Redefining 'Age Gap'

Yesterday, I sat down and watched The Idea of You on Prime, which is a nice enough little romantic comedy about a 40-year-old single mom who hooks up with a 24-year-old boy band singer. Liked it, as these films go, but something didn't sit right with me.

See, I'd seen it advertised everywhere as Anne Hathaway's new age gap movie, yet sitting down to actually watch the movie, I found none of the salaciousness and scandal those headlines implied. Just a pretty normal relationship between two people, facing the obvious and expected differences when there's a notable age difference.

I thought, well, it's the magazines' fault. They shouldn't have advertised it as an age gap movie. Except, isn't it? Even by permissive accounts, 16 years is quite an interstice. And yet it doesn't sit right with what I was expecting. Which begged the question...

What do we mean when we say 'age gap movie'?

"The Idea of You" | Credit: Amazon Prime Studios

A quick search online brings up titles like American Beauty, An Education, The Piano Teacher, The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Notes on a Scandal and of course, Lolita. There are, of course, others like Lost in Translation and Something's Gotta Give, but a concerning bulk of our age gap movie roster is made up of 'romances' between significantly older men and teenage girls.

Which may be titillating, but is at its core deeply worrying. I realized, looking back, that hearing this new film advertised as an age gap movie, I'd expected some of that illicitness. Which, of course, doesn't belong in a relationship between a 24 and a 40-year-old. Or in most age gap affairs, really, where those involved are consenting adults.

The only place where it does belong is in a relationship between a mature person and an immature, still-developing, barely-out-of-childhood teen. As a society, we seem to have confused the two.

Yes, Lolita features an affair between two people at very different ages, yet to label it an "age gap movie" somehow seems to normalize it, don't you think? I mean, "age gap movie" sounds pretty much like any other genre. Action movies. Comedy movies. Age gap movies.

Many of the movies on such lists aren't your average movie genre. They're predatory. Labeling them as age gap puts them in the same category with non-creepy age gap movies, and with non-creepy age gaps in real life. When some 30-year-old celeb hooks up with someone 20 years older, the tabloids may talk it up, but we've come to see it as normal. After all, developmentally and emotionally, the difference between a 30 and 50 year old is nothing like the difference between an 18-year-old and a 40-year-old.

That's because the latter is a relationship between someone whose brain isn't fully matured and who has limited life experience, and someone who is fully developed, which can be very dangerous.

On that list, I also found my personal favorites, Blue Car and Fish Tank. I say favorite because those are the two that, in my humble opinion, best capture the inane creepiness and abusive nature of such 'relationships'.

Following the growing tenderness between a middle-aged English teacher and a young girl from a broken home, Blue Car manages to make the supremely charming David Strathairn into a veritable creep. Never in my life have I seen a more awkward, stilted and downright disturbing sex scene. Something that makes you uncomfortable just watching, 20 years later. As it should, considering the difference between the two characters.

Certainly a vivid contrast with the overly romanticized and passionate kiss that Lolita and Humbert Humbert share when she's off to camp.

Fish Tank, I saw when I was 16. Huge crush on Michael Fassbander. Adored this kind of movie since it tapped straight into all my daddy issues. Even then, I found it creepy. Yet re-watching it recently, I was struck by how blind I'd been to its warnings. For once, it's a movie that doesn't glorify or romanticize at all this sort of "age gap romance". When her mom brings home a new boyfriend, 15-year-old Mia is at first skeptical and stand-offish. However, as 30-something Connor plays daddy and weasels his way into their hearts, affection begins to blossom. It isn't long before affection grows into sexual exploitation, though.

I think that's what's good about some of these movies, that the directors go to painstaking lengths to make the male protagonists creepy and disturbing. As you should when depicting this sort of story. For us to then dismiss them as "an age gap movie" or "older man - younger woman romance" seems extremely reductive and dangerous.

Why? Because it normalizes it, for one. And because it romanticizes it. There are all sorts of age gaps. This particular brand of age gap is often abusive and weird. I think it would make some people searching this (and there seem to be a whole lot) think twice if instead, we removed all the age gap titles featuring teenagers, and re-labelled them as "so you wanna watch a movie where a creepy man in his 40s lies to and tries to screw an underage, naive girl". Maybe that would at least alter their expectations a bit about what they're viewing.

Besides, these movies don't accurately reflect the dilemmas and hurdles of being in an actual age gap relationship.

When you're 27 and dating someone in their 40s, your biggest concern isn't being caught by the law or by your parents. It's having different understandings of a Saturday afternoon, of style, of making cultural references that the other person doesn't get.

There were aspects of The Idea of You that I liked precisely because they did that. Captured the different life stages and the different social and cultural references that two people 15 years apart will naturally encounter in a such a relationship.

Movies like Lost in Translation, Liberal Arts or Mr. Morgan's Last Love may not be as naughty, but they tend to be more fulfilling. Because leaving aside this pedophilia obsession, they actually explore the challenges of falling for someone who grew up in a different moment, who experienced a different social scene and parenting style, and someone who is navigating life from a different perspective and perhaps has never experienced true heartbreak or actual love.
Which, I feel, can also be a really interesting story to tell.

Does it matter that much? I think so. I know I often say this, but how we speak determines how we think. And when we normalize or downplay abnormal, predatory scenarios, we're putting ourselves and our children at risk. Of course, it's not just how we speak about these movies, it's the stories themselves. The idea, the myth of the nymphet has long been a staple of our creative endeavors and I don't think a mere rebranding can exorcise it from our collective imagination. But that's an issue for another time.

What do you think? About this, about age gaps in love, whatever.