Judi Dench is old — 72 — and Helen Mirren, 61, is not exactly in her first
flush. Diane Keaton is knocking on a bit, also 61, and Julie Christie, 65,
is no spring chicken. Mick Jagger is famous for, among other things, being
63, and Bob Dylan, at 65, is well qualified to sing, as he does, about
impending oblivion. If you like these people, admire them, identify with
them, then you’re probably old, too.
You will find this hard to accept, if you, like them, are a baby-boomer, a
unit in the population bulge that followed the second world war.
Baby-boomers are the most privileged demographic cohort in history, and the
deluge of material rewards they enjoyed convinced them, sometime in the
1970s, that they could do something about death — even that it might be
optional. From Jane Fonda workout videos to Nivea DNAge, and now the film
Wild Hogs, in which suburban boomers take to the highway on motorbikes, the
boomers have sought the fountain of youth with increasingly desperate
enthusiasm.
Their primary tactic, however, was not exercise, face cream or leather gear.
It was denial. As the boomers aged and took over the commanding heights of
the arts and media, they became ever more obsessed with youth. In spite of
the fact that the boomer bulge meant the population as a whole was ageing,
they persisted in pretending their entire target market/audience was aged
between 18 and 35, and — wishful thinking this — rabidly sexually active. It
was this demographic delusion that, presumably, persuaded the BBC that Moira
Stuart, 55, was too old to read the news.
Now, this elaborate ritual of denial has been passed on to the next
generation. Marketers have now defined a new age sector as “middle youth”.
“It’s essentially a name for the age demographic of 30-45, which is refusing
to conform to the traditional ‘middle-aged stereotype’,” says Zoe Lazarus,
of the marketing consultancy Lowe Worldwide. “The traditional ‘view from the
kitchen window’ approach to marketing to women in this age group is becoming
less appropriate to a generation that still wants to be seen as energetic,
youthful, stylish and sexy.”
So, denial is just a river in Egypt after all. But, in fact, straws in the
wind suggest things might be changing. The boomers might be about to do what
they have never done before — face facts. Dench, Mirren and Keaton, for
example, are boomer heroines who have all defiantly asserted their age. In
particular, in the 2003 film Something’s Gotta Give, Keaton diverted Jack
Nicholson (70 next Sunday) from an obsession with young women, and in The
Queen, Mirren played old age as a very special kind of triumph. Indeed, in
doing so, she turned the real Queen (81 next Saturday) into a kind of boomer
icon, an image of real, as opposed to merely cosmetic, survival. Presumably
inspired by this, Alan Bennett, 72, has written a story entitled The
Uncommon Reader, in which the Queen suddenly becomes an intensive and
highbrow reader. It’s an odd conceit but, plainly, it is intended to redeem
the condition of being old.
And now, Christie has returned to join these ranks of elderly heroines. In
Sarah Polley’s film Away from Her, she plays a woman succumbing to
Alzheimer’s. The particularly harrowing point here is that, physically,
Christie looks superb. But it counts for nothing as her self dissolves into
nothingness. Jane Fonda workouts won’t stop that. In addition, though Jagger
and most rockers persist in acting like teenagers, Dylan on his three most
recent albums has sung about ageing and death. His voice, which sounded old
when he was 20, now sounds positively decrepit, though all the more
magnificent. As Kazuo Ishiguro, 52, has observed, Dylan has once more gone
on ahead, this time to romanticise old age. But, crucially, he has not done
so by pretending it’s no different from youth. On the contrary, age is
primarily defined as proximity to death. “It’s not dark yet,” he sings, “but
it’s getting there.”
This highlights the central problem with facing the facts of ageing. As Dylan
sings and Christie’s character shows, you can prance, dance and have as much
sex as you like, but you’re still closer to death. This is more than just a
statement of the obvious: it is a scientifically exact description of your
predicament. For a long time, scientists had a problem with defining ageing
— it happened at different rates in different people and manifested itself
through different symptoms — but they finally arrived at a simple,
statistical statement. Ageing is the increasing probability of death. Every
eight years, you are twice as likely to die. There is no gainsaying this or
exercising your way out of it. It is how life-assurance companies make money.
For some — notably advertisers — this makes acceptance impossible and drives
them to ever more refined forms of denial. “Middle youth” is straight
denial, but when that becomes impossible, there is the phoney celebration of
age. Both Fonda and Keaton now appear in L’Oréal ads, but their role is to
insist that you can look young in old age, rather than simply good at any
age. L’Oréal’s cretinous slogan — “Because you’re worth it” — has never
seemed so poignantly challenging, demanding the wry follow-up, “Why, when
I’m almost dead?”
