Tag: Older Women in Film & TV Theme Week

Older Women Week: Funniest After 50: Four Comediennes to Love Forever

Betty White, Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, and Helen Mirren… At first, when writing this article, I thought about pointing out the ways in which Hollywood has shorted these prolific and amazing actresses, and while I’m sure that’s happened to them at some point in their careers, in reading about their lives, I realized that would almost be a disservice to all that they’ve accomplished. Rather, this piece is meant as a tribute to these enduring female comediennes, who have not only flourished but also paved the way for so many other actresses and actors.

Written By Rachel Redfern
The always hilarious Betty White
When thinking about female comediennes, we often consider the hilarity of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, Sarah Silverman, Ellen Degeneres and Mindy Kaling (plus many more); however, rarely do we think about those funny women who helped to pioneer women in comedy, and who manage to stay current today. Even more than that, do we ever think about actresses over the age of 80 who are still out there, busting sides and helping to expand the boundaries of cinema? Four people who are doing just that? Betty White, Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, and Helen Mirren. These women have managed to retain a certain appeal and charisma, keeping them current and having a substantial effect on popular culture. 

But what roles are they playing? Are they merely fulfilling our stereotypes of older women? It is common knowledge that most female actresses are given a narrow width of roles once they top the age of 45, the focus at that point aiming more towards how well they aged and can they convincingly play Scarlett Johansson’s mother?

At first, when writing this article, I thought about pointing out the ways in which Hollywood has shorted these prolific and amazing actresses, and while I’m sure that’s happened to them at some point in their careers, in reading about their lives, I realized that would almost be a disservice to all that they’ve accomplished. Rather, this piece is meant as a tribute to these enduring female comediennes, who have not only flourished but also paved the way for so many other actresses and actors.

Betty White (1922)

While Betty White has had a career in show business for most of her life, White was most known for her role on Golden Girls over twenty years ago, a role in which she was spunky and hilarious. But the steam generated by that show built her up until suddenly, ten years ago when she started guest starring on dozens of shows, won seven Emmys, become the oldest person to ever host Saturday Night Live, and even had a spot on a major super bowl ad.

But why? What’s so enduring and endearing about her? Is the fact that White, born in 1922 (she is now 91 years old) retains a youth and vitality that is staggering? Is it the comedic roles she easily slips into as a lovable and sassy grandmother? At first, when considering the usual roles that she plays I wondered, is White fulfilling a wishful stereotype for audiences (that of a hilarious, raunchy, older woman) without playing more dramatic roles or portraying realistic situations for the elderly?

But in my consideration of her career, I changed my perspective; Betty White is a comedienne and has been for most of her career. The fact that she’s still entertaining and embracing offbeat comedic roles, and even hosting her own prank show called Betty White’s Off Their Rockers, is actually one of the best tribute to funny women everywhere.

Maggie Smith (1934)

You’ve watched Harry Potter, and probably Downton Abbey, so you know who she is, but Smith has been a prominent actress since 1952, although she started her career in the theater. However, I didn’t necessarily consider Smith a comedic actress until actually taking a closer look into her expansive and productive bibliography. Since 1956, Smith has been recognized as both a powerful dramatic actor (becoming a member of the Royal National Theater in the 1960’s, nominated for an Oscar only a few years later for her role as Desdemona in Othello) and as a woman of great comedic timing and talent.

Consider her acerbic wit and hilarious disdain as the Dowager Countess in Downton Abbey, the prim nun in Sister Act, and a lovely, elderly Wendy in Hook. The unfortunate moment in all of this research is the realization that most people of my generation have tasted only the barest sample of Maggie Smith’s range, especially in regard to her comedic abilities.

Judi Dench (1934)

 

We don’t always consider Judi Dench as a comedic actress, because well, let’s face it, she’s a drama powerhouse. Elegant, confident, she displays all the characteristics of a self-assured woman of grace and intelligence, both off- and on-screen. However, similar to Smith, Dench was also a fixture of the England theater scene for many years, being a member of the Royal Shakespeare company, and it was there, that she gained prominence for both her drama and comedy work, once being cited as the greatest comedic actress in all of England.

In 1981 she starred in the critically acclaimed British romantic sitcom, A Fine Romance, with her husband, Michael Williams, but it’s her more current work as M in the James Bond series that I find interesting. Her performance has been acclaimed for its combination of British sarcasm and competent, cold leadership.

Besides that, she’s hilarious in private life, once stating that since Harvey Wienstein helped to further her career that she had his name “tattooed on my bum ever since.”

Helen Mirren (1945)

Helen Mirren has retained a sexiness and a dynamic appeal, which she happily carries with her as she enters her seventies. I love that. While it’s true that too much emphasis is placed on the physical beauty of the women in Hollywood, Mirren’s draw comes from more than just her good looks. She’s always been known for her sensuality and for the heat and intensity she could bring to a film or theater production.

Like Judi Dench, Mirren was also a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company in her youth who then moved onto fame for ability to portray British royalty, having played three queens so far: Queen Elizabeth I, Queen Elizabeth II, and Queen Charlotte. Yet, while most of her substantial theater experience was in drama and displaying “sensuality” and “sexual allure,” in film and television, she’s become a recognizable comedic personality.

Her roles in Calendar Girls, the dark-comedy and action thrillers Red and Red II, countless television interviews and even, a night spent hosting Saturday Night Live in 2011 have solidified Mirren as a sultry and mischievous comedienne. (Click here to see Helen Mirren and Billy Crystal consider a remake of When Harry Met Sally and here to see a fabulous video of Mirren talking about women in Hollywood and the “worship of the young male and his penis.”)

I find that combination fabulous, and in many ways groundbreaking; Mirren has managed to successfully embrace her famous sexuality and incorporate it into her own unique style of slapstick, confident comedy.

The brilliance in examining the comedic range of these four women is that all have developed a unique style and are at ease with their age. They don’t take themselves too seriously, and because of their resilience, diligence, hard work, and talent, (in a notoriously competitive and unfriendly-to-women-environment) they embody the best of women in Hollywood—stalwart performers whose years of experience is outstanding and mind-boggling.

What are some other actresses that have successfully retained their comedic abilities as they’ve entered their golden years?

Rachel Redfern has an MA in English literature, where she conducted research on modern American literature and film and its intersection, however she spends most of her time watching HBO shows, traveling, and blogging and reading about feminism.

Older Women Week: ‘Fried Green Tomatoes’: A Celebration of (Older) Women

This is a guest review by Amanda Morris.
Sassy and fearless storyteller, 82-year-old Ninny Threadgoode (Jessica Tandy), takes Evelyn Couch (Kathy Bates) and viewers on a journey through a tableaux of Southern family and friendship in Fried Green Tomatoes. There’s a lot going on in this film worth talking about, from race and sexuality to class and masculinity. But let’s focus on how the film presents older women. Based on a Fanny Flagg original novel, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, the movie presents a vision of mature women who are survivors that guide their families and communities with compassion, stubbornness, and love.

Original trailer for Fried Green Tomatoes
Set in 1920s Alabama, Fried Green Tomatoes is a story about the healing power of stories, as much as it is about how Evelyn develops a friendship with Ninny that is forged from story. The primary characters are older women, with men taking supporting roles, which is an impressive reversal for any Hollywood film. The story within the story features the friendship and love between young Ruth Jamison (Mary-Louise Parker) and Idgie Threadgoode (Mary Stuart Masterson), Ninny’s family and friends from 50 years in the past. Ninny, Evelyn, Mama Threadgoode (Lois Smith), and Sipsey (Cicely Tyson) present four different views of older womanhood in this complex film that touches on many taboo subjects that older women aren’t usually permitted to grapple with on film. All four demonstrate the the kind of agency and decision-making prowess usually reserved for younger women and men.
“I’m too young to be old and I’m too old to be young,” Evelyn says to Ninny during one of their visits. Ninny asks a few pointed questions and then diagnoses Evelyn as going through menopause. This subject opens the door to a further conversation about Ninny’s son Albert, “the Lord’s greatest gift,” who died at 30. Mentioning child death and menopause in the same scene is unusual, not to mention the casual and straightforward way it is handled, without excess drama or emotion. Rather, these issues are presented as just a part of life, and Ninny’s wisdom is hard-earned and taken in stride, which helps the middle-aged Evelyn change her own attitude about feeling depressed and lost.

For Ninny, who remembers by the end of the film that the most important thing in life is “friends, best friends,” keeping friendships alive through story provides a pathway to both the fascinating past and the unknowable but exciting future. On her birthday, Ninny tells Evelyn not to fear death because even though she is “at the jumping off place,” she isn’t scared at all. Ninny’s spirit is energetic and intoxicating as she regales Evelyn (and us) with the life and times of Idgie and Ruth, including how Idgie was accused of murdering Ruth’s husband, Frank Bennett (Nick Searcy). Ninny’s frank mode of speaking, indomitable spirit, and ability to treat everything as an adventure, even while sampling the fried green tomatoes that Evelyn brings for her birthday, sets this character apart from other representations of older women on screen. In fact, Ninny is so different from our expectations of an 80-something woman that the disconnect between Ninny and the nursing home where she lives becomes starkly apparent when Evelyn discovers that Ninny really is meant to stay in this dying, sad place for good.

