The age gap in Hollywood movies: not happy ever after

41 year difference between De Niro and his life partner Chen

The average age gap between the male and female leads in Hollywood is 15 years. I don't need to tell you which gender is the older one. And that's average, meaning that in some movies, the male lead is 20 years older or more.

At the end of the movie, it is usually expected that the male and female leads will live for ever happy together. Well, that "forever" is not going to last long. 

Women in the US live on average 5 years longer than men. That means our female protagonist is likely to spend 20 years crying over her love interest's grave. Women's roles peak around age 30, whereas men's roles peak at 46, often with men in their 40s or 50s paired with women in their 20s or early 30s.

It would make much more sense for the woman to be older than the man. By about 5 years. Then they could leave our planet at about the same time!

The gender gap in movies ends up creating a model of normality. People go to the movies and identify with the protagonists. Men will think: oh, I can have a partner that is 10 or 15 or 20 years younger than me. Women will think: oh, I won't get a partner that's my age, I'll have to be in a couple with an older man. 

Marriage fits right in the capitalist market model. De Niro is a celebrity hence his value is top, and he can "afford" a woman 41 year younger. If he were retired in Bayridge, he would be no match for her. Women are supposed to look young and fresh whereas it's ok for a man to look seasoned: he's wise and has made money. Hence at 40 or 50, their market value differs markedly in our society. There are couples were the woman is older, but they tend to be discreet or they get ridiculed or worse, see French President Macron and his older wife who were targeted by US media.>

Are aliens just a projection of our subconscious?

 

Is it egocentric to believe in aliens?

Our planet is peopled by thinking creatures, therefore we imagine the same of other planets. Aliens have been typically reported to have two legs and two arms and an overlarge head and eyes, a tiny mouth, no hair. They look like a cross between a fetus and a skeleton which has lost some of our organic properties: they don't look like they would sweat or bleed.

They could be analyzed as a product of our subconscious, and of our fascination with forms that are nearly human: ghosts, zombies, severed limbs all linger on the boundaries of humanity. Such constructs challenge our perception of what it means to be human and alive, and tend to inspire us with terror. What happens to “me” when I die, besides putrefying, and where was I before I was born? 

Is my body me?

Whether we believe in an afterlife or not, our body becomes separated from our soul, intelligence, consciousness, emotions, once we die. Whatever happens to everything else, our body decays after our death, and that's awful. It becomes alien. The ovule fecundated by a spermatozoid also lacks consciousness, and emotions, and intelligence, if not soul according to some religions.

And is my hand, severed, still me? And is that photo of my stomach's endoscopy a representation of “me”? It seems that in our guts, in our entrails, death and putrefaction loom more menacingly than in our external appearance that defines us as humans. After all, our pancreas does not differ much from a bat's. 

The mystery of our boundaries (interior/exterior, dead/alive, whole/divided, psychical/physical) informs all horror films, Alien and its skinless creatures come to mind. These are different from reported images of aliens. ETs are described as being inorganic by people who claim to have seen them, while creatures imagined to provoke terror are ultra organic. 

If aliens look like fetuses, do UFOs look like our rockets?

As humans we tend to project our own essence and it's hard for us to imagine something really different. Reports of UFOs are suspiciously close to our own technology: a flying saucer is a metal rocket that projects light, only round instead of elongated.

It is remarkable that their name and shape refer to a container of food -think breast- that crosses the sky in a circular movement. Our technology is mostly inspired by the phallus (rockets, racing cars, skyscrapers, gas pumps, syringes, plugs). Aliens as a fantasy of femaleness?

Or a suppression of masculinity as portrayed stereotypically: aliens have no body hair, no muscle mass, and no erections for sure. They're movable brains.

An appealing theory has it that aliens planted Amanita muscaria on the Earth. People who have sampled this toxic mushroom (carefully enough to be able to tell the tale: I do not recommend trying this) have had out-of-body experiences. Some had the impression they floated way, way above the Earth and explored the cosmos. 

Aliens would have given us this way of experiencing the outer world rather than by physical means. While I know this is sweet folklore, the concept implies that aliens might transport themselves, or communicate using completely different means from us. No metal, no fuel, no electromagnetic waves.

Is there life on other planets that is not particularly intelligent?

To go back to alien intelligent life, we could imagine there is life on other planets that is not particularly intelligent. The creatures, deer-like, would lead gentle, unremarkable lives that do not necessitate the development of thinking. It is meditative to imagine a planet without wars, without facebook, without famines nor obesity.

I let myself dream of Planet Earth where Man would never have happened: a kind of paradise with huge areas of savannah, rain forest, ice pack, taiga, tundra, all pristine. Rhinoceros, unconcerned about the value of their horns, roam freely. Whales swim with no threatening boat in sight. Dodos only have to worry about their next meal.

Does evolution necessarily lead to the development of intelligence?

But life without intelligence doesn't actually make sense for a system in the long term. If life appears on a planet, if from an inert environment, something alive (and what is alive? Basically something that is complex and can die if that complexity is destroyed. When we die, our complex bodies get taken over by bacteria that is a less organized form) happens, it's going to evolve. Complex creatures are not going to just happen, ta-da, from one day to the next. That's if we take a scientific point of view, and not mythological!

If there is evolution from simple to more complex, then intelligence is going to give select creatures a massive edge as it has on our planet, and is bound to happen eventually. It could be that one planet hosts more than one species with intelligence, like we had Neanderthal, and Homo floresiensis at some point, and gosh, I really miss them.

Could a planet be inhabited with just one big jelly?

The alternative to this scenario is a planet where there is just one entity. Maybe something like a mycelium. This organism is not in competition with anything else, but works and evolves cooperatively. I imagine a kind of cloud that moves like a huge sea creature, a bit foamy perhaps, that changes color, and changes shapes. It might not need to develop intelligence, but then again it might as it morphs and expands and needs to use different resources.

I like to think that the intelligence of this organism is wise, because it does not know competition, conflict, violence. And maybe it could impart some of its wisdom to us by finding a way to communicate: stay tuned. We'd stop killing each other, and trying to outdo our neighbors, and to own more and more and more than we need, to leave less and less resources to others, like who needs to possess 165 billion dollars when we could share the planet in peace and justice?

Written fast and furiously by  - -  Arabella von Arx

All images from wikimedia commons.