On September 17, former actress, current author and filmmaker Justine Bateman joined the class “Aging in the Media” to discuss her perspective on aging and its stigma in women. The underclassmen seminar class, supported by the Interdisciplinary Teacher Grant, invited Bateman to present her ideas regarding aging through a discussion format with attending students.
The seminar is taught by professor Caroline Cicero of the Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, who co-teaches the class with professor Laura Castañeda at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.
Justine Bateman, known for her role on “Family Ties” and her recent filmmaking projects, shared that her proactive part in combating negative views on aging didn’t stem from her Hollywood stardom in the 1980s.
“I never saw [the criticism] at all,” Bateman said. “Funny enough, I never felt pressure about it, it was always from people outside the business.”
Instead, she told the class that things took a turn when she got older.
“I googled my name, which is a big mistake, and the autocomplete was ‘looks old.’ I was 43 years old, and my face hadn’t changed,” said Bateman, “And then through that, I made the mistake of making them right and me wrong. I was like, ‘well, there’s so many of them and so few of me.’”
Bateman discussed the feeling of this public perception; how she turned to a vulnerable state rather than confront the issue. But, through a way of thinking, she overcame this grudge against the media, against her own looks.
“I was like, what’s the anchor for society in general, that they hold on to this idea that women’s faces, women’s older faces, are broken and have to be fixed?” Bateman told the class. “The core fear is … an anchor for this belief.”
Since her involvement in the entertainment industry, Bateman admitted to students that social media hasn’t been forgiving when it comes to aging.
“We should see [somebody’s spirit] more and more as we get older,” Bateman said. “That’s another thing that the internet has unfortunately done for us, is flatten our impression of people to a two-dimensional absorption of them.”
Bateman embraces the saying “it’s never too late.” After graduating from UCLA with a computer science degree at age 50, she wrote her book shortly after and later directed a movie at 55.
Her overall advice to the seminar students was to follow her lead — that age shouldn’t classify your ability to do something, that students should “try and remember [that] until you die, it’s your time, and you can get anything you want done.”