You're Leaving When? by Annabelle Gurwitch

Author:Annabelle Gurwitch
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781640094482
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2020-12-16T00:00:00+00:00

They Got the Alias That We’ve Been Living Under

WE’VE COME A LONG WAY, baby. Hollywood has discovered midlife downward mobility. As Gloria Steinem told us, “If you can see it, you can be it,” and although we might prefer to sail into our golden years on a yacht, there’s satisfaction in being seen. Disgruntled empty nester whose kids have boomeranged and are sponging off you? Caregiving and plotting your exit strategy? Ghosted but refusing to be relegated to spinster purgatory? On screens big and little, the new old isn’t putting her feet up by the fireplace with the man who fucked the funk out of her—she’s burning down the house and toasting marshmallows over the charred embers. Our avatars are of an age to have presumably heard Debbie Harry’s invitation to “die young and stay pretty,” and to have thought better of it. There’s a rousing quality to the onscreen depiction of women in midlife that’s reminiscent of the 1969 Stonewall protests, when activists rallied the crowds with “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!” The less than subtle subtext of these films is “We’re older, we’re bolder, get used to it!”*

I grew up before Blockbuster, DVR, and streaming, when new movies ran for months at our local theater. Long after my memory goes—pets’ names, kid’s birthday, first-grade teacher, and the street I grew up on (my internet passwords)—all that will be left is the plot of the 1976 sci-fi thriller Logan’s Run. I saw it at least a dozen times. Younger audiences will recognize the dystopian narrative in more recent films like The Giver and The Hunger Games. It goes like this: our planet can’t sustain the population, so some of us must be sent “elsewhere.” In Logan’s Run, upon reaching the ripe old age of thirty, citizens must report for relocation to the utopian Sanctuary. Spoiler alert: when Logan “runs” to escape this fate, he and pals discover there is no Sanctuary; they are being harvested for food. Critics have long speculated that the film is a metaphor for the industry that gave us the faded, frightening spectacle of Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, but what I learned from Logan’s Run was that thirty years old was a plausible expiration date.†

In the 1970s, thought-provoking films like An Unmarried Woman, starring Jill Clayburgh as an unconventional divorcée reinventing her life, were released, but I was too young for them to be on my radar, so my first peek at the midlife female in captivity was on the small screen. What’s not to love about The Golden Girls, the sitcom in which three friends and one of their moms move in together to pool resources. They had their share of infighting, but what’s a weekly show without conflict? The show is a bona fide cultural institution. How do we know that? Golden Girls Live: A Musical Drag Parody toured the country continuously for sixteen years, RuPaul’s Drag Race did a tribute show to the Girls, and one of the most popular novena prayer candles you can purchase is the Saint Dorothy (Bea Arthur).

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