Neither character fulfills any recognizable roles. While Bavmorda is a mother, she does not act maternal in any way and there is no mention of a husband. Fin Raziel seems to exist outside of any recognizable gender or sexuality role. Both are defined almost solely by their age and their power.
Their fight towards the end of the movie is different and unique- what other example is there on-screen of two older women performing such a physical fight? FIn Raziel, Patricia Hayes, was 79 when Willow came out and Jean Marsh (Bavmorda) was 54. Their characters and how they are presented is a rarity on-screen. Their age is actually NOT important to the plot. Other than Fin Raziel's realization, there is little mention of their age, their appearance. This is in contrast to other movies from the same time.
Beetlejuice (1988) also has an odd scene focused on aging Genna Davis and Alec Baldwin in their wedding clothes. They go from young, married adults (Davis was 32 when the movie came out and Baldwin 30). The imagery isn't subtle, women go from married to decayed. There seems to be no in between. You're a housewife, married, and then you're a corpse. Your defining quality is the marriage, your role as a wife.
But I was older before I learned the devastating fact that Miss Havisham was 37 and apparently the definition of old, decayed, left behind, abansoned.. The image that sticks in my head is Martita Hunt as Miss Havisham from the 1946 Great Expectations. I think I saw it one day on TCM while home sick. But I remember being very scared by her, by the idea that she just sat in this house, the set table with the wedding that never happened, the cobwebs, the fact that this woman's life just STOPPED. Even as a young person this struck me as wrong, and terrifying.
High Spirits (1988) came out the same year and the plot depends on the age, the decay, of Daryl Hannah's character, Mary. Her ghost haunts the castle, doomed to be chased and murdered by her husband night after night, and only once Jack (Steve Guttenberg) kisses her decayed self is she free of it all.
This presentation of older women as decayed, not just old, but falling apart, was also seen in Ghostbusters (1984) with the librarian they encounter.
The idea of women going from young and vital to old and decrepit was a reoccuring theme. 1982's Thriller featured this with the zombie women.
The simplistic understanding that women are only presented as specific ages, in specific very gendered roles, is not a new concept. The idea of women as moving from maiden, mother, crone is archetypal. On screen we tend to only see women in these roles, there are few on-screen representations of women in between these roles, or NOT fulfilling these roles. While there are more than there used to be, roles that show women who choose to be single, choose to be childless, women in menopause, are few and far between. Women are most often seen in these very antiquated roles. Even women who briefly rebel against these traditional values so often return to these roles, order restored by the end of the movie or television show.
The idea that media does not know what to do with women who don't fit is not new. The one that sticks in my head, rattles around and around is Miss Havisham from Great Expectations. The text says that she was "scarcely forty."
I thought of this line more recently when I read that "Carrie’s age range in “And Just Like That...” puts her in the same age range as the characters in “The Golden Girls” season one, according to TODAY with Hoda & Jenna. In “The Golden Girls”, Rose is 55, Dorothy is 53, Blanche is 47 and Sophia is 79. In “And Just Like That...”, Miranda and Charlotte are 54, while Carrie is 55."
Media does not know how to present older women and "older" here means a RANGE of ages. Television and movies don't seem to know what older women look like. They are EITHER the Golden Girls, "old" and in caftans, retired, or they are whatever the female version of super serum, anti-aging is. In Scream 5 (2022) Neve Campbell fits this version, at 48, as does Courtney Cox at 57. It's always what I think of as weird yoga look. It's this gaunt, stretched, uber thin look. As though the women have dropped all unnecessary weight. But it's also as if they are frozen, they don't look like any age. There is no grey in their hair. They don't seem to be suffering from hot flashes, or belly fat. They're older but not old. This is very much what "age" looks like these days, as seen in Just Like That. It's a look that struck me with Gillian Anderson's look in The Fall (2013-2016). I FIRST remember seeing it with Madonna at the end of the 1990s, beginning of the 2000s. It seemed presented as both an ideal of how to age, mainly by NOT aging.
