When it comes to an industry like film, that is a business entirely centered around making maximum profits, there are bound to be some patterns and tropes that arise. This is because everything in the film industry is actually quite formulaic to ensure the guarantee of making money.
In other words, if a structure, concept, or behind the scenes detail helps a film to find success among viewers, other productions tend to utilize the same or similar approaches to attempt to find similar success. The more times the approach is repeated andcontributes to another movie’s success, the more likely it is to be repeated again, thus creating these tropes.
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Most of the time, these tropes are carefully considered to achieve success through bettering the story of a film, or its production process. However, sometimes these tropes aren’t directly related to the film at all, but rather, cater to more skewed reasons, like appealing to particular viewers, capturing certain environments for certain motives, reflecting certain character types in a biased light, etc. These tropes are certainly less concrete and many times fade out with enough time, but until they do, it’s oftenhard for them not to stand out. There are certainly plenty of tropes in film that viewers may not realize hold particular significance, but there are still some that simply just don’t seem necessary.
The Dawson Casting trope is a good example of a trope that viewers may not understand the reason for. This trope is when actors that are older (sometimes visibly so) play teenage characters. While viewers may notice apparent age differences, they may not understand that it actually helps prevent several legal complications. In Hollywood, there is only alimited amount of time that child actorsare allowed to be on set or working, which would simply not work for the intensive and long process of filming a movie or show. As a result, many shows addressed the complication by casting child twins or casting adults to play kids.
On the other hand, there are tropes like casting actors with unobtainable physiques to create sex appeal and attempt to pull in more viewers, much like many films and shows use nude scenes or sex scenes. These tropes, though common, don’t usually contribute anything to the story orthe audience’s emotional connectionto it. So why then include them in the story? To appeal to a particular audience. Often movies and shows find a target audience and accumulate tropes that appeal to that group, or in some cases, groups, considering that many longer shows and films will stack tropes to try to broaden their cast to more viewers.
One trope that has commonly been used for this purpose of appealing to a particular audience is the Playing Gertrude trope. This is a trope that has actually been used for generations, most notably beinga staple casting techniquefor Gertrude in Hamlet, which is where the trope gets its name. For this trope, an older female character is played by a much younger woman to give the character more sex appeal, catering to the male audience. This trope was created in the belief that casting an age-appropriate woman would, one, lose the interest of male viewers, and two, lessen the sexual tension between the actor playing the female character, and the male actor playing her love interest. Sometimes, the female actor may even be playing a character that is meant to be much older than their male co-star’s character,yet their co-star is actually olderthan them.
In other words, the Playing Gertrude trope is pretty notably sexist as it suggests that women past a certain age hold no sexual appeal or power, and that female characters’ only purpose is to give male viewers something to look at. It’s also clearly part of the double-standards Hollywood creates between women and men in the industry, as men’s careers can be mostly unaffected by their age, while their female counterparts could lose relevance once wrinkles or gray hair appear.
Of course, it should be noted that this trope is as old as thedecades it’s been usedsuggest. It began in a time when many women were still expected to do housework all day long, and thus, most viewers were made up by men, or female viewership just wasn’t considered. As time has gone on and women have become more of an undeniable presence in the economy, more concern has been given to female viewers. As a result, more sexist tropes have begun to get phased out, becoming taboos rather than tropes.
The Playing Gertrude trope, so clearly catering to the male view and not acknowledging all that femaleactors have to offerthroughout their lives, is likely to also totally phase out in time– and it’s already started to. Further, as more women are finding their ways into more influential roles in Hollywood, they’re addressing these outdated and sexist tropes, and creating new ones that inspire and validate the experience of female viewers. Though these exclusive tropes may be bothersome to many viewers, they serve as reminders of how important a role film plays in our society’s perception of each other.
