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A second set of programs on movies, novels, and the transformation of life’s second half focuses on gender and its impact—on men, on women, and the late life relations between them. The extensive study guide and its five different curricula will be available here for download sometime in September of 2008, but pre-orders are being taken now.

The cost, payable by credit card, will be $300—far less than our previous partners ended up paying for our first program when we were grant supported. Fourteen LLIs have already agreed to run these new programs, and others are encouraged to join them and to swap adventures and advice. We will of course support these programs as well, just use our site's contact form.

Unlike Part One: The Elderquest in Today’s Movies and Novels, these new programs focus on the battle to overcome the still dominant narrative of aging as decline, and they do so in four closely related curricula—Men, Women and the New Old Age, Women and the New Old Age, Men and the New Old Age, and Late Life Love and Relationships. The first three are based on the premise that successful aging depends in large measure on the ability of today’s men and women to overcome ageism and forge more mature gender identities. The fourth examines the impact that winning or losing these struggles has on those seeking late life love and relationships.

All four will maintain, with slight revisions and improvements, the curricular structures that helped to make Part One such a resounding success—eight three-hour sessions that combine scholarly presentations, feature film screenings, readings, and facilitated discussions of the films and novels, supported by comprehensive film lists, book lists, and additional readings and references on the new website. The Study Guide will be even more extensive, however, since there are many more movies and novels on this subject, so we have provided alternate syllabi and film and book lists for each program. All in all there will be 12 different syllabi for the four programs. This extra choice is also in response to repeated requests for more variety in the programs and their films.
Note: A fifth program that consists exclusively of novels will also be available in three different versions.

The Study Guide: An Outline

The cost for complete ownership of The Study Guide, its fifteen different curricula, its comprehensive lists of films and books on the various aspects of gender and aging, its tips for presenting, organizing, and evaluating its programs, and instructions for joining our online community, is $300. This, the lowest practical cost we could come up with, will just cover our development, writing, and production costs, which, because of its more numerous programs and films from which to choose, will probably be close to 150 pages in length.

Introduction:

The only negative comments about our Part One programs were ones that we had anticipated. Though nearly all participants felt that the elderquest was a more appropriate, even inspiring new narrative for their own aging, few felt that it would replace the dominant narrative of aging as decline anytime soon.

Sadly, we had to agree. The boomers, whose first cohort turned 65 in 2006, may be the generation that is supposed to change everything, but they are still unwilling to think about aging at all.  And who can blame them?   Most of today’s literature, film, and popular culture as well as its public and private discourse continue to insist that aging is to be feared (or denied altogether), and that the old can only be pitied or scorned. As boomer Nora Ephron (who at 65 is in that first cohort) puts it, “No one wants to be old even if the extra years do make us a bit wiser. I’d trade all that end-of-life wisdom for five more years of youth. Besides, what will I do with all those extra smarts? I’ll be so old, ugly, and out of it that no one will listen to me anyway."

This isn’t so much a denial of the aging process as it is internalized ageism, that still rampant and socially acceptable prejudice against older adults, and, since we all eventually get there, it amounts to a prejudice against and disgust with the older versions of ourselves.

On the other hand if these  Elderquest narratives already had the power to engage the elderly and alter their attitudes toward their own aging in spite of the fact that there are still comparatively few of them, and they are almost completely unknown, then the balance  of the new cinema and literature and its even more  numerous stories of older men and women caught in this struggle between their own internalized ageism and their efforts to make the most of the new old age, might prove to be even more relevant and potentially helpful—to those who are already 65 as well as all those boomers who will be reaching that milestone by 2030.

We definitely think so, and we are also convinced that our audiences will agree that these new narratives, even the ones that end in victory for the old paradigm, do posit the possibility of development and change and more closely approximate the experience of the new old age in the process.

After all, reaching sixty no longer means the immediate onset of inevitable decline and withdrawal for anyone except the seriously ill or the deeply depressed. Advances in medical science, expanding life spans, and a decline in the birth rate are all scientific and demographic facts. As a result more and more of us are living longer and longer, and this gift of an additional fifteen, twenty, even twenty five years of mostly healthy, potentially productive living is really a whole new life stage (Europeans call it the Third Age) that precedes and outlasts the last stage (The European Fourth Age), the onset of incapacitating physical and mental decline.

In other words, the 1994 New Yorker cartoon that we will be sharing with our students is misleading and only partly true. Two middle aged men sit facing each other at a corner of the bar, while one laments, “See, the problem with doing things to prolong your life is that all the extra years come at the end, when you’re old.”

They do, of course, come when we are old, but they don’t come at the end.  They come during that new gift of years when we are still vital, still curious, still relatively healthy and active, and, most importantly, still developing emotionally and intellectually as we search for and begin to develop a broader, deeper, and more carefully considered perspective on the meaning and value of our whole lives.

But this is a perspective on the new old age, the beginnings of a new development narrative, that not enough of us, even those who are already 65, have yet to experience much less expect. That’s why the drama and nearly all the narrative interest of these many movies and novels  is focused on how these struggles will eventually turn out—by giving in to the old expectations and fears, or by somehow breaking through them to something more useful, positive, and new.

A survey of the movies and novels on our various lists reveals that the overall outcome is still unclear.  About a third of these aging characters make it through to something new (The Richard Harris  and Robert Duvall characters in Wrestling Ernest Hemingway or Lady Slane in Vita Sackville West’s feminist classic, All Passion Spent), another third either succumb to the old fears or flounder in indecision (Jack Nicholson’s Schmidt in the film About Schmidt  or  the Bill Murray character in Broken Flowers), and the final third ignore these conflicts altogether, either acting out the grim narratives of the old, old age (the Helen Mirren character in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone) or falling back on comic but  often trivial campaigns to ignore or deny any of the problems and challenges of the old, old age or the new (Jack Lemon and Walter Matthau in Grumpy Old Men or all the aging men and women in Waking Ned Devine).

