Aging Men and Masculinities in Contemporary Spanish Cinemas and Audiovisual Industries

Economic, sociopolitical, and cultural structures have institutionalized the different stages of life based on an individual’s level of independence and productivity (Thane 2005). Neoliberalism has promoted the idea that older people do not contribute anything to society but consume national economic resources: pensions and healthcare expenditures. Drawing an arbitrary line between productivity and unproductivity solely based on retirement, often at the age of 65, clearly exposes an arbitrary notion of age that creates and sustains the binary young/old: being young (positive) vs. old (negative). In 1969, Robert Butler coined the term ageism, the social discrimination suffered by older people after retirement. One year later, Simone de Beauvoir in The Coming of Age (Beauvoir 1996) also emphasized the stigmatization of older people, men and women, after retirement, adding, however, that the image of women as “unproductive” started much earlier, coinciding with the menopause, which put an end to their “(re-)productive” capacity.

Challenging traditional biopolitical models that claim that older people are a burden on society, however, the focus of cultural gerontology has been to unveil how “we are aged by culture” (Gullette 2005). In this sense, Margaret Gullette’s studies have revealed how cultural narratives have created a notion of aging as a decline. In order to prevent excessive financial burden on the state, neoliberal and biomedical stakeholders have promoted the narrative of “successful aging” (Rowe and Kahn 1997), which fosters aging “well” or “healthy” aging. Central to this notion is the promotion of staying/looking young for as long as possible, resorting to physical exercise, plastic surgery, vitamins, etc. However, as Linn Sandberg (2013) has argued, both narratives–decline and successful aging–have disregarded the material corporealities of the aging body. That is, aging is affected by multiple factors, including gender, and, therefore, it cannot be seen as a homogeneous process for both men and women, as Sandberg’s concept of “affirmative aging” suggests.

Traditionally, gender studies have focused on women. It is women who have undergone the worst effects of gender discrimination, and so it is women who had to make gender visible as a political category for the first time. No wonder most gender-ed approaches to aging have focused on women. Older feminist scholars like Gullette (2005), Woodward (1988), Kapplan (2005), and Sontag (1972), among others, showed how cultural representations of aging women tended to depict female aging as decline, with the female body being recurrently hidden from the youthful structure of the look (Woodward 1988). It was also these feminist scholars who disclosed that, contrary to male actors, female actors tend to disappear from the screen after the age of 40 (Chivers 2012; Dolan 2017; Gravagne 2013; Medina Bañón and Zecchi 2020).

Yet gender studies have since the late 1980s started to pay increasing attention to men’s lives as well. Over the last twenty years, gender studies have increasingly expanded to incorporate both women and Critical Studies on Men and Masculinities (CSMM). This has contributed to promoting a thriving interdisciplinary masculinity research, which has given way to a fast-growing number of publications in the Social Sciences and the Humanities, including sociological, psychological, historical, anthropological, and cultural studies of masculinity, amongst others (Armengol 2022). As more and more work is being done in the name of masculinity studies, scholarship has slowly but steadily begun to analyze social constructions and cultural representations of aging men and masculinities, too.

While the first studies of masculinities in the late 1980s stemmed from sociology and psychology, the field, as Michael Kimmel has argued, has since the late 1990s moved “very influentially” into the Humanities, so that this is now “probably the center” (Kimmel 2009), resulting in the recent publication of a growing number of studies on cultural representations of masculinity in literature, cinema, art, music, the media, etc. These studies have covered a diversity of topics, such as cultural representations of male sexualities, the male body, fatherhood, friendship, and gender violence, to name but a few. However, masculinity studies have mostly been focused on the experiences of younger and middle-aged men, while aging studies have largely concentrated on older women. Thus, as Linn Sandberg (2011) argues, older men have remained largely invisible in both disciplines. While male aging may not be as culturally denigrated as female aging, it is, of course, equally deserving of scholarly attention, which, however, seems to have seldom received. Indeed, aging males, when/if studied at all within feminist scholarship, have only occasionally been approached as a specific and equally complex gendered group, having been recurrently depicted as a homogeneous, ‘genderless’ group against which older women were implicitly compared (Armengol 2014; Hobbs 2016).

