Hope you’ve had a good week – it’s certainly been a good month for Queenagers onscreen – and it’s got me thinking about midlife beauty.
Demi Moore, 62, won a Golden Globe for her performance in The Substance, a feminist horror movie about ageing, objectification and misogyny in Hollywood. On Wednesday I led a group of Queenagers to Soho, to see Nicole Kidman’s new film Babygirl (which won her best actress at the Venice Film Festival 2024) and has been hailed as containing “2024’s most erotic sex scene”.
In it, Kidman’s 50something character finally gets the courage to truly ask for what she wants in bed, via an affair with a younger male intern. (The director has spoken about the age gap, saying, “If we see a movie where the male actor is the same age as the female actor, we find that odd. Which is insane.”)
What NOON members thought about Babygirl
After the film, our group went for tea, cocktails and cake to discuss it. “The wardrobe was great,” enthused one woman, to laughs and nods. Several thought that Kidman wasn’t sexy or sensual enough to pull off the story. One Queenager enjoyed it but felt like “it has nothing to do with my life.” But many of us agreed that the overall theme of a midlife woman’s liberation was great to see onscreen.
I don’t love everything about the movie, which I have now seen twice, but I do think it is unusually nuanced and female-focussed (I love that it was written and directed by a woman, Halina Reijn), and it has as its heroine a Queenager!
This matters because for years, Hollywood movies generally failed the Bechdel test, named after the writer Alison Bechdel, who first described the issue – defined as whether, during a film, 2 female characters have a conversation of longer than 2 minutes which is not about a man. And since the dawn of the pictures, female actors have had a “shelf life” or a “half life”, rather than a “full life” like the men. (Only 9% of UK audiences can name 15 women who appear regularly on screen aged over 45, while 48% can easily name 15 older men, according to Nicky Clarke’s brilliant Acting Your Age campaign.)
That is why this spate of awards for female midlife stars such as Michelle Yeoh (62), Kidman (57) and Moore (62) matters. Finally there is a new conversation on our screens tackling how older women are perceived in our culture.
Want more? For more older woman-younger man onscreen stories, check out Lonely Planet with Laura Dern and a younger Liam Hemsworth in steamy Morocco; and Gabrielle Union (who you can hardly believe is 52) in The Perfect Find, which has been called one of the most perfect rom-coms of the 2023. Both on Netflix.
The older women we’re finally see onscreen
These films pose an even bigger question: In a patriarchy, which values women primarily for being young, hot, fecund and up for it, what is an older woman actually for?
Nearly a third of women in our Queenager cohort don’t have kids so the traditional definition of grandmother is out. And when the beauty arms race spits us out, what’s next? Where in popular culture are the signposts for what a successful older life for women might look like?
Well…at NOON for one.
And at least films like The Substance and Babygirl are beginning to grapple with this topic.
The midlife beauty question
As readers of this newsletter know, the question of what older women “are for” is an issue that fuelled my book Much More to Come (a Times bestseller), which also tries to unpick the conditioning we have been subjected to around ageing and the tyrannical way we judge ourselves and our bodies.
Demi Moore’s character in The Substance makes a terrible Dorian Grey style pact: Half the time she can be young and beautiful; the other half she must live hidden away as a decrepit hag. Eventually she takes a terrible revenge on the patriarchy (I won’t ruin it for those who haven’t seen it). Her monstrous incarnation rages, “But I’m the same person you loved!”
Babygirl is also revelatory on the ageing front, when Kidman’s character – Romy Mathis, a female CEO in her fifties – is shown going for Botox, needles and all, and is then reprimanded by her daughter: “Why do you do that to yourself? You look like a dead fish!”
(How aptly that captures society’s doublespeak about older female beauty. We demand women remain untouched by ageing or that they “age beautifully” – that is, always remaining youthful – then we cast their efforts as desperate or reprehensible.)
It is truly taboo-busting to witness Kidman on screen being “tweaked”. Seeing her with a needle in her face is way more out there than the movie’s depiction of a 57-year-old woman dating a 28-year-old man!
If you’ve seen Babygirl or just want to discuss the themes, come along to our Ask Eleanor online chat on Wednesday at 1pm, open to all NOON members. We want to hear what you have to say!
– Eleanor Mills
