I think that there are a lot of demographics that have a very overused function in films...
...So I agree that it is an over-used trope, but I don't find it much more offensive than other tropes.
I never said ‘offensive’ - boy, that word is loaded. I do understand where you’re coming from when you make that point, but I must say, at times it baffles me as an argument.
I think the first time you made a similar point was the feminism thread. I just don’t see what the existence of any other tropes, if that’s what we must call it, has to do with this ‘trope’ (again, if this is even about tropes). I don’t think it’s particularly helpful to evoke the idea that all cinema is stereotypical when you’re discussing a particular issue. What does that give? What has it got to do with anything? How does saying there are many other tropes shed light on this particular topic?
Imagine you were writing a paper about child slavery in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the 21st century - surely child labour in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when it was pretty common, would be irrelevant?
And I do see a difference between girlfriends/wives and this one, but I fear this will really detract from the main topic of the conversation if we go there. Suffice to say that it’s not the same to kill a wife mainly to give the protagonist a revenge motive (and I wouldn’t say
most wives in films die, the above is more common in third-rate thrillers and B-movies) and to implicitly show that old people cannot but die. This is about age, as per OP. I do agree with the OP that if you see an old person at tie beginning of a film, it’s a fair assumption that they will die.
In my view, no matter how many wives are killed for the protagonist to have a revenge motive, that doesn’t suggest women are destined to die. There will likely be a new female interest over the course of the film and, more importantly, other secondary female characters, be it a ‘prostitute’ or a barmaid or whatnot. I don’t even believe women die disproportionately more in action films than men - I’d argue that, on balance, the number of slaughtered evil henchmen evens that one out. One wife/girlfriend vs loads and loads of ‘disposable’ male machos.
But old people tend to be underrepresented in that there’s usually one elderly character, and it’s this character that inevitably dies. This doesn’t always (I would argue, hardly ever), serve to teach anyone anything. It’s one thing to take this approach to instill empathy or whatnot, but another to make an explicit argument that old people’s lives are less valuable. This is not in any way like the murdered women.
Dante’s Peak has a scene where the protagonists (woman with kids and her new male love interest)
WARNING: spoilers below
are escaping on a boat through an acid lake. The boat starts to melt. The elderly character in the scene, the woman’s former mother-in-law, the mother of her late husband, jumps into the acid to push the boat to shore. Her legs melt into stumps and she dies, having saved the family. Unless one is used to hardcore horror, this is an extremely graphic scene, which serves to reinforce the point even further. Why didn’t the younger guy jump in the water? In many cultures that would be the expected thing to do - save the women and children and the elderly.
are escaping on a boat through an acid lake. The boat starts to melt. The elderly character in the scene, the woman’s former mother-in-law, the mother of her late husband, jumps into the acid to push the boat to shore. Her legs melt into stumps and she dies, having saved the family. Unless one is used to hardcore horror, this is an extremely graphic scene, which serves to reinforce the point even further. Why didn’t the younger guy jump in the water? In many cultures that would be the expected thing to do - save the women and children and the elderly.
But I guess the writers had to make sure the lovely young lady had someone to screw.
I see no comparable use of female characters. If we’re talking about the idea that women will always prioritise children and sacrifice their lives for children, then I think there’s a certain biological instinct there that can’t be ignored, but I don’t remember very many scenes of leaving a woman behind to die in a disaster film being seen as totally cool and noble. Yes, you have
Harry Potter-type stuff when the woman covers her child and dies, but anyone would do that. This is the point of the maternal instinct, biologically.
But scenes like the
Dante’s Peak example make a point that this is the elderly’s narrative (and life) function. This is chauvinistic in some sense or bigoted, or perhaps there’s another word, but it’ll come to me.
Again, as I was watching
Greenland, I wondered whether there is a film where the elderly character says to the younger adults in this semi-noble way that they’ll die where their wives died and whatnot and condemn themselves to dying as someone ‘less important’, but the protagonists then make them change their mind and save them. A bit like Walter White deciding,
WARNING: spoilers below
Nah, you know what, this is fun, think I’m gonna give that chemo a try
Nah, you know what, this is fun, think I’m gonna give that chemo a try
. Change of heart.