In American society and in Hollywood films, too often women are invisible, much less a force to be reckoned with. Older women in particular are meant to be hidden away, not viewed as holders of wisdom or desired as sexual beings or feared as people who could create change or cause damage. And when women ARE a force in film, there tend to be dire consequences for demonstrating independence and strength. This is not the case in Fried Green Tomatoes. Ninny and Evelyn are older female characters who not only carry the film with their stories but also demonstrate real strength and determination in the face of denial, obstinacy, and youthful swagger. Consider one of my favorite scenes in the final third of the film where Evelyn stands up to two young women over a parking lot slight:

Evelyn discovers her inner Towanda
Who else hasn’t wanted to react this way when cut off in a parking lot or in traffic? Evelyn’s action is cathartic for older female viewers as we imagine ourselves in her seat, embracing our inner Towandas right alongside her. She is accessible because she is imperfect, emotionally complex, and full of vigor. As a character, Evelyn is not just a reflection of Southern middle-aged womanhood; she is a modern Everywoman and we cheer for her every discovery and improvement that she makes for her own benefit, such as her decision to invite Ninny to live with her and Ed (Gailard Sartain), who is less than thrilled with the idea.

When Evelyn states, “Don’t you ever say never to me,” this is a direct reflection of Ruth’s statement when she and Idgie have to jump from the train. The scenes in this film intertwine and interconnect in ways that help viewers see older women as positive, strong, and wise role models. Even the tertiary but important characters of Mama Threadgoode and Sipsey show strength and determination when it isn’t popular or socially acceptable to do so.
The scene where Sipsey stands up to Frank Bennett and says, “I ain’t scared of you,” sets the stage for her later accidental murder of the man when he tries to abscond with his and Ruth’s infant son from the Cafe.

Cicely Tyson as Sipsey
While murder is decidedly against the law, audiences are meant to sympathize with this older Southern black woman who is standing up to white male domination.
As for Mama Threadgoode (Smith), she also stands up to societal expectations when she invites Ruth to stay for the summer as a way to reach Idgie. She says to Ruth after Idgie, who appears indifferent to Ruth’s presence, walks away, “Oh, it’s got to work. Somebody’s got to help her and I can’t.” The expectation is that mothers can fix their children’s problems, and Mama Threadgoode reverses that expectation by reaching outside for help.
Nominated for two Oscars (Best Actress in a Supporting Role and Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published), Fried Green Tomatoes weaves a moving picture of older women that is uplifting even as this vision borders on the sentimental. Gentle strength is the beating heart of this story, embodied by the older female characters who weave powerful stories that are strong enough to heal even the toughest cynic among us.

Amanda Morris, Ph.D. is an assistant professor of multiethnic rhetorics at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania, and when she’s not writing or wrangling students, she loves shark fishing, gardening, and cooking with her man.

Older Women Week: Kind Grandmothers and Powerful Witches in Studio Ghibli Films

Studio Ghibli

This is guest post by Eugenia Andino previously appeared at her Web site (in Spanish) and is cross-posted with permission. 

The female protagonists in Studio Ghibli films have often been analysed as examples of feminist work; ranging from young women (like Nausicaa or Princess Mononoke) to little girls like Ponyo. The most popular ones, like Chihiro in Spirited Away, are just on the brink of adolescence. While it is true that there are not many adult women in Studio Ghibli films, there are varied, sympathetic and imaginative portraits of older women, normally in supporting roles.
These older women can be broadly grouped in two types.
The main ones are the wise or nurturing women. The first of them is Obaba in Nausicaa. We first meet her when her family meets Lord Yupa, a visitor, and Obaba interprets for them the local legend of a hero in blue, in a golden field, who will save the Valley. Obaba is brave and strong, if somewhat fatalistic; she dares invaders to kill her, and near the end of the film she seems resigned to the end of the people either by the toxic plants, an attack of giant insects, or foreign invaders. In any case, it is remarkable that for the role of symbolic voice of the Valley culture, the film chooses an old woman rather than a wise man or a warrior.
Princess Mononoke is a film with a similar theme, the conflict created by an industrial city whose prosperity depends on the exploitation of a magical forest. The old, wise woman here is Hii-sama. She tries to placate the possessed boar who bites and curses Ashitaka, without success, and then decides that the protagonist should leave the village and find a cure in the west. Since Ashitaka leaves not to come back, she doesn’t reappear. Again, the character gives richness to the film.

 

Dola and her sons

 

Sometimes the nurturing woman isn’t a “wise woman” type but simply kind, nurturing, and treated with great sympathy by the story. This is the case with Granny in My Neighbour Totoro, and of the many women in the home where Lisa works in Ponyo. In the forced absence of Satsuki and Mei’s mother because of her illness, Granny (who is not their grandmother but a neighbor, and the grandmother of Satsuki’s friend, Okagi), gives much needed love and attention to the little girl. At the same time, the film never implies that only women should take care of children, as can be seen in the initial scenes of the two little girls housekeeping and bathing with their father, in a rare, realistic and positive example of fatherhood. In this film and in Ponyo, these kinds old neighbors form a community that gives much needed emotional support to little children with loving but busy parents.
But older women’s roles as family caretakers aren’t only surrogate, as we can see in My Neighbors the Yamadas, a sweet “slice of life” piece composed of vignettes. Here we find a family with Takashi, the father, Matsuko the mother, Shige the grandmother, Noburu, a teenage boy, and Nonoko, a little girl. At the end of the film, Noburu jokes that the family works because all three adults are crazy: if any one of them were sensible, the balance would be broken. There’s some truth to this, as there are a number of unresolved tensions among the adults that would be unbearable with only two of them (or if they didn’t love one another very much). The conflict between Granny Shige and her son-in-law is stated early on the film: the property is hers, but he built the house himself. Here and elsewhere, Matsuko doesn’t take sides and tries to stop the fight. On their part, Shige and Matsuko both argue about their (unenthusiastic) housekeeping. Although Shige is often witty and very funny, it’s not all rosy; for example, the melancholy caused by the nearness of her death and the sickness of a friend is the theme of one of the Shorts.

 

In Spirited Away, we find an example of each category, so let’s introduce the second one: the ambiguous villain or antagonist.
This film has two twin sisters, Yubaba and Zeniba. Their age is doubtful: they look old, but Yubaba has a baby boy. In a way that reminds me slightly of Lady Eboshi in Princess Mononoke, she is, first and foremost, a businesswoman. Her biggest flaw is her greed, but she’s not truly evil. She doesn’t want to cause unnecessary harm, and she always keeps her word, even when she complains that it goes against her interests. Her sister Zeniba starts off as another antagonist, who attacks Haku and transforms Yubaba’s baby boy into a mouse, and then turns out to be grandmotherly and friendly and angry only at her sister for ordering Haku to steal from her. This gives complexity and appeal to the character, showing that “nurturing grandmothers” have their own interests and needs too.

 

Hii-Sama dictates Ashitaka’s destiny
In Howl’s Moving Castle there is another couple, if not so well paired up: Sophie, the main character, is transformed into a 90-year-old woman by the Witch of the West. This gets the main adventures of the film started as she searches for a way to break the spell and finds Howl. Just like in Spirited Away or Ponyo, the spell is broken with love, which isn’t very original. The interesting thing about Sophie’s transformation is that a shy, insecure, and practical girl finds a housekeeping job that suits her well, but only after being cursed with old age. This, in the context of Ghibli films as a whole, suggests again the nurturing, caring values of grandmotherly types. Here, they are certainly compensated and kept refreshing and fun rather than repetitive with the Witch of the West, a rare character because she’s mostly (or completely) villainous, with no redeeming features. And finally, Madame Suliman, of uncertain age (her hair is white, but she doesn’t look as old as the other two), is a powerful magician who used to be Howl’s master and teacher.
The Castle in the Sky includes an ambiguous character which is probably the funniest and most groundbreaking of all of Ghibli’s older women: Captain Dola, an air pirate. She initially appears to be a villain, but later she joins forces with the protagonists, Sheeta and Pazu, against Muska. With her sons as henchmen, stealing treasures is her main objective. She shows a great love for her sons, companionship with her husband, and kindness to Sheeta while still fulfilling the role of reckless, greedy pirate. She’s arguably the most memorable element in the whole film.

 

A grandmotherly Zeniba teaches No-Face how to knit

 

Despite the repetition of patterns, with all these witches and grandmothers, the characterisation of older women in Studio Ghibli films is never stereotypical. If Ghibli heroines can show children that little girls can be clever, courageous and admirable, these secondary characters show that their spark and their charm are not lost with age.
Eugenia Andino Lucas is a teacher of English as a Foreign Language in Spain. She’s also working on a PhD on Gender Violence in the novels of Charles Dickens. You can follow her on twitter: @laguiri and on her blog: eugeniaandino.bachpress.org.

 

