Redefining 'Age Gap'

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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'?


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"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.



A little levity.

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.

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19 comments
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Sounds like a movie to add later this weekend.. at first from the thumbnail I thought it is "La la land" giving the same vibes especially the theme..

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Yeehaw, pardner! This here blog sure makes a powerful point about how we perceive age gap relationships in movies. It's mighty important to differentiate between healthy love stories and predatory behavior, don't you think? Keep spreadin' that awareness, cowboy style!

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We just watched this film last night! I'm of the opinion that as long as someone is both legally an adult and mature enough to handle this kind of relationship it can be healthy and balanced. Being on the same level, maturity-wise would be the key. Relationships themselves are very difficult as it is but dating someone with that large of an age gap would multiply the challenges.

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Ah what a coincidence! 100% agree :D

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Honestly had never heard of 'age gap movie'. I dunno why that would even be a marketable concept. I myself am in a fairly spacious gap of 6.5 years which has its own notable issues, but I wouldn't say movie-worthy as a concept lol.

The ones you bring up just make me feel weird knowing they exist. I have a kind of suspicion that most movie directors touching on touchy subjects are themselves a but suspect. Call me judgemental or whatever lol but I just get that vibe (and a non-zero percent of the time I turn out to be right)

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(Edited)

Mobbs? LOL! When I was 16 years old, I read a novel titled Harriet Said by British author Beryl Bainbridge for my book report in the eleventh grade. The novel was about a 13-year-old girl who becomes intimately involved with a 56-year-old man insofar as it leads to the murder of the man's wife. So many years later, this novel was made into a movie titled Heavenly Creatures. In the movie, the girl protagonist was 14 years old, and her forbidden lover was only 19 years old. By putting the two characters so close in age difference in the movie, the plot lost much of its shock effect that made the book a success.

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Well I mean... If you can completely remove the artist from the art then it might have some impact in and of itself. But the fact a human wrote it makes me feel a bit sus, only because I live in a world where epstein's island was a whole thing, and so much of it is out in the open.

There's that red hot chili pepper guy who is 61 and dating a 19 year old - and a ton more out there. Sure, legal, technically, but that's still pretty messed up. How long were they talking before the young girls became legal?

I just find it hard to believe somebody who doesn't personally have a fantasy about this stuff would write about it purely for arts sake. Like, I wouldn't write a book about the explosive romance between two ballet dancers - not my wheelhouse.

Also, why's my name funny -__-

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The late Beryl Bainbridge was always known to flirt with taboos in her novels. The point that I'm trying to make is that if a movie producer turns a book into a movie, they really do no justice to the author if they whitewash an essential characteristic of the plot. In the book Harriet Said, the female protagonist was 43 years apart in age difference from the older man. In the movie, they were only 5 years apart. Because the story is about a forbidden liaison between a teenage girl and an older man, it loses much of its effect when the movie producer does what is basically changing the plot.

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(Edited)

Mobbs? I wasn't laughing at your name. What I was laughing about was that when you said that 6.5 years was a fairly spacious age gap, it brought to mind how a movie producer shrank the age difference noticeably between the female teenage character and the older man from the book Harriet Said. It was almost as though the movie producer rewrote the story upon making it into a movie.

Oh, by the way, the actual name of the movie I was talking about was Heavenly Creatures rather than Heavenly Bodies. Sorry for any confusion that misnaming the movie in my previous reply may have caused. I never saw Heavenly Bodies.

I wasn't aware of the red hot chili pepper guy. Yeah, that sounds like a Lori Mattix thing. From what I heard, that was so common way back in the day.

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Why did you downvote one of my articles?

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I don't like your posts - Highly disturbing

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(Edited)

Well, I could publish human-interest stories, and I do like to write them. If I did so, you probably would even like them. However, they don't get as many views as controversial articles do. And if I write controversial articles, then I have to be brutally honest about what I write instead of sugarcoating everything.

I guess I should have waited until the eighth day from the publication dates of my two latest articles before walking into the lion's den and posting anything that someone might take the wrong way. I would have been 20 cents richer than I am now. I didn't realize that this was going to get hostile. I guess I should publish my articles on Blurt.blog instead where there is no downvoting posts. 😒

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I'm not throwing dead animals through your bedroom windows. It's just a downvote. We've all had them at various times. Anyway here is not the place to discuss

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Hmmmm. Cowboy.curator just upvoted some of our comments on this discussion thread. Looks like we've both made ourselves a friend here.

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There's a lot of debate within the scientific community over whether it actually takes 25 years for a person's brain to develop. Pedophilia has nothing to do with movies about a teenager and an adult falling love with each other. Yes, it's true that the American culture tends to stigmatize these scenarios more aggressively than other cultures do. However, if you're viewing the movie Gardens of the Night, then you're watching a movie about dangerous pedophiles inasmuch as the victm in that movie is an 8-year-old girl. If you're watching American Beauty or Diary of a Teenage Girl, then you're merely seeing a film about a forbidden romance between a teenage girl and an older suitor. It doesn't necessarily have to be about anything predatory.