Women in Films: Age of Anxiety : Movies: While men age gracefully, older women are portrayed as background furniture, says a new study.
BOSTON — Older women portrayed in film remain largely stereotyped as “hags, nags, witches or worse,†a new study by a pair of Boston researchers has found.
“It’s interactive,†said Elizabeth Markson, a Boston University sociologist who is associate director of the university’s Gerontology Institute. “I think that film reflects society, and society reflects film.â€
“Men in the movies who get older are seen as distinguished. Women are seen as old,†said Watertown, Mass., psychotherapist Carol Taylor, Markson’s collaborator on “Interpretations of Older Women in Film: A Sociological/Psychological Analysis.†The two researchers will present the paper today at Boston University.
As stars, Taylor said, “you may have one or two women per decade†who are over the age of 60. Otherwise, “older women in films are pretty much treated like background furniture,†she said.
By contrast, Taylor said, “we noticed just how many male actors there are who make films right up to when they die.â€
Taylor and Markson said their research stemmed in part from a curiosity they felt about the “slew†of films featuring older women in prominent roles that came out in the 1980s.
But further examination showed them that the slew turned out to be four films, “On Golden Pond,†“Driving Miss Daisy,†“Whales of August†and “The Trip to Bountiful.â€
A computer comparison of ages of Academy Award winners for best actor and best actress showed “about a 10-year age difference,†Markson said. Men who earned the best actor award averaged around 45 years of age, she found. Their female counterparts were closer to 35.
“In some ways we were confirming what our eyes had already noticed,†Markson said. “In part we were testing whether our eyes were correct.†With “something less than a 1 in 1,000 possibility†that their results were due to chance, “we found that yes, indeed, our eyes were correct,†Markson said.
As a further element in their “men versus women†comparison, “most of the differences in the women is due to what we call the Hepburn-Tandy effect,†Markson said--â€in other words, the ability of one or two female stars to survive†and to continue acting.
Katharine Hepburn, she noted, “shows up as an Academy Award winner just about every decade. With men, it seems to be more random.â€
Only Marie Dressler, who won the best actress award in 1932 for “Min and Bill,†skews that equation, Markson said. “If we take her out, then we have nobody†other than Katharine Hepburn or Jessica Tandy winning the best actress award over the age of 60.
“I think this shows that the double standard falls most heavily on older women,†said New York writer Molly Haskell, author of “From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in Movies†(University of Chicago Press).
“I think one thing you’ve got to realize is that the standards of physical beauty are much more rigid when applied to women than to men,†Haskell said.
Markson pointed out that the representation--or as she prefers to think of it, misrepresentation--of older women in films is also affected by the roles to which they are constrained. When given significant roles, she said, “older women are typically cast as figures who exist to support the activities of men or families.†Like Hepburn in “On Golden Pond,†“they are the mediators,†Markson said.
Alternatively, older women may still be seen in the mold of 50-year-old Gloria Swanson in 1950’s “Sunset Boulevard,†as “a spider woman, entrapping the young man,†Markson said.
Finally, there is the “less attractive, less desirable, opinionated and eccentric†older woman, the “old bag,†Markson said, who is typified by Geraldine Page in “The Trip to Bountiful†or, more dramatically still, by Jessica Tandy’s role in “Driving Miss Daisy.â€
“She proves her incompetence in the very first scene when she backs the car off the road,†Markson said.
She speculated that this narrow characterization of women can be traced to the fact that “by and large, when older women are portrayed, it is primarily through male eyes.
“Again, this is a reflection of society as a whole,†Markson added. “It is not unique to the film industry.â€
But film’s pigeonholing of older women probably is more pronounced because of the relative dearth of female directors, Markson said. She noted that Lena Wertmuller, for the 1975 film “Seven Beauties,†is the only woman to have been nominated for the Academy Award for best director, “and she lost to the guy (John G. Avildsen) who directed ‘Rocky.’ â€
Even in the latest round of Oscars, Markson said, Penny Marshall’s film “Awakenings†was nominated in best picture, best actor and best screenplay categories, but Marshall failed to win a nomination for director.
Markson and Taylor said that while welcoming the critical and box-office success of a movie like “Thelma & Louise,†which focuses on the relationship of two women, they were troubled by the lack of an appropriate vocabulary to describe this type of movie.
“We’re stuck with calling them ‘buddy films’ †itself a male term, Taylor said.
But Haskell said she was heartened that the climate in Hollywood today could support a movie with a pair of female protagonists who are over the age of 22.
“It’s really amazing. Something like ‘Thelma & Louise’ could not have been made even five years ago,†she said.
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