The Expiration-Date Culture

By BRUCE HANDY

Is it just me, or has the news been larded with stories that speak eloquently and amusingly of our cultural obsession with youth and newness? Well, to some extent, it probably is just me: I happen to be turning 40 this week, so I'm a little sensitive. But I swear, every paper I read, every newscast I watch, all I'm hearing is age, age, age.

Consider the story a few weeks ago about Riley Weston, the writer on the WB series Felicity who was fired when it was learned she was 32 years old instead of 19, as she had claimed. As a supposed teenager--judging from pictures, she could pass as Winona Ryder's sprightlier kid sister--she was considered a special asset on a show about a college student. Her angry bosses, sounding like defensive Republicans explaining impeachment, said it was the falsehood that troubled them, not the fact that Weston was in reality old enough to be the title character's mother (in some places, anyway). Her defense: she began lying about her age when she was a struggling actress, a profession in which it is assumed everyone lies about his or her age; it was only for consistency's sake, she claimed, that she continued lying once she became a writer. What Weston left unsaid is that given Hollywood's relentless, cannibalistic hunger for the new thing, TV writers too lie about their age all the time, often shaving years and suspiciously dated credits (Who's the Boss? Uh-oh) from their resumes. A thirtysomething friend of a friend of a friend of mine, a comedy writer, even had plastic surgery so he could pass as a twentysomething, presumably fresh off the Harvard Lampoon.

Or so I've been told. This may be the show-business version of an urban myth, but like any myth, it speaks to a genuine fear. And as it happens, the Writers Guild of America released a study last week showing that the older a writer is, the more likely he or she is to be unemployed: while 73% of film and television writers in their 20s are working, the figure drops to 59% for those in their 30s, and on down to 32% for those in their 50s. Of course, it's conceivable that these numbers are a reflection less of raw, hurtful prejudice than of the sad truth that older writers, to give but one example, just aren't funny enough to write for Veronica's Closet--and how unfunny that must be. Neither explanation, I might add, is much comfort for someone on the cusp of a fifth decade.

One could argue that popular culture's pandering to the young is a kind of dumbed-down reflection of the higher arts' 20th century fixation on the avant-garde. One could especially argue the point if one were looking for a serviceable transition to a discussion of last week's news that the Museum of Modern Art in New York City had to give up four highly esteemed drawings because they are no longer considered "modern." This is due to a quirk in the will of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, a co-founder of the museum and the donor of the drawings, two each by Van Gogh and Seurat; she felt that 50 years after her death (which came in 1948) the works in question would be better off in dustier institutions like New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago so that MOMA could continue its unimpeded focus on the new. Of course, the museum's management no longer takes such a narrow view of things, perhaps in part because the drawings are now valued at more than $40 million, and perhaps in part because, given the state of the art world today, who would even want an unimpeded focus on the new?

But a will is a will, and so off the masterworks went, victims of a distant philosophical cousin to kissing up to the 18-to-34 demographic. This led to a round of thumb sucking in the media's tonier precincts about MOMA's mission in a postmodern world. Is there such a thing as contemporary modernism? How does one resolve the paradox of an institutionalized avant-garde? Couldn't somebody else's will have made them get rid of those silly Dalis? While for me personally the debate didn't cut quite as close to the bone as did the fuss over Riley Weston, it did serve to remind me that I have yet to produce a masterwork of my own and that Van Gogh was 37 when he died.

I suppose I should take comfort in the spectacle of John Glenn rocketing off into outer space, which as a media event is being sold to us as the harbinger of a grand new age of elderly achievement and vitality. Still, for all of Glenn's outsize bravery--and narcissism--I suspect that as a subject of public fascination his flight is really just a more patriotic, sober and expensive variation of The Wedding Singer's rapping granny. It's one of the most unshakable rules of comedy: old people acting hip always get a laugh. And, yes, there is comfort in that. As a newly minted middle-aged person, I am no longer culturally relevant, but if I hang around long enough, maybe someday, if I'm lucky, I can be a novelty act. As Mufasa says, it's the circle of life.