I watched snippets of Superman Returns tonight on HBO, after having seen it in the theater last summer. I’m not going to waste your time by pointing out the terrible special effects, the gaping plot holes, and the baffling ending that I am sure cannot be explained to me logically by anyone.
But I do want to talk about this one thing, because I’ve seen it a lot lately and it is driving me crazy: why are female love interests today getting younger and younger while the male leads stay the same age?
I think Superman Returns is the best example of this phenomenon, since this movie supposedly takes place five years after the original Superman movie (which was released in 1978. Now, in the original movie, Lois Lane is painted as a no-nonsense career women - a reporter high up on the ladder at a big city paper. Margot Kidder (below left), who plays the original Lois Lane, was 30 when the movie was made and might even look a bit older than that in the movie. It might be a stretch, but it’s somewhat believable that she could be writing big articles for the paper at that time.
Now let’s fast forward to Kate Bosworth (above right), who plays Lois Lane in Superman Returns thirty years later. She was around 23 when the movie was made, and she looks around that age in the movie. But she’s got a five-year-old kid and it’s been five years since Superman was around - this should land her in her mid-thirties, at least. Instead, she looks a solid ten or fifteen years younger than she should.
I might be able to suspend my disbelief that some 23-year-old has landed a huge job at a city paper, but now I’m supposed to believe that she got five years younger instead of five years older during a five-year span of time? Is she also from a different planet? And am I also supposed to believe that, if she’s 23 now, that she was 18 when she got the job at the paper and originally met Superman? That’s harder for me to accept than a guy who wears a cape and blue tights and carries around commercial jets.
Even more than that, am I supposed to believe that she’s gotten more glamorous, less charmingly odd, and less practical after the birth of her bastard child and as time passed?
Who knows, maybe this has to do with the fact that I’m a brunette. Who tends to photograph weird. Or that I am not nearly as skinny as either Bosworth or Kidder. But seriously, I think it might be a scary sign of our times. For a long time we’ve know that actresses tend to “lose their value” as they age much faster than their male counterparts, but this is getting ridiculous.
I mean, we’re getting a strong, quirky, smart, career-minded character in Lois Lane, but in today’s standards we have to also make her barely legal? What do we tell the girls in this country, who are going to think that they and their aspirations expire right before they’re old enough to rent a car? That they should hurry up and get married before they become invisible at 25? That they should skip college and get to man-finding?
And don’t be that one guy who mentions that Juliet was 12, because I don’t want to hear it. Juliet might have been 12, but she was also dumb and immature enough to kill herself over a dude when she should have been pursuing her own dreams, taking guitar lessons and gossiping on the phone, had phones been invented.
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January 10, 2008 at 1:50 am
hiamanda
Well, shit, I guess it’s time to lock myself in the invisibility closet. Damn, I thought I’d have at least another five years. I guess things really have changed.
January 10, 2008 at 1:38 pm
slurredpress
You have got to get out of my brain. I was planning on recommending “3 movies about time travel you probably haven’t seen” this morning.
Luckily, Superman Returns wasn’t one of them.
January 10, 2008 at 3:36 pm
kate
I was bothered not only by Bosworth-Lois’s extreme youth, but also by her extreme thinness. We’re supposed to believe she’s a hard-as-nails investigative reporter and single mother, sassy and smart enough to catch the attention of Superman… yet she looks so thin and frail that it seems unlikely she can even pick up her child and probably gets a head rush every time she stands up because she hasn’t eaten in three days. If Superman is such a super guy, he should encourage his baby mama to eat a sandwich.
January 10, 2008 at 5:51 pm
Beth from Avenue Z
Please don’t think of this response as coming from somewhere haughty. It really comes more from a place of acceptance.
Regarding the size, shape, age, career, color, beauty of Superman’s leading ladies: I really don’t care. I really don’t. I don’t care, and none of the people I care about care, and few of the people they care about care.
