فصل 12

12

I don’t know if we’ll ever live in a world where sixteen-year-old boys will throw their PlayStations in the trash because they’ve discovered they’d rather sit in the movie theater watching Best Exotic Marigold Hotel 12, but I’m guessing it probably won’t be in my lifetime. Most movies are made for people who want to watch Jurassic World over and over. Hollywood is mostly for young people, and young people mostly like to look at other young people because that’s who they relate to. The people who pay for movies and TV to get made are mainly making them for young people too. In television, “young people” are people ages eighteen to forty-nine. You may have heard of these people—they’re sometimes referred to as the “key demographic.” They’re the ones whose attention advertisers most want to capture on television and in the movies, and I’m going to tell you why: paper towels.

I was recently at the house of a friend who’d just made one of those trips to Costco where you feel really smug about all the money you saved until you get home and can’t fit the twenty-pound jar of generic peanut butter in any of your cupboards because you forgot about the ten giant jars you already have. So she was trying to get rid of some stuff. She offered me one of those twelve-packs of paper towels that can also be used as an air mattress if you have a guest over, and I was pretty psyched to take it off her hands. I happened to actually need paper towels, and I was like, wow, what a great coincidence. Then I looked at them a little more closely, and I realized they weren’t my brand of paper towels.

I always feel guilty when I use paper towels, but what makes me feel slightly better is getting the kind that are perforated at narrower intervals and can be ripped off into smaller sections. I feel better because at least I’m not using a whole towel. So I turned down these free, non-perforated paper towels, which my friend thought was crazy, and that’s how I suddenly realized I was out of the key demo.

To some degree, I get why our business likes ’em young. Advertisers want people they can convert, people who haven’t yet made up their minds about things like what their favorite paper towels are or what car they like to drive—people who might change their minds and switch to a different brand because of the ads they see. But as consumers get older, they decide what they like to use and they hardly ever deviate, which means advertisers need to move on to influence the next batch of potential paper towel devotees. Which is why there aren’t more older people—especially women, who apparently have a tendency to pick their paper towel preferences earliest—in movies and television.

“But what about Betty White?” you ask. You’re right! Betty White is hilarious, talented, and still working. That is so incredibly rare that she is literally the only person anyone ever mentions when challenging my paper towel theory. No one ever says “What about Betty White and Bathsheba Phlellington?” because Bathsheba Phlellington stopped getting work years ago, and that’s only partially because I made her up. There simply isn’t a ton of work for women in her category, and therefore there isn’t one other example of a Betty White type other than Betty White herself. There are a handful of women who are slightly younger than Betty that I could cite as examples, it’s true, but I dare you to name five who aren’t Meryl Streep and Diane Keaton or who don’t also have the word “Dame” in front of their name.

Carrie Fisher is one of my favorite actors and writers. I’ve enjoyed her films, seen her on Broadway, and read everything she’s written. When I was writing my novel Someday, Someday, Maybe, I kept her Postcards from the Edge on my desk the whole time, and when I got stuck I’d pick it up and reread sections I’d already read a dozen times. Our books are very different, but the fact that she is an actress who wrote a novel—one that was loosely based on her own life—and became a successful screenwriter was a big inspiration to me.

Recently Carrie Fisher responded to a New York Post article that quoted her mentioning the pressure she’d felt to lose weight for the most recent Star Wars film. The writer commented that if she didn’t like being judged on her looks, she should “quit acting.” He went on to say, regarding her work as a writer, “No one would know the name Carrie Fisher if it weren’t for her ability to leverage her looks.”

Carrie Fisher is a bestselling author and screenwriter, giant movie star, and all-around attractive person. And there are a lot, and I mean a lot, of really beautiful people in New York and Los Angeles who’ve come to those places in an attempt to become actors. If getting work as an actor was simply about leveraging your looks—if that was the sole currency of success in our field—then everyone on Vanderpump Rules would be winning Oscars one day and I would be the center pullout thing in next month’s Maxim. I’m not saying either thing can’t happen, but it hasn’t yet, perhaps because there’s at least a subtle difference between acting on a reality show and modeling, on one hand, and being a talent like Carrie Fisher, on the other. “Leveraging one’s looks” is just one component. Also, I’m not even sure Maxim has a center pullout thing.

One day I might not feel like “leveraging my looks” anymore, and I’m okay with that. I’d like to age gracefully, although I’m not yet entirely sure what that will mean. I just know there are certain things I don’t want to have to do to look younger. I don’t have problems with plastic surgery in theory. Wait—that’s not true. I do sort of have problems with it. I’m just trying to sound blasé about something that’s currently fashionable but also troubling to me. See also: high-waisted jeans.

For starters, as a viewer, I just can’t stand it when it’s all I can see. Suddenly I go from watching a scene with two actors I like to being more focused on a conversation between Upper Lip Filler and Botox, and it’s too distracting. If I could be guaranteed that no one, including myself, would notice something I did to my face to look younger or somehow better, maybe I’d do it, but I feel like I have one of those faces that shows that sort of stuff too easily, and I don’t want to be worried that you’ll start mistaking my forehead for a skating rink.

Also, while there’s nothing wrong with doing things to make you feel better, I just wish the choices were limited to simpler things many of us have access to, like drinking more water or jogging or finding a more flattering shade of lipstick. It’s a bummer that it’s even an option to appear more youthful by chopping off your ears and reattaching them in order to hoist up your neck flaps (this may not be the precise surgical term). It’s confusing to me that my aversion to doing that has any sort of bearing on my work as an actor. “You mean you aren’t willing to chop off and reattatch your ears in order to hoist up your neck flaps, Lauren? Don’t you care about us? Where’s your commitment to your craft?” mean people on the Internet yell. I wish this possibility simply didn’t exist, so that we all had somewhat of a fair playing field. But this is as futile a concept as my belief that everyone who’s born should automatically be allowed to live until age eighty-five. The people who treat themselves the most healthfully would get extra credit, more time to live longer; the partiers and couch potatoes would get docked points, living less long. This system is much more fair than the random “sometimes smokers live into their nineties, while marathon runners occasionally drop dead at forty-five” thing we’ve got going now. But alas.