Geriaction Cinema: Introduction

The Irishman (2019). Directed by Martin Scorsese. Shown from left: Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Ray Romano. Photo courtesy of Netflix/Photofest.

TO SAY that Da 5 Bloods (Spike Lee, 2020) is self-conscious in its engagement with cinematic precedents would be an understatement. The Vietnam veterans at the heart of the narrative directly criticize Rambo: First Blood Part II (George P. Cosmatos, 1985) and Missing in Action (Joseph Zito, 1984) as manifestations of Hollywood “trying to go back and win the Vietnam War,” even as they themselves return to Ho Chi Minh City decades after the conflict on a quest to address unfinished business. The riverboat trip that takes them back into the jungle where they will confront their demons is accompanied by Richard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries,” adding Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) to a long list of overt film references.

Even amongst such programmatically knowing intertextuality, one element of Da 5 Bloods stands out as jarringly non-naturalistic. The numerous flashbacks to the war focus on the four main characters and their fallen comrade, Stormin’ Norman. For the purposes of narrative verisimilitude, all five men should be in their late teens or twenties, yet Paul, David, Otis, and Eddie remain in their sixties, still played by the actors who portray them in their present-day manifestations. No attempt is made to de-age these actors, either through makeup or digital manipulation, resulting in an incongruous spectacle that unavoidably draws our attention to the artifice of the filmmaking process. We might argue that the effect is to place the audience on a cognitive level with the four main characters, whose flashbacks we are witnessing as they look back on their youth through the prism of age and bitter experience. This reading is supported by the film’s official press release, which declares that the lack of de-aging is supposed to illustrate how “current dilemmas and even ailments color recollections of [the characters’] former selves” (Ugwu). Accordingly, references to the historical continuity of racism are unmissable throughout the film, as the legacies of colonialism in Vietnam merge seamlessly with memories of the war and the civil-rights movement and feed directly into discussions around the escalation of racial tensions during the Trump administration and the Black Lives Matter campaign.

Lee’s refusal to compromise with the demands of seamless narrative flow should, however, also be considered in a broader industrial context: one in which processes of de-aging actors have become conspicuously de rigueur in genres that are commonly associated with masculinity and its crises. The director’s claim (contradicting his producer’s) that the lack of any such process was purely down to budgetary constraints seems to be more a mischievous reference to Netflix’s highly publicized financing of CGI de-aging in The Irishman (Martin Scorsese, 2019) than a genuine explanation (if narrative cohesion was Lee’s main priority, it would surely have been affordable to cast four young actors to believably portray the flashback-era characters). The decision to eschew de-aging of any sort should therefore be seen as a performative, playful violation of the fourth wall. This perspective is borne out by the film’s modes of address, such as when Paul (Delroy Lindo) performs his departing soliloquy by looking straight into the camera, or when each flashback is announced by an overt change of aspect ratio and a shift to grainy film stock, thus foregrounding the signifiers of mediation. Finally, in the closing moments of the film, the main characters are at last de-aged in a digitally manipulated still photograph. This segues into archive footage of a 1967 speech from Martin Luther King, Jr., about the legacy of slavery, which is then followed by a caption about Dr. King’s assassination. The “photograph” is therefore framed as part of a closing epilogue showing the real-life historical events behind the story, by implication positioning the rest of the film as a self-conscious reenactment.

Issues of aging have become so prevalent in action-related genres in recent years … that Lee’s conspicuous denial of de-aging trickery is simultaneously a frustration of audience expectation.

It is revealing that the aging process is the primary means through which Da 5 Bloods’ playfulness occurs. Issues of aging have become so prevalent in action-related genres in recent years—from the digital rendering of youth in Avengers: Endgame (Anthony Russo and Joe Russo, 2019) and Captain Marvel (Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, 2019) to the return of familiar, now retirement-age heroes in Star Wars: The Force Awakens (J. J. Abrams, 2015), Blade Runner: 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, 2017), Terminator: Dark Fate (Tim Miller, 2019), and Rambo: Last Blood (Adrian Grunberg, 2019)—that Lee’s conspicuous denial of de-aging trickery is simultaneously a frustration of audience expectation. If Rick Altman’s notion of a “generically trained audience … sufficiently familiar with genre plots to exhibit generic expectations” holds true, then representations of aging have surely now become part and parcel of that generic contract where the “action film” is concerned (Altman 279).

