Last night the Britbox gods offered up the sort of material that has me clicking faster than if they said ‘Steve Pemberton, Janine Duvitski, and young(er) John Castle in a special just-for-Phoebe comic murder mystery.’ Yes, it was Stephanie Cole, aka Diana Trent from “Waiting For God,” in “The Cleaner,” a new murder-comedy about a man whose job is cleaning up crime scenes. Each episode features a different such scene, and one, “The Aristocrat,” has Cole as… Diana Trent but posh. Posh and… actually old. 79, playing 87. Not that this description does the character justice. There’s some Hyacinth Bucket in there as well.
To repeat myself from past newsletters: I have complicated feelings about Cole as Diana. On the one hand, she is perfect in the role and it could not have been anyone else, which is decisive. On the other, that a woman in her late 40s at the time was cast to play a 70ish retiree, and the same-age love interest of a character played by an actor actually that age, kind of has to say something about what reads as ‘old’ onscreen. Even in Season 1 of “Waiting For God,” Cole looks old. Some of this is excellent acting and hair/makeup, but it’s also that she looks like a woman who has passed The Age, and not surgically hidden this fact. Regardless, it’s lovely beyond all get-out that Cole is still active, still acting, still tweeting about acting, and has this special acting niche of three decades’ worth of playing a senior citizen. But this is not (just) about Stephanie Cole. It is also about The Age.
A Slate advice-seeker wrote in to complain that her mother-in-law keeps telling her she “look[s] tired.” My first thought was, that is indeed annoying. My second: that it’s annoying in very much the same way as being told to smile. Both are remarks about which one feels compelled to say (but not think) that the remark-maker means well. It’s your welfare they’re thinking about! This person just wants you to get enough sleep, or to be happy. Also, both are the sorts of comments it’s gauche to have feelings about. Don’t like them? Brush them off! If the comments get under your (sallow) skin, it’s on you, is the thinking.
But “smile!” and “you look tired” share more than this. They’re also both comments on outward appearance and its failure to live up to others’ expectations. Not smiling doesn’t mean a person is upset (who grins randomly while walking down the street?), nor does smiling upon command have a great history of improving someone’s mood. Similarly, “tired” is not a physical appearance. What’s being commented on when someone says, “you look tired,” is an absence of makeup, or a failure to bounce around in a chipper-enough manner, or—more on this in a moment—the presence of wrinkles or jowls. It’s an insult and reads as one. But a sneaky insult because of the plausible deniability that someone was merely concerned. But… what exactly was the concern, and why would “how are you?” not have sufficed?
“Smile!” and “you look tired” operate in the same framework, but for different life stages of women. A girl is told to smile because—allow me to make a deeply unoriginal but still necessary observation—someone thinks she’d be so much prettier if she smiled. Sometimes implied but sometimes stated outright. It’s about the societal demand that young women look nice, and that they beam receptively at anyone who wants them to.
“You look tired,” meanwhile, is a warning: You’re not young anymore, and if you don’t go out of your way to mitigate this, you’ll swing all the way over into someone who could get cast as a 70-year-old. Which… would that be the end of the world?