can never last. French films do this myth especially well. Near the end, the about-to-part lovers go around in raincoats (it's always raining at this point), smoking cigarettes and looking ineffably sad.
Older Lovers like Jennifer O'Neill may not abound in real life; they may just be adolescent male fantasies. One of the sexiest fantasy women to ever sizzle the screen is 79-year-old Maude of the cult film Harold and Maude. The septuagenarian (Ruth Gordon) seduces 22-year-old Harold (Bud Cort), and, with her love and zest for life, raises all manner of hormone levels and saves him from suicide.
Harold's mother is unloving and anti-sexual; Maude is the perfect antidote. Harold wants to marry her, but she seems to know that this love story is a young man's Oedipal fantasy of the ideal Older Lover, who must disappear once the young man is sexually initiated and brought into full manhood. On her 80th birthday, Maude checks out by swallowing a fatal dose of pills. Perhaps, in this myth, Maude's death is necessary for Harold's liberation, but the old gal looked to me as if she had a lot of life left in her. In this case, the myth of the Good Fairy Lover proves dangerous to women's health.
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