Da 5 Bloods (2020). Directed by Spike Lee. Shown from left: Johnny Nguyen (billed as Johnny Tri Nguyen), Clarke Peters, Delroy Lindo. Photo courtesy of Netflix/Photofest.

Certainly, such shifts have not gone unnoticed in film scholarship. Action cinema has long been analyzed for its investment in spectacle and hyperbolic masculinity, its significance for film marketing, and its ideological implications across various conflicts and contexts (see especially Tasker, Spectacular Bodies; Jeffords; Pfeil). Its stars have also been extensively studied in their cultural-political surroundings (see Holmlund, “Masculinity as Multiple Masquerade”; Geraghty; Saunders; Morrison, among many others). In recent years, a growing trend within this field has analyzed the emergence of a “geriaction” (or “geri-action”) subgenre, in which aging (mostly male) action stars reprise famed personae and self-consciously engage with their diminished physical prowess. As the action-adventure format’s blockbuster-era manifestation has reached old age, and the personae of Cold War–era action stars have adapted to incorporate themes of aging, so too have scholarly discussions around seniority in the genre’s marquee personnel come to the fore.

After groundbreaking work by Chris Holmlund on the aging-star body of Clint Eastwood (Holmlund, Impossible Bodies 141–56), The Expendables (Sylvester Stallone, 2010) and its sequels have emerged as emblematic case studies for how themes of redundancy, expendability, and dependency that are associated with old age in neoliberal Western cultures have been articulated through action cinema in the past decade (Boyle and Brayton; Tasker, “Stallone, Ageing, and Action Authenticity”; Donnar, “Narratives of Cultural and Professional Redundancy”; Bühring, “Declining to Decline”; Holmlund, “Presenting Stallone”). This franchise’s reprise of 1980s–1990s action-film personae played by Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dolph Lundgren, Bruce Willis, Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Mel Gibson, Wesley Snipes, and Harrison Ford have provided ample material for the identification of this broader trend, which merges self-referential nostalgia for “tough guy” masculinity and a preoccupation with the aging male body. Stallone in particular has been analyzed as the aging action star par excellence, due to his consistently self-referential engagement with his own star personae (Gates; Holmlund, “Presenting Stallone”; Donnar, “Redundancy and Ageing”). Donnar argues that notions of redundancy and aging have always been integral to Stallone’s star image, “generically as an action star performer and narratively via culturally and professionally redundant and aged characters” (247). For Donnar, Rocky and Rambo both register the superfluousness of hyperbolic masculinity and the expendability of a victimized working class (250). The physical aging of that same persona therefore renders literal these ever-present themes.

These varied forms, and the dynamic status of the geriaction arena, were in evidence in the papers delivered at the symposium “Geriaction Cinema: A Symposium on the Ageing Action Star” that we hosted at Bournemouth University in 2018.

