The doom of growing old in ‘The Amusement Park’ & ‘I Care A Lot’

My mother turns 65 this year. It’s all a bit surreal, getting older. If she’s getting older, that means I’m getting older. I turned 35 this year. Lord god almighty, when the hell did that happen? Anyway, aging is a wonderful and terrible thing. Life certainly makes more sense in my 30s; parts of my life, from long-buried traumas to ongoing struggles with depression to major career moves, creep further into the light, whether you want them to or not. But it does, and it’s there, and you have to confront it. You deal with your shit, and then you move on. Well, you try to move on. The thing about getting older is people start dying all around you. In the last year alone, I’ve lost five people — two friends and three relatives, including my sister Jeanette. So, not only must you forge ahead into the sweltering darkness, a cavernous place no one but you can go, but you must carry the excruciating weight of grief over and over and over again.

But back to getting older.

Several years ago, my mother spent some time in a nursing home after a fall that shattered her knee-cap (for the second time). She remains quite tight-lipped about her experiences there. When she does speak of it, often regaling a tale of being poisoned, a fear floods her eyelids in sharp flashes. Conversation then quickly shifts to something more inane like the weather or her plants. It was four years ago, when I was living in New York, that she took up a brief residency in a nearby facility. Whatever happened inside their walls only she knows, terrible things she now harbors in her heart. Perhaps it’s the implication of such terror that is most frightening, particularly as we all grow older and the options for elder health care grow slimmer and grimmer.

George A. Romero’s The Amusement Park, initially filmed as a PSA back in 1973, combs through this end-of-life spectrum as a way to hold a looking glass up to society. The treatment of the elderly community — and it’s well-documented how rampant physical and psychological abuse have become in nursing homes and assisted living spaces — is presented through an amusement park and its various attractions and side shows. It’s some twisted episode of The Twilight Zone, burrowing and sliding into the epidermis like a slimy parasite.

When an older gentlemen (Lincoln Maazel) enters the park, his eyes wide with hunger and excitement, he’s quickly met with disdain and coldness. He’s herded along his route, frequently unable to participate in any of the most thrilling entertainment, with a host of other elderly individuals, whose lives seem precariously close to the end. But their vitality frequently glimmers in their eyes but squashed by the younger and more fit generations. As Maazel’s unnamed character (he’s unnamed because he could literally be anyone; he’s all of us inevitably) wanders through the park, peeping in to the side-shows and hopping in line for concessions, his situation grows ever more dire when he soon suffers physical abuse, and the emotional trauma grows in tandem. He’s nearing the end of his life, so, society says, he has little value, other than a pocket to pick, to the world. He must be discarded as as soon as possible. He’s taking up too much space, they say.

48 years later, and nothing has changed. You can watch the news or read social media, and you’ll see we’ve moved no further than previous generations. When I Care A Lot (directed by J Blakeson) dropped earlier this year, I was intrigued by its premise, and I knew Rosamund Pike would certainly deliver a captivating performance (she usually does). But what I did not expect was how much the film, centered around a legal guardian whose entire livelihood is exploiting the elderly, would fill me with blood-boiling rage. Like I was shaking I was so angry. Hollywood likes to makes movies about America’s many problems, but they don’t want to do anything to actually stop it. Marla Grayson (Pike) is a shark, and she can always smell the blood in the water. When she descends upon Jennifer Peterson’s (Dianne Wiest) home, she takes no prisoners, swooping in to claim the property and Jennifer’s very life as her own. It’s terribly cruel and makes for a devastating and infuriating watch. The film makes no statement other than to present reality as it is. That’s not art. It’s just sad.

The Amusement Park and I Care A Lot would make for a downright nightmarish double-feature. Both films are certainly provocative, if nothing else. They’ll make you think about the tragedy of the real world, perhaps inspiring you to do something of good in the world. Or maybe you’ll simply slip back into your cushioned lifestyle, slowly barreling down the track to a similar fate. But let me ask you this: in 30 or 40 years, wouldn’t you want someone to save you from such brutality? Or would you prefer to resign to such an existence where you’re nothing but a carcass for the world to suck dry?