When we think of Beethoven, we don’t generally think of him as being one particular age. The same is true for Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Pablo Picasso, William Shakespeare, or Emily Dickinson. The creative output of those wonderful geniuses did not coincide with one particular point in their lives, but rather was produced over a range of ages.
In this way, such artists have escaped the tyranny of age discrimination, and society’s odd views about age in general. They have instead been celebrated for their talent, for possession of a singular voice, for the output of a magnificent mind.
This is not the case for actors. Without even thinking about it, we make a clear distinction between the young Bette Davis and the older one, or the Nicholson of “Five Easy Pieces” and of “About Schmidt”. There is a vast gulf in our minds between Ingrid Bergman in “Casablanca” and in “A Woman Called Golda”. We can’t help it — age discrimination is deeply indoctrinated into us, and we cannot simply wish it away.
Yet this will change. Some time in the next twenty years — perhaps sooner — all movie production will go entirely digital. The person you see up on the screen will be a simulcrum, an artificial person digitally puppeteered by its real counterpart. And at that point actors will be able to be whatever age is most convenient. Only talent and commitment will matter, not mere accidents of chronology. An actor of twenty five will easily be able to portray himself or herself at the age of seventy five, and vice versa.
In that historical moment, the actor will become as ageless as the painter, the sculptor, the playwright and the poet.
> When we think of Beethoven, we don’t generally think of him as being one particular age.
I hope you don’t mind me disagreeing here… Good old van is of course that old man with slightly crazy eyes and wild hair. Pablo the moustachioed weirdo and William the guy we know from that bust…
I suppose if we look back shorter in time, the image we have of an artist differs more though (Michael Jackson being a fairly current example, regardless of an alleged status as a genius).
I do agree on the ageless though, in the sense of them not aging, but certainly being of a particular age(-group).
Michael, thanks for the clarification. I was trying to say that we use the image of some artists at a single age merely as a convenient visual icon to stand in for an entire life’s work. For example, just one visual snapshot of William Shakespeare is generally used as a convenient placeholder to represent him. I think this the case because his work is not intimately tied to his physical appearance.