Monday, April 22, 2013
THAT'S WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THESE HIGH SCHOOL GIRLS, MAN. I GET OLDER, THEY STAY THE SAME AGE: It hardly counts as "news," but it's nice to see in graph form just how consistently Hollywood Leading Men Not Named "Tom Hanks" keep getting cast with much younger love interests, no matter how much the men age.
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Unless I miscounted, there are only three instances on all the graphs in which the female love interest's age is listed as 50 or higher. Susan Sarandon (58) in "Shall We Dance," Julianne Moore (50) in "Crazy Stupid Love", and Catherine Keener (54) in "Captain Phillips."
ReplyDeleteThat ageism hurts women more than men in Hollywood is not a new story, add this data to the heap that proves it.
I also don't understand why we are so accepting of these age differences... in real life a 20 years difference raises eyebrows, at the least.
ReplyDeleteI don't think we are. I comment on it every time I see it in a movie, but it rarely moves beyond whisper-in-a-theater stage.
ReplyDeleteI think it is influenced by the fact that very often the actors are not playing their age. And in film and tv for women that often means some woman is playing a few years (or more) older than her actual age--on stage entirely different rules apply as you can play both way older and younger much more easily. Which then makes it a little harder to realize is this a real or imagined 30 year age gap. Like is Actor X playing 35 while actually 43 while Actress Y is playing 30 while actually 23. Because then the character age gap is fine while the actual human age gap is ooky.
ReplyDeleteThis may be a chicken-and-egg thing, but I think these on-screen dynamics mimic the reality at a certain level of Hollywood power, where (it seems) all of the graying men have much younger wives or partners. Whether it's a reflection of their milieu or wish fulfillment (or I'm just full of shit), I don't know, but my guess is that it doesn't seem all that weird to the mostly men who green-light things or get things green-lit. Of course, the explanation they'd give is based on arguments about the bottom line, but there may be some confirmation bias in there.
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