Chapter 8 - Contemporary productions and the ageing star

Summary

Film stars must continuously negotiate their stardom status as they grow older in a highly mediated world where youth is considered a prime value – particularly in Western cultures. Whether a star is able to ‘age successfully’ has been a growing area of investigation in Film and Media Studies, under the banner of what has become known as ‘Ageing Studies’ (Basting 1998; Gullette 2004; Harrington, Bielby and Bardo 2014). Early scholars in the field have drawn from theories on feminism and gender to move away from a biological approach to ageing – gerontology – and instead to emphasise how we learn to act one's age. In other words, age, like gender and other markers of identity, is understood as a cultural construction (Gullette 2004; Lipscomb and Marshall 2010: 2; Swinnen 2012: 7). Mark McKenna's analysis of Sylvester Stallone for the Celebrity Studies journal, for example, explores how certain stars, like Stallone, have a rare level of iconicity that is indicative of a significant moment of cultural resonance which ‘often brings with it a refusal in popular culture to allow the iconic image to change, grow or evolve’ (2019: 501). Since that image inevitably does change, there is a perception that stars become redundant. However, some artists, like Stallone, have been able to capitalise on this narrative of redundancy and reconceptualise ageing as transition (McKenna 2019: 501). Even though Darín has never reached that level of iconicity in the public sphere, the typecasting he experienced at particular points in his career – mainly the galancito and the chanta imagery explored in previous chapters – have threatened him with an expiration date. In light of these realities, the following pages will explore whether he has also been able to reconceptualise his ageing as career transition.

Sabrina Qiong Yu states in her introduction to Revisiting Star Studies that ‘there is a common perception that ageing is less an issue for male stars than female stars, since appearance weighs much more in a female star's career. This explains why researchers focus heavily on ageing and female stars […]’ (2017: 5).