The Rise of the Silver Foxes: Aging and Appearance in Hollywood

The last edition of the Cannes festival was, in the words of one of its most perceptive chroniclers, Tatiana Siegel, “the international parade of male film senescence”. On the red carpet or on the poster of the films submitted to the contest, Sylvester Stallone, Harrison Ford, John Travolta, Nicolas Cage, Arnold Schwarzenegger or Matthew McConaughey, a bunch of men born before the oil crisis. The youngest, McConaughey, is 53 years old. The oldest, Ford, just turned 80.

Siegel considers that this “geriatric drift” is explained above all because, in the last ten years, Hollywood “has failed in the attempt to consolidate a batch of young actors with a pull at the box office.” For every Timothée Chalamet there are at least “half a dozen silver foxes.” [en inglés, silver foxes] who stubbornly resist retirement and who are adored by the general public”, from George Clooney to Denzel Washington, including Richard Gere, Michael Douglas, Samuel J. Jackson, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, Jeff Goldblum, Daniel Day Lewis, Mark Ruffalo , Antonio Banderas, Jeff Bridges or the six champions of eternal youth mentioned above.

More information

Of course, almost all the members of this fox aristocracy have something in common: they strive to look much younger than they are. Abdominal liposuction, restorative surgery, hyaluronic acid injections, blepharoplasty (this intervention, increasingly frequent in men of a certain age, which consists of removing excess skin on the eyelids), teeth whitening, anti-aging serums, hair implants, dyes, pre-teen haircuts, male hair follicle and sebaceous gland-proof cosmetics, brand-new tattoos (like those of Colin Farrell, Brad Pitt, or Johnny Depp, who keep adding layers of ink to their skin canvases), fancy sneakers , chino pants or youth cut suits like the ones stylist Sharen Davis gets for Denzel Washington.

Jack Nicholson, with the most famous movie tickets, poses in Los Angeles in 1993.Donaldson Collection (Getty Images)

Any resource is valid to hide the havoc caused by the three horsemen of the biological apocalypse: gray hair, baldness and wrinkles. Even optical illusions that mask flaccidity, such as false chest shirts or so-called booty pants, pants that enhance the behind.

For a dignified old age?

The new, and increasingly large, promotion of silver foxes, argues the editor of The Guardian, Wendy Ide, “is being denied the right to age with dignity and naturalness, as Paul Newman or Sean Connery did in their day ”. If Nicolas Cage puts himself in the shoes of Dracula (in Renfield) to sink his teeth into the jugular of Awkwafina, an actress 25 years his junior, it is urgent to find resources that allow him to rejuvenate him by at least a couple of decades. Although that implies incurring in the increasingly reviled digital de-aging, brought to a paroxysm in films like The Irishman, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Fate (for part of the footage, Ford appears rejuvenated in scenes that recreate the past) or Captain Marvel , but used, to a greater or lesser extent, in almost all productions that have protagonists over 40 years of age.

Ide sees in all of this a new (and “disastrous”) turn of the screw in the prevailing ageism in the great cultural industries. Old age (male) is tolerated, what a remedy, due to a biological imperative and lack of generational relief, but it is fought from the trenches of appearance and dissimulation. The message that is transferred to society as a whole could not be more ominous, in Ide’s opinion: from the age of 55, “if you don’t want to disappear from the map of things that matter, you have to look like Brad Pitt.” To the makeup, props and pimping of the big screen, of course, not the man who wakes up in his mansion in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles and promises himself that, this year, he will leave the cinema to become a full-time winemaker . And if you are around 80, “the pair of references for success, prestige and beauty that you have left are Harrison Ford and Michael Douglas”.

Are there no longer mature men like before?

Sean Connery retired from acting at age 73, after starring in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. At that time, he still felt “in top form”, with a lot of ammunition in his cartridge belts, but unable to deal with “the bunch of idiots who rule Hollywood and don’t know what to do with an old piece of furniture like me”, although the piece of furniture in question It was an authentic Louis XV chest of drawers, an irreplaceable object.

