再思高齡形象：邁向文學與文化高齡化研究

The issue of aging has been attracting global attention since the late twentieth century. The global anxiety about aging demographic can be attributed to the following variables: large-scale, global wars rarely take place after the Second World War; technological advancements of medicine are happening rapidly; post-war baby-boomers have been stepping into the old age; declining birth rate becomes the common problem in developed countries. These global contexts and the widespread improvement in global life expectancy precipitate reflections on and re-assessments of the concept of “aging.” The worldwide increase in human lifespan has largely facilitated political regimes and medical institutions to produce forceful dominant aging discourses and policies on the ground of “aging.” The subject of aging is accordingly subsumed into the discipline of medicine, as is aging discourse into illness narrative. In the name of “care,” medical technology predominantly intervenes into the life of the elderly, positing them as “inclusive exclusion.” In this vein, this essay argues against the “decline ideology,” which deploys its maneuver by categorizing the elderly as “exception.” By connecting the old age with “illness” and “senescence,” the “decline ideology” contrasts old age with youth and invests it with stereotypical attributes, which facilitates the commodification of life’s time, turning old age as the site of “production-consumption” for the operation of a late-capitalistic logic. Under such circumstances, life in the old age becomes the “bare life” (zo?), which needs medical care, management, and discipline when taken into custody in various heterotopias; on the other hand, the aging population is paradoxically conceived as bios bestowed with “privileges” and the “right” to be cared for. This essay examines Go Grandriders and Amour to interrogate whether aging images in these two films offer opportunities to re-conceptualize the idea of aging. Do they rebut or reinforce the “decline narrative” which presumes the old age to be a state of exception? Finally, this essay proposes a “post-millennial life course,” which remains open to restructuring and ongoing redefinition, in place of the habitual conception of late life.