Older Women Week: How ‘Golden Girls’ Shaped My Feminism

Golden Girls
Written by Megan Kearns | A version of this article originally appeared at The Opinioness of the World.
 A child of the 80s, I grew up watching TV shows like Murder She Wrote and Love Boat. Living with my grandparents for 6 years clearly influenced my television viewing habits! But my favorite series of my childhood — and one of my absolute faves as an adult — was Golden Girls.
Humorous and feel-good, I didn’t realize at the time that Golden Girls was such a cutting edge show. It’s not often that a movie or TV series focuses solely on female characters. It’s even rarer when those women are over the age of 50. Following the lives of four single female friends living together in Miami, Golden Girls showed us that grandmothers are sharp, funny and sexy, that they still have goals and dreams. It forever shaped the way I view women.
Created by Susan Harris, the series’ quartet featured smart, sarcastic Dorothy (Bea Arthur), sexy, feisty Blanche (Rue McClanahan), sweet, clueless Rose (Betty White) and sharp, jaded Sophia (Estelle Getty). These women formed a tight-knit family. They teased one another and supported each other through tough times, all while gossiping and eating cheesecake. Sidebar, it was great to see women unabashedly eat on-screen. Dorothy Zbornak, a bibliophile with her witty quips and shrewd outlook on life, was the one I could identify with most. But the show gave equal time to delve into each woman’s life and her perspective with a palpable chemistry between them.
Golden Girls was ahead of its time. We rarely see female actors over the age of 50 portraying characters embracing and owning their sexuality. Reduced to our appearances, women are told time and again that beauty, youth and thinness determine our worth. When the media body shames and bodysnarks female actors’ bodies, it’s clear how how far we need to go in featuring women’s stories. And so in our youth-obsessed society, it’s revolutionary to see women over 50 on-screen as beautiful, vivacious and sexual.
A groundbreaking show, it dealt with issues such as safe sex, ageism, sexism, mental illness, domestic violence, interracial relationships, homelessness, HIV/AIDS, LGBTQ rights, immigration and animal rights. Yet it was equally revolutionary for focusing on women and their friendships.  
Too few films and TV shows feature female leads. It’s even rarer to see a series focus on female friendship. Golden Girls paved the way for TV series like Sex and the City (even down to conversations revolving around the diner, echoing Golden Girls‘ late-night cheesecake chats), Living Single, Girlfriends, Designing Women, and Girls. While it might be easy to brush off the four women as caricatures or archetypes, each role was nuanced and complex. It’s important to see ladies celebrating ladies.
Women’s dialogue and plotlines in film and (to a lesser extent) in television, don’t typically focus on other women or even themselves. If women talk to each other, it’s often focusing on men. While imperfect, this is why the Bechdel Test matters. Dorothy, Blanche, Rue and Sophia cared about their careers and volunteered in their communities. They talked about current affairs, social issues, motherhood, family, their aspirations and goals. They swapped stories on dating, marriage and sex. But they were never defined by the men in their lives. They defined themselves.
In the series finale, Dorothy tells Blanche, Rose and Sophia, “I love you, always. You’ll always be my sisters. Always.” It was that kind of powerful sisterly camaraderie that resonated with me throughout my years. It informed my feminism.  

Golden Girls reinforced the importance of women’s opinions, that their lives and stories matter. It highlighted the value of female friendship, proving that women’s lives don’t revolve around men. It showcased social justice, conveyed the detriments of patriarchy, and proved that women don’t have to abide by confining stereotypical gender roles. It taught me that it’s never too late to start over. You’re never too old to live the life you wish or to forge new friendships.

So Dorothy, Blanche, Rose and Sophia…thank you for being a friend to us all.

Older Women Week: You Don’t Own Me: ‘The First Wives Club’ and Feminism


Movie poster for The First Wives Club

This guest post by Mia Steinle previously appeared at Canonball and is cross-posted with permission.

In the late nineties, as I was entering early teenagerdom and as a group of marketers was inventing the term “tween,” my favorite movie was about a group of middle-aged divorcees waging war on their self-centered ex-husbands. The First Wives Club had come out in 1996, and it’s possible — nay, likely — that my parents rented it from our local Blockbuster shortly thereafter, but it wasn’t until some years later, at the dawn of a new millennium, that I was treated to this quintessentially 90s nugget of female empowerment, over and over again on my friend’s VCR.

Diane Keaton, Goldie Hawn, and Bette Midler in The First Wives Club

We admired Bette Midler as ballsy, street-smart Brenda, who is incensed that her ex-husband Morty has the gall to bring his girlfriend (Sarah Jessica Parker) to their son’s bar mitzvah. We laughed at Goldie Hawn as Elise, a habitually drunk, botoxed actress, whose producer ex-husband has just taken up with an even younger actress (Elizabeth Berkeley, whose performance makes SJP look like a comedic genius). And, while the other ladies are fun and glamorous, I think we were most touched by the neurotic realism of Diane Keaton as Annie, an anxious, eager-to-please, but ready-to-burst housewife whose husband (played by the Rev. Eric Camden, aka Stephen Collins) leaves her for their therapist.

After the suicide of a mutual friend — a woman who gave the best years of her life, and her self-esteem, to a man who then left her for a younger woman — the ladies band together to get back at their exes. As Annie explains, it’s a matter of justice; they made life easy for their ex-husbands for years, only to be discarded in middle-age — that time of life when society tries to force women into invisibility: sexually, romantically and professionally.

The ladies set to work destroying their exes, using a combination of cunning and, perhaps most unconventionally, financial savvy. Their greatest successes aren’t born of cat fights with second wives, but of their ability to read tax returns (Morty cheated on his), rig auctions (Annie uses her winnings to buy ownership of her ex-husband’s advertising firm) and do simple arithmetic (turns out Elise’s ex-husband’s new girlfriend is only 16). And their accomplices, on the surface, are the types of characters who don’t usually get to be clever, the types of characters we’re supposed to laugh at. But Maggie Smith as a wealthy socialite, Jennifer Dundas as Annie’s lesbian and feminist daughter and Bronson Pinchot as an interior decorator of vague foreign origin, are just as smart and savvy as the first wives. Not being male, not being young and not being straight aren’t liabilities for these characters.

As a 12-year-old, my life bore little resemblance to theirs, but The First Wives Club gave me one of my first, delicious glimpses into womanhood — a womanhood that includes sassy retorts and getting drunk at lunch and hanging out with your best friends (and also with Bronson Pinchot and Gloria Steinem). It’s a version of womanhood where we know that Maggie Smith, no matter how old, is always cooler than Sarah Jessica Parker. Where finding out that your daughter is a lesbian is no big thing. (“Lesbians are great nowadays!” Annie remarks after hearing the news.) Where female empowerment isn’t just a nebulous buzzword, but something you achieve and celebrate.
When I sat down this week to watch the movie with fellow Canonball editor Lindsay (who had never seen it before — by contrast, our contributor James owns two copies), I wondered how it had weathered the 15 years since its release. But, really, aside from a few instances of characters exclaiming, “It’s the nineties!” the movie holds up surprisingly well. In a way, it’s almost more progressive than a lot of today’s female-led comedies. Spoiler: while we’re left to assume that Brenda and Morty are going to get back together, neither attention-seeking Elise nor insecure Annie take back their ex-husbands. As Annie explains:
He wants to come home again and he feels emotionally ready to recommit to an equitable and caring relationship. I told him to drop dead.

Because at its core, The First Wives Club isn’t a story about romance or marriage. It’s a story about finding the bravery to stand up for yourself — especially when “yourself” is a woman, and not the young, pretty kind either. And seeing Keaton’s Annie transform from the nervous wreck that I so deeply identify with, to the kind of woman who can tell the dad from 7th Heaven to drop dead, is like a breath of fresh air. 
 

Mia Steinle is a journalist living in Washington, D.C. Her work has appeared in Huffington Post, Columbia Journalism Review, and POLITICO, among others.

Older Women Week: The Ruthless Power of Patty Hewes from ‘Damages’ & Victoria Grayson from ‘Revenge’

The shadow of Patty Hewes dwarfs her protege Ellen Parsons in Damages
Emily Thorne stands beside her enemy Victoria Grayson in Revenge
Written by Amanda Rodriguez
Spoiler Alert
Older women in film and TV are generally a stereotypical lot. They’re usually sexless matrons or grandmothers who perform roles of support for their screen-stealing husbands or children. These older women are typically preoccupied with home and family, lacking a complex inner life because they are gendered symbols of, you guessed it, home and family. Occasionally we see older women who go beyond that trope, even defying it to focus more on power, prestige, winning, and their own personal success and public image rather than that of others. Two potent examples of this are Patty Hewes from Damages and Victoria Grayson from Revenge. 
The award-winning actress Glenn Close brings Damages‘ corporate lawyer and anti-heroine, Patty Hewes, to life with complexity, subtlety, and sheer force of presence. Patty Hewes is the uncannily successful proprietor of the law firm Hewes & Associates. She has high-up connections that she thinks nothing of exploiting, and she has no problem circumnavigating the law and propriety to win a case or to get what she wants. She thinks nothing of, say, attempting to murder her protege, Ellen, and succeeding in murdering Ellen’s fiance or blackmailing witnesses or judges. Patty has a reputation for ruthlessness, and, basically, people know she’s not a woman to be fucked with because she will toy with her opponents before unleashing an unholy shit storm that utterly destroys them. She’s beyond smart; she’s brilliant. She’s dedicated, ambitious, addicted to winning seemingly unwinnable cases, and cares more about her career than she does about anything else in her life.
Patty Hewes: You do not want to fuck with her.
The much acclaimed Madeleine Stowe portrays the equally ruthless Victoria Grayson on Revenge. The playing field is different: instead of a court of law, Victoria reigns supreme as a filthy rich socialite in the Hamptons who, like Patty, plays deep games of power and manipulation and is a woman who gets what she wants. Victoria shamelessly throws around her wealth to gloatingly buy off people and services, and if that doesn’t work, she capitalizes on her cool poise to threaten unspeakable reprisal if her powerful will is not obeyed. In all honesty, it was hard to find emotive pictures of Victoria because Madeleine Stowe masterfully plays her character’s unruffled containment, with emotion only briefly escaping through her eyes or a momentary flash of facial expression before disappearing beneath a well-practiced veneer of composure.
Victoria Grayson sits in her signature chair smugly triumphant about…something. To be fair she’s usually smugly triumphant.
Both Patty and Victoria have elegant homes and expensive wardrobes that are further embodiments of their success. They both play the game. It is usually a game of their own making where the rules are known only to them and are likely to change when it suits them. Both are detached and calculating, having trouble relating in genuine, meaningful ways even to the people who mean the most to them. In fact, their closest loved ones tend to despise them the most for the atrocity of their actions. However, their maternal instincts (or lack thereof) are points of differentiation. Patty has a son, Michael, and she wrests custody of his daughter from him primarily to teach him a lesson. She is cold and harsh with Michael, and once she has sole custody, Patty is distant and downright absent from the upbringing of her granddaughter, Catherine. We also come to find out that she aborted a child in her youth, choosing her career over motherhood. This sets Patty up as a typical Hollywood example of the masculinized female authority figure. Her lack of maternal instinct is set up as proof that her power has dehumanized her, implying that a woman who succeeds in the masculine world of corporate law can’t possibly be a good mother with a happy home life. Aside from the glory of her career, Patty’s life is depicted as empty and lonely; her nights are filled with solo booze consumption, and the only companion to whom she can freely relate is her pet dog, Cory.
Patty feeds her beloved Cory.

