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The Silvering of Genre: Deferred Retirement and Hard-bodied Dissonance

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Contemporary Cinema and 'Old Age'

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Abstract

This chapter shifts attention from the silvering of stardom in the economy of celebrity to the play of meaning produced in the dynamics of gender, genre and stardom in contemporary old age films. It explores the silvering of romantic comedy, heist and action genre narratives and thereby highlights a play of dissonant ‘elder kitsch’ in the intersections of generic and cultural verisimilitude in Last Orders, The Queen, Quartet, the Marigold Hotel films, The Hatton Garden Job, Going in Style, RED and RED 2. Produced through the Hollywood conglomerate’s distinctive British and US film industry aesthetics and mobilising the cultural verisimilitude of neo-liberal betrayals of a promised golden retirement, these films variously operate ideologically to efface anger and resentment at those betrayals; to articulate a gendered third age imaginary; to normalise deferred retirement; to reiterate successful ageing’s hetero happy imperatives ; to reproduce the West’s claims to neo-colonial privileges in the stakes of globalised care of the old; to privilege ‘whiteness’ , and recuperate actively visible older female figures into dependency and vulnerability. Consistently, masculinity is shored up as stronger, smarter, tougher, more resilient than its feminine counterpart, while its alignment with nature and biology is reitertated at the intersection with old age in ways that re-secure threatening ruptures to the gender binary.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Glasgow, UK

    Josephine Dolan

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  1. Josephine Dolan
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Dolan, J. (2017). The Silvering of Genre: Deferred Retirement and Hard-bodied Dissonance. In: Contemporary Cinema and 'Old Age'. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58402-1_5

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