Representations of aging men in Western cultures tend to reflect hegemonic discourses based on stereotypes that either associate aging with decline or emphasize “successful” aging (healthy and sexually active older men). As a result, and through a detailed analysis of aging men’s life stories, distorted images of aging men surface. Although studies focusing on these cultural representations of aging men have started to be published in the last decade (Armengol 2014; Armengol & Medina 2022; Chivers 2012; Cohen-Shalev & Marcus 2013; Dolan 2017; Hartung et al. 2022; Hobbs 2016; Medina 2018; Tracy & Schrage-Früh 2022; Zecchi et al. 2021), it is also true that more attention needs to be paid to cultural representations of aging men and masculinities so as to provide more nuanced perspectives on the subject.

In line with these ideas, then, the present special issue seeks to offer an innovative and interdisciplinary approach that includes original articles addressing precisely essential questions about the intersections of masculinity and aging, as well as masculinity and aging studies, particularly in and through contemporary Spanish cinemas and audiovisual industries. More specifically, the select papers draw on visual (re)presentations, ranging from cinema to TV series to documentary films to media and photography, so as to understand more fully the interrelationship of masculinities with a variety of social issues specifically associated with men’s aging in Spain, such as older men’s health, social inclusion and exclusion, sexualities and affective relationships, as well as ageist stereotypes, amongst others. By looking at men’s experiences of, and attitudes to, aging in and through their visual representations, the issue also aims to explore the gendered specificities of men’s aging from an intersectional perspective so as to highlight that aging masculinities are inextricably linked other essential social issues such as class, sexuality, disability, national(ist) and racialization processes, environmental and animal ethics, etc. The resulting notions of aging men and masculinities that emerge from these intersections will be shown to shape their cultural representations.

Hannah Zeilig argued for the critical potential of identifying the personal, emotional, social, and political constructions of aging in order to make both age and gender ideologies visible. She explored the age ideologies that underpin literary and, by extension, film narratives, questioning how age and gender interact to shape such narratives. In doing so, she questioned how much artwork relates to other narratives and discourses on age (Zeilig 2012 at 30). In line with Zeilig’s contentions, the present special issue contributes a number of articles that specifically bring together masculinity an aging studies, two traditionally separate fields of Spanish studies. Although masculinity in contemporary Spanish culture has been examined in film (Fouz-Hernández & Martínez-Expósito 2007; Gabilondo 2006; Perriam 2013; Hartson 2017; Ryan and Corbalán 2019), its intersections with aging studies are still scarce and, thus, we believe this study is timely.

While aging studies are starting to take off within Spanish Studies, most of the research carried out so far has dealt with representations of aging women. For instance, in the past few years, several collection of essays have been published (Galán 2013; Medina Bañón and Zecchi 2023; Rodríguez 2018; Zecchi et al. 2021) which analyze the invisibility of older people as main characters in film, the presentation of the female aging body and its sexuality, the possibility of a feminist film theory approach to aging, female intergenerational relationships and ecocriticism, among others. Thus, analytical approaches to aging masculinities within Spanish studies are very much needed, especially to unveil the complexity arising from the intersection of diverse aging and masculinity practices. This special issue thus aims at filling an important gap. The articles delve into the interrelationship of aging and masculinity from different critical perspectives while intersecting with other fundamental areas of study such as environmental and animal studies, stardom and celebrity studies, late-life creativity, intergenerational relationships, as well as gender and sexuality studies.

Katheleen Woodward has pointed out the importance of bringing together aging studies and environmental studies so as to examine generational divides and foster intergenerational solidarity to battle climate change. As Núria Mina-Riera (2023) has argued, both aging studies and ecocriticism analogously examine representations of the aging body and the non-human world as abject (76). Likewise, intergenerational relationships between younger and older adults have become central to the discussion of social, political, and cultural changes regarding men and masculinities. Topics such as men’s role as grandfathers and fathers within the family and society, stereotypical understandings of generational differences and conflict, and the construction of aging masculinities and gender relationships have all become recent subjects of discussion (King et al. 2013; Tracy & Schrage-Früh 2022).

