In Our Prime

by Patricia Cohen

  “The old fragmentation was based on realities, but this new segmentation springs wholly from the imagination of the marketer,” Tedlow argues. “There was no such thing as the Pepsi Generation until Pepsi created it.” Manufacturers and advertisers were attempting to “create group identities where before there had been nothing more than elementary feelings and survey answers.”

  Since the sixties, corporations and political parties have increasingly used survey techniques to break the public into finely graded segments and cluster them in novel formulations. But while some of these consumer-oriented surveyors revealed affinities that people were unaware of, many others created group identities where none previously existed. In recent years, marketers and consultants have created categories like early adapters, techies, metrosexuals, soccer moms, cougars, angry white men, and Sam’s Club voters—some of them based on perceived similarities that seem critically important one moment and dissipate the next.

  Throughout the late sixties and seventies, the cult of youth dominated the country and the airwaves, nudged along by Nielsen’s attention to a younger demographic. The feminist movement inspired a couple of popular exceptions, like the TV character Maude, an outspoken, Mack truck of a middle-aged protagonist. But advertisers continued to dismiss viewers in their middle years. “I went to Hollywood in 1979 and asked television executives if they were bringing out anything for older audiences,” Landon Y. Jones, the author of the 1980 book Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation, recalled. “They looked at me like I was from Mars.”

  In the mid-1980s, baby boomers moved into middle age and positions of power in broadcasting just as cable was restructuring broadcast television. By 1990, viewers were abandoning the networks in droves. The prime-time cable audience had increased thirty-five percent, while the networks’ had shrunk by twenty-five percent. The trend continued through the end of the century.

  The obsession with age had created a double bind. “The worse TV nets perform at getting large audiences, the more they emphasize segments, and the more they emphasize audience segments, the more they lose audience,” John Polich, a professor of communications at Fordham University, observed. In surveys, the vast majority of respondents over 40 complained that they had a hard time finding television shows that reflected their lives.

  As cable stations proliferated, many sought to target a niche of viewers. This both fragmented the culture and reinforced the notion that each age group has its own distinct interests, stories, and styles. MTV and Nickelodeon sought to siphon off younger audiences and children; ESPN went after sports fans. The WB network, launched in 1995, was created in response to ad buyers’ continuing hunger for youthful programming (it was later swept up by the newly constituted CW network). The Super Bowl may be the only regularly scheduled program left that can count on drawing in large numbers from every generation.

  Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, advertisers and ad buyers continued to crown the younger consumer as king. “If you were 50, you were dead,” said Matt Thornhill, the founder of the marketing firm the Boomer Project. “You just didn’t exist. We could care less about you. If we cared about you at all, you were part of this group called seniors, and we wanted to sell you Geritol and Depends.”

  The preference showed up in ad prices. In 1997, thirty seconds of ad time on Fox’s The Simpsons (thirty-second in the ratings) commanded $168,100, while Walker, Texas Ranger (in thirty-fourth place but with an older audience) cost $85,400. For Melrose Place, a show popular with teenagers, Fox got $17.28 for every thousand viewers who watched compared with $5.10 that CBS received for the same number of middle-agers who tuned in to Touched by an Angel.

  The head of sales for Fox at the time described older viewers as “common currency, copper as opposed to gold,” adding, “Who do you think are the early adapters? They set the style and determined what was trendy.”

  The predilection for youth has persisted despite demographic shifts that bulked up the middle-aged public. In 1993–94 the median age of prime-time viewers topped 40; in 1997, it inched past 42; in 2010, it passed 51. During the past two decades the television audience has aged twice as fast as the general population. Television is the favored medium of middle age, but it has been a case of unrequited love.

