https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3077-925X
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Abstract
Older men’s sexualities have recurrently been defined as either “asexual” or “in decline.” Their sexualities, when/if represented at all, have also been associated with the “dirty old man” stereotype, which has depicted sex in old age as both unpalatable and grotesque. Delving into these (mis)representations, this article offers an overview of representations of older men’s sexual lives in contemporary Spanish cinema and TV series, which seem to reify but also challenge such stereotypes. Thus, for example, both the classic film El abuelo by José Luis Garci and the highly acclaimed animation movie Arrugas by Ignacio Ferreras, based on Paco Plaza’s graphic novel of the same title, present the older men in an old people’s home as eminently asexual, while the TV series Crematorio, based on Rafael Chirbes’ homonymous novel, focuses on the relationship between an aging (heterosexual) man and a younger woman, which thus seems to reinforce the traditional “dirty old man” stereotype. Yet Salvador Calvo’s “El trasplante,” one of the episodes of the recent remake of Chicho Ibáñez-Serrador’s well-known horror TV series Historias para no dormir, appears to turn the stereotype upside down, featuring a dystopian story of an older woman who grows increasingly apart from her suddenly rejuvenated lifelong husband. Movies such as En la ciudad sin límites, on the other hand, question rigid (hetero)sexual binaries as the dying older male protagonist, a supposedly straight husband and father, is finally revealed as bisexual, while Eloy de la Iglesia’s Los novios búlgaros depicts a middle-aged man’s attachment to a younger boy, who ends up marrying his girlfriend. Using the character of Salvador Mallo as his alter-ego, Pedro Almodóvar’s (semi-)autobiographical Pain and Glory also focuses on gay aging, redefining it as a queer” rather than linear or “straight” temporal experience (Halberstam), while one of the latest Spanish horror films, Malasaña 32, revolves around a house inhabited by a ghost whose traumatic past as a transgender person living under the Francoist regime comes back to haunt the present. Whilst exploring a number of selected films and TV series that seem to conform to conventional images of older men’s sexual lives, this article will thus include alternative film representations that also undermine such limited and limiting images, thereby redefining aging men’s sexualities on the contemporary Spanish screen as much more complex and plural than has been acknowledged.
Notes
1 See Brennan.
2 See Waxman.
3 Hobbs (1–26).
4 This article focuses exclusively on aging masculinities as represented by male directors, whether gay or straight. In doing so, this study aims to explore the (self-)representations and, in Almodóvar’s case, even (semi-)autobiographical meditations on male aging by contemporary Spanish male filmmakers themselves. While far beyond the scope and possibilities of this article, it would be interesting, however, to carry out further specific (or comparative) studies of such representations by contemporary Spanish women filmmakers, such as, for example, Isabel Coixet’s adaptation of Philip Roth’s novel Dying Animal in her movie Elegy (Citation2008).
5 The Transition is the name given to the historical period ranging from the end of Franco’s dictatorship in 1975 to the onset of democracy in Spain in the 1980s.
6 See, for example, Parkin (65); Shahar (94); Botelho (138); Thane (“20th Century” 281).
7 In the original graphic novel, Agustín is actually described as a “guarro” (Roca 26).
8 As Miguel jokes, one can lose their mind, “pero no las ganas de sexo” (Roca 37).
9 Interestingly, the real estate bubble, and the associated corruption, described and denounced by Chirbes in 2007 was prescient, giving way to the 2008 financial crisis, which hit Spain particularly heavily.
10 While having been secretly in love with another man for most of his life, Max’s “double life” is only replicated by his sons, including Luis, who has abandoned his wife Carmen for the babysitter, and Víctor himself, who has an Argentinian girlfriend but is secretly in love with his sister-in-law.
11 When Víctor discovers that Rancel was imprisoned for ten years for conspiring against Franco, apparently after being betrayed by Max, Víctor wrongly assumes that his father is now feeling guilty because of this betrayal and wants to apologize to Rancel before dying. In reality, however, it was Marie who, out of jealousy, gave Rancel away and caused his arrest: Max simply feels guilty of having stayed with Marie after this.
12 Our identity, as Katharina Zilles has rightly noted, is as inflected by aging as it is by disability, which is actually quite often understood as a premature form of aging. “The ‘message of ageing’—that physical existence is moribund, frail, vulnerable—is clarified and exemplified,” as Zilles insists, “by the irreversible maiming of the body: the mark of disability points to the marks of age(ing); one category of otherness brings along, and shapes, another” (230).
13 It is true that contemporary gay culture, as McRuer himself acknowledges, is dominated by youthism, “musculinity,” and able-bodiedness, but not despite the 1980s AIDS crisis, but precisely because of it, as a direct response to the images of sick and disabled bodies that it ensued (2).
14 It may be worth remembering here that in Spain the Francoist regime enacted a fierce repression not only of political but also gender-sexual dissidence, especially LGTBIQ + communities, which had a strong clerical imprint (Ugarte 13). Catholic morality was linked to the “moral of the victors,” strong and virile, as opposed to the “moral of the defeated,” seen as weak and effeminate. In this dualism, the so-called “asocial/inverted” became an enemy of the Francoist regime, as they were considered opposite to both (hegemonic) masculinity and the heteronormative family. When political and police persecution are added to social marginalization, repression is introduced at the legal level and “asocials” become “criminals” (Ugarte 19; Mora 40). The result was that many were forced to conform to the heteronormative structure and lead a double life, or even enter the ranks of the Catholic Church to go unnoticed in a hetero-oppressive system. Most of them grew up under the so-called Vagrancy Law (Ley de Vagos y Maleantes, 1933) of the Second Republic, extended by the Franco regime in 1954 to integrate the legal figure of the “homosexual” and/or “asocial/inverted,” which included a wide array of gender and sexual dissidence. In 1970, the Social Dangerousness Law (Ley de Peligrosidad y Rehabilitación Social, 1970) was passed, which was intended to replace the previous law by emphasizing the intention to “prevent crime” and promote social “rehabilitation.” However, it was only during the Transition and, especially, on December the 26th, 1978 that the Council of Ministers of Spain ratified the modification of the Law on “Dangerousness and Social Rehabilitation.”
15 As Freeman argues, “queer becoming-collective-across-time and even the concept of futurity itself” are often “predicated upon injury–separations, injuries, spatial displacements, preclusions, and other negative and negating forms of bodily experience–or traumas that precede and determine bodiliness itself, that make matter into bodies” (11).