Thus, the first three articles of this issue deal with different audiovisual representations–film and documentary film–of aging masculinities, non-human animals, and environmental issues. Mario Camus’s 1984 film adaptation of Miguel Delibes’s novel Los santos inocentes (1984) portrays rural life in 1960s Spain under Franco’s dictatorship. The film meticulously depicts with great detail the rural, daily coexistence of human and non-human animals. Ignacio Ramos-Gay argues that this interspecies interaction often involves the instrumentalization of animals or their extermination in competitions and trophy hunting. This androcentric exploitation of nonhuman animals also serves, he elaborates, as a metaphorical reflection on the class-based hierarchy established after the Spanish Civil War, where the defeated were subjected to dehumanizing techniques, which worked to emphasize their allegedly subhuman status, manifested through social structures of servitude. This burden was borne, above all, by older and disabled men, who were dismissed by the ruling elite, who equated their moral worth with that of pets. They became as expendable as the non-human animals hunted in the scarred rural Spanish landscape. The article shows how the animalization of older and disabled men is symbolically articulated in Camus’s film. Notably, these characters are consistently depicted as wild animals, completely stripping them of their inherent value and moral worth within the sociopolitical framework of the Francoist regime.

The second article, by Claudia Alonso-Recarte, focuses on anachronistic images of masculinity in more recent years. Indeed, she argues that the image of the Spanish male hunter has recently drawn increasing suspicion from more progressive generations eager to question the meaning of such predatorial activity within the context of the more globalized, democratic ideal of Spain. Not unlike bullfighting, hunting with dogs–particularly Spanish greyhounds [galgos] and warren hounds [podencos]–has become one of the country’s trademark forms of human-animal relationships, in which machoism and masculinity determine and define the toxicity of sexist forms of encountering and interacting with the animalized Other. Alonso-Recarte analyzes how identity markers such as masculinity and age are employed in the construction of the image of galgueros, or Spanish greyhound breeders, so as to articulate an animal ethics-based narrative that speaks to the more visible struggle against speciesism and sexism in today’s Spain. She contends that within the context of animal ethics discourses, galgueros are effectively embodied by aging, rural men whose ‘traditions’ and communal forms of dog-disposing are represented as outdated, anachronistic practices that are symptomatic of a type of male population affectively attached to a type of national sentiment that is arguably in decline. Specifically, the article addresses the representation of these men, the premature aging of greyhounds through their instrumentalization, and the delicate geo-historization of rural communities of galgueros in two recent animal advocacy documentary films: Febrero, el miedo de los galgos (2013) and Yo galgo (2018).

Like Alonso-Recarte, Alfredo Martínez-Expósito’s essay keeps exploring the connections between aging, masculinity, and environmental issues. He does so by analyzing the environmental drama Cenizas del cielo (2008), set in a polluted area of the otherwise idyllic North-western region of Asturias, wich was internationally saluted as Spain’s first unambiguously ecologist film. While most studies have focused on its environmentalist theme, the film, according to Martínez-Expósito (2017), presents additional thematic complexities, such as the progressive depopulation of a fast-aging rural Spain, the challenges of growing old as a lonesome man in a traditional, patriarchal community, and the generational frictions between peasants and green activists. Galician-born actor Celso Bugalloembodies in Cenizas del cielo the complex intersections between aging, ecology and masculinity. He plays the combative character of Federico, a local farmer in his sixties who lost his wife to the pollutants of a nearby power plant. In his determination to see the plant closed, this rebellious character clashes with local politicians, activists and even with the small-village community. A living metaphor of an aging but still defiant Asturias society, Bugallo’s character is thus studied in this article as the site of multiple insurgencies.