While it is noticeable—and has been noted here—that the genre of action (and geriaction) has largely been centered on the crises, validations, and affirmations around masculinity, it has never been exclusively male. Chris Holmlund’s 2019 Leverhulme Public Lecture at the University of Reading, “Mother-F*ers of Invention: Women in Geriaction,” points out that the origins of the term geriaction lie in addressing how to keep elderly patients in care homes active—and the patients in question were largely female. The adoption of the term in relation to aging action stars shifted the gender emphasis and this shift is evident in the articles in this collection: they all address masculine geriaction. This was not a deliberate choice, but the absence does raise many questions around the position of women in action as a whole. We cannot point to a lack of women in either Western or global cinema (arguably, the female action star is much more prevalent in cinema from Southeast Asia—Chen Pei Pei and Michelle Yeoh are possibly the most recognized in the West), while Indian actor Priyanka Chopra has made a mark as an action star in both America and Bollywood. Hollywood has produced a number of female performers whose action credentials are continuing into their 40s (Charlize Theron, Angelina Jolie, Michelle Rodriguez), much like Sigourney Weaver before them, while Linda Hamilton made a welcome return to the iconic role of Sarah Connor in Terminator: Dark Fate (Tim Miller, 2019). Holmlund’s 2019 lecture posits that knowledge and ability are foregrounded as important in situating the aging female action body—a point that resonates with Kelvin Ke’s article “Rehabilitating Hegemonic Masculinity with the Bodies of Aging Action Heroes.” Ke argues that the wisdom gained with maturity replaces an egocentric toxic masculinity, which in turn allows for the exploration and validation of different forms of heroism.

These varied forms, and the dynamic status of the geriaction arena, were in evidence in the papers delivered at the symposium “Geriaction Cinema: A Symposium on the Aging Action Star” that we hosted at Bournemouth University in 2018. While small in scale, the symposium showcased papers looking at geriaction from gendered, global, and industrial perspectives. The keynote address by Rajinder Dudrah (which forms the nucleus of the article contained in this collection) examined the evolving later-life career of Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan in “The Geri-Actions of the Aging Amitabh Bachchan.” The global perspective continued with MaoHui Deng and Fraser Elliott’s examination of Sammo Hung in “Fighting with Dementia: The Bodyguard and Contemporary Hong Kong Cinema.” This paper interrogated how themes of dementia and “not-remembering” act as analogies for contemporary trends in Chinese-language cinema, as the past of both stars and of Hong Kong cinema itself become appropriated into a unified “Chinese cinema” by an increasingly influential mainland. The symposium also explored the female face of geriaction, with Lisa-Nike Bühring’s “Retired, Extremely Dangerous and Female: Helen Mirren Kicking Ass in R.E.D.” This paper argued that while Mirren’s portrayal in the film is counter to the dominant representation of aged femininity as fragile, the narrative as a whole supports neoliberal discourses around aging and consumerism.

Two papers, which together highlighted the neoliberal fetishism of “useful” youthfulness and the attendant redundancy of old age, took different approaches to Sylvester Stallone. Jorge Pérez Iglesias’s paper, “The Decline of the Muscle Cinema in Last Action Hero and Demolition Man,” outlined how the self-reflexive outputs of Stallone’s 1990s work reflect the changing political climate in America at that time. Mark McKenna considered Stallone’s economic capital and the ways in which he has adapted his star persona to extend his global celebrity image in “Sylvester Stallone and the Economics of the Ageing Film Star.” Christa van Raalte further added to this focus on the aging male action star with her paper, “21st Century Cowboy? Deconstructing the Hero in Late Clint Eastwood Movies,” which focused on how Eastwood’s later films actively deconstruct and reference his earlier work and persona (and an expansion of van Raalte’s paper is also included in this collection).

Christopher Holliday took an industrial perspective and looked at the mediation of youth and age by digital technologies in “Next Generation Hollywood: Digital De-Aging and the Virtual Recreation of Youth.” By tying the ontology of the digital image to notions of aging as a sociocultural construct, Holliday compellingly explored how the “youthing” of aged stars via their digital likenesses represent a possible future for computer-mediated acting. The genre of geriaction was further opened up by two papers focused on the world of espionage. Alexander Sergeant’s examination of James Bond in “007’s ‘Nasty Habit of Surviving’: ‘Working-Through’ Temporality and Ageing in the James Bond Franchise” argued that the cyclical nature of the franchise provides a repetitive repression of aging alongside an imperialist fantasy of national identity. Laura Crossley’s paper, “Palmer, Smiley … and Powers: Old Spies in a Young Man’s Game,” examined the dichotomy of the mentor/mentee relationship evident across a number of spy texts, with a particular focus on the star persona of Michael Caine.

