I have always been rather uncomfortable with the culture of “cute,” specifically with the way it has come to be applied to the elderly. Inexplicably, many people seem to have a bizarre compulsion to label the symptoms of bodily decay as somehow possessing some sort of ironic attractiveness. More often than not, it’s “cutest” when old people do something that would be more likely done by the young, like dancing or rapping. This is stupid. Old people don’t do things young people do because they have personal dignity and bones like packing peanuts.
Still, people insist on cooing over the elderly. For example, take the faux-blonde, night school graduate, empty-nesting divorcees, with stapled stomachs and drawn-on eyebrows, who work behind the desk at my grandma’s doctor’s office. Every time I take her there, they insist on speaking to my grandma the way they probably spoke to their grandchildren before their new husbands started creeping the grandkids out and their children stopped letting them visit.
Oh Mary, they wheeze out in high-pitched condescension through red, smeared lips, your outfit is so cute today. Have you not been using your walker? Oh Mary, you’re a stubborn one, aren’t you? The doctor wants you to use your walker so you don’t fall down and hurt yourself. Don’t you want to not fall down?.
I can always tell my grandma is nauseated. If she wasn’t so conditioned by a near-century of matronly submission, she’d probably punch one of them in the baby-maker.
It’s almost as if there’s an age at which people just assume everyone becomes feeble-minded and incompetent–an age at which the slightest regard for hygiene, fashion, fitness, or sexuality, suddenly becomes a novelty worthy of celebration. Commercial art, in its never-ending quest to exploit all human weakness, has not passed on the opportunity to cash in on the culture of cute.
The recent documentary, Young@Heart is an obvious example of the “have people pay to see old people do stuff” strategy.
OMG!!!!111!!!11!1111!1 Those old people are soooooooo cute.
This film by TV director, Stephen Walker, features the “Young at Heart Chorus”, a Massachusetts senior citizens’ choir. If old people’s singing doesn’t already satisfy your lust for cutesy, picture this: a choir of old people who only sing modern pop songs, from Coldplay to the Ramones. Once you’ve pictured that, you really don’t even have to watch the movie. That’s it. Old people singing Sonic Youth. That’s all.
Sure, there’s the obligatory meditation on mortality when choir members start to die (because they’re old), but it really only serves as a brief respite from a constant bombardment by reverse precocity. The whole movie seems like Walker is wadding up old people and hitting you in the face with them.
LOOK AT THEM! AREN’T THEY CUTE? THEY ARE OLD! YOU’RE NOT LOOKING! LOOK! LOOK! LOOK! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, PLEASE LOOK! THEY’RE CUTE, DAMMIT!
The result is a 120 minute Viagra commercial with (arguably) better music. Thank goodness, for Mr. Walker’s sake, there are old people around for him to exploit. A low-budget documentary about the Mormon Tabernacle Choir wouldn’t be quite enough to earn his graduation to the big screen.
(Coming tomorrow, the discussion of Best Boy I promised for today, unless I think of something else)
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