In the autumn, when the summer holidays are over and the children are safely back in school, the movie industry decides that it’s time to entertain the adults.
Every other part of the year, of course, is devoted to dazzling and distracting the under-20 set. They’re treated to noisy, explosive superhero films and often disgusting horror pictures on the solid economic principle of supply and demand: children are out of school for the summer and essentially lazing around aimlessly, and therefore have a hefty appetite for movies.
In the autumn, though, the supply of children goes down – there’s schoolwork and sport and all sorts of competing activities – which means the movie studios have to look for demand elsewhere.
And they find it in the parents. Or at least they used to.
I’m describing a long-lost time when the difference between children and adults – well, to be fair, the difference between teenagers and adults – was a bright and obvious one. The line between the behaviour and taste of an adolescent – loud music, fiery explosions, a single-minded fixation on the physical attributes of the naked human body – and what grown-ups are supposed to prefer – witty dialogue, complicated plotting, subtle romantic chemistry, restrained tension – has been slowly erased over time.
This autumn, for instance, when the studios traditionally release their more thoughtful adult fare, among the biggest movies in cinemas are a Matt Damon-starring science-fiction-action-adventure picture called The Martian, an animated comedy called Hotel Transylvania 2, and the teen action movie Maze Runner.
In other words, just because the kids are back in school doesn’t mean kids aren’t going to the movies. They are. It’s just that now it’s mostly grown-ups who think and act like children.
Your concept of what an adult is depends, of course, on how old you are. If you’re around my age – and never mind exactly how old that is – grown-up people have always been serious and sober types in suits and ties, polite and restrained and as a rule born before 1950. But that isn’t quite accurate any more. Old people these days are essentially fully-grown hippies – the product of the do-anything go-go 1960s. Their hair may be grey (or simply gone) and they may be walking a little more carefully, but they’re still the unreconstructed, unashamed adolescents of the 1960s and 1970s, just all grown up.
Which is why animated movies that have traditionally appealed only to children – or over-the-top action pictures, graphic horror movies and lowbrow comedies – now garner a sizeable audience from among the over-50 set. Old people, it seems, aren’t all that different from teenagers.
America and Europe and large parts of Asia are facing increasingly older populations. The “baby boom” years of the last century are tapering off, and the children born during that time are now well into their old age. Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney – two icons of the young and happening 1960s and 1970s – are now 72 and 73, respectively. They don’t seem like the retiring types, heading out to the garden to do a bit of pruning, followed by a visit to the local senior centre for a game of bridge. Why, then, do we expect the rest of their age cohort to do the same?
They don’t. Popular matchmaking sites and smartphone apps like Tinder and OKCupid now have well-funded and targeted competition for the older population of single people. There’s an app called Stitch that is a matchmaking service for people in their late 50s and older, so they too can enjoy the soulless and ultimately creepy activity of swiping through photographs on the phone, choosing which ones seem promising. There are even apps that help connect old people with young tech gurus who can help them with their technology – we all know someone in our lives who is too old to truly understand how to work a smartphone. Now there’s an app to help summon a young person to help an old person use their phone to act like a young person.
The losers here, obviously, are the young people, who keep trying to carve out their own styles and habits, only to have them co-opted and enthusiastically embraced by their grandparents. What’s the fun of watching some truly trashy movies in the summer if there are a bunch of old people behind you, enjoying the same experience? And worse, what if they’re on dates, too? Or busily working their phones at the same time – texting and swiping and surfing – like unfocused and hyper-active teenagers?
This is all good news for the movie studios, who now no longer have to worry about the demographic vagaries of the laws of supply and demand. There’s an inexhaustible supply – for the next 30 years at least – of teenage-minded old people.
The trouble will come when, as inevitably happens, the next generation breaks the tradition and discovers the joys of quiet and more thoughtful entertainment. If old people insist on behaving like children, we have to hope that children will start behaving like old people.
Rob Long is a writer and producer in Hollywood
On Twitter: @rcbl