What we have therefore is a Cinema and Literature of Age that is clearly transitional. The leading edge is already concerned with the construction of a new and more appropriate aging narrative, the Elderquest, while the more numerous movies and novels that make up the rest provide us with dramatic proof that the decline narrative, though still powerful enough to shape and sour our conceptions of old age, is beginning to reveal its inappropriateness as a guide to today’s rapidly changing new, old age.

We will begin Program One therefore with a discussion of some of the ways in which ageism and gender stereotypes can interfere with one’s understanding and experience of the new old age—in these movies and novels and in our own lives.

For men, it seems quite often to be a question of “Wrestling Ernest Hemingway,” as the film of that title so brilliantly demonstrates. How—in the face of declining physical strength and the possibility of impotence; retirement and the loss of purpose, power, and prestige—can the aging male let go of his anger, disappointment, and denial; learn to display his sudden, emotional vulnerability, begin to listen—to himself and to others—and redefine what makes him whole. In short, what does one do when one discovers that all those things that made one happy, relevant, and whole in youth and midlife are either taken away or no longer seem important?

We all know what Hemingway did. He put a shot gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. None of our aging protagonists follow suit, an indication that this particular gender stereotype may be losing its grip somewhat, and yet many of them, especially the Richard Harris character in Wrestling Ernest Hemingway, just barely escape, primarily because of their willingness to reveal their new vulnerabilities, listen to others, and realize that the macho model is no longer much use.  But are he and the others capable of coming up with new and alternative models for men in old age? Most do and some don’t, and that’s what makes these stories so relevant and engaging.

For women, combating the expectation that aging represents the beginning of the end is in some ways more difficult because unlike men who must learn to cope with the end of their gender dominance they have been subjected to gender as oppression throughout their lives. In the past forty years, however, some have been at least partially liberated from this oppression by the woman’s movement and its alternative models. But this is a two edged sword for the only partial success of this movement means that women now enter age with two, in some ways contradictory, notions of what it means to be a woman.

But one thing that all women can agree upon is that old age brings with it a kind of invisibility to men brought on by the inevitable erosion of the kind of physical attractiveness that is valued so highly in our youth dominated (and still patriarchal) society.

But there are two, quite different ways to respond to this partly physical and partly cultural phenomenon. Those most devastated by this loss of visibility and attractiveness to men are urged to “defy age” and remain “feminine forever,[9] by turning to Hormone Replacement Therapy, anti-wrinkle creams, and other treatments, diets, and exercise regimens designed to keep them young and sexy forever. (This obviously is Nora Ephron’s dilemma).

Others, inspired by Germaine Greer and other feminists and role models, are urged to celebrate their post-sexual years because invisibility can also mean liberation as one learns to enjoy the benefits “of being heard rather than seen.

Isak Dinesen referred to this as “the supreme elegance of learning how to wane,” Margaret Mead called it “post menopausal zest,” and its goal is to become a crone: “that sapient, intractable, and quintessentially post-hormonal female who until some centuries ago was universally looked upon as a principal repository of memory and wisdom.”

It’s doubtful that anyone but the most desperate chorus girl or the most radical feminist would champion either of these options to the total exclusion of the other, but it seems equally clear that most contemporary women would acknowledge both as significant components of their aging experience.

There are other challenges facing the aging woman as well—coping with the loss of children and/or careers; the death of loved ones[11], and the prospect of separating from, caring for, and then becoming one’s mother. And again, the aging women in these movies and novels confront all these problems with mixed but highly instructive results.

Here are a few examples of the  films we will be studying—Venus, The Other Side of the Street, Ladies in Lavender, Wrestling Ernest Hemingway, The Gin Game, Boynton Beach Club, Calendar Girls, Innocence, and Love in the Time of Cholera (though the original novel is far superior). All in all there are more than 150 films and eighty novels on this subject.

For those of you unfamiliar with our first study guide, The Elderquest in Today’s Movies and Novels, it is available for printing and/or downloading at www.lets.umb.edu/elderquest

Syllabi

Note: Each of these programs will begin with a first session that defines the course’s premise and introduces most of its themes through the use of handouts and clips from the films to be viewed in the following weeks).

1. Men and Women Aging:

• Curriculum One: (As detailed as the curriculum in our Elderquest study guide)
• Curricula Two and Three: Alternate lists of appropriate films
• Complete Filmography: Annotated list of the more than 100 films on the subject

2. Women and Aging:

• Curriculum One: (As detailed as the curriculum in our Elderquest study guide)
• Curricula Two and Three: Alternate lists of appropriate films
• Complete Filmography: Annotated list of the more than 40 films on the subject

3. Men and Aging:

• Curriculum One: (As detailed as the curriculum in our Elderquest study guide)
• Curricula Two and Three: Alternate lists of appropriate films
• Complete Filmography: Annotated list of the more than 70 films on the subject

4. Late Life Love and Relationships:

• Curriculum One: (As detailed as the curriculum in our Elderquest study guide)
• Curricula Two and Three: Alternate lists of appropriate films
• Complete Filmography: Annotated list of the more than 35 films on the subject

5. Novels on Gender and Aging:

• Curriculum One: (As detailed as the curriculum in our Elderquest study guide)
• Curricula Two and Three: Alternate lists of appropriate films
• Complete Filmography: Annotated list of the more than 80 novels on the subject

6. Addenda:

• Suggested writing assignments for all of the curricula
• A Complete Annotated Filmography on Gender and Aging
• Becoming part of our online community