As I've gotten older I've started to really hate this look, this presentation. Are all of us actually aging, not able to lose the inches around our waist, walking around in tank tops in 50 degree weather, visible gray in our hair, failing? Are WE being left behind? Are we excluded if we don't embrace the non-aging aging? How much damage does this representation do to everyone who can't not age? What are we, an older, perimenopausal, menopausal, audience supposed to make of our role, our lives, our stories, when there seem to be so few options? Either we're in traditional roles, then fade away once our purpose is served, or we spend time and energy chasing a youth, a look, a resistance to aging, that defies, ignores, rejects, the fact that a woman can age and have a life.
As I got older the image and concept continued to bother me. Because it presented women as only useful for specific roles, of what these images said awaited women who did not conform. Later, as I had all of the above images in my head, they seemed to combine to tell a singular story. Women who aged, who were not wives or mothers, would end up alone. Maybe they'd have power, maybe they'd be useful, but that was all they would have. Women who DID get married ran the risk of being at the mercy of violent, controlling men. Murdered at a young age, frozen in time, forced to relive horrible moments over and over while also all of this only existing as an illusion, the truth being that you're old, decaying, decrepit, outside of this cyclical narrative. You fulfill specific roles expected of you-wife, mother, defined by these dictated roles, and THEN you're old and decrepit and decayed. If you don't choose the role of wife, mother, then you end up stuck at work, haunting empty spaces, a monster to others, a horror. A cautionary tale. And ultimately that is what Miss Havisham is meant to be, a cautionary tale of what happens if you reject the roles you're supposed to fill.
In horror, women have not progressed much past these fairly rigid, defined roles. They are "Final Girls" who lose everything, whose entire lives are defined by trauma. They are monstrous mothers whose entire existence is abject and horrific. There are few older women in horror and they often exist outside of the boundaries and definitions of societal roles. Bette Davis plays Mrs. Aylwood at 72 in The Watcher in the Woods (1980), a woman haunted and traumatized by her life and her past. Zelda Rubinstein was only 49 when she played Tangina in Poltergeist (1982), and Fionnula Flannagan was 60 when she played Mrs. Mills in The Others (2001). Each of these women play vital roles in their plots, they are older women who are specialists, able to offer specific knowledge vital to others. They know things others don't. It is presented that in part it is their age that allows them this knowledge, this ability to see things, their life experiences. But they are not the center of their stories. Their roles are important, but only to serve others.
Media seems uninterested in telling the story OF these women, of centering them. In this way we can place them in the same context of Gothic women, the older housekeeper, the unmarried, older woman who haunts the edges. They are lessons to others, resources for others, but never the center of the plot, they never get their story told. Women who are wives and mothers are the ones who tell their stories.
Despite all the ways that Kristeva's work has been applied to women in horror, and Clover and Creed's work, little of it moves past women as mothers. Characters are girls, then mothers, skipping any formative years in between, and then disparu. They just disappear from view. Middle age, menopause, does not seem to exist in these worlds. Women transition straight into old age when no one is interested in their stories, their experiences. Just ten, twenty years that don't count. Especially with horror this seems like a very strange absence because perimenopause is a time period RIFE for telling horror stories. Horror stories that focus on the body, on the abject, on the betrayal of your own skin, on feeling out of your body, out of society, isolated, alone, left behind. Of no use, invisible.
Perimenopause, menopause is the PERFECT horror story, the perfect setting because this time, this ongoing time, this time that stretches on and on and one, forces women to face and reconcile their own truth, their own existence, often against society and what they've been told or thought they knew all their lives.
So what do we make of, what is the purpose of, women/characters who aren't girls? Who are not or will never be, wives and mothers? DO women serve any purpose once they are no longer physically capable of serving traditional gender roles?
I think this all opens up an interesting avenue of scholarship. In my previous work I've analyzed what happens to "Final Girls" who age, how we as an audience make sense of them. For my work now, I want to look further, past middle age, preimenopausal, and post-menopausal women, to put them in conversation with the Gothic tradition, to see these women as truth tellers, storytellers, as providing voices of resistance and frames for understanding the truth of a story.
No comments:
Post a Comment