Through a Woman’s Lens
Aging, Beauty, and the Politics of Seeing
Zoe G Mera. 30/03/2026.
If movies and fictional stories are supposed to present - and represent - different characters with whom we can relate: when is my mother going to see herself portrayed on the big screen? Is the only way for to see real representations of older women onscreen going to underground festivals? The following is a discussion on how the film industry has created the image of the never aging woman - from the beginning of the cinematic industry to how women are historically portrayed in impossible beauty standards.
The early years of cinema: the birth of an industry
Commercial cinema was invented by the Lumière brothers in 1895. It began to be used as a way of showing what the world was like at a time when travel was only accessible to a few people. The Lumière brothers sent their technicians all over the world to bring the wonders of the globe to theaters. A few years after its invention, cinema, or the magic of Méliès, offered something more than just a living document of what was in the world. In this cinema of attractions, dancers, contortionists, strongmen, and artists of various kinds stood in front of the camera to show other kinds of wonders. They were creating a new kind of performance.
George Méliès experimented with the possibilities of doing tricks with the film itself to create optical illusions. At the beginning of the century, more elaborate stories began to be told, such as in Le Voyage à la Lune (Méliès, 1902). And it was in 1915, with David Wark Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, that the history of classic narrative cinema was established. In The Birth of a Nation (David Wark Griffith, 1915), the use of different shots—such as wide shots that allow the audience to situate themselves in space, or close-ups that allow them to recognize the characters' expressions—and the rhythm set by them marks a turning point.
From the 1920s to the 1960s, Hollywood had a virtual monopoly on narrative cinema, although the avant-garde and non-Western cinema also continued to experiment with this art form. There were five major studios (Paramount, Metro Goldwyn Mayer, Twentieth Century Fox, Warner Bros., and RKO) and three smaller ones (Universal, United Artists, and Columbia), which functioned as film factories.
The way films were made was industrial, somewhat Fordist. The work was divided among specialists, and workers were hired by each studio, including directors and actors and actresses. Each worker specialized in a series of specific genres, which were clearly differentiated and did not usually mix. Actors and actresses also specialized in a particular genre, creating stars who were recognizable not only for their physical appearance, but also for the roles they played.
The star system
The star system was one of the systems used by studios to attract audiences to theaters. The star system was made up of stars, actors, and actresses who starred in films. Stars were not only a tool for telling a story, but also a form of marketing, as Paul McDonald explains: "films were increasingly marketed through star differentiation" (2000:11).
These stars represented a character archetype, and they did so throughout their professional careers. For men, the most typical were: The Hero, a man who must solve a problem, in many cases, save the girl; or The Seducer, more passionate and dark. And for women, two opposing characters: The Good Girl, the innocent woman who must be saved; and the Femme Fatale, the woman whose frenetic sexuality leads men to ruin, and herself to be changed by a man who leads her to the right path—forming a family—or to be punished.
The film industry generated huge profits; it was, and continues to be, a multi-million dollar industry. It is the capitalist dimension that made, and continues to make it an extremely competitive sector, especially for those who work in front of the camera. Stars are under greater pressure to maintain their image, which must be carefully crafted in the style of their fictional character in order to attract audiences. In the case of women, beauty, closely related to age, was, and is, the minimum requirement for remaining a star.
However, for any Hollywood star, it is not only their work as an actor in the film that counts. As Karen Hollinger explains in Hollywood Acting and the Female Star, "the star actor is seen as an amalgam of complementary texts, including performance, promotion, publicity, criticism, and commentaries" (2006:22). The image of stars is important on many levels, and their personal lives and the opinions of the public or critics are crucial to their professional careers. Richard Dyer calls this image "extensive, multimedia, intertextual" (1986:3). Tracy Allerton explains through Dyer the main axes of the star image: "it has four parts: what the industry produces (films, other texts), what the media say (paratexts), what the star says (text, paratext), and how audiences react (reception, paratext)" (2010:16).
Patriarchy and representation: being a woman and a star
The concept of patriarchy has been discussed by feminist philosophers over the last few decades. Drawing on the definitions of many, as Simone de Beauvoir, Kate Miller, and Rosa Cobo, patriarchy could be defined as the system that generates and perpetuates a situation of inequality between men and women, in which adult men enjoy certain privileges.
Sociopolitical, cultural, and thought systems have changed throughout history. However, the patriarchal system has been transforming and adapting to these changes. Feminist movements have done extremely important work, from theorizing the issue to fighting for and achieving basic rights. Many philosophers, economists, etc., have chosen the gender perspective to develop their thinking and study reality.