Hollywood’s idealization of women used to affect me, sure. And I live here in sunny San Diego and workout in a gym downtown. Some of these women are absolutely perfect — body, hair, age, career aspirations. You name it. And they name it, of course. They let you know they’re “juicy” with an ass-wide logo. They tell you they’re “hot” with the three letters stretched in rhinestones across their perfect breasts. They’re not afraid of letting you know that they’re perfect.
But I’ve got two defenses for this. First, I know that they don’t actually think they’re perfect. Someone else in their circle is always a little more perfect. Or something on them jiggles. Or their nose has a bump. Or their boyfriends are only concerned about their looks, and when other looks catch their attention, the pretty girl has nothing.
The second defense has to do with my point above. No one who matters in my life cares about how perfect the women on the screen or the women in the gym are. Sure, we may all look. But the cast on a movie screen is much like the color of a kitchen in a model home. It’s all about the look, the feel, the impression. But paint is paint is paint.
Again, I hope people don’t read this and think that I think I’m a better person for not worrying about mass media’s portrayal of women as sex objects. I agree it’s sad, and I’m certainly aware that women in our society are influenced by these messages. But at the age of 39, I’m very, very, very happy to say that I really don’t care.
January 10, 2008 at 6:03 pm
Nathaniel
Yeah, Kate Bosworth was waaay too waifish to play Lois Lane. The other men I saw this movie with were similarly turned off by the casting choice.
From now on I’m only taking my cues about gender roles from batman.
January 10, 2008 at 6:26 pm
The Fighting Life
Beth, I think it’s more about what they did to the character of Lois Lane with that casting decision. Margot Kidder brought some real personality to the role, while Kate Bosworth seemed easily interchangeable for any other twenty-ish actress.
In other words, they took a good character and made her flat and uninteresting, which is pretty much the opposite of what they should do.
It also just makes no sense. I see it as being less about feminism and more about how idiotic movie studios can be. They equate young and pretty with success when it comes to female characters, which is painfully simplistic. It’s also insulting to the audience to expect that we won’t notice the fact that Lois Lane is aging backwards.
That’s not to say that Kate Bosworth was what made Superman Returns a bad movie. She was just one more piece in the totally forgettable puzzle.
January 10, 2008 at 6:47 pm
Beth from Avenue Z
Ahhhh… Yes, I agree that these points about her age make perfect sense when we’re discussing vile errors in storytelling. I’m laughing here because I was trying to come up with other examples of youthful actresses thoughtlessly cast as older, smarter women — but I got nuthin. I haven’t had a TV in, I don’t know — 5 years? And I rarely go to the movies these days. So my ability to cite references from popular movies does not exist. I watch episodes of 6 Feet Under on my laptop. Yeah, I got nuthin.
January 10, 2008 at 11:09 pm
seaswell
beth - thanks for your comments! good point about no one being perfect (even if they are, in fact, juicy) and good point about hollywood always having been like this. it’s not something we should waste time on and something we should try not to waste time on (and as a woman and freelance writer who is making it on her own - i want to be more like YOU). i just worry about younger women finding people to look up to - i suppose i remember watching lois lane and thinking about how awesome she was and that that’s not going to be there for a new generation sucks.
ben (fighting life)- you are right on, too. we can’t go around replacing interesting, quirky characters with boring young and skinny ones. it’s more than an age/appearance thing, it’s a women as objects instead of real people thing. also, as much as this movie sucked, i had fun making fun of it while watching it with you.
nathaniel - i totally LOVED batman forever. i don’t remember if there was a love interest. was there?
kate - seriously. if you have to spend more than ten minutes of a movie wondering how a woman’s waist supports the top half of her body, there’s something going wrong.
hiamanda - you’ve got some years left on you!
January 11, 2008 at 3:01 pm
Liana
I think the youth obsession HAS gotten worse- Botox, anyone? And by the way, botox is botulism TOXIN. It is a nasty bacteria that can rot food- and people are having THAT injected into their faces?!?! Ew.
While “young and beautiful” has always been an ideal, I think there has been an increase in our society of deciding women’s worth and opportunities end earlier and earlier. *sigh*
January 12, 2008 at 4:20 pm
Carolyn
Right on, Sarah.