While she is a twisted excuse for a mother, Victoria has a ferocious maternal instinct. She ascribes the utmost importance to her role as “mother.” Though her games, plots, and intrigues enmesh her children in a suffocating web of deceit and motherly control, Victoria’s goals (however misguided) are always designed to protect and benefit her children. For example, Victoria offers her daughter Charlotte’s boyfriend $20,000 to piss off, and in her mind, she’s doing it to save her child from a boy who is unworthy and with whom a lasting relationship is doubtful. Victoria also has her son, Daniel, viciously beaten in prison in order to show the court that his life is in danger and he should be remanded to house arrest under her direct care and supervision. Power, in Victoria’s hands, hasn’t robbed her of her maternal instinct; instead it has made her love dark and hard and cruel.

Victoria bears the strongest distaste for Emily Thorne, her son’s fiancee; her maternal instinct telling her (correctly) that Emily is up to no good.

Patty and Victoria also differ in the depictions of their sexuality. Patty is basically an asexual being, especially after her vitriolic divorce from her cheating husband, Phil. The show alludes to her complex sexual past (with two marriages and a sordid affair with a witness resulting in the birth of her son), but no relationships or trysts materialize throughout the series because when would she have the time? Like her maternal instinct, Patty has surrendered the freedom of sexuality in return for power and prestige.

Patty sacrifices what society tells us it means to be a woman for masculine power.

Victoria, on the other hand, has a passionate sexuality that is as fierce as her ambition, as fierce as her maternal instinct. Equal to the contained control of Victoria’s public facade, is the pure abandonment of her sexuality. Unlike Patty, Victoria desperately wants love. Revenge shows that Victoria’s denial of love and the denial of the honesty of her sexual desires (first with her painter/counterfeiter Dominik and later with her husband’s coworker David Clarke) in exchange for money and power has lead her to deeper darkness, deeper emptiness, and a dwindling moral compass. The supposition seems to be that a woman can’t be rich and powerful while feeling love and tenderness.

Victoria rapt in her lover David Clarke’s arms.

Both Patty and Victoria live in a perpetual state of guilt and remorse for their actions. Victoria suffers from interminable guilt for helping her husband frame her lover, the only man she ever loved, David Clarke, for terrorism and murder. She does this, presumably, because she is afraid to lose her wealth, her position, and the power that come with them. Victoria identifies her past crimes as “heinous.” In flashbacks, there’s a softer edge to Victoria, an openness and a willingness to love and to connect. Over the years, we see that her choice of power over principles has eroded her ability to empathize and turned her into the stereotypical ice queen. Eventually, we see a shift in Victoria where it seems she can no longer bear the guilt she suffers, and she seeks to purge herself of her crimes through confession (of course she manipulates the situation to ensure her own immunity…and it doesn’t end up happening).

A seemingly pivotal moment for Victoria as she prepares to board a federal plane to Washington and make her confession.

Patty also feels unassuageable remorse about many of her decisions, most notably her youthful abortion and the path on which it set her life. The symbolic weight that the abortion bears and the resulting demonization of Patty for her choice are disappointing. The implication is that if Patty had had the child instead of aborting it, she would’ve been a better person, contented and whole. This idea goes against the very grain of Patty Hewes. Would her ambition have dissipated upon the birth of her daughter? Her love of power, the law, the game, and manipulation disappeared when she looked at her screaming newborn? None of those things happened when she later gave birth to her son, so the reality is that having that child instead of aborting it would’ve made her gravely unhappy and trapped her, and she probably would’ve fucked up that kid’s life and its sense of self even worse than she fucked up Michael’s.

Though we learn much of Victoria’s past which casts her in a more sympathetic light (i.e. her mother was a gold digger who resented her, allowed her to be molested, and then kicked her out when she turned 15), she remains aloof and composed, while Patty has more moments of genuine vulnerability. Barefoot, curled on her couch with Ellen and her dog, Patty becomes human. Her temper tantrums where she wrecks her desk and throws her oft-held whiskey glass across the room show the depth of her frustration and impotence. Her wracking sobs and hysteria after she’s given the order for Ellen’s murder show the viewer the true emotional cost of her choices…and that she makes them anyway.
Patty loses it after giving the order to have Ellen murdered.
It’s no secret that I’m fascinated by women with power. I wrote about the machinations of women and corporate power in my review of Passion, and I wrote about the ruthless Claire Underwood of House of Cards (another aging anti-heroine). Patty Hewes and Victoria Grayson are both complex, compelling characters. The way they inhabit their power is endlessly watchable. Despite their borderline amorality, it’s infinitely gratifying to watch both of them at work, setting up the players and knocking them down in a life-sized game of chess. Unfortunately, there is such a profound darkness and emptiness in both Patty and Victoria as well as in their lives. They have cut themselves off from human connection and have lost the ability to love the simpler things in life. The message is “power corrupts,” but I wonder if Victoria and Patty are extreme examples of this because they are women, as if femaleness automatically bestows qualities of nurturing, affection, connectivity, and compassion. The implication is that the kind of power these women seek is outside the feminine realm, and to grasp it, they must reject their very nature, which leaves them a hollow shell of a person. It’s all too rare that we see a subtle, powerful woman who commands respect who hasn’t sacrificed her humanness in the bargain. Though I love these wicked, wicked anti-heroines, I want to see more balanced representations of women with power who aren’t demonized and damaged due to its pursuit. 

Older Women Week: ‘Notes on a Scandal’: The Older Woman As Predator and Prey

This is a guest post by Elizabeth Kiy.

“I don’t know. It’s just the distance between life as you dream it and life as it is.” –Sheba Hart

Notes on a Scandal film poster

In Notes on a Scandal, a 2006 British psychological thriller, a web of lies and manipulations form around the relationship of two schoolteachers who live very different lives.

Told through her point of view, the film takes viewers into the mind of Barbara Covett (Judi Dench), an elderly woman whose sweet voice and grandmotherly appearance hide a cunning mind and sinister intentions. She lives alone with her cat and confides only in her journal, whose entries form the film’s narration.

Her loneliness is compounded by this narrative technique, as Barbara is often given no one to play off of and instead watches interactions from a distance, remaining an entirely closed off person with a rich internal life she only reveals in her private writing. For an older woman, whose age, unmarried status and perceived lack of attractiveness leave her virtually invisible and of no value to society, this narration allows her to express her resentment. But underneath her malice is the profound loneliness of a woman who seems to have never learned how to connect to people and to remain in their lives without manipulations.

Barbara only confides her real opinions in her journal

To a degree, her isolation is self imposed as Barbara sees the people around her, students and teachers alike, as uncultured, unwashed and unilaterally badly behaved. That she sees herself as above them is highlighted in an early sequence when she watches the children come into the school from an upper floor window. This is the scene where Barbara first sees Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett).

Sheba’s first appearance presents a sharp contrast. She floats, very blonde and pale in a sea of dark haired students in black uniforms and the viewer’s eye, aligned with Barbara’s, is easily drawn to her. While Barbara, a through disciplinarian in dowdy clothes, fits naturally into the school environment, Sheba is alien within it. It is suggested that she has no authority over the students because she still sees herself as a young person and wants to be their friend. The film also addresses the idea of class difference which further sets Sheba, with her upperclass background, apart from the working class pupils.

The details of Sheba’s life seem comfortable enough; she lives in a large, ornate house with her much older husband (Bill Nighy–who interestingly portrayed a love interest to Dench in Best Exotic Marigold Hotel) and her two children, a teenage daughter (Juno Temple) and a boy with Down syndrome, but none of it makes her happy. In a telling detail, a photograph of Sheba in her youth, dressed in a punk style, is shown in her studio.

Teenage Sheba was a Siouxsie & The Banshees fan

Like her pottery and the art in her shed, this photograph suggests a life unfulfilled, that she imagined a bigger, more bohemian life for herself. This was the time in her life when she felt most free and most herself, before she was married or had children, and it is this sense of fulfillment she tries to reclaim by ultimately entering into a relationship with one of her students.

Her relationship with 15-year-old Steven Connolly is particularly disturbing because actor Andrew Simpson certainly looks this age. At first, he satisfies her idealism, and helping him develop his potential as an artist makes her feel useful in a way she hasn’t felt in a long time. She tells Barbara it was he who began to pursue her, constantly following her and playing on her sympathy with sad stories about his family life. The first time she leaves her family to meet him, lying about where she is going, the camera briefly lingers on her son and husband, showing her last minute hesitation.

In viewing the situation as one where he pursued her and she was helpless in her desire (whether or not Sheba’s story to Barbara is reliable), she allows herself to feel young, desirable and like a teenager again, experiencing clandestine affairs. In this sense, her much older husband is recast as her father, which Connolly thinks he is when he sees him. Sheba’s relationship with her daughter, who is the same age as Connolly, is also changed as they both enter a similar world of teenage dating.

Teenage Steven Connolly pursues Sheba

In the end, it becomes clear Connolly can’t take the burden of this complicated relationship and the knowledge that she has a family and feels he has been used by her. In her efforts to reclaim her own carefree youth, she has been stealing his and forcing him to grow up. In one telling scene, Connolly looks through her records and is unfamiliar with the artists, highlighting their age gap. The wrongness of Sheba’s actions is brought home to her when Connolly, naked post-sex tries on her son’s hat. At the sight of him, she is repulsed and forces him to take it off.

Though both women struggle with loneliness and are unhappy with their lives, the different ways they deal with similar emotions cast them in degrees as predator and prey.