The filmmaker and theorist Laura Mulvey theorizes about the male gaze. In her essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975), Mulvey draws on psychoanalysis to explain how pleasure is formed in cinema, based on identification and scopophilia—the pleasure of looking—on the part of the viewer. She also talks about the existence of an active subject, who looks, and a passive subject, who is looked at. In the case of narrative cinema, the active subject occurs in three key gazes: gaze of the character (male), gaze of the camera, and gaze of the audience itself. The role of passive subject falls to the female character.
In many films, women become just another element of the plot. As explained above, they may be women who need to be saved, or women who, with their charms, pose an obstacle to the protagonist. But sometimes, her presence is not even important to the plot: "the presence of women is an indispensable element of spectacle in ordinary narrative films, although their visual presence tends to work against the development of a plot line, freezing the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation" (Mulvey, 1975:4). The gaze of the male character and that of the audience share the contemplation of the female body. In many frames, there are also a phenomenon that the author explains: the dehumanization of women through the use of shots: "the beauty of women as objects and the space of the screen merge; [...] whose body, stylized and fragmented by close-ups, becomes the content of the film and the direct recipient of the viewer's gaze" (Mulvey, 1975:7). Although Mulvey uses the close-up to define this type of image, it would be more appropriate to refer to the detail shot, used to focus on objects from close up. The detailed shot literally objectifies the woman we are watching.
This theory helps to understand the pressure on actresses to remain attractive to the public gaze. The actor is also an attraction, and Mulvey herself admits that some films place this objectifying gaze on the male body. However, it is often used as a humorous device, or as an inefficient way of trying to turn the tables, as it still uses the same patriarchal tools.
The male character is an object of identification, and therefore must also be as perfect as possible, but factors such as intelligence or elegance, that is, an attractive personality, play a much more important role than physical appearance. The female character, however, needs to follow attractive beauty standards in order to succeed. Thinness, skin color, and hair are a fundamental part of these standards, which are achieved by only a minority. But even for this elite, there comes a time when beauty standards become impossible to maintain.
Youth goes hand in hand with the canonical beauty imposed by Hollywood. Youth is a more universal problem than clothing size or even skin color. Because, despite the double difficulty (intersectionality) that can result for an actress who is racialized or trans, everyone ages, and the glass ceiling is always thicker for women. The glass ceiling is a term used to describe the general difficulty for women to occupy positions of power in the workplace. In this case, the age glass ceiling in Hollywood refers to the difficulty actresses have in acting in commercial films after the age of 30, a difficulty that grows exponentially with age.
The representation of women over the age 40
Many actresses have spoken publicly about their fear of losing work after turning 40. "(...) As I was hovering around 40, I thought each movie would be my last, really. And all the evidence of other 40-year-old women at that time—this is 27 years ago—would lead you to believe it was over." commented Meryl Streep herself in an interview for WSJ Magazine. Many have also spoken publicly about the decline in actresses' careers after a certain age, as Zoe Saldana stated: "by the time you're 28 you're expired, you're playing mommy roles." (The Telegraph, 2014). Because even when female characters are present, they are relegated to secondary, stereotypical, or shallow roles.
According to various studies, such as Hanssen and Fleck's 2012 study, age and gender are two of the biggest factors contributing to the gap between Hollywood actors. In their study "Persistence and Change in Age-Specific Gender Gaps: Hollywood Actors from the Silent Era Onward" (2012, Clemson University), they used data from IMDb to analyze how the casting of actors and actresses has evolved according to their ages. They analyzed 10,000 roles from the earliest American films, excluding documentaries, animation, and pornographic films. The results demonstrate that women in their twenties star in up to twice as many films as men of the same age. However, at age 30, the number reverses and becomes uneven, almost to the point of disappearance.
The study by Dr. Martha M. Lauzen, for The Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at the University of San Diego, summarizes how these figures hardly changed in 2020. Although it does appear that over time there is a greater presence of older people in commercial cinema, the data remains very low for women over 40. "The report also found that major female characters experience a precipitous drop from their 30s to their 40s – falling from 31% of the roles to just 13%” (Lauzen, 2020).
Lauzen's study also looks at the types of environments in which women were portrayed. "A larger proportion of male than female characters had an identifiable occupation. 73% of male characters but 57% of female characters had an identifiable job or occupation" (Lauzen, 2020). It also looks at the characters' employment status, whether they appear in work or domestic settings (59% male versus 41% female), and the importance of their marital status (known for 47% of female characters, versus 35% of male characters).
It is clear that although female characters over 40 are more present than a decade ago, the way they are represented is more specific than in the case of male characters. This is due to a need to justify the presence of women in the plot. Most likely, if there is an older woman on the scene, it is because it is an essential requirement of her character, and even then, in many fictional productions, much younger actresses are hired to play almost impossible roles. One example is the film Alexander (Oliver Stone, 2005), in which Angelina Jolie played Olympia, mother of Alexander the Great, played by Colin Farrell. During filming, she was 29 years old, only one year older than Farrell. But if we enter the realm of comparisons between female protagonists and their male counterparts, it is rare to see a fiction in which they are not 20 years younger.
