Can Hollywood really tackle the double standard of ageing?

In Rupert Sanders’ 2012 film Snow White and the Huntsman, Charlize Theron’s evil Queen Ravenna murders the father of Kristen Stewart’s Snow White. Sticking the knife in, she tells him “men use women. They ruin us and when they are finished with us, they toss us to the dogs like scraps”. Refusing to accept this loss of power, Ravenna goes all-out to cling on to youth and beauty, turning to dark magic to suck the life out of women younger than her. 

As I argue in my book Hags, while her actions might be extreme, it’s not as though Ravenna doesn’t have a point — not just with reference to the world of fairy tales, but to the film industry in which she comes to life. I was the same age as Theron (late thirties) when Snow White and the Huntsman came out, and found it distinctly uncomfortable to see the way in which Ravenna’s “vanity” was played off against the “goodness” of characters younger than her. Sequences in which Theron’s face was digitally aged — to show her “true” evil self — felt like a commentary on the shelf life of the Hollywood actress. Intentional or not, there was a cruelty to it. “How terrible,” the film seemed to say, “that Ravenna feels disposable — so disposable that she turns to evil! — but isn’t Theron disposable too? Aren’t all women, in the end?”

In her 1972 article “The Double Standard of Aging”, Susan Sontag claimed that “for most women, aging means a humiliating process of gradual sexual disqualification”:

Since women are considered maximally eligible in early youth, after which their sexual value drops steadily, even young women feel themselves in a desperate race against the calendar. They are old as soon as they are no longer very young.

Whether or not this is true for most women today, it is absolutely true for women in the entertainment industries. A loss of youth and beauty — however the latter is understood — is accompanied by a loss of status. “After a woman’s body has reached its sexually acceptable form by late adolescence,” wrote Sontag, “most further development is viewed as negative.” Thereafter, a woman’s task is “to try to maintain that image, unchanged, as long as possible”. Even so, she must not look as though she is fighting ageing. To do so is vain, frivolous, ridiculous. She must keep herself young by magic or failing that, she must eventually admit defeat. 

These two options — magic or defeat — are on display in two more recent productions, Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance and Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl. In both of these, the dilemma faced by the ageing female performer has no cover narrative; it is the story itself. As such, they are much kinder films than Snow White and the Huntsman. The overlapping struggles of the real-life actress and the character she plays — Demi Moore/Elisabeth Sparke in The Substance and Pamela Anderson/Shelly Gardner in The Last Showgirl — are freely acknowledged as opposed to lurking as hidden jokes. That the double standard extends beyond the fictional world is central to each film’s message. 

There’s something very powerful in both actresses embracing these roles without shame. If Anderson’s Shelly is deluded about her loss of status, while Moore’s Elisabeth makes an insane decision to keep hold of hers, they are only responding to the options before them. They are not evil or vain or stupid; they are flawed, certainly, but the system in which they operate is rotten. 

There’s a limit … to how effectively the medium can critique itself

The performances of both Moore and Anderson are magnificent. It does, I think, offer a sliver of hope that this topic is finally being approached with compassion and humour, neither idealising nor vilifying the women at the centre of it. Yes, one can argue (and I certainly thought this) that both actresses still look absurdly good for their ages, and that this becomes yet another way in which the film industry cheats with inclusion (we’ll have older women, as long as they don’t really look old). Then again, it is simply true that within the entertainment industry, the double standard of ageing never comes for the average-looking woman because she is never accorded high status to start with.

There’s a limit, though, to how effectively the medium can critique itself. Films such as The Substance and The Last Showgirl can capture the practical consequences and psychological trauma of being a fully-formed, flesh-and-blood woman who has only been valued for her younger body, but the rage in both feels contained, and largely directed at women themselves. The men — Dennis Quaid’s grotesque producer and Jason Schwarzman’s smarmy casting director — might be unpleasant, but they ultimately retain the position of blokes telling it like it is. The hierarchy remains intact, both on and off screen. Because of this, it is hard to watch certain scenes — Shelly being shot down at her audition, or Elisabeth reacting resentfully to her alter ego Sue — without feeling the humiliation is a bit too real. There is still a long way to go. 

A week after watching The Last Showgirl, I overheard some of the dads at my son’s football match discussing “how rough Pamela Anderson looks these days”. They shook their heads sadly, as though they, personally, had been robbed of something precious. I knew there was no point in challenging this, or even informing them that they were no oil paintings. That would only have suggested to them that I, like Anderson’s Shelly, didn’t get the rules. But deep down, all women know them. It is one thing to no longer be blamed for how we respond to them; changing them will be another thing entirely.