The next two articles focus on celebrity studies, another central concern of current aging studies scholarship (Chivers 2012; Dolan 2017). More specifically, both Raquel Medina and Jorge Pérez discuss the role played by different aging celebrities in Spanish cinema and media, respectively. Thus, Medina claims that the the Spanish star system is currently witnessing a significant shift as its most celebrated male actors from the 70s to the early 21st century are aging. She notes how this aging applies both to those belonging to the silent generation (such as José Sacristán at 86, Emilio Gutiérrez Caba at 81, Miguel Rellán at 80, José María Pou at 78, and Eusebio Poncela at 76), as well as those from the baby boomer generation (like Antonio Resines at 69, Imanol Arias at 67, José Coronado at 66, Antonio Banderas at 63, and Juan Echanove at 62). This demographic trend reflects the broader aging population in Spain, and consequently, Medina argues that the aging of these iconic actors mirrors the aging of Spanish cinema and television audiences. In this sense, the article delves into the appeal of long-lasting TV series like Cuéntame cómo pasó (2001–2023), which underscores the strong connection established over the years between the characters, the actors enacting them, and the viewers, all of whom share in the experience of the passage of time. The article further scrutinizes how aging male actors often take on leading or supporting characters that adhere to the archetype of being fit, rugged, attractive, and sexually active, thereby aligning with the prevalent notion of successful aging seen in the geriaction subgenre of the U.S. audiovisual industry (Crossley and Fisher 2021; Donnar 2016; Feasey; Holmlund 2019; Jinde 2022; Purse 2017). Nevertheless, Medina concludes that, in certain instances, male characters may also encounter a form of feminization associated with aging, as exemplified by TV series like Entrevías (2022) and El príncipe (2014–2017). Such representations explore the new roles assumed by aging masculinities when addressing social and familial issues, ranging from the materiality of the body to moral obligations. Finally, series like Sentimos las molestias (2022) follow the path opened by The Kominsky Method (2018) by resorting to classic stereotypes of aging as a decline.

Like Medina, Jorge Pérez keeps focusing on aging and celebrity studies, in this case through Spanish sports media. On September 23, 2022 freelance photographer Ella Ling captured an image of tennis superstars Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal holding hands while sobbing uncontrollably during the tribute paid to the former’s retirement from professional tennis. The photo went viral on social media, and journalists and fans were quick to embrace it as a corrective to what popular discourse refers to as “toxic masculinity.” In his article Jorge Pérez analyzes this photo as an iconic picture that captures the masculine zeitgeist of contemporary times. It is a cogent visual image to illustrate a third phase of masculinity research that goes beyond the theoretical framework of “hegemonic masculinity” (Connell 2014) to fathom the diversification of forms of masculinity that Eric Anderson conceptualizes as “inclusive masculinities.”. As inclusive as this paradigm of changing masculinities is, it has largely overlooked, Pérez elaborates, the dimension of age. Aging men in film, media, and popular culture are typically depicted in a state of decay and decline, while shifting patterns of masculinity seem to be limited to youth males. This photo not only challenges prevailing norms around masculine behavior but also the way young athletes are socialized into sport (privileging hypermasculinity, dominance, and aggression). This photo, Pérez concludes, also makes great strides in presenting a forward-looking picture of Iberian masculinities. This is particularly crucial for Rafael Nadal’s celebrity brand, which is associated with a traditional form of manhood (his brand logo is “the raging bull” connoting masculinity, strength, and power), and who has been involved in sound polemics regarding his backward views on gender equality.

