The Price of Not Ageing: Five Stories for Thinking About Old Age, from Oscar Wilde to Michael Haneke
Summer invites us to read more slowly, to watch films without hurry, to let stories reach us in a different way. It is also, perhaps without us seeking it, a good moment to ask uncomfortable questions: why is ageing so hard for us? What does it mean to accept the passage of time? Is immortality really what we desire, or is something else at stake?
This month, Barcelona’s Grec Festival premieres a new stage adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray. A work written more than 130 years ago that remains disturbingly current. Long before epigenetic clocks, rejuvenation therapies or longevity medicine existed, literature and cinema were already exploring our relationship with time. And in many cases, they did so better than any scientific essay.
These five works do not offer answers to the passing of time, but they pose questions that deserve a place in our suitcases.
We have all looked at a photo from ten years ago and taken an extra second to recognise ourselves. Or we have unintentionally avoided a mirror with bad lighting. Oscar Wilde turned that into literature more than a century ago: what would we be willing to sacrifice in order to remain young? Dorian Gray keeps his beauty while a portrait accumulates, in his place, the marks of time and of his actions. It is not a gothic horror story. It is a metaphor about the price of appearance and the illusion that one can escape time without paying anything in return.
Coralie Fargeat, the French director and screenwriter, takes up that same question in The Substance and pushes it to the limits of the body and identity: how much of herself is a woman willing to sacrifice in order to continue being seen? The century and the language change, but the discomfort is the same. And in both cases, what begins as a desire ends up becoming a trap.
Against that obsession with stopping time, other works propose something more difficult: to look at it directly. There are people who spend years postponing a long‑overdue conversation, a visit that never quite happens, a reconciliation that can always wait a little longer.
Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain does not seek how to live forever, but how to live knowing that one day we will no longer be here. It is a film about love and loss, but above all about what is lost when resisting death becomes the only way of existing. David Lynch, known for everything but quietness, films The Straight Story with a disarming stillness. Alvin Straight is 73, his body no longer responds as it once did, and he decides to travel hundreds of miles across the United States on a lawnmower to reconcile with his ailing brother. There is something in that gesture — the late urgency, the pride that softens — that feels familiar to almost anyone who has had to make peace with someone they love.
And then there is Amour. Its director, Michael Haneke, films without concessions an elderly couple, illness, dependence, slow deterioration. And love when youth and certainties are gone. Many viewers left the cinema thinking of their parents, of what it will be like to care for them, of what it was like to be cared for. It is, to my mind, the most demanding of the five, at times painful, but also the one that most directly touches on something the longevity conversation often forgets: ageing well does not depend only on how many years one lives, but on how one cares and is cared for when vulnerability arrives.