Returning to the representation of older women, sociologist and political scientist Mª Silveria Agulló Tomás produced a series of tables in 2001 summarizing the stereotypes attributed to them in fiction. Agulló also mentions their absence in masculinized genres such as action films, science fiction, etc. (Agulló, 2001). It was not until twenty years later, with the release of Eternals (Chloé Zhao, 2021), that superheroines over the age of 40 were seen for the first time, played by Angelina Jolie, 45, and Salma Hayeck, 54.
The association of these roles with women who are aging is related to the term "successful aging." Successful aging is a term that began to be used in gerontology in the 1960s. One of the most widespread models in this field is described in the article entitled "Successful Aging" published in The Gerontologist by Rowe and Kahn (1998). In this model of successful aging, there are three fundamental pillars: the absence of disease and disability, active participation, and the preservation of good physical and cognitive functions. This view of aging has been— and continues to be—a subject of debate. Given the representation of women in commercial cinema, ageism—discrimination based on age—focuses on actresses, condemning them to avoid aging. Or, on the other hand, to age successfully.
Agulló mentions the role of older women as a social expense or burden, sick and dependent. This is a very common characterization, which medicalizes the elderly, portraying the inevitability of aging as a pathology. However, the stars who play these roles are examples of successful aging off-screen, a success that is accompanied by—and surely aided by—a luxurious lifestyle. As Dr. Dolan puts it, "This undoubtedly serves the interests of Hollywood, but it also suggests that 'successful aging' has a privileged and protected status in the embodied ideologies of old age" (Dolan, 2013).
Actresses must be able to slip in and out of the character who is seen as old.
Intersectionality: minority is the majority.
Intersectionality was first introduced by Kimberlé Crenshaw as part of critical race theory in the 1980s. This theory shows the way that different forms of discrimination and oppression dialogue within each other. The underrepresentation of diversity specially strikes women over 40. Just think for yourself: how many non white, queer, disabled, elderly women are portrayed onscreen? Often, mass media narratives cannot handle diversity and complex female/non binary characters, especially if they reach the middle age gap. For many years, it seemed like there was only one middle aged black woman in Hollywood: Viola Davis. She’s been called “the black Meryl Streep”, an adjective that screams racism under a flattering intention. And Davis herself has addressed this in different interviews “I have a career comparable to Meryl Streep’s, Juliane Moore’s, Sigourney Weaver’s (…) I’m nowhere near them. Not as far as money, as job opportunities, nowhere close to it.” (Women In the World, 2018). This is how bad it is for one of the most awarded actresses in the main media.
Cinema has long celebrated the illusion of the ageless woman - beautiful, desirable, and frozen in time. But as women grow older, their on-screen presence fades, reflecting an industry still uneasy with female aging. That narrative is beginning to shift, with filmmakers pushing for richer, more authentic portrayals of women beyond their thirties. Real progress will come when Hollywood stops treating age as a liability and starts seeing it as part of the story. Until then, one question lingers: when will every woman finally see herself, fully and truthfully, on screen?
Bibliography
Agulló Tomás, M.S. (2001) ‘El tercer plano: Estereotipos, cine y mujeres mayores’, in Muñoz, B. (coord.) Medios de comunicación, mujeres y cambio cultural. Madrid: Dirección General de la Mujer de la Comunidad de Madrid, pp. 245–276.
de Bertodano, B.H. (2014) ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’s Zoe Saldana: on ageism and sexism in Hollywood’, The Telegraph, 27 July. Available at: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/10981076/Guardians-of-the-Galaxys-Zoe-Saldana-on-ageism-and-sexism-in-Hollywood.html
Dolan, J. (2013) ‘Smoothing the wrinkles: Hollywood, old age femininity and the pathological gaze’, in Carter, C., Steiner, L. and McLaughlin, L. (eds.) The Routledge Companion to Media and Gender. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 342–351. Available at: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203066911
Dyer, R. (2004) Heavenly Bodies. London: Routledge.
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King, B. (1985) ‘Articulating stardom’, Screen, 26(5), pp. 27–51. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/26.5.27
Lauzen, M.M. (2019) It’s a man’s (celluloid) world: Portrayals of female characters in the top grossing films of 2018. San Diego: Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, San Diego State University.
McDonald, P. (2001) The Star System: Hollywood’s Production of Popular Identities. Short Cuts edn. London: Wallflower Press.
Rowe, J.W. and Kahn, R.L. (1997) ‘Successful aging’, The Gerontologist, 37(4), pp. 433–440. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1093/geront/37.4.433