I Care A Lot? In America? No Chance in Hell.
Next week, Netflix will premier I Care A lot — in which a sociopathic court-appointed guardian strips the rights from and imprisons an elderly woman who, much to the peril of the guardian, has connections with the Russian mob.
There’s no reason it shouldn’t do well and finally bring some sorely needed attention to an underreported issue even though it turns a genuinely horrifying American legal practice into a comedy thriller.
The J. Blakeson-directed film received overall positive reviews at last year’s Toronto Film Festival, and, with a cast that includes Rosamund Pike, Peter Dinklage and Dianne Wiest, has generated some buzz.
Not to mention everyone’s so starved for entertainment right now that, even when Netflix rereleases movies such as The DaVinci Code, they instantly end up in the platform’s top ten and reignite debates from decades ago.
However, I have my doubts that anyone will care about I Care A lot.
Because, and this shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, America is hopelessly and irretrievably ageist.
So, a movie about a psycho who kidnaps old people? Shit, who cares?
If a seven-year-old girl disappears, my phone will go off as if the apocalypse is nigh in amber and she will control even the ADHD-riddled cable news cycle for weeks. Well, as long as she’s white of course. If a 70-year-old woman vanishes, black, brown or white, she barely warrants a half inch in the local paper.
As for so-called “silver alerts” I’ve never received one. Ever.
Comedians like Seth Meyers can’t get through a single show without some sort of joke about an old person. He’s not the only one.
But, in his defense, joking about race, disability, body size, sexual/ gender identity and mental issues will get him on the wrong side of Twitter’s rampaging mob. Laughing at the elderly is fine though, even with the most ardent progressive.
On the Republican side, you’d think the irony that 1.5 million Americans have had every single one of their civil rights removed, been separated from their families and placed in solitary imprisonment in cages with curtains through massive judicial overreach and corruption in Dem-run states like Michigan and Nevada would have pundits salivating.
And if we were talking about kids, I guarantee opening monologues on Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity would be relentless followed by earnestly shocked congressional hearings.
But, we’re not. It’s 1.5 million old people so you can’t even get a statehouse Republican from some mini-district in bumblefuck, Kentucky to pee on the issue’s shoe.
Even the 8Chan users behind QAnon knew that the best recruiting tool was to latch onto the #SavetheChildren crowd. I’m not even sure there is a hashtag for Save the Old People. The conspira-bullshit that Hilary Clinton regularly dines on a bunch of conservative kids is the gift that keeps on giving. Hilary Clinton dining on Chuck Grassley? Meh. Hope she brought Alka Selzer.
The reason my award-nominated investigation into guardianship abuse in Michigan ended up on my blog here was best summed up by Buzzfeed, who told me when I pitched it to them that “No one wants to read about the elderly.”
Someone will no doubt remind me that the blanket coverage of the way nursing homes basically sat back while COVID decimated their populations spurred some outrage.
But no one seems to want to ask why this country ever thought these facilities were a good idea.
The warehousing of an entire population in conditions that make ASPCA commercials look like a promotional package for Club Med Turks & Caicos should be abhorrent by its very nature.
But it is so woven into American culture that the kids, furious at the treatment their parents and grandparents received, become equally enraged when asked “Why’d you put them in there in the first place?” and defensively proclaim that no one understands “how difficult it is to handle Mom and Dad.”
To that point, it’s interesting how being a new parent to someone who requires round-the-clock attention, cries a lot, shits their diapers, dribbles, needs feeding, walks off when your back is turned or sticks their fingers in a wall outlet is a miraculous blessing but doing that for a parent is way, way too difficult.
Fortunately, Joan Lunden is sympathetic enough that she’s got an entire list of places that you can stick Mom when she becomes a pain in the ass.
I wonder why A Place for Brats isn’t as much of a thing? Maybe because a business built around the idea of shipping children off to a place where they’ve got a better than 80 percent chance of having the shit kicked out of them and spending weeks lying in their own feces is something no one in this country would even begin to countenance. Bit of a different story when it comes to old people
There are hundreds of other examples.
If you are below the age of 50 in this country, your opinion counts, marketing companies will step over dead bodies to reach you, politicians and SuperPACs will pander like overly-sycophantic Maitre D’s, employers will automatically see you as inherently more valuable, progressives and Republicans will fight tooth and nail for your identity and rights (in the latter’s case especially if you have yet to reach the age of zero) and chances are that a movie about a social issue that should outrage even the most cynical will be massive.
Christ, even when my agent and I are pitching the book I’ve co-authored about the infamous cases of elder abuse in Nevada to publishers, I’ve had to be so damned careful not to mention the words “elderly”, “senior” or “older” in any of the sample materials, that I’ve all but created the new word “juven(ish).” Of course, when they figure out it’s about older people, publishers immediately cast doubt on its marketability.
I put it it to you that the national obsession that has made Botox surgeons, Revlon, and Viagra’s marketing companies massively wealthy is not simply about the fear of aging in this country but the fear of no longer remaining relevant.
Because about the only places the over-fifties are considered valuable are in the AARP’s membership department, at Tom Selleck’s “We’re honestly not trying to fuck you” reverse mortgage company and with their peer con artists.
I hope I’m wrong about I Care A Lot.
I hope it spurs at least an hour’s rage-debate on Twitter.
I hope the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences makes it the issue of the year and showers it with nominations.
I hope it makes UIC lectures begin with everyone having to recognize and confess their youth-privilege.
I hope it makes Tucker Carlson do his squinty, sideways-head thing at the camera and ask “Did you know this was happening?” Rachel Maddow spend an entire segment proving how the whole scheme was dreamed up by Trump and Wolf Blitzer to go into hyperbolic overdrive that the guardianship scandal threatens to tear the country even further apart and into almost certain war with Iran.
I hope I start getting at least one silver alert and that the insidious nursing home industry lobbyists the American Healthcare Association and LeadingAge go the way of the NRA and start to implode under a mass post-COVID realization that their fight to ensure blanket liability protections for abusive and disease-ridden nursing facilities is the end result of someone’s really near-sighted idea. I hope that we start looking at the elderly not as jokes, or as inherently worthless, too much trouble or commodities to be vaccuumed away when all their money has gone but as human beings.
No. Probably not.