The Expendables 2 (2012). Directed by Simon West. Shown from left: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis. Photo courtesy of Lionsgate/Photofest.

Apart from the adapted papers contained in this collection as already indicated, other presentations from this symposium have since found publication outlets, notably “Sylvester Stallone and the Economics of the Ageing Film Actor” (McKenna) and “Retroframing the Future: Digital De-Aging Technologies in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema” (Holliday). This special edition of the Journal of Popular Film and Television is therefore a timely intervention, both arising from our event and participating in this growth area of scholarship.

The global nature of geriaction is something also noteworthy: as the examples of female stars from Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent, as well as the papers from the symposium, indicate, “geriaction” is certainly not an exclusively US phenomenon. This crucial point is foregrounded in the first of this collection’s articles. In “The Geri-Actions of the Aging Amitabh Bachchan,” Rajinder Dudrah examines the ways in which the concept of geri-action fluctuates according to its cultural contexts, taking Bachchan’s career as a case study to aid the understanding of a polycentric global cinematic landscape. Dudrah interrogates scholarly approaches to world cinema, stardom, and pastiche to develop fresh insights into Bachchan’s star appeal, his glocal significance, and the nuanced impacts of his aging on these diverse factors. In turn, this article offers an alternative perspective on notions of “action” in an Indian cinematic context, going beyond fighting and stunts to invoke a broader range of “doing, excitement, and spectacle,” including emotions, song and dance routines, dialogue, and the nurturing of an online star persona.

In “Reflections on Mortality: The Imagery of Mirrors in Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino,” Christa van Raalte offers a close reading of Eastwood’s aging action-hero persona in Gran Torino (Clint Eastwood, 2008), providing a detailed account of how this figure has morphed by adapting the elegiac tropes of the Western genre. Through notions of an inverted Lacanian “mirror stage” of old age, in which the subject fails to identify with a decrepit self-image, van Raalte charts how Eastwood’s film rearticulates the various stages of the star’s recognizable persona through the repeated use of mirrors. These are shown to reflect and dwell upon the aging body of the erstwhile action star, self-reflexively framing him in relation to his past roles.

In “Too Old for This Sh*t: Aged Action Heroes, Affect, and ‘the Economy of Exertion,’” Lennart Soberon provides a corrective to scholarly approaches that place aging as an aberration within the action genre, instead situating the performance of age as a logical extension of that genre’s patriarchal pleasures surrounding stoical suffering. Situating the action film in a historical continuum that frames strenuous, victimized masculinity as fundamentally redemptive, Soberon argues that its relationship to both the Western and melodrama provides a framework of resilience that emphasizes and rearticulates masculine agency through an “economy of exertion.” Old age is thus identified as an ideal set of preconditions to disavow the structures of male hegemony, instead placing the “besieged underdog” action hero in a marginalized position of empowering victimhood.

The global nature of geriaction is something also noteworthy: as the examples of female stars from Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent, as well as the papers from the symposium, indicate, “geriaction” is certainly not an exclusively US phenomenon.

In “Make America Hate Again? The Politics of Vigilante Geriaction,” Gregory Frame examines how visions of obsolete, aging masculinity in contemporary vigilante films have become co-opted into a conservative discourse of US national pride, as symptomatic expressions of Trump’s America. Taking the Death Wish remake (Eli Roth, 2018) as his key case study, Frame analyses how signifiers of aging in such films serve a broader purpose of resuscitating authoritarian heroism, speaking for a (white male) nationalist machismo that feels itself to have been rendered outmoded by social, economic, and political change. Specifically, the article places geriaction vigilantism within Trump-era anxieties about immigration and urban decay as disruptive forces to white male hegemony, offering an important examination of this latest iteration of a subgenre and its relationship to shifting political contexts.