Alone and undervalued, Barbara rapidly develops an obsession with her younger colleague, which makes her feel more vital and connected to the world. She is fascinated with the exotic character that Sheba seems to be, someone so different from her. She is also jealous of Sheba, as in her narration she says that people like her only think they know what real loneliness is. With this in mind, when she discovers Sheba’s affair with Connolly, she uses it to blackmail her into being her friend.

Though society easily defines a woman like Sheba as a predator, and she is punished with a jail sentence at the film’s end, Barbara’s predatory nature is much subtler and hidden. She looks at Sheba’s life noting how around her family, she acts in a serving position, making dinner and tidying the dining room while the others sit and talk, that she alone has had to take care of the children. This allows Barbara to resent Sheba’s family as a burden placed on her that she’d be glad to be rid of.

Several characters mention Barbara’s old friend, Jennifer, who she doesn’t want to talk about, suggesting she has had these obsessives friendships before. They also suggest Barbara’s attraction to Sheba is actually repressed lesbian desire, unfortunately casting this desire as predatory by connecting it with Barbara’s manipulations. In one scene, the camera, showing her point of view, focuses on an extreme close-up of one of Sheba’s golden hairs falling. Like a lover, Barbara holds it delicately, as if it is precious to her and saves it in her diary.

The camera shows Barbara’s point of view as she gazes at Sheba with lust

In addition, during a moment of casual dancing during her first visit to the Harts, Barbara’s eyes scan up Sheba’s body, and her dancing is shown in slight slow motion, accentuating Barbara’s lustful gaze. This gaze challenges the societal view of an older woman as a sexless grandmother and presents her as someone with active sexual desires.

Sheba is also guilty of manipulating Barbara and dismissing her because of her age. Early on, when she first begins to confide in Barbara, she sees her as a good person to talk to because she assumes she does not have her own life or secrets. She assumes a woman like Barbara would be glad just to have a friend, and dismisses any idea that she could have sinister intentions running contrary to the older woman’s assumed place in society as the grandmother. With this assumption, she begins to prey on Barbara’s loneliness, continuing to see Connolly and buying Barbara gifts to silence her. The viewer begins to feel sympathy for Barbara here as her narration reveals that she lives in a fantasy world, believing she has a wonderful relationship with this loving friend who will take care for her in her old age.

Barbara dresses as a doting grandmother to visit the Harts

Similarly, Barbara shows her first genuine smile when she is first invited to Sheba’s family dinner. Because the film follows her through the minute details of getting ready; buying clothes and having her hair done, the invitation is inflated in importance. As the details momentarily consume the film, the preparations seem to become her whole life, revealing how small, unimportant and lonely it is. The insert shot of her in the mirror, nervously touching her hair stresses her concern about looking a certain way and fitting into the role expected of her.

She emerges wearing pearls and carrying flowers, the very picture of a sweet grandmother.

The film takes great care to show Barbara in an unflattering light, making the signs of her age, her thinning hair, neck fat and heavily wrinkled skin, appear (for lack of a better word) pathetic. It also suggests Barbara’s appearance mirrors her cold-hearted nature. This seems a bit hypocritical, as much of the film can be interpreted to suggest that the older woman should not be dismissed as having none of her own desires and secrets. By aligning the film with Barbara’s point of view and then including scenes, like the overhead shot of Barbara smoking in the bath with her sweaty older body on display, it is suggested not only that she is monstrous, but that she sees herself as monstrous.

Barbara’s “monstrous” older body on display in a purposefully unflattering shot
The older unmarried woman is often portrayed in media in a very cliched fashion, as treating her pet like a child, and this point in Barbara’s character is a bit heavy-handed. Her most vulnerable, “pathetic” moments occur around her cat, Portia, and its failing health. The one time she is explicit about her sexual attraction to Sheba, when the camera, showing her point of view, pans down to Sheba’s breasts, is after she finds out Portia is terminal. Angered Sheba doesn’t reciprocate, she reveals that she fully understands Sheba’s state of mind when she delivers the ultimate insult, telling her, “You’re not young.” When Portia is put down, Barbara is bewildered and irrational and tries to force Sheba into being with her. She goes to Sheba’s house and screams at her, attempting to pull her away from her family exactly when she is trying to reconnect with them.

To Barbara, this final betrayal marks the end of their friendship, as she buries not only her cat, but the silver frame Sheba had given her. Having become completely unhinged, Barbara now wants to possess Sheba and become the only thing in her life, as Sheba is in Barbara’s. With this goal, she reveals Sheba’s relationship with Connolly.
The overwhelming solitariness of Barbara’s life is contrasted with Sheba’s warm family evening, through crosscutting between them, counting down the last moments of Sheba’s happiness. When the affair is revealed, Sheba’s house is swarmed by the media, and her family rejects her. With no one else left, she has to call Barbara and rely on her friendship when she has nothing else.

Sheba, in her punk make-up, discovers the journal

Alone in Barbara’s apartment, Sheba tries to convince herself that she is still young and attractive, by applying punk make-up, finally visually becoming the teenage girl she had felt like.
As she sits, considering herself in the mirror, she discovers ripped pages from Barbara’s diary and, furious and scared, she begins to search for it. The film cuts between Barbara innocently shopping for their new life and Sheba discovering her obsessions and manipulations.
In the end, Sheba returns home to talk with her husband and rebuild her family, while Barbara sits with her new notebook, speculating on the life she could have lived with Sheba. Time passes and Barbara meets a new woman and begins her predatory advances all over again.

Barbara makes a new friend and the story begins again

Notes on a Scandal is an interesting film to look at through a lens of age, as it portrays elderly and middle-aged women being driven to manipulate each other and those around them by their fear of growing old and being (or feeling) alone. It is complicated in its depiction of lesbianism, its suggestion that a teenage boy is responsible for seducing his teacher, and its often cliched presentation of an elderly woman as a spinster worthy of pity.

Elizabeth Kiy has a degree in journalism with a minor in film from Carleton University. She lives in Toronto, Ontario and is currently working on a novel.

Older Women Week: Telling Stories: ‘My House in Umbria’

Film poster for My House in Umbria

This is a guest post by Amanda Civitello.

Emily Delahunty is a writer of fiction. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of My House in Umbria, a beautifully atmospheric film by Richard Loncraine starring the inimitable Maggie Smith. Smith shines in a rich role that takes advantage of her great skill. Too often we praise her – as I did for Bitch Flicks here – for her fantastic comic timing and cut-glass wit, forgetting that she is a dramatic actress as well, and worthy of much better parts than those that ask her to do little more than deliver a one-liner. That’s sadly what seems to garner her recognition these days: an impeccable demonstration of acerbic wit in the form of what Smith deems a “spiky old lady.” In a season of melodrama and over-the-top performances on Downton Abbey, for example, there was one standout moment of arresting, extraordinary acting, and it belonged to Maggie Smith, standing alone beneath the stone arches in the aftermath of her Lady Sybil’s death. She looked for all the world as if burdened by innumerable sorrow, and it was an utterly heartbreaking image. My House in Umbria gives Smith the opportunity to exercise her considerable mastery in a part that provides ample moments of similarly reflective silence as well as witty repartee.
In contemporary Italy, a terror attack on a train leaves only four survivors from a carriage of eight. Mrs. Delahunty, of course, is a survivor, as is the General (Ronnie Barker), a young German man (Benno Fürmann), and a little American girl (Emmy Clarke, in a remarkable performance for such a young actress). When the survivors can’t return to their homes until the investigation is complete, Mrs. Delahunty, an English expat, welcomes them to her villa in Umbria. There, they all find healing in each other’s company, the quiet routine of the countryside, and the presence of the little girl orphaned by the tragedy. Aimee arrives at the house rendered mute by the tragedy and the loss of her parents, but through the persistence and attention of Mrs. Delahunty, the others, and the staff – including Timothy Spall in a great turn as Quinty, manager of the estate – she soon finds her voice again, and it is she who inspires healing, forgiveness, and hope in the others. Their insular little community is rocked, however, by the arrival of Aimee’s estranged uncle, who comes to take her back to America, as Aimee’s departure threatens to destroy their tentative peace. 
Maggie Smith as Mrs. Delahunty in My House in Umbria
“We are the stories we tell ourselves,” director Shekhar Kapur asserted in a TED talk about creativity, and that’s true; put differently, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” wrote Joan Didion in 1979. We tell ourselves stories to overcome hardship, to reason ourselves out of the incomprehensible. We dream up explanations and embellishments. We protect ourselves and entertain ourselves, and in the end, there is often little difference between what actually happened and what we say happened. After a while, we come to believe the story, to find it true rather than fictitious, and our perspective is shaped accordingly.

“We survived,” Emily is fond of saying to a number of characters in the film – and while she’s obviously referencing the terror attack when she speaks to her fellow “walking wounded” – it’s apparent from its very first utterance that Emily has survived far more than the explosion in carrozza 219. As her story unfolds, we come to discover that Emily is a survivor of childhood abandonment: she was sold as an infant to a childless couple by her parents who had no place for a child in their circus-act lives. She’s a survivor of sexual abuse and a survivor of a succession of abusive relationships. She traveled extensively with boyfriends pursuing extraordinarily odd jobs. Emily recounts her own troubled history as a kind of story, her memories tinged with a distinctly literary tone, and at times – and like the characters – one questions the veracity of some of her stories, particularly when her version doesn’t exactly mesh with another’s. But does it really matter if they’re true or not? 
The surrealist depiction of the terror attack itself
For Mrs. Delahunty, these kinds of stories seem to come as naturally as breathing: she invents entire lives for the strangers around her – like this writer has done since she started dreaming up stories for the staid nuns teaching her lessons – and relates them with such authority that it’s difficult to retain a critical air about them. We believe the stories Mrs. Delahunty tells because she believes them. Maggie Smith underscores this over and over again. She crinkles her eye, purses her lip, fiddles with her sunglasses or her ever-present glass of grappa in such a way that, even as we believe wholeheartedly in the story Mrs. Delahunty weaves, we can’t help the flicker of incredulity that creeps up. Of course, we do believe her, as the writer intended, but our perception of Mrs. Delahunty is marked by the subtle reminders from Smith to listen with a critical ear.