If Medina and Pérez focus on aging celebrities, whether actors or sports media, the next two articles focus on aging male actors and/or/as filmmakers in Spain. While Ramos-Gay takes us back to the historical formation of aging masculinities during the Spanish Transition, Manuel de la Fuente explores the lifelong career of Spanish actor and filmmaker Fernando Fernán-Gómez. Few male actors and filmmakers in contemporary Spanish cinema encapsulate the exploration of aging as profoundly as Fernando Fernán-Gómez. His creative maturity aligns with the advent and consolidation of democracy in Spain following the demise of dictator Francisco Franco. Within his films, Fernán-Gómez conducts a methodical analysis of the older person’s role in Western society, straddling the delicate balance between the marginalized position to which they are relegated and their resistance to being pushed to the sidelines. De la Fuente’s article delves into the three most significant films that address this theme. The first film, Mambrú se fue a la guerra (1986), exposes the harsh reality of a social system that forces an ex-combatant of the Spanish Civil War to age in seclusion within his own home due to the fear of reprisals from Franco’s regime. In the second film, El viaje a ninguna parte (1986), the patriarch of a traveling theater troupe resists succumbing to a profession that many regard as a mere relic of the past. His journey mirrors the struggles of older people in a society that often dismisses their contributions. The final film, El mar y el tiempo (1989), focuses on the figure of an exile who returns to his homeland after decades. These three consecutive films form a triptych that illuminates the various facets of how society grapples with older people when they are no longer perceived as useful or productive members of the community.

Older men’s sexualities have recurrently been defined as either ‘asexual’ or ‘in decline ’ (Goltz 2011; Sandberg “The Old, the Ugly and the Queer”) 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, Armengol’s essay offers an overview of representations of older men’s sexual lives in contemporary Spanish cinema, which seem to reify but also challenge such stereotypes. Thus, for example, both the classic film El abuelo (1998) by José Luis Garci and the animation film Arrugas (2011) by Ignacio Ferreras present the older men in an old people’s home as eminently asexual, while the TV series Crematorio (2011), 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 “El trasplante” (2022) one of the episodes of the recent remake of Chicho Ibáñez-Serrador’s well-known horror TV series Historias para no dormir (1966–1968 and 2021 to date), 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 gay. Using the character of Salvador Mallo as his alter-ego, Pedro Almodóvar’s (semi-)autobiographical Dolor y gloria (2019) also focuses on gay aging, redefining it as a queer” rather than linear or “straight” temporal experience (Halberstam 2005), while one of the latest Spanish horror films, Malasaña 32 (2020), 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, Armengol’s essay includes 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.

If Armengol focuses on older men’s sexualities, gay and straight, as embodied by older male characters and/or directors (e.g., Almodóvar’s semi-autobiographical movie Dolor y gloria) in contemporary Spanish cinema and TV series, the next article by Santiago Fouz-Hernández concentrates on gay aging and desire in Catalan director Ventura Pons’s filmography. In a career spanning more than 5 decades, Pons (Barcelona, 1945) has directed over 30 films. His eclectic filmography does not easily fit categories or labels of any kind, including queer cinema. However, the frequent presence of gay male characters and same-sex desire in his films is significant, especially given the advanced age of a very high proportion of those men. Pons’ camera does not shy away from presenting their bodies as both desirable and desiring. Indeed, Pons’s documentary film Ocaña, retrat intermitent (1978), invited identification with an older man as a key witness of the story. Often, same-sex relationships between men in his films occur in the context of prostitution. Sex between men in examples such as La rossa del bar (1986) or Amic/Amat (1998) would fit the pattern that Thomas Waugh (1993) defined as ‘the third body,’ a visual economy based on the Greek model where the younger man is usually seen as the object of the gaze and the older one as the subject that stands in for the older gay male spectator. However, what is remarkable in Pons’ case, Fouz-Hernández argues in his article, is that this pattern is often reversed, making a spectacle of the older man.