  A&E’s Raven thinks the 20-somethings who buy ad space further denigrate the value of middle-aged viewers. “When you go to an ad agency, the people who are making the decisions are my son’s age,” said Raven. “It’s hard to make the case to advertisers that baby boomers are an important demographic.” No one knows that better than David Poltrack, who came to CBS more than four decades ago, and since 1994 has been vice president of research and planning. CBS’s audience is typically a few years older than its competitors, and for more than twenty-five years, Poltrack has consistently argued that the 18-to-49-year-old slice of the audience is not the nirvana that most advertisers and television executives assume. He says that all the truisms about middle-aged viewers—that they spend less, avoid switching brands, and formed their lifelong habits at the dawn of time—are exaggerated, if not altogether wrong. He maintains it is a mistake to neglect the vast swath of 50-plus Americans who are television’s most loyal viewers. “We should really be paying attention to the baby boomer market,” Poltrack explained from his no-nonsense office on the twenty-fourth floor of Black Rock, CBS’s granite headquarters in Manhattan. “We’re leaving this age group at a point when wealth is great, consumption is greater, and their consumer power is greatest.” He has made that argument hundreds if not thousands of times. As is explained in the next chapter, only recently have advertisers and buyers begun to heed his message.

  The neglect of middle age in the movies is due to a different constellation of economic interests than that of television and magazines. The industry caters to youthful audiences not because advertisers demand it but because filmmakers and studios believe that young audiences will buy more tickets. In the late fifties and sixties, that assumption was true. Middle-aged parents spent their movie and popcorn money on shoes and accordion lessons for the first baby boomers. In 1957, three-quarters of theater audiences were under 30; half were under 20. A decade later, the same kids who had kept their parents home on Saturday nights were filling seats themselves. Half of the film audience was between 16 and 24. “To catch the greatest audience you had to zero in on the 19-year-old male,” American International Pictures concluded in a 1968 report, arguing that female and younger viewers deferred to the male teen’s movie selection. AIP was an independent company specializing in exploitation films, but its analysis was extraordinarily influential.

  Today, movie audiences look very different. Forty percent of frequent moviegoers are over 40; twenty-one percent are between 18 and 24. But movies are still geared toward 19-year-old males. Teenagers are more likely to rush to theaters on that crucial opening box-office weekend that primes foreign sales of distribution rights. Animated and action features not only draw in young repeat customers, but they offer more opportunities for lucrative merchandise tie-ins and a longer afterlife on DVD and around the world. (There is not a very promising market for Middle Age Man action figures.)

  The film industry’s attitude toward middle age is captured by a printed notice that occasionally appears on tickets for pre-release film screenings that the invitation does not extend to anyone over 50.

  Midlife On-Screen

  The privileged status of youth on television and in movies has strongly influenced our conception of middle age. Characters on-screen exert a magnetic force on viewers, simultaneously reflecting and guiding tastes, values, attitudes, and affections. A character can create a fashion trend (Diane Keaton’s tie and hat in Annie Hall), turn into a cultural touchstone (Snooki in Jersey Shore), ignite a generational stance (Easy Rider), or coin a catchphrase (“Make my day”). The extraordinary promotional power of being on-screen is what initially turned nameless actors into celebrities and product spokesmen, and is what currently makes movie
s and TV shows such a valuable adjutant of the Midlife Industrial Complex. Film and television manufacture myths, prototypes, and desires, as well as the gestures, language, and styles to communicate them. They influence both men and women’s notions of what sexiness, beauty, patriotism, sincerity, and snobbery look and sound like.

  For decades Hollywood has instructed men on how to look cool, how to romance a girl, and how to have a midlife crisis. The hardy trope of leaving your wife, buying a sports car, and running off with a cheerleader at age 40 plotted out in countless films, television episodes, and cartoons has persisted through the years, even making an appearance recently in the Grand Theft Auto video game. (When the aging crime boss buys a sports car, his wife says she can “smell” his midlife crisis.)

  In the 1960s and 1970s, films featured middle-aged sellouts exiting the rat race or suffering from existential angst. In The Arrangement, Eddie Anderson (Kirk Douglas) composes ad campaigns for a “clean cigarette” before trying to swerve his Triumph into a tractor trailer, and in Save the Tiger, Harry Stoner (Jack Lemmon) careers toward a midlife breakdown as he engages in smarmy attempts to stave off bankruptcy.

  In The Swimmer, based on John Cheever’s short story, Neddy Merrill (Burt Lancaster) realizes one midsummer Sunday while drinking gin at a friend’s that a watery route home lies through the backyard pools of his affluent Westchester neighbors. As he progresses on his journey, his whimsical venture turns into a pilgrim’s progress in reverse. Films habitually used the successful suburban middle-aged man as a metaphor for social anomie and moral bankruptcy. In 1968, Merrill seemed like a symbol of America in that annus horribilis, when Robert Kennedy was assassinated, riots reverberated through college campuses, and the country seemed to have lost its way in an unpopular war.