This is the dirty little thought that haunts the still youth-centred culture.
It was brilliantly parodied by Chris Morris. In a spoof news broadcast about
a bomb in Oxford Street, he dismissed the victims with the words, “Being
old, they would have been dead soon anyway.” And, in countless television
shows, the old are portrayed as the one group about whom it is possible to
be relentlessly and personally cruel. Proximity to death means you and your
feelings matter less.
The — in marketing terms — gigantically successful response to this has been
the promotion of Dove products, first in the form of the Campaign for Real
Beauty and, latterly, as being not antiage (the usual descriptive formula
for utterly ineffective cosmetics), but “pro-age”. Discussed in editorials
and on The Oprah Winfrey (53) Show, this has succeeded in highlighting the
whole proximity-to-death issue.
In its pro-age form, the campaign, by Annie Leibovitz, 57, involves shots of
naked old people. This proved too much for the Federal Communications
Commission in the USA, which banned the television version of the ads,
ostensibly on the grounds that they breached the FCC’s “implied nudity”
regulation. However, Susie Orbach, visiting professor of sociology at the
London School of Economics, insists it was because they couldn’t stand the
idea of elderly nudity.
Orbach was one of the academics commissioned by Dove to provide a respectable
basis for the campaign. Their report, Beauty Comes of Age, said that women
over 50 wanted a change of view on women and ageing, that the media must
cease its misrepresentations, and that they “want to be specially considered
when health and beauty manufacturers are creating products for women”.
“The central issue for older women,” Orbach tells me, “is invisibility.” The
intensive sexualisation of society by the media — particularly the use of
the young female body — means that identity itself has become dependent on
physical attractiveness. Just as the self afflicted by Alzheimer’s
dissolves, so the ageing self dissolves as its body loses the ability to
attract the attention of the young. Men can get away with distinguished,
says Orbach, but women are forced to be too heavily dependent on mere youth.
Of course, Dove itself is no different from hundreds of other products. All
that is different are the values Unilever has chosen to attach. “In a
product category where there is little differentiation between individual
brands,” says Lazarus, “it is clever of Dove to recognise that aligning
yourself with a shared attitude of specific cause is a great way to build
loyalty and, of course, generate column inches.” The campaign,
promoted on giant billboards in big cities, is said to have added $1.2
billion to the value of the brand. But has it added anything to the value of
age?
Almost certainly not. Advertising and marketing continue to be dominated
either by middle-youthers who think they are still young or by baby-boomers
who think they invented and own youth culture. Charles Saatchi, 63, will
still race around Hoxton looking for young talent, women will still get
Botoxed, and men will continue to apply Grecian 2000. About $13 billion
worth of antiageing cosmetics are sold annually. Even Robert Mondavi, the
winemaker, has joined in, with Davi’s Le Grand Cru Face Cream, $175 for 2oz.
It’s full of grape-seed extract, apparently. People may pay lip service to
the dignity of looking their age, but, when the chips are down, youth is the
only game in town.
Yet the arts may — should — go some way to changing this. The London and New
York gallery owner Bernard Jacobson specialises in older, living masters.
“They are more patient and humble, also less desperate somehow. I suppose
they’ve seen it all before,” he says. This kind of insight hints at the
possibility that, even if boomers have trouble accepting death, they can at
least embrace some form of maturity. For me, 55, two phenomena suggest this
may be possible. The first is Stephen Frears’s film The Queen. This is
partly because of the power of the Queen herself as an emblem of survival
against all the odds — the misbehaviour of her boomer children included —
and partly because of the way Mirren, always a highly sexual actor, so
decisively took the role far beyond mere impersonation and into a realm
where it was possible to see old age as distinctively meaningful.
The second is Dylan’s renaissance as the supreme contemporary artist of old
age. His new songs accept that proximity to death is a terrible, intractable
predicament, but they deliver wisdom from within that predicament, not by
concealing or denying it. Both Mirren and Dylan are supreme boomer heroes.
They lived the life and are now romanticising old age as something utterly
distinctive, and, as far as the boomers are concerned, new.
Life expectancy at birth in Britain is now 77 for men and 81 for women. For
the boomers, it’s not dark yet, but they’re getting there. With luck,
wisdom, though a long time coming, will get there first.
Bob Dylan’s tour is at Wembley Arena tonight and tomorrow; Away from Her
opens on April 27; Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader is published on
September 6 (Faber and Profile £12.99) www.bryanappleyard.com