Brad Pitt in 2023. 59 years old.Tim Goode – PA Images (PA Images via Getty Images)

Until his last day, in the opinion of the Irish journalist Margaret Jennings, Connery “embodied the ideal of masculine beauty, with his gray hair, his sculpted and wrinkled face, his premature alopecia and never corrected or attenuated with undignified procedures.” In 1984, at the age of 54, he gave up playing James Bond because he felt “too old and too conventional” for the role, but 15 years later, at the age of 69, he was voted the sexiest man in the world by People magazine. , an acknowledgment to which he reacted with a brief: “This time I have run out of words.” When asked, back in 2012, what was the secret to his longevity and enduring attractiveness, Connery replied, somewhat contradictoryly, that it was a foolproof recipe with three ingredients: “Whisky, consistency and a healthy life.” . Jennings believes that the Scottish actor, both in his work and in his life, gave the world a real lesson in “dignified” aging.

Thus we stumble upon the essential question: what does aging with dignity consist of? Experts in vital knowledge do not agree. For Gabriel García Márquez, it would be a matter of preserving “the madness of the heart” once “the hardness of the thighs” had been lost. Ingmar Bergman talked about climbing a mountain. You leave your breath on each slope and you rise, gain perspective and enjoy better and better views. Salvador Dalí, in one of his unforgettable displays of cynicism, said that men who do not reach 80 are usually those who insist on continuing to live as if they were still 40.

To talk about dignity and mature beauty, we turned to Abraham T., a 61-year-old image consultant who does not want to provide his full name “because of how thorny the issue is.” Abraham claims to have “relapsed again and again into the worst extremes of a crisis of the 40s that has become chronic over time.” He has worn a wig (he prefers to speak of “toupee”, to emphasize how “ridiculous” false hair is now for him), he has undergone a hair transplant “in an atrocious aesthetic excursion to the Turkish Riviera”, he has dressed “Like a late teen”, he has exhausted “the options offered by conventional, conventional and biological cosmetics”, has whitened his teeth and started dyeing his hair “with an aberrational lotion” many years ago, as soon as the first gray hair

Faces sculpted by time

Today he begins to see this tremendous effort “as an absurd war against my body and against the passage of time.” It claims, “without sterile moralism or dogmatism”, the right to “look for any resource that allows you to feel comfortable in your own skin”. But he admits that he would like to reach “a state of acceptance, to look in the mirror and say to yourself, without further ado: ‘this is me, this is what time has been doing to me, and it’s fine'” . After all, as he himself claims, today he feels “more attractive than ever”: the unexpected success on Tinder has made him regain faith in his erotic potential. And it is that Abraham has verified that the silver foxes are a new fetish. In recent years, he has been on “fruitful” dates with people twice his age. Alopecia, wrinkles and the happiness curve do not exclude you from the sentimental market. There is “beauty” in the faces sculpted by time. And people willing to recognize and track her on dating websites.

Sylvester Stallone at a premiere in 2021. He was, in the image, 75 years old.Axelle/Bauer-Griffin (FilmMagic)

For allusions, we turned to Raquel, a 34-year-old lawyer, addicted, as she humorously admits, “to silver foxes.” About two years ago, Raquel read a report that pointed out that middle-aged men are increasingly taking better care of themselves, turning to cosmetics and worrying about fashion. It was also stated that digital searches for concepts such as “silver [o grey] foxes” and “DILF” (an acronym for “father I would sleep with”) were skyrocketing, as straight women became increasingly interested in older lovers.

He decided to try, also through Tinder. And he tells us that a Brad Pitt has not crossed his path, “because there is only one Brad Pitt”, but a series of “cultivated, serene and concerned” men, capable of making a more or less conventional appointment worthwhile. the sorrow. He does not idealize them, he only describes what has been found. Compared with much younger interlocutors and potential lovers, Raquel’s silver foxes have turned out to be “good conversationalists, with a lot to tell, willing to listen to me and capable of enjoying a pleasant evening without anxiety and without rushing.” Amaral has already said it: “Like Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas, I have no plans beyond this dinner.”

You can follow ICON on Facebook, Twitter, Instagramor subscribe here to the Newsletter.

2023-07-14 03:31:43
#interesting #mature #man #died #men #doomed #eternal #youth