Is the modern mind out of step with the modern pace of ageing? Two recent incidents – one personal and one as glittery as Hollywood’s award season – provoke consideration of such a question.
In the first; a middle-aged acquaintance is alarming friends with his accelerating attempts to youthify. He recently got a little Botox jab to iron out an ageing wrinkle between the eyes. This received many compliments, but then came a touch-up of some crow’s feet that were bothering him. After that was some jaw sculpting, because the temptation to erase the weathering of his features was not reduced by his procedures but encouraged by them. Now he’s had something done to his nose, and his mouth, and added dental veneers. Compliments have been replaced with public silence and private fraught concern.
For what it’s worth, the advice of the more scrupulous plastic surgeons is to tell someone overdoing the fillers and snips that they look so great right now that exposing themselves to the risk of losing it through more procedures is not worth it. Time can age a face but it can also level a valley and sometimes, maybe, even smooth out overswollen lips.
This is not a criticism of cosmetic surgery, so much an admission that at the age of 48 I have also found myself staring into the bathroom mirror trying to understand how my clothes, hobbies, tastes and interests have stayed so squarely in my 20s while my face has not. Absolutely I’ve poked at my cheeks and tried to convince myself that some surgical rerigging would be quick, easy, painless and risk-free.
I’m hardly the only person captured by this sentiment. Australia is now competitive with the United States when it comes to a per capita comparison of how much “work” we’re getting done. Over one-third of cosmetic surgical procedures in the US take place on people over 65 – a figure predicted to increase as the population ages. Kim Kardashian once said she’d eat shit if it made her look younger. Given the physical impact of cosmetic surgery on elderly bodies is both extreme and understudied, it’s a proposal with the appeal, perhaps, of some genuinely lower risk.
But such risks, in either case, might be becoming unnecessary. While pursuit of surgical de-ageing grows, rational appraisal suggests the motivation for it is based in an increasingly outdated understanding of what youth represents. There was a time when being young was conceived as a boxed window of opportunity to find true love and sexual fulfilment, to have children, to feel physically strong and healthy, to enjoy the powerful sensation of potential. It was fetishised by those older as something like a lost and unrecoverable domain.
Yet improvements to wealth, health, wellbeing and technology, a liberalising society, and the changed nature of work and the built environment have stretched that capacity window well beyond the narrow frame of youthful years.
Unprecedented in human history is an emergence of older generations who maintain their vitality and potential while possessing minds matured and developed with experience. I’ve come to realise there’s a cultural distortion field in operation when I lament my lost youth, given that in my midlife I am a thousand times more healthy, happy and, frankly, fun than when I was young.
A Twitter account called @BrimleyLine uses a striking mechanism to demonstrate this generational transformation. Beloved character actor Wilford Brimley was 18,530 days (50 years and a few months) old when he played an “old” man in aged care home in the 1985 movie Cocoon.
So this account posts pictures of modern celebrities as they cross the “Brimley Line” of 18,530 days. Let’s not kid ourselves that contenders are entirely without cosmetic enhancement, but more striking than their looks are what they’re doing. There are rockers still rocking, hockey players still hockey-ing and actors at not even the peak but perhaps the dawn of their fame.
Specifically, Brimley Liners include actor Ke Huy Quan, the near-forgotten child actor whose explosive breakout role in the movie Everything Everywhere All At Once has won him universal regard. He’s joined by Brendan Fraser, no longer the sculpted hunk from The Mummy but whose 54-year-old arrival as a serious dramatic actor brings tears to the eyes of awards audiences before he even speaks. Iconic, glamorous and adored Golden Globes best female actor winners Michelle Yeoh, Angela Bassett and Jennifer Coolidge crossed the line even earlier. They’re in their 60s.
Shared aesthetics often coalesce around sources of the greatest cultural vitality. As the domain of human potential is staked by the powerful older, it’s not unreasonable to imagine beauty standards may one day shift towards a visibly mature aesthetic. In hope, I keep my own hands off the needles and the knife. I think of the man with the age-erased face as both a symbol and a warning of the shifting aesthetics of time.
