Hugo Schwyzer

The first post I ever wrote on “older men, younger women” was inspired by a movie, Love Song For Bobby Long. The most hits I’ve had on any post so far in 2008 was also movie-inspired: Age is Never Just a Number.

Right before we left on Spring Break, my wife and I went to see Smart People. It was a bit of a disappointment, largely because the two leads (Dennis Quaid and Sarah Jessica Parker) seemed miscast in their roles as a college professor and physician. The two supporting cast members, Juno’s Ellen Page and the sublime Thomas Haden Church, did their best to redeem the film. Church plays “Chuck”, a middle-aged ne’er-do-well who moves in with a widower prof (Quaid) and his overachieving daughter, Vanessa (Page).

Ellen Page is as pitch-perfect as ever as Vanessa, a socially awkward over-achieving young Republican who mothers her father and studies frantically for the SAT. Her monumentally self-absorbed father largely ignores her evident unhappiness — but uncle Chuck doesn’t. Chuck is troubled by his niece’s robotic, joyless behavior, and he starts a concerted campaign to get Vanessa to have fun. He gets her stoned one night, and then another night takes her to a bar. As they leave the bar, a tipsy Vanessa grabs her uncle and kisses him passionately. Chuck pushes her away immediately, horrified that she has misunderstood his interest in her. Much of the rest of the film (and indeed, the best scenes in this mediocre picture are all between Page and Church) is concerned with the way in which Vanessa and Chuck work through their awkwardness engendered by that kiss, and the way in which Vanessa comes to understand what it was and is she means to her uncle.

This whole subplot was refreshing. So often in contemporary film (”Juno” featuring an excellent example), we see older men as lechers or boundary violators. There are too few examples of older guys modeling a safe, nurturing non-sexual relationship with a teenage girl. The mildly original twist of “Smart People” is that, of course, “slacker” Chuck is much wiser than his brilliantly obtuse brother and his hyper-anxious, Stanford-bound niece. Chuck sees his niece for who she really is: a troubled, lonely girl seeking solace through perfectionism and control. His interest in Vanessa is lovingly avuncular. I don’t generally recommend smoking pot as an adolescent coping strategy, but when Chuck gets Vanessa high, it’s hard not to realize that that was exactly what she needed at that particular moment.

Vanessa does what so many young women are trained to do: she romanticizes an older man’s interest in her. My main point in all of my posts on student crushes is that the young tend to get crushes on older teachers not because they want us, but they want how we make them feel. (This idea is explored in a bit more depth here). When a tipsy Vanessa kisses her uncle, it’s pretty clear she’s not motivated by genuine sexual desire. She’s probably, like many teens (particularly mildly drunk ones), unsure of what she feels, other than very happy and overwhelmed. And all of that “happy overwhelmed-ness” gets sexualized.

I have no patience with the hopeless maxim that “women trade sex for love, men trade love for sex.” That notion underestimates the real power of both women’s libido and men’s capacity for emotional intimacy. At the same time, I think it’s important to note that we live in a society in which the highest form of closeness is invariably portrayed as sexual. Sometimes, we kiss and sleep with people we don’t necessarily want to be sexual with because we don’t know another way to ask for intimacy. The film makes clear that Vanessa’s crush on her uncle is less about sexual desire and more about her own relief and excitement about breaking out of her shell. When she kisses Chuck drunkenly in the parking lot, she does so because she has no other way available to her to express how much she loves him at that moment.

The film’s conceit is that Chuck’s boyish irresponsibility is balanced by his kind, intuitive wisdom. Happily, there’s never even an inkling that he is sexually drawn to Vanessa. And Chuck handles his niece’s advance nearly perfectly; for her own sake, he has to pull away until she comes to understand what it was that she really wanted from him. He sees Vanessa as a complete person, something her myopic father cannot do. And he gently, firmly, lovingly keeps a boundary in place. In this respect, he’s as good a role model as I’ve seen on screen in recent years for how an older man ought to respond to a girl’s crush upon him. (Chuck pulls a bit too far away, I think, but his withdrawal fits the film’s narrative.)

One of the most important things older men can do in the lives of their nieces (or students, youth group kids, etc.) is practice safe, loving, radically non-sexual closeness. On occasion, a girl might respond as Vanessa responds in “Smart People”. But whether flirtation or sexual interest represents authentic desire or simply masks a longing for closeness and validation, the wise and right thing for an older man to do is not respond in kind. There’s an old saying in youth ministry: “affirm and re-direct.” When a kid is acting up or needs attention, the key is to acknowledge their immediate need and then get them re-focused on something more positive.

Young women need men in their lives who see them. In that relationship, the sine qua non of really seeing is practicing warm closeness without even a frisson of sexual intimacy. And in an otherwise disappointing film, we’ve got an imperfect but still laudable example of how to do just that.