Review of 'The Becoming of Age' by Pamela H. Gravagne

In The Becoming of Age, Pamela H. Gravagne has produced a lively and timely conversation among theoretical inquiry, popular cinema, and cultural narratives of aging.Her premise is that film has the capacity to alter consciousness about growing older.Of course, Hollywood is particularly harsh on the aging process, filling its stories with dramatizations of decline and disability where older women are tragically betrayed by their aging bodies, while older men fare only slightly better.However, Gravagne ventures beyond these obvious stereotypes to shake up the temporal confines within which our culture subjugates older people.The first theoretical chapter argues that images matter because their power to represent endows them with the violence to exclude, which makes viewing films an exercise in mediating the myths and realities of aging.But how can we tell the myths from the realities?In response, Gravagne threads discussions of image, discourse, narrative, and myth with theories of essentialism and social construction to create a journey into the cultural spaces of meaning-making itself.The five subsequent chapters tackle gender, intimacy, desire, dementia, time, and being.Each applies the ideas of contemporary theorists such as Judith Butler, Stuart Hall, Pierre Bourdieu, Mikhail Bakhtin, Elizabeth Grosz, Ian Hacking, and Karen Barad, amongst others, to the task of deconstructing cinematic experience and parsing it into finer liberating shades of ambiguity and unpredictability.However, the theoretical reviews can become weighty and break up the continuity of the argument.Theorists from one chapter do not always reappear in later chapters, while the textual shifts between the films and abstract theories create detours that cloud some of the thematic strengths of the chapters.Where Gravagne shines as a theorist is where she pursues her own formulations of postmodern criticism and argues less by way of reference to others, making clear that the originality of her book lies in relocating age at the center of critical thought.Gravagne interprets her selected films (including animated features) in chapters Two and Three according to their potential as "counter-stories."She chooses Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino (2009) because it is about an older man and widower who reinvents himself, learning and growing anew against the decline narrative's firewall.Yet Eastwood's Walt does not fully produce a counter-story because he decides to die (courageously) rather than face his future frailties.This is a generous treatment of the film and of Eastwood, a producer who otherwise champions individualistic vigilantism against the supposed corruption of American traditions, often with the unapologetic use of gun violence.Likewise, Gravagne's discussion of the film Calendar Girls (2003) scores good points about anti-aging culture and the social disadvantages for aging women, but the film's "fairy-tale" ending also puts a cramp in its counter-story adventurousness.The films that illustrate Chapter Four, on "Intimacy and Distance," such as Something's Gotta Give (2003) and Still Doing It: The Intimate Lives of

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