I’ve never watched an episode of “Golden Girls.”
I watched a couple of episodes of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” but the only thing I remember is the way Mary Tyler Moore threw her hat up in the air as an overly optimistic voice in the background sang, “You’re gonna make it after all.”
Rose Nylund and Sue Ann Nivens are foreign names to me, but Betty White is a name I can’t escape.
It’s hard to figure out what White’s appeal is beyond being a feisty, cool old lady, and yet she’s idolized by her fans. Watch her “Saturday Night Live” episode ““ people literally start cheering the second she comes on the screen. If an entertainer gets applause for her mere presence, that’s when she knows she’s hit the big time.
But then again, Betty White has been in show business since the 1940s. She was a pop culture icon way before generation Apple products. What we really ought to get at is why she’s popular now, again, at age 88.
For those out of the loop, White was Ryan Reynolds’ crazy grandmother in the 2009 film, “The Proposal.” She made an appearance in a Snickers commercial, where she played an athlete competing like a grandmother. She hosted “Saturday Night Live,” if people still watch that.
The list of her appearances within the last two years goes on. Basically, if a sweet old lady comes on the screen (and more than likely says something the Federal Communications Commission would like to censor) then it’s Betty White.
The Washington Post TV critic Hank Stuever has a theory. In a May 8 article, he attributed her renaissance to an obsession with finding whips in retirement houses ““ finding naughtiness where it doesn’t belong. Specifically, he said, “America loves a slightly dirty-minded meemaw.” Truer words have never been written.
Vincent Brook, a lecturer for the School of Theater, Film and Television has a similar theory. He credits White with a certain sexuality. Not in the sense of being sexual, but rather being open about sex in a way most people’s grandparents are not, will not and have seemingly never been.
White, Brook said, isn’t so much an “old, fogey grandmother” but a dream come true.
We might be living some sort of wish fulfillment through White. She has all of those traits that people wish their grandparents had and, by still being feisty after 70 years in the industry, she shows us that age is just a number.
At the same time, White may just be one part of a larger trend of what can be called “Elderly Reemergence” in the entertainment industry. Kathy Griffin is sometimes upstaged by her mother on her own show, and anyone who skipped Travie McCoy’s performance at Bruin Bash to see “Red” knows that the 50-and-up crowd is holding its own on the big screen.
Morgan Freeman has been playing the wise, sometimes humorous sage for as long as many generation Apple products can remember, and Helen Mirren has been working steadily for decades. They’ve been paying the bills, to be sure, but neither has played a prominent role in any action movies in recent years (not counting Morgan Freeman in “Wanted”).
According to Brook, this is part of the baby boomers (a term that comes into all conversations about anything from social security to World War II history lectures) becoming older. There’s a big percent of our population who would have watched “Golden Girls” and had trouble imagining power-hungry Sue Ann Nivens from “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” play sweet, docile Rose.
For the rest of us, we can watch her shows on the Internet.