  Other variations on the theme have waxed and waned. As baby boomers in the 1980s approached middle age, they found fresh inspiration in nostalgia. High jinks, first loves, adolescent insecurities, and post–high school panic were on display in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Porky’s, Pretty in Pink, Risky Business, Sixteen Candles, Say Anything, Weekend at Bernie’s, St. Elmo’s Fire, and The Sure Thing. John Hughes was the master. The film scholar Robert Sklar called him a “paradigm for the baby boom generation’s creative influence on American movies, moving from teen subjects to even younger protagonists as its own prolonged adolescence shifted abruptly toward parenthood.”

  The more solidly male boomers moved into middle age, the more fun the midlife crisis became. Merry arrested development was the theme of movies from City Slickers (1991), where Billy Crystal and his pals go West and play cowboys, to 2010’s Hot Tub Time Machine (the title says it all). Even in more introspective films like Sideways (2004), which follows two disappointed middle-aged souls on a weeklong trip through California wine country, the buddies have a good measure of excellent wine, golf, and sexual antics.

  Economic downturns, both in the seventies and now, have produced more sympathetic screen portraits of men thrown into a midlife crisis when they lose their jobs, or are forced to rethink their work and lifestyle, like George Clooney in Up in the Air (2010). Male boomers can finally start to relax, however. The angst of midlife crises is being handed off to Generation X, as in Greenberg (2010) with Ben Stiller as a former musician whose primary enjoyment at 40 is writing peevish letters of complaint to businesses.

  Hollywood has always offered women lessons in sexiness, but it has been more ambivalent about middle-aged women having sex. The response to female lust in midlife has swung between fear and ridicule. In the fifties and sixties, predatory older women were often viewed as deviant, even diabolical. They lured men into ruinous Faustian bargains, like Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) in Sunset Blvd, Gene Kelly’s wealthy patron Milo Roberts (Nina Foch) in An American in Paris, and “2-E” or Mrs. Failenson (Patricia Neal) in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Science-fiction B-movies in the late fifties fed on these sexual anxieties, serving up Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, who cared only about getting revenge on her husband for his affair with a younger woman, and Wasp Woman, whose quest for eternal beauty turned her into a murderous insect. The sinister side of midlife sexuality has been a recurring theme on day- and nighttime television soap operas. Sexually driven women were usually mentally unbalanced and mightily punished as in Fatal Attraction, when Glenn Close’s character is finally killed after wrecking a happy family and boiling a little girl’s pet bunny.

  Alternately, the lustful middle-aged woman has been mocked as if the combination of sexuality and midlife was by its nature laughable. The libidinous cooking show host Sue Ann Nevins in TV’s The Mary Tyler Moore Show or the love-starved landlady Mrs. Roper in Three’s Company were comical characters whose roots reached back to Chaucer’s bawdy Wife of Bath. The type is still conspicuous on television sitcoms and in films. They are much more physically appealing, but they can still be dangerous. In the 2011 comedy Horrible Bosses, Jennifer Aniston plays a man-eating dentist whose constant sexual harassment of her assistant drives him to contemplate murder. In NBC’s Parks and Recreation, Tammy (the 58-year-old Megan Mullally) is a voracious sexual piranha who reduces her ex-husband to a beast. Reality shows reinforce a more troubling impression of older women as sexual predators, Mrs. Robinsons pumped up with breast implants and Botox. NBC’s Age of Love pitted 40-plus women, “cougars,” against 20-something “kittens.” In 2009, Bravo introduced a variation on the theme, Cougar, in which twenty men in their twenties vied for the affections of a perfectly toned 40-year-old blonde.