The article on Catalan director Ventura Pons thus serves as a useful introduction to the works of other “peripheral” representations of aging masculinities in Spain. Indeed, the Iberian Peninsula has produced some of the most compelling and enduring male archetypes in Western cinema and culture, including eponymous characters such as El Cid and Don Juan, and iconic personages such as the bullfighter or the hidalgo, among others. Nevertheless, constructions of masculinity in Iberian cultures, both Castilian and others, go far beyond these figures. Therefore, the issue also includes different re-visions of Iberian masculinities as they are manifested in, for example, Catalonia, the Basque Country, or Galicia. We hope that rethinking masculinities from these cinematic counterpoints will contribute different perspectives on the topic, and that by exploring Iberian cinemas and audiovisual industries through (aging) masculinities, we will understand new aspects of the relationship among these national(ist) identities. Thus, the aim of Esther Zaplana’s article is to have a closer look at Catalan director Albert Serra’s take on the literary myth of Don Quixote through his film Honor de Cavalleria (2006), exploring the meanings derived from Serra’s demythologizing of the old icon as regards the connections between literature and film. Using masculinity as a critical approach, the analysis employes established discourses on aging men and examine how Serra’s avant-garde visual esthetics strip its protagonists of their captivating appeal. The notion of the knight as the ideal of masculinity is challenged and hence the deceived, tired, anti-hero, Zaplana argues, comes down the pedestal in old age to show a relatable and quotidian facet of his life experience. Several aspects of the film narrative where the link between masculinity and aging–as well as its traditional identification with heroism, idealism, Quixotism, and romanticism–are rewritten are the focus of the analysis. Likewise, the literary myth speaks to us openly and voices Serrás concerns about desolation and decline, a dimension that resonates with collective anxieties about senectitude and the perils of old age.

Cinco lobitos (2022), the debut feature of Basque woman filmmaker Alauda Ruiz de Azúa, reflects on the challenges of motherhood through the relationship of its two female leading characters. Even though these two main characters bear the heavyweight of a narrative set in a historically matriarchal society such as the Basque one, Irene de Lucas argues in her article that the two male supporting roles—that of the young father and the old grandfather of the newborn child—are critical to articulate the film’s underlying discourse on the complex and evolving relationships amongst the members of a family unit, whether it be the result of traditional marriage (that of the grandparents) or a modern partnership (the young couple). Despite their age difference and distinct upbringing, the two male characters, according to De Lucas, mirror each other in their embodiment of an emotionally absent life partner and paternal figure who prioritizes his role as a provider rather than a caregiver. Hence, intertwined with the struggles of maternity and its acute impact on women’s life choices, the portrayal of fatherhood in this film, De Lucas concludes, equally reflects on the evolution of the paternal role throughout a man’s life and evokes how the traditionally assigned gender roles echo across generations of fatherhood and/as nationhood.

Arguably, the most recognizable figure of Galician manhood on screen today is the aging drug kingpin, as the burgeoning cinematic genre of Galician narco noir has exposed audiences to Galicia’s key role as a gateway for the steady flow of cocaine into Europe. The final article by Catherine Barbour thus examines the representation of aging masculinities in a range of contemporary film and television series that center on Galician drug-trafficking, drawing on fictional case studies as well as those based on actual events, such as Todo es silencio (2012), Fariña (2018), Vivir sin permiso (2018–2020), Quien a hierro mata (2019) and Operación marea negra (2022–2023). The plurality of aging masculinities in these works (hegemonic, subordinate, disabled, etc) both consolidate and undermine preconceptions about older men, especially compelling in the context of stereotypically ‘masculine’ organized crime. Given that noir has been credited with exposing anxieties at the intersection of gender and national identity, analysis of how this demographic is represented in the genre signals to the wider societal impact of crime, corruption and impunity and fundamentally sheds light on the heteropatriarchal construction of Galician nationhood.

All in all, then, this special issue should provide some more insights into the complex, multifaceted, and often contradictory representations of aging men and masculinities in contemporary Spanish cinemas and audiovisual industries, which are anything but monolithic. While far from providing an exhaustive study, or final conclusions, the volume should at least help open up new questions and discussions around this topic. Above all, it should underline the complexity as well as the necessity of further investigations into social constructions and cultural representations of aging masculinities in Spain, which are inflected, as we shall see, by equally complex factors such as gender, class, sexualities, racialization, disability, and/or national(ist) identities, amongst others. This issue should therefore be seen as simply a first step in this direction, which will, hopefully, pave the way for future research on the subject.

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Funding

The research work leading to the publication of this article was made possible thanks to the financial support of the Spanish Research Agency/Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI) through the project “Género y edad” with grant number PCI2019-103512 (2019–2022).