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‘Grey is the new green’? Gauging age(ing) in Hollywood’s upper quadrant female audience, The Intern (2015), and the discursive construction of ‘Nancy Meyers’

ABSTRACT Released in 2015, Nancy Meyers’ The Intern was met by a lukewarm reception. The story of a successful start-up entrepreneur Jules (Anne Hathaway), who hires a ‘senior’ (citizen) intern Ben (Robert de Niro), Meyers struggled to get the film greenlit despite her previous commercial success, and despite films with intergenerational appeal being said to constitute ‘the industry’s holy grail’. This article examines how in the media reception of Meyers’ films, her presumed appeal to older women fans in particular is consistently positioned dismissively by critics, a discourse in which she is pigeonholed as a ‘mom-com director’. Such disdain is tