When members of the Hårga – Ari Aster’s Swedish cult in Midsommar – reach the age of 72, they are instructed to jump off a very high cliff. “They have reached the end of their life cycle,” the Hårga explain, Swedishly, to their dumbfounded American guests.
As horror films go, it’s an unexpected twist – all the more so because it bucks what might be described as the genre’s most unrelenting theme, which is that the elderly are almost always villains, not victims. Throughout the long history of horror, the old have waited, jealously, to feast on the young, either in over-friendly cabals (Get Out, Rosemary’s Baby, Hereditary), or alone (X, Saw). All versions, perhaps, of horror’s longest-lived baddie: the vampire.
“Old age is a massacre,” wrote Philip Roth, but we have a distaste for those who seek to avoid the axeman, even a fear of them. Morality tales about the quest for eternal life pervade not only horror films but the whole of western culture – and questers are always punished. They are selfish and unnatural. We don’t want the old trying too hard to be young.
The feeling is still strong within us: it was particularly provoked in recent days by two magazine cover stories from different ends of the news stands. First, there was the supportive yet squeamish reaction to this month’s Sports Illustrated, which featured Martha Stewart in a bathing suit looking 20 years younger than her 81 years. “Power to Stewart”, a typical article said, unconvincingly. “But what kind of power?… Do we celebrate the potential for human agelessness… or mourn the fact that no one seems equipped any more to deal with the one certainty in life?” Stewart was soon having to defend herself in interviews.
Then there was the cover of the New Scientist, which pointed towards a parallel conflict of feelings, this time in the scientific community. It centred on a new generation of anti-ageing drugs, that can lengthen lifespans by killing or suppressing senescent cells, a species of run-down cell that lurks in the tissue, refusing to die and dripping poison into its surroundings. But it also touched on the rather fraught position that anti-ageing occupies in the research community; the field still finds itself partly outside mainstream gerontology and vaguely associated with quacks and deluded billionaires. (The Food and Drug Administration, one researcher says, is yet to recognise ageing as a disease in its own right, which holds back the area.) In the UK, anti-ageing researchers say they struggle for government funding.
Why do we so dislike the idea of a battle with age? It is odd, because when it comes to fending off the reaper, what is deemed acceptable often seems to come down to semantics. In medicine, “successful ageing” is a perfectly respectable concept, and anti-ageing less so. But the two fields share precisely the same aims: an old age of healthy vigour, free from disease, engaged in one’s communities. Anti-ageing merely tackles the root cause of the diseases gerontology prefers to deal with one by one (senescent cells can trigger Alzheimer’s, heart disease and osteoporosis). Gerontologists fret that anti-ageing medicine is “against” ageing, but this tension seems largely rhetorical. Even if they avoid the term, they themselves are “against” a loss of function, ill health, a slowing of the system. What is this but anti-ageing?
If scientists have taken refuge in euphemism, so have the beauty and fashion industries, which are constantly on the search for new obfuscations through which to flog the same youth-promoting products. The frank ageism of the 1950s and 60s has long given way to the concept of “ageing well” or even “pro-ageing”. Yet it is hard to see where “good ageing”, with its preternaturally vigorous ambassadors such as Helen Mirren and Andie MacDowell, really departs from just “looking and seeming young”. The difference is certainly subtle. “[Helen] Mirren is not someone who is trying to be as unobtrusive as possible, in the way women over a certain age were once expected to be,” one article runs. “But nor is she promoting the implausibly whooshy hair of a 27-year-old supermodel we saw on Martha Stewart…”. Mirren’s hair looks pretty whooshy to me. (One thinks of the reaction someone may have had a century ago to today’s 40-year-old cover stars.)
In a way, it is not surprising that euphemism dominates our approach to ageing. We have long treated it as a monster we want to see only out of the corner of our eye. The opposite of the fear of death is apeirophobia – the fear of eternal life – and I wonder whether a version of this, too, enters our approach to anti-ageing. The idea we could suddenly live much longer (scientists recently put the maximum span at 140 years), or seem unusually youthful in our 80s, gives us a vertiginous feeling, where once we had the comforts of fatalism. Where will it end?
Then there are the moral objections. Treat ageing, some fear, and we will be soon overrun with an elderly population that will feed on and poison the rest of us – like a body filling up with senescent cells. But this misunderstands the idea. Treating ageing is an attempt to stretch out periods of health, not just the deterioration at the very end. Healthier people can work for longer and will need less help.
It makes sense to think of age as a disease to be fought. After all, the diseases of ageing are tightly interlinked – chronic inflammation, DNA damage and mitochondrial dysfunction turn one another on in vicious cycles, producing the illnesses we associate with our 80s and 90s. Age is a driver of disease; it makes no sense to ignore it while bemoaning the ravages of dementia or cardiovascular disease. Instead, we should tackle it head-on. Time to gather our courage and face the monster.
• Martha Gill is an Observer columnist
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