Because of this, My House in Umbria succeeds primarily on the strength of Smith’s acting. Much of the film consists of an internal narrative, in which we hear through voiceover Smith’s thoughts on the fellow passengers who become her houseguests. She concocts background stories for each of them, a mixture of dreams, astrology, and deductions liberally sprinkled with what she wants their stories to be. She wants to create, for example, a love story between Werner and the young woman accompanying him. When the General takes to Aimee, she decides that it’s down to a bit of guilt about the way he raised his own daughter who perished on the train. These ideas are rooted in her observations, of course, but they aren’t necessarily real. The General might have actually had a very good relationship with his daughter, for example, barring his dislike of her husband, and might not harbor any regrets over her childhood. Of course, he might not, but it doesn’t matter; what matters is that Mrs. Delahunty believes these stories, and we believe them right along with her. It’s to the credit of actors like Timothy Spall, Ronnie Barker, and Chris Cooper that they deliver the kind of quiet, restrained performances that render Mrs. Delahunty’s musings believable. 
Emmy Clarke as Aimee and Maggie Smith as Mrs. Delahunty in My House in Umbria
Her stories ultimately influence the ways in which she interacts with her guests, most notably Mr. Riversmith (Chris Cooper), Aimee’s estranged uncle. Through a bit of eavesdropping and her own tendency to dramatize a situation, Mrs. Delahunty – to her mind – fleshes out Mr. Riversmith’s character, melding bits of reality (he’s a professor who studies the carpenter ant) with logical extensions and explanations, some of which require her to dismiss the observations that don’t quite fit her narrative. (She steadfastly refuses, for example, to leave him alone as his body language would attest, convincing herself that it’s a front.) Mr. Riversmith, however, is the one guest who fights back against her, refusing her repeated offers of a drink – “You could do with a drink,” Mrs. Delahunty asserts time and again, to which Mr. Riversmith replies, in escalating anger, that he drinks little, if at all, and certainly not at 9am – and suggesting she kindly get her nose out of his business. Yet, Mrs. Delahunty persists, and it’s to Smith’s credit that we cheer her on, and see the value in it, even when it becomes uncomfortable to watch.
The film’s climax sees Mrs. Delahunty, sloshed beyond belief on her grappa, stumble into Mr. Riversmith’s bedroom in the middle of the night, clutching a bottle and two glasses, and demanding that he speak to her (and share a drink, of course). She levels all of her conjectures at him – her reasoning about Werner, her thoughts about healing as a group, the defaults she finds in his character, and, above all, her desperate need to keep Aimee in Italy. She is practically paralyzed with fear and sorrow at Aimee’s leaving; her anxiety reveals itself in a surprising way. There’s always been an undercurrent of latent romance on Mrs. Delahunty’s part; here it bubbles to the surface in a scene achingly sad in its desperation. She opens her robe and offers him her breast, and, to her shock, he shields his eyes and turns away. The anger melds with crushing disappointment in Smith’s expression – but at what? At Riversmith’s refusal? (She is a woman, after all, who remarks in the opening scene that men still continue to give her a second appreciative glance.) At Riversmith’s defiance? We aren’t sure, and neither is Mrs. Delahunty. 
The General teaching young Aimee the Cha-Cha
For the real truth of Mrs. Delahunty’s stories has nothing to do with actual events or actual personalities and everything to do with seeing the heart of a person or a situation. She has a knack, through her fictionalizations, to make blatantly, disturbingly, brutally honest observations of the people around her. (She cracks the case before the inspector does; not by research and detective work, as he does, but on the strength of a dream and eagle-eyed observation.) And it’s Mrs. Delahunty, therefore, who manages, in a web of conjecture, to get at the core of Mr. Riversmith’s character: his guilt. “Colpa,” she tells him before he throws her out of his room, her voice wavering in her drunkenness. “It means guilt. We all of us feel colpa about something. Do not, I beg you, let colpa stand in the way of your actions.” He responds with an angry, “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about!”
“I think you do,” Mrs. Delahunty replies. “You feel colpa because you never made peace with your sister. And because of that, you feel obliged to take the child back with you.” He’s never said as much to her, of course – he never mentioned Aimee’s mother apart from a brief acknowledgment that he had never met Aimee because of his falling-out with her mother, his sister. 
The tension between Mrs. Delahunty and Mr. Riversmith comes to a head when she argues with him late at night
And yet she is right: he does feel guilty, and, the following morning, Aimee returns home, welcomed back into Mrs. Delahunty’s arms in a beautifully shot scene. This parallels the shot of Aimee standing at the window as the carriage explodes, the light bright behind her; in this scene we see her lit from behind, away from the window, locked in a loving, maternal embrace. There’s no need to emphasize the Italian, or to couch her words in bumbling poetry. It’s a literary trick, to use a foreign word in place of an English translation, and one we’d expect to find on the page rather than on screen. But in Smith’s hands it transfers marvelously to film, and we’re reminded, once again, that all of this has been made possible because Mrs. Delahunty sees the world as a writer of fiction.

My House in Umbria is in many ways a meditation on fiction and characterization, on the way we writers create characters from those around us, and fictionalize our friends. It is, on a smaller scale, about grief and about survival. What it is not about is justice: there’s nothing more than the sketchiest of explanations for the perpetration of this crime; there is no arrest, and the terrorist ultimately gets away. This is unsurprising, perhaps, as the attack itself is presented in a dream-like, surreal manner, happening in slow motion as if it’s already a memory. In that particular sense, My House in Umbria is not especially satisfying. But as a film that grapples with the concept of forgiveness in the wake of tragedy, My House in Umbria is hugely successful. For Emily, writing and forgiveness (and guilt, yes) are inextricably linked. 
Aimee’s return home, with the sunlight streaming behind her
And yet, through all of this, Emily is a writer with a terrible case of writer’s block. She writes the odd phrase in her notebook, but throughout the film, we never see her write. Her literary career is in the past, her interest in her work having been eclipsed by a steadily increasing dependence on alcohol. The ending is happy not just because Aimee returns home but because Mrs. Delahunty seems to find her own footing again. “She’s happier than she’s ever been,” Quinty remarks to the General, and then, Mrs. Delahunty says it herself, marveling that she feels the inspiration to write returning to her after a long winter. What makes Maggie Smith a great actress, of course, is that she develops incredible depth to her characters. Far too often, an older actress must create that intensity for herself out of a supporting part that’s lacking in complexity or that’s rich in tropes. In My House in Umbria, Maggie Smith delivers an exquisite performance that should drive home to screenwriters the necessity of writing complex roles for older women: Smith takes a well-rounded character and rich scenario and makes them so compelling, so enthralling, so utterly fascinating that one wonders why screenwriters aren’t lining up to craft such parts for her. And, more importantly, why the parts waiting for her are reinventions of the same, tired tropes. 

Amanda Civitello is a Chicago-based freelance writer and Northwestern grad with an interest in arts and literary criticism. She is the editor of Iris, a new literary magazine with an LGBTQ+ focus for YA readers. She has contributed reviews of Rebecca, Sleepy Hollow, and Downton Abbey to Bitch Flicks. You can find her online at amandacivitello.com.

Older Women Week: Charlize Theron: Too Hot to Be Wicked?

Film poster for Snow White and the Huntsman
This is a guest post by Katherine Newstead.

When I first heard that Charlize Theron was going to play The Wicked Queen in Snow White and the Huntsman (Sanders, 2012) I thought this was completely ridiculous; Theron is way too young and, frankly, way too hot. However, that was kind of the point.

Ravenna, aka The Wicked Queen, Theron’s character, bases her whole existence on maintaining her beauty and youth and stands as a symbol for women’s supposed fear of ageing and anxiety toward the ageing female body.

Charlize Theron is the Queen of Wicked Hot
In a scene toward the beginning of Snow White and the Huntsman, during Ravenna’s and the King’s wedding night, she tells of how she has replaced his old (emphasis on the “old”) Queen, and how, in time, she too would have been replaced. Thus, Ravenna speaks of the “natural” cycle of youth replacing age and appears to blame patriarchy for this situation, as men “toss women to the dogs like scraps” once they have finished with them.
“When a woman stays young and beautiful forever, the world is hers.”
Mirror, Mirror … er, not on the wall
Ravenna truly believes that the maintenance of age guarantees success. And why not? How many anti-ageing adverts will be shown on television today, promoting the latest magical cure for the horrors of ageing. Such adverts have been labelled as responsible for cultivating a new trend for female narcissism as a form of liberation and emancipation yet, as Douglas writes, it is not patriarchy that women blame for the flaws and disappointments that they see in themselves, but themselves (1995).

What is the most obvious symbol of narcissism? A mirror, naturally. And who has a mirror? The Wicked Queen; I see a connection forming. Ravenna’s somewhat obsessive relationship with her mirror is what ultimately becomes her downfall, not her relationship with Snow White. It is the mirror that goads her, telling her that she is not the most beautiful woman in the land; that would be Snow White, who never looks in the mirror and therefore isn’t haunted by the need to find, and ultimately destroy, perfection. As Waugh states:

Mirrors offer an illusory image of wholeness and completeness, the promise of the security of possession, but they too are agents of oppression and control, enticing us with their spurious identifications. (1989:12)

See, this is what happens when you don’t moisturise
 
Thus, Ravenna’s narcissism is fuelled by her mirror, which has a male voice (funny, that), and reflects (literally) the views of society, a society that is told time and again that to be successful and like, wanted, you have to appear young and beautiful.

