Okay, I feel a rant coming on.
There’s been a lot of talk about how Carrie Fisher “looked awful” and “didn’t age well.”
I thought she looked fine for a 59 year old. Maybe she hasn’t aged as well as some (Harrison Ford barely seems to have changed) but she hasn’t aged badly.
She’s just 59. Furthermore, the character she is playing is also supposed to be elderly, so makeup would not have been trying to make her look younger - which they often do with older actors. 52 year old Alex Kingston looked to be maybe thirty tops in the Doctor Who Christmas special. Makeup.
So, why does everyone think Carrie Fisher looks awful?
Because we don’t often see women of a certain age on the screen.
And when we do, they’re made up to look younger.
The only major role for an older woman I can think of recently was Dame Judi Dench’s M.
Female leads average, depending on who you ask, between 4 years and 8 years younger than male leads.
As male actors age, their partners often stay the same age. Most of Harrison Ford’s love interests have been at least 15 years younger than him. Guess who that includes? Yup. Ford is 15 years older than Fisher.
We simply don’t see older women on the screen. They disappear.
Earnings for women in Hollywood peak at 34 and decrease rapidly.
Earnings for men rise until 51 and then remain steady.
There aren’t roles for older women.
When Carrie Fisher steps onto the screen as a 59-year-old woman without makeup, without hair dye, but unashamedly a woman of a certain age, we’re not seeing something we usually see in a movie.
And some people are reacting to that by complaining that she doesn’t meet their expectations: The expectation that the primary role of a woman on the screen is to be attractive to men.
In other words, whether the people complaining know it or not they are being sexist and they are supporting the profound sexism in Hollywood.
But the makers of the movie have held a line. They’re saying General Leia Organa should not look like a young woman. General Leia Organa doesn’t need to be pretty. She doesn’t need, either, to be moping around regretting her “lost beauty”.
She needs to be kicking butt and sending out her pilots to blow up the First Order.
We need more older women on the screen, we need to let the ladies of the cinema grow old gracefully just as much as the men do. Only then will we stop valuing “actresses” by their boob size more than by their talent.
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snowghoul
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