The shift of political contexts was in evidence as this collection was being put together, as the Trump administration gave way (grudgingly) to Joe Biden and the Democrats. While Trump’s jibes of “Sleepy Joe” aimed at his political rival sought to emphasize Biden’s age (ironic, considering Trump himself is only four years younger), the more measured persona displayed by Biden seemingly spoke of gravitas and maturity, especially when contrasted with Trump’s often infantile showboating. The first week of Biden’s presidency was characterized not by “sleepiness” but by the volume of executive orders signed, with fifteen on the first day alone (Levine). For many, this was an affirmation of wisdom but was also part of a progressive social project that commentators and observers may more usually associate with youth.

Wider cultural shifts effected by the Covid-19 pandemic have also shone a spotlight on our relationship with aging. In the UK, older lives have become paramount, with many lockdown restrictions and the later vaccine rollout aimed at protecting the elderly; the standout hero of 2020 was the 99-year-old Captain Sir Tom Moore. Discussions around both the frailties and value of the aging body have become mainstream and, where older people are often rendered invisible and irrelevant in a youth-focused society, the refocus resulting from the pandemic has meant that older lives are not necessarily viewed as redundant.

These themes and concerns are evident throughout geriaction cinema and are manifest in the articles in this collection. The almost defiant refusal of Da Five Bloods to hide the age of its protagonists and the situating of them as they are now in their own past embodies our complicated relationship with aging, with the intersection of past and present made both visible and indivisible. It is arguable that almost all film renders this intersection visible: if we have grown up watching particular actors, we carry very vividly the memory of how they looked even in the moment where we see them as they are now. This is made yet more complicated through processes of digital de-aging in films such as Ant-Man (Peyton Reed, 2015), where the de-aged Michael Douglas is an almost-but-not-quite rendering of his youthful self, immediately followed by Douglas’s present appearance. These moments are limited, unlike The Irishman, where the extensive scenes with the de-aged Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci offer the not particularly tantalizing prospect of extending their careers indefinitely.

Yet there is a poignancy in viewing The Irishman that is probably unintended by the filmmakers: the digital effects are impressive but, while the faces of the men are digitally resculpted, their physicality betrays their age: slower, more limited movement, thicker bodies. Their aged selves lie as a pentimento beneath the digital artifice, a constant reminder of the unstoppable reality of aging. As with Deleuze’s crystal-image, the past and present coexist inextricably. As we have addressed throughout this introduction, these are not issues relevant only to the West and certainly not just to cinema. There is a commercial imperative on the part of the stars discussed here to maintain their careers, just as the industry will capitalize on the current trend for nostalgia that makes films such as The Expendables attractive to an audience base that was not even born when the stars first came to prominence. What to do with an aging action star may not be the most urgent question to answer but the wider themes that these films explore articulate our fears about the tensions between relevance and redundancy. By building on the previous work in this area, this timely collection points toward the varied pathways through and around questions of action and age and we hope that readers will be inspired to pursue these across global cinemas.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Laura Crossley

Laura Crossley is Senior Lecturer in Film at Bournemouth University. Her research interests include national identity, British film, nostalgia, postmodernism, and post-colonialism. Her specific areas of interest are British spy fictions, particularly on film and television. She is currently researching aspects of nostalgia culture in contemporary Cold War fictions as part of a wider research project. She is founding coeditor of the Routledge Studies in Espionage and Culture (Routledge) and is part of the BAFTSS Special Interest Group on British Film and Television.

Austin Fisher

Austin Fisher is Associate Professor of Popular Culture at Bournemouth University. He is author of Blood in the Streets: Histories of Violence in Italian Crime Cinema (Edinburgh UP, 2019) and Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western (I. B. Tauris, 2011), as well as editor of Spaghetti Westerns at the Crossroads (Edinburgh UP, 2016). He is also coeditor of both Grindhouse: Cultural Exchange on 42nd Street, and Beyond (Bloomsbury, 2016) and Bloomsbury’s Global Exploitation Cinemas book series. He sits on the editorial boards of the Transnational Screens and [in]Transition journals, as well as the Popular West book series (Oklahoma UP).