So, here I am at the gym watching television again and catwoman, who is portrayed by a young Halle Berry is beating the crap out of the older villain who is played by Sharon Stone. I watch the entire finale in which Sharon Stone, whose nefarious plan is to unleash a toxic compound upon the sagging, wrinkled faces of sad older women who can't stand the thought of losing their sex appeal, finally falls to her grisly death: the skin on her cheeks cracking to reveal the aged person that she was all along underneath her artificial marble-like skin.
"There it is again!" I think to myself as I pin the example on the schema I've constructed specifically for my casual and biased research into this phenomenon that I like to call "Snow White Syndrome": the blatant loathing, continuous thrashing and/or outright obliteration of the older woman in Hollywood movies. Though I realize that this is not the only lie that Hollywood tells, it is one that I find isn't often discussed. While the young female is busy kicking ass in order to perpetuate the myth that violence is strength, the older female is either being brutalized, extinguished, or she is simply unpalatable: weak, desperate, hideous, jealous or sad.
For example, while practical, clever, gorgeous, warrior teen Katniss is whipping out her bow and arrow in the Hunger Games, her mother is so emotionally unstable that she is unable to be a parent and her older female escort is a frivolous phony who apparently bathes herself in cover-up. To pull an example from an entirely different generation, Working Girl shows a young, smart, unthreatening female breaking the glass ceiling, but only in the context of replacing her older counterpart who is envious, bitter and cruel. It is also important to note that in each of these movies, the older male is portrayed as kindly, paternal, and in even in cohoots with the younger woman to participate in the scintillating marginalization.
In any event, I guess it wouldn't bother me quite so much if the contagion remained quarantined in the movies. I see the war on the older woman in real life and you know where I see the missles coming from the most? Women. Women who say they don't like women. Women who turn their beautiful faces into expressionless masks because there is so much pressure to worship youth. Older women who engage in persistent self-loathing and repeat disparaging myths about themselves such as "men grow old gracefully and women just grow old". Young women who say they don't care if they turn their skin to leather in a tanning booth because "nobody will want me when I'm older anyway." Never mind the cancer.
It's as though women are telling themselves these things in order to buffer the inevitable blow from their bleak futures as hopeless, lonely Mrs. Robinsons. However, it appears to me that it is less like "being realistic" and more like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The conclusion? In Hollywood, it's still a man's world. Women are allowed to be strong as long as we are elevating male values of aggression or entertaining male fantasies for sex and nurturing. We can run around in tight leather jumpsuits with guns strapped to our luscious young bodies and we are allowed to be mothers and grandmothers. If we are older, we are allowed to display our power only if it is fueled by a deep jealousy of the younger woman that is replacing us and is eventually destroyed only to reveal the pathetic, weak person who is buried inside. What we are not allowed to be are older women with sex drives and feelings of self-actualization, real confidence and fulfillment.
"Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's more attractive, happier and healthier than ever? Who's feeling like she finally owns herself, finally knows herself, finally kind of likes herself? Who's finding beauty and delight in the complexity of the mind and doesn't really give a rat's ass about the complexion of the skin? Who wouldn't go back to being twenty again unless she were paid enough money to spend her life walking the planet and saving elephants?"
Me, at forty-five. Fuck you, Hollywood.
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