• Richard Johnstone

12 October 2011How do we want to be seen as we get older, asks Richard Johnstone in Inside Story - and who is our audience?

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THERE is a scene in Todd Phillips’s buddy film The Hangover (2009) that reminds us, even as we celebrate the contemporary phenomenon of extended youth, that nothing lasts forever and that a day of chronological reckoning will come. Three latter-day musketeers, having misplaced the fourth, are quizzing a hospital resident in an effort to fill in the drug-induced blanks of the previous night, restore their memories and find their lost friend. As he responds to their questions, the doctor continues in a routine and detached way to examine an elderly patient. The old man, dressed only and unflatteringly in his underpants, is both in the scene and out of it. The chatter goes on around him, but he doesn’t speak, other than to thank the doctor politely at the end of the examination. He is, we infer, suffering a form of disorientation and disconnection that is beyond restoration.

It is a funny scene, not least because the joke is on the young(ish) men as much as on the old man. As he sits there in biddable silence, he embodies a state of mind – of being acted upon rather than acting, of forgetting what happened yesterday – that is so central to our perception of what it means to be really old that, like the hyperactive heroes, we can hardly bear to look for fear of having to confront what may lie ahead. It is one of the most unsettling of twenty-first-century dilemmas: forty may be the new thirty, and sixty the new fifty, but surely the day will come when we are forced to relinquish our youth – when no more extensions will be granted – and to accept, with as good a grace as we can muster, that old is old…?

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Photo: Will Choi/ Flickr