  The emergence of a healthfully sexualized woman in middle age may well be the most dramatic change in a screen character in the past thirty-five years. For a long time, the repressed and joyless middle-aged woman was a stock character as the title of a 1997 study on aging women in popular films illustrates: “Underrepresented, Unattractive, Unfriendly, and Unintelligent.” She has pretty much vanished from the screen. In her place, at least on television, is the beautiful, sexually charged woman in midlife bloom. Samantha Jones in Sex and the City is the übermodel, but she can be found in some form on nearly every network during prime time. ABC’s Desperate Housewives has no fewer than four at a time. Unlike the predatory cougar, her carnal appetite is seen as admirable rather than fearsome.

  More rare are scripts that tackle the realities of middle-aged sex. The director Nancy Meyers recalled that when she was writing Something’s Gotta Give (2003), “I showed an early draft to a guy I know who is around 60. . . . There’s a joke in the movie where a middle-aged man is making out with a middle-aged woman, and he says, ‘What about birth control?’ And she replies, ‘Menopause.’ And this guy said to me: ‘Don’t mention menopause. Not sexy. Why bring it up?’ I said: ‘Hey, what do you mean? This woman is 55 years old—I’m not going to write a movie about people this age and have them act like they’re 32. It’s part of the story.’”

  Meyers, known for her privileged, upscale backdrops, is not talking about cinema verité. In Something’s Gotta Give, Diane Keaton’s successful playwright lives in a Hamptons mansion, is whisked to Paris by a handsome young cardiologist (Keanu Reeves), and is followed there by a multimillionaire entrepreneur (Jack Nicholson). The sex scenes allowed only a quick and appealing flash of flesh. It contains nothing of the bracing honesty of Terms of Endearment (1983), which had Jack Nicholson (again an irrepressible aging playboy) and Shirley MacLaine display bulging bellies as they faced each other across a bed for their first sexual encounter. Here middle age could be just as passionate as youth even without a perfect body.

  Like the caricatures of middle-aged women as depressed and stodgy, Stepford perfection can reverberate through the culture in a troubling way. The bombardment of images of middle-aged women with long, lustrous hair, smooth faces, and insatiable desire is strong incentive to use Botox, wrinkle cream, and hormone therapy. Absence, the more common fate of middle-aged women in Hollywood, is similarly powerful. When people over 40 are erased from cinematic tales of love, intri
gue, excitement, or heroism, the tacit message is that such adventures are for another generation.

  Modern screen romances match up men, no matter what their age, with nubile women. In the 2009 film Crazy Heart, a well-worn Jeff Bridges, 60, was paired with Maggie Gyllenhaal, 32; in Lost in Translation (2003), Bill Murray, then 54, had a deep connection with Scarlett Johansson, 19; and in Entrapment (1999), Sean Connery, then 69, teamed up with Catherine Zeta-Jones, 30. Woody Allen has repeatedly cast himself as the object of youthful desire in several of his films.

  When actors and actresses are close in age, they are frequently put in different generations. At 36, Anne Bancroft was the predatory Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate (1967), although she was a mere six years older than Dustin Hoffman, who played the wet-behind-the-ears college graduate. In the 1962 version of The Manchurian Candidate, Angela Lansbury, just three years older than Laurence Harvey, played his mother. More recently, Hope Davis, born in 1964, said that for one movie part, she was asked to be the mother of Johnny Depp, born in 1963. “That tells you something about the absurdity of this industry and the whole age thing,” she said. She turned down the role. As one writer suggested, in Hollywood women seem to age in dog years—seven for every one a man experiences.

  After retiring, the silent-screen star Lillian Gish recalled: “When I first went into the movies Lionel Barrymore played my grandfather. Later he played my father, and finally he played my husband. If he had lived, I’m sure I would have played his mother. That’s the way it is in Hollywood. The men get younger and the women get older.”

  Today, middle-aged women don’t even get to play middle-aged women. In the 2004 film Alexander, Angelina Jolie was 28 when she portrayed the mother of Colin Farrell, 27. (Val Kilmer, at 45, was the father.) Men in their 30s are credibly cast as 20-year-olds, whereas women in their 20s are pictured as middle-aged. Hollywood, of course, is in the business of fantasy. Still, a casting formula that excises middle age altogether constricts judgments of style and beauty. American films conform to a different sort of Tayloresque standardization, a uniformity that the novelist Italo Calvino said failed to “teach us to see real women with an eye prepared to discover unfamiliar beauty.”