Surrounding yourself with oldsters
Late-life pitfalls get exposed in Florida-set documentary film
I once asked Bernie Sahlins, the co-founder and former owner of the Chicago comedy theater known as Second City, to explain his secret for professional and personal longevity. And he told me.
Sahlins, who died in 2013 at 90 and even provoked a rare appearance from Bill Murray at his spectacular memorial service, was a serial entrepreneur and comedic innovator who was directing shows and consulting all over the globe well into his late 80s. He replied to my inquiry with his usual intensity, pushing his face close to mine.
“I have a lot of young friends,” he said. “Younger friends are my secret.”
Shortly afterward I ended up on a flight between Chicago and New York drinking a cocktail with a stranger, a nonagenarian, pioneering female architect. She told me that while many of her friends had died, she had been determined to replace them with friendships with the children of her friends. I made some mental notes for the future.
Sahlins, especially, was on my mind as I watched “Some Kind of Heaven,” the documentary (both in theaters and on Amazon Prime and other streaming services) about The Villages, the huge retirement community in Central Florida with a fast-growing population in excess of 100,000.
The film, directed by Lance Oppenheim, is both riveting and depressing. It gently but firmly makes its case that the utopian, “over-55” development hides profound sadness and loneliness among its tricked-out golf carts trucking through its manicured town centers, its margarita nights and yacht-rock concerts, its church services and synchronized-swimming classes.
Baby boomers, who have fueled the recent growth of The Villages, in general led far more sensual lives than their parents, experimenting far more freely with drugs, sex and hedonism and often fighting off previous generations’ notions of dignified aging. Oppenheim’s film, which does not make you want to move to The Villages, is, at its core, asking how well that set of choices really plays out in your later years.
I doubt the realtors of The Villages are thrilled with the film, and I’m sensitive to the argument
that the documentary does not come from the inside but was made by a 24-year-old filmmaker who, hugely talented as he most certainly is, can’t really understand what it is like to grow older, and the choices and necessities occasioned by aging, because he knows only its outward manifestation.
There is also a smack of both ageism and intellectual elitism to the film, the story of ordinary, middle-class snowbirds who typically worked hard during their lives, and yet a documentary co-produced by the New York
Times and the work of a young graduate of Harvard University.
Why not look for a filmmaker who actually lived there? Does not the Times otherwise continually advocate for communities telling their own stories? But that is a side of itself that the newspaper does not so easily confront.
The well-meaning people of The Villages, mostly friendly folk with times on their hands and voids to fill, were surely an easy target for a visitor with such an artistic eye for the latest application of American Gothic, so willing and able to discern and
expose their vulnerabilities.
All that said, Oppenheim still makes Sahlin’s case as well as I have seen it made since Bernie made his grand exit.
Surrounding yourself entirely with people your own age has only superficial advantages. There are no irritating children running around The Villages. The subjects in the documentary say they like that state of affairs, but their lives as presented here bespeak otherwise.
The film leaves you with a picture of a community out of intergenerational whack, a parody of the model so common elsewhere in the world, where seniors occupy valued places inside multi-age communities, offering advice and support to whippersnappers. In return, they are able to count on the care of their neighbors and families as needed.
Older people don’t need to prolong their youth by acting as if nothing had changed; they enjoy the respect they have earned. Real villages (as distinct from The Villages) have worked for hundreds of years as human communities precisely because they are made up of youth and elders, those on the edges and those in the middle, all learning from and enjoying friendship with each other.
Life is complex and we’re all different, of course. There are
plenty of lonely seniors in traditional villages. And no doubt some people at The Villages are perfectly happy, living out their years in the Florida sunshine, far from a documentarian’s gaze.
If you’ve worked a job for most of your life, you’re surely entitled to some fun, and you should be free to define that for yourself. And we’re all aware these days of life’s brevity and the unfairness of the battles with health that can take over our being, or that of someone we love. Who is anyone to judge?
Which brings me back to Sahlins and another of his creeds. In a famous 2006 commencement speech at Columbia College Chicago, he talked of the importance of having not a job but a vocation or a calling.
“You are members of a highly privileged group,” he told the graduates, after telling them they were unlikely to get rich as artists and creative individuals.
“You are able to make your life and work one.”
That — along with cultivating a whole bunch of young friends who can keep you on your toes — seems to me a pretty good prescription for a happy life, although it really does often take a village.