It is well-known that since they started being born, owing to their numbers, the baby boomers have shaped our culture. And because of their role as consumers, their tastes have naturally been catered to, especially in Hollywood. Teenagers still dominate the movie audience in the theaters, but there is enough money to be made outside those theaters to allow us baby boomers to continue to wield influence.
Whereas in the old days, a hero was typically a young bachelor, with an equally young love interest, as the baby boomers got older, got married, had babies, and got divorced, so too did the heroes start having more complicated lives in the movies. In Lethal Weapon (1987), Mel Gibson plays Martin Riggs, a cop on the verge of suicide because his wife died. In Die Hard (1988), Bruce Willis plays John McClane, a cop who must rescue not a damsel in distress, but an estranged wife in distress. And in Unforgiven (1992), we find that the Man with No Name has become a widower with two children, struggling to make it on a hardscrabble farm.
Such fate almost befell James Bond. In On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, he gets married. But as this movie was produced in 1969, a time when most baby-boomer men thought about marriage only as a way of avoiding the draft, Bond’s wife is killed off only minutes after the nuptials. And unlike the deeply troubled Riggs of Lethal Weapon, in the next Bond flick, Diamonds Are Forever (1971), Bond avenges his wife’s murder, after which catharsis he never bothers about her again. In other words, Bond got all that marriage business out of the way while baby boomers were still young, leading lives relatively free of domestic complications.
As the baby boomers have become older since the 1960s, James Bond has gotten a bit older as well. When Sean Connery starred in Dr. No (1962), his first Bond movie, he was thirty-two years old; when Daniel Craig starred in Casino Royale (2006), his first Bond movie, he was thirty-seven years old. Right now, at the age of forty-seven, he is in the process of making the next Bond movie, Spectre, during which he suffered an injury. Well, that’s to be expected for a man of his age. In any event, director Sam Mendes says that Bond is now “wiser,” which is another way of saying he is older. If Craig stars in another Bond movie after this one, we will probably read that his performance as Bond was spry.
But while we expect aging male actors to keep playing romantic leads much longer than perhaps they should, the rules are different for women. And thus it is a bit surprising that Monica Bellucci, the Bond “girl” in the upcoming Spectre, is fifty years old, making her the oldest Bond girl ever (the average age for a Bond girl is thirty). And she is four years older than Daniel Craig. Well, at least she’s Italian.
This leads to the question as to what the best way is to satisfy the romantic fantasies of male baby boomers, a question that will only become more pressing, and perhaps more alarming, as we get older. It has been said regarding a man’s desire for women, “Young men want them young, and old men want them younger.” Judging by those who can afford it, there seems to be some truth in that, thus giving rise to the expression “trophy wife.” On the other hand, there is much to be said for having a woman your own age, with whom there is a better chance of compatibility. And it costs less.
But while age in a relationship is indeed a serious matter in real life, it would seem to be of less concern in our fantasies, where we need only worry about what it pleases us to imagine, or what it pleases us to see in a movie. On the one hand, in a fantasy we can be any age we want. So there is nothing to keep a man from identifying with some twenty-two-year-old actor who is the romantic lead. On the other hand, we can never fully forget our present age, which threatens to spoil the identification. In fact, if the actor is too young, he just reminds us of how old we truly are. Therefore, it makes sense that older male actors are needed in order to facilitate identification on the part of an aging male audience.
At first thought, it would seem that this places no restriction on the age of the woman, at least as far as the male fantasy is concerned. And yet, here too, some of the problems in real life, problems that fantasies might be thought free of, feed back into those fantasies and make them as unworkable as reality often turns out to be.
In 1973, Clint Eastwood directed the movie Breezy, which is about Frank (William Holden), a man apparently in his mid-fifties, and the title character (Kay Lenz), a girl not quite twenty. The two become lovers, and while it is just the two of them, Frank believes he does not care what others think. But once they get out in public, what those others think begins to bother him. A saleslady refers to Breezy as his daughter, and a waiter asks to see her ID before serving her alcohol. But it really gets bad when they run into Frank’s friends, who are polite, but obviously embarrassed by the awkward situation. One of those friends really rubs it in when the next day he compliments Frank on his ability to carry on with a young girl without caring about the opinions of others. The friend goes on to say that if he had a young thing like that, he is sure he would only be a meal ticket for her, and that he would start to think of himself as a child molester, thereby giving voice to apprehensions Frank has been trying to suppress. As a result, he almost breaks up with Breezy, saying in so many words that he is too embarrassed by their age difference to continue. But then there is a tacked-on happy ending, in which they decide to make a go of it anyway, perhaps “for a year.”
Despite that happy ending, we agree with Frank’s friends that he is too old for her. At the age of sixty-eight, I saw the movie recently, and I certainly did not enjoy it as a fantasy about an old man having a young girl. Instead, I thought it was a little creepy. But I guess the age difference did not bother Eastwood, because he was seventy-two when he starred in his self-directed movie Blood Work (2002), where he slept with a woman played by Wanda De Jesus, who was only forty-three. That age difference was not as stark as the one in Breezy, but I’m glad Clint Eastwood has quit doing that.
Therefore, this new Bond movie will have it just about right: an older James Bond and an older Bond woman as his love interest. They are about the same age, young enough to still be good looking, but not so young as to make us baby boomers feel ancient. However, this can only go on for so long. As we baby boomers move from being young-old to old-old, we should not expect, nor will we want, still older Bonds and older Bond girls. At some point a rupture will occur, and Bond will once again be played by a young man with young Bond girls. And in general, heroes will once again be bachelors leading lives free of domestic complications. The baby boomers will have ceased to have an impact on the movies.
Obviously, this has been a male-oriented essay, concerned primarily with men and their fantasies. Undoubtedly, old women must have fantasies about having relationships with young men too. That’s why they made the movie Harold and Maude (1971).