So, oppressed by the chidings of the man in the mirror, Ravenna tries to ensure that she remains the most beautiful woman of all, and God help you if you get in her way. Ravenna literally sucks the life force out of any young woman in her path, perhaps a tad symbolic? You may be young and beautiful, but your anxieties about your rapidly ageing body — *points at Ravenna* — will eventually suck all the goodness out of you. Not to mention the years of hard work you’ll no doubt face, what with menstruating, having babies, getting paid less than anyone with a penis … I digress. 

But, seriously, Ravenna stands like a team mascot for post-feminist discourse on doing it for yourself, looking out for number one, revelling in your new found ability to look hot — at whatever the cost — and mow those bitches down who dare get in your way. Oh, and the whole thing about women becoming invisible once they reach a certain age and being overlooked by a society that sees them no longer economically viable? Yeah, Ravenna is far from invisible, what with all the shouting, killing, turning into a murder (right?) of crows. It’s like she’s saying, “HELLO? I’m still here, I still exist. I can be beautiful (and economically useful to society) toooooooooo!”
Charlize Theron in Snow White and the Huntsman
Yeah, so Charlize Theron as The Wicked (though not so old) Queen? PERFECT casting. Wish I’d thought of it myself.

Bibliography

Douglas, S. (1995) Where the Girls Are: Growing up Feminine with the Mass Media, Times Books: United States.

Waugh, P. (1989) Feminine Fictions: Revisiting the Postmodern, Routledge: London.

Katherine Newstead is a 27 year-old Film Studies postgraduate, from the University of Exeter. After completing her Masters dissertation on the representation of girlhood in the Disney fairy tale, she has returned to the University of Exeter to write her PhD thesis on the “Othering” of older women in the contemporary cinematic fairy tale.

Older Women Week: ‘The First Wives Club’: "Don’t Get Mad. Get Everything."

Film poster for The First Wives Club
This is a guest post by Jen Thorpe.

The First Wives Club is the story of four women who became friends with each other when they were in college. After graduation, the friends ended up drifting apart. This is a situation that happens to a lot of women. Life gets in the way.

People get married, have children, and (hopefully) find “real jobs.” It becomes increasingly difficult to find the time (or the energy) to socialize with friends who are no longer a part of our day-to-day lives. When you are in your 20s, you truly believe that you will be best friends forever. You intend to stay connected. Years later, you wonder whatever happened to those friends (whom you haven’t heard from in years).

In the movie, three of the friends reunite after learning that the fourth friend, Cynthia Swann Griffin (played by Stockard Channing) died by suicide after her husband divorced her. The surviving friends are now in their mid-forties. Each one is either divorced or is going through the process of divorce.

The movie does a good job of picking up on some of the thoughts that women who are 40 or over struggle with. Elise Elliot (played by Goldie Hawn) is overly concerned about aging. There is a scene where she begs her plastic surgeon to make her lips fuller (again). He resists, reminding her of all the plastic surgery she has already undergone and pointing out that she is beautiful.

Elise looking for wrinkles at the plastic surgeon’s office
Not every woman over 40 is going to turn to plastic surgery as a “fountain of youth.” Elise chose it because she is an actress who is having difficulty finding work. Suddenly (or so it seems to Elise) she is only being offered the role of “the mother.” For her, aging essentially means that she will no longer have a career. Elise is the perfect example of what really does happen to actresses once they turn 40.

She is a more extreme example of what many women (who are not actresses) feel when their hair starts turning gray and they begin to get “crow’s feet.” The fear is that these very natural parts of aging mean that the woman is no longer desirable, or sexy, or beautiful. There are women who are absolutely terrified of “getting old” because they worry that no one will want them.

Unfortunately, this fear is not an unfounded one. Elise’s husband, Bill Atchison (played by Victor Garber) is divorcing her and has started dating a woman who is much younger than than Elise. Tension builds when Elise is asked to play the role of “the mother” in a script where Bill’s new lover will play the lead role of the daughter.

A similar thing happened to Brenda Cushman (played by Bette Midler). She got married to Morton “Morty” Cushman when they were young, ran the cash register in his electronics stores, and had a son with him. Now, Brenda is 45 and Morty has left her and gotten into a serious relationship with Shelly Stewart (played by Sarah Jessica Parker). Brenda and Morty’s fifteen-year-old son has trouble coping with this situation.

Brenda laments to her friends that everything with she and Morty was just fine. Then, on their 20th wedding anniversary, Morty began having what Brenda calls a mid-life crisis. In short, he decides that she isn’t fun anymore and is holding him back. He replaces her with a thinner, younger, blond woman who is about half her age.

“Who’s supposed to wear that? Some anorexic teenager?”
There is a scene where Brenda is walking past a department store with a friend. She stops to look at a tiny black dress in the window. “Who’s supposed to wear that?” she rhetorically asks her friend, “Some anorexic teenager? Some fetus?” Her rant continues with her intent to lead a protest by never buying any more clothing until the designers “come to their senses.”
Her words are something I can personally relate to. I recently turned 40, and I am no longer the “anorexic teenager” that I was in high school. I’ve gained some weight since then. This is normal. We get older, our metabolisms slow down, and weight loss becomes more difficult. I, too, wonder when the designers will “come to their senses” and produce clothing that adult, women can actually fit into!

Annie Paradis (played by Diane Keaton) has a slightly different story. She isn’t actually divorced yet. She and her husband Aaron Paradis (played by Stephen Collins) are separated. They had been going to couple’s therapy but now are each seeing a therapist individually. Annie truly believes that they are in the process of working things out and getting back together.

Her daughter, Chris Paradis (played by Jennifer Dundas) describes her mother as a “doormat.” Chris is a college student and old enough to see that her father isn’t treating her mother very well. She is frustrated that her mom allows it. Unlike Brenda’s son, Chris doesn’t want her parents to get back together.

There is a scene where Annie is going on (what she believes) is a date with Aaron. She is convinced that he is going to tell her that he wants to get back together. Instead, after they have become intimate in his hotel room, he announces that he wants a divorce. This completely destroys Annie.

She is a woman who, like many women, has issues with self-esteem. After a lifetime of suppressing her anger, and striving to always be “nice,” Annie finally lets out her feelings in a loud, sobbing, messy way. At the same time, the phrase she uses most often during this catharsis is “I’m sorry.”

Annie screaming “I’m sorry!!!”
Annie, Brenda, and Elise form the “First Wives Club” and decide that they want to find a way to take revenge upon their husbands. The main plot of the movie focuses on the many ways the women do exactly that. Their ex-husbands find themselves losing favorite possessions, losing money, and (potentially) losing their jobs. Women who are going through a divorce may want to watch this movie simply to live vicariously through it. What happens is overblown and unlikely to happen in the real lives of most women.

Later, the women start to want more than revenge. They decide to turn their efforts toward helping other divorced women. Again, this requires their ex-husbands, whom they have now managed to blackmail, to spend more money. To me, this part of the plot felt a bit forced and strange. The change from “let’s get ’em” to “let’s open a charity” was rather abrupt.

The First Wives Club was released in 1996, a time when almost no one carried a cell phone. As such, the majority of phone calls that take place in the movie are done on land-line phones with clunky receivers. There is a scene where Brenda goes out to dinner by herself. She doesn’t spend the meal fiddling with her cell phone – and neither do any of the other people in the restaurant. Times have changed since the late 1990’s (and realizing this makes me feel “old”).

Jen Thorpe is a freelance writer, podcaster, and gamer. She is the cofounder of the No Market website (nomarket.org) and writes for it frequently on a wide variety of topics and subjects. You can keep up with everything she does by following her @queenofhaiku.

Older Women Week: Aging and Existential Crisis in ‘3rd Rock from the Sun’

Poster for 3rd Rock from the Sun

This is a guest post by Jenny Lapekas.

3rd Rock from the Sun follows the story of four aliens sent to earth in human form to study the ways of humans. Their mission was originally supposed to last only one day, but the High Commander, Dick Solomon (the delightful John Lithgow) extends it to six hilarious seasons filled with the flamboyant comedy and intelligent, pithy dialogue we rarely see or expect anymore in the American sitcom. What the crew doesn’t anticipate are both the joys and inconveniences of their human bodies: emotions, sexuality and relationships. Dick immediately falls for his office mate at Pendleton University, Dr. Mary Albright (Jane Curtin), who finds him pompous, arrogant and strange beyond belief. Although Dick mocks Mary’s thesis, wrecks her car and even breaks up with her to date the university’s new English professor, Mary comes to love Dick and can never keep away from him for too long. Harry (French Stewart), the “Transmitter,” is the clueless brother, Sally (Kristen Johnston), “Security Officer,” is the seductive but unrefined sister, and Tommy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), “Information Officer,” is the eldest of the crew, but confined to an adolescent earth body. Throughout the series’ run, Jane Curtin was in her 50s, and the show’s treatment of her age reflects this.
Upon their arrival, the aliens count their fingers and toes in their Rambler.
Mary is a powerful presence in the series; she’s an attractive, articulate college professor with a Ph.D. and the heart of Dick Solomon, the High Commander in his wacky group of interplanetary adventurers. While Harry is undoubtedly a queer figure in his role as the buffoon within the somehow functional family unit, and Nina, Mary’s assistant, arguably remains stuck in her typecast role as the “sassy, black woman,” Mary’s position as an older woman propels her through the series as ironically naive, desperate for acceptance from a band of outsiders, and hopelessly in love with Dick. Although Mary is initially disliked by Dick’s family, Sally, Harry and Tommy warm up to her after she proves that her earnest sensibilities compliment Dick’s rashness, exuberance and incessant need for the spotlight. While Dick’s antics are endearing, certainly, Mary’s drive for stability is an unmistakable dynamic in the pair’s relationship, especially while in the company of Dick’s family.

Mary goes camping with the group, and Sally reluctantly bonds with Mary when, applying ointment to a blister on Sally’s foot, Mary shows her a scar on her chin, the result of a field hockey scuffle with a girl when she was younger. Mary claims, “I dropped my stick and opened her up like a melon,” and an impressed Sally responds, “Albright, you’re pretty tough…for a prissy little bookworm.” As the Security Officer of the mission, Sally relates to Mary through the theme of violence. This pleasant moment appears as the result of Mary’s wisdom and life experiences, which are, in this case, unexpected since Mary is, after all, only a “bookworm” in the eyes of Dick’s family. Because Sally is young and beautiful, and she arrives to earth gendered as a male who is bitter about his anatomy and not romantically attracted to men initially, she enters the scene with male privilege and feels entitled to dismiss Mary as a mere distraction for Dick, who should be focusing on the mission; however, we come to find out that Mary is the mission. Because Sally stands out as an obvious feminist character–an Amazonian warrior–it’s relatively easy for viewers to pass over Mary as the middle-aged, level-headed academic in favor of the Solomons’ shenanigans. While Sally is conflicted about being “the woman” once they land, Mary has already spent many years as an earth woman, which means that her past indiscretions are unearthed.

Throughout the show’s run, Mary is the object of ridicule by Dick’s family for her age and her alleged lascivious past. Her mother even tells Dick that she had to crush birth control pills and sneak them in Mary’s cereal every morning because Mary was so promiscuous as a teenager. However, Mary quickly becomes the unofficial matriarch of the Solomon posse as Sally is much too militant and oblivious to the ways of earth to practice responsibility and forethought, aside from cooking and cleaning for her family–her “duties” as a woman. Sally can certainly act the part, but it’s always fleeting and disingenuous. Not quite as stubborn as Dick and not nearly as clueless as Harry, Sally’s downfall is her conflicted approach to womanhood, which actually serves to reframe the face of femininity and its gendered expectations on the show; Sally intermittently embraces and rejects the roles she’s expected to take on as “the woman” of the mission while Mary welcomes all facets of womanhood, including her sexual exploits. 
Although Mary is immediately drawn to Dick’s zany genius, she finds him an obnoxious office mate.
When Dick convinces Sally to lose her virginity in season two, he explains, “Dr. Albright dove right in, and it was her first time.” At this, a nearby Tommy bursts out in incredulous laughter; the implication is not only that Mary has had many suitors in her lifetime, but that she’s apparently been on earth a very long time. Later, Mary tells Dick, “When I was a young professor on the fast track, there were things that I did.” When Dick asks what those things were, Mary admits, “The Dean.” While Mary seems mildly regretful, she readily offers this information, and Dick refrains from judging her. Mary, then, serves to guide Sally’s path as a woman while on this planet. Mary assures the long-legged alien that being a virgin is a personal choice that is no one’s business but her own. Because sexuality and old age seem contradictory to the aliens, it seems comically unnatural to Dick’s family that Mary is or was ever the object of sexual arousal.

Because Mary is teased for her old age, especially since she’s no longer viewed as the sexual being she was once known as, it’s at the forefront of particular episodes. In season three, Dick hounds a photographer who once took “tasteful, artistic” nude photos of Mary when she was younger, and he comes to terms with them only after he begins shredding them. He discovers that the shots are beautiful and capture how beautiful Mary was, but he also realizes that she’s still sexually appealing because he loves her; he tells her that she has aged “like a fine wine.” What’s striking about this resolution is that Dick must see the photographs to behold and master this young image of his lover in order to feel secure in his position as her boyfriend. When Mary sees the photos, she comments that she was a “hottie.”

Ironically, Mary’s love for wine renders her immune to the poison placed in her drink by alien-hunters.
While Mary’s love for indulging in all of life’s pleasures is a recurring source of amusement on the show, Mary never denies that she enjoys sex and booze. She even gets drunk with Dick while playing a board game and admits to sleeping with Dick’s nemesis, Dr. Strudwick, a conversation the anthropology professor can’t even recall the following morning. Despite her earth antics, mild by comparison, Mary is the unequivocal voice of reason in a show that features the traditional formula of three kooky men and the woman who spends her time proving that she’s as worthy as they are, despite her status as an empowered woman. Mary is our surrogate in an environment that has little to no handling on the Solomons. We then need Mary in order to navigate our way through the misinformed and sometimes deranged misadventures of the crew.
Mary is the only earthling who finds out that the Solomons are aliens, and Dick even points out their home planet for her.
When the teenage Tommy decides that he’s fed up with high school girls, he begins to pursue Mary, and even requests that she call him the more sophisticated “Tom.” Tommy spends time with Mary because he values her knowledge and wisdom as an older woman, but he eventually caves to Dick’s demands that he back off the woman Dick is “not in love with.” In this case, we see a reversal and a challenging of what we know to be the standard fantasy of most men: to be with young girls. However, Tommy is the crew’s Information Officer, and he seeks earth women who can offer just that: knowledge and maturity. Tommy is a feminist character in his conscious decision to reject vacant, naive beauty in favor of substance. Because Tommy is indeed the oldest alien, he recognizes the value in dating Mary, even if she doesn’t realize the two are dating. In this way, Mary is prized as an older woman rather than demeaned as one.
Tommy and Dick stand off outside Mary’s front door.  Tommy says, “For the first time on this planet, I’ve met a woman who appreciates me for what I think.”
Without the balanced mix of Mary’s centered cool and her willingness to participate in the farcical plots of 3rd Rock, we have no anchor securing our spot somewhere between the logical and the absurd. Mary acts as a catalyst for progress and learning within the aliens’ lives, particularly that of Dick, who is irrevocably enlightened by knowing her. It’s because of Mary’s endless array of neuroses–abandonment issues, childhood obesity, dysfunctional family relationships–and codependent relationship with Dick that we come to adore the aliens and also recognize that we may be the aliens instead. Jane Curtin also refuses to be overshadowed by the eccentric comedic presence of John Lithgow, which is no small feat. 
When their mission is canceled, Dick tells Mary that she’ll remember him as “a feeling.”
Although Dick is an alien, and therefore a genius and a master of physics, Mary gives Dick a lesson in feelings during the group’s mission, a subject that was thoroughly foreign to him. The High Commander’s decision to extend the mission is a direct result of Mary’s ability to incite human emotion in an otherwise clinical, dismissive Dick–to teach him how to be human. In other words, we can thank Mary Albright for six seasons of intergalactic comedy gold from writers Bonnie and Terry Turner. Shortly after arriving, Dick tells Mary, “I want very much to feel, and I want even more to be felt, and I mean that from the heart of my bottom.”

Jenny Lapekas has a Master of Arts degree in English, and she teaches Composition at Alvernia University in Pennsylvania. Her areas of scholarship include women’s literature, menstrual literacy, and rape-revenge cinema.

Call for Writers: Older Women in Film and TV

Call for Writers: Older Women in Film and TV

“Once women passed childbearing age they could only be seen as 
grotesque on some level.” 
– Meryl Streep

As female actresses age, their roles–in film and television–seem to rapidly diminish. In a 2012 interview with Vogue, Meryl Streep said that when she turned 40 in 1989, “I remember turning to my husband and saying, ‘Well, what should we do? Because it’s over.’” The magazine points out that, “The following year, she received three offers to play witches in different movies.” She has gone on to star in many multifaceted roles, but her observation of ageism in Hollywood–against women specifically–is on point.

In a recent interview, Melanie Griffith described the same frustrations: “It is what I never thought would happen when I was in my 20s and 30s, hearing actresses b—- about not getting any work when they turned 50. Now I understand it, it is just different. It is all about youth and beauty, for women anyway…”

While some publications point out that the “over-40 actress” is seeing fame and fortune in today’s Hollywood, others depressingly point out that this might have something to do with an advance in “anti-ageing techniques” (while citing Tina Fey’s assertion in Bossypants that men cast who they find “fuckable”). Not surprisingly, a majority of women between 50-75 have reported being unsatisfied with the representation of their age bracket (and especially their sexual desires) on film. Older mother/daughter duos on screen are often just a few years apart in real life.

Bitch Flicks‘s Robin Hitchcock looked at statistics from the Oscars over the years, and found that female actresses win more awards when they are young, and male actors win more awards as they age. It’s all too clear not only what Hollywood values, but also what we’ve been conditioned to expect. Statistically, male protagonists may get older, but their love interests do not.

This month at Bitch Flicks, our theme week will explore “Older Women in Film and TV,” and we are excited to open up the floor to analysis of films and television shows that get older women right, and those that get older women wrong. We look for analysis of the film or show as a text, but also for specific character studies, in addition to general commentary.

Below is just a sampling of films and television shows that highlight older women:

Amour
Harold and Maude
Away From Her
Golden Girls
The Joy Luck Club
Refuge
Damages
Over the Hill Band
Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work
Made in Dagenham
Calendar Girls
Shirley Valentine
Another Happy Day
The Stone Angel
Hot in Cleveland
RED
RED 2
The Iron Lady
The Turning Point
Something’s Gotta Give

First Wives Club
Being Julia
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
Bread and Tulips
Absolutely Fabulous
All About Eve
The Hot Flashes
Under the Tuscan Sun
Two For The Road
Young at Heart 
Death Becomes Her
Fried Green Tomatoes
Hope Springs
Lovely, Still
Mrs. Henderson Presents

Here are some basic guidelines for guest writers:
–Pieces should be between 700 and 2,000 words.
–Include images (with captions) and links in your piece, along with a title for your article.
–Send your piece in the text of an email, attaching all images, no later than Friday, September 20.
–Include a 2-3 sentence bio for placement at the end of your piece.

Email us at btchflcks(at)gmail(dot)com if you’d like to contribute a review. We accept original pieces or cross-posts. You may either send us a query and a writing sample or a completed piece for consideration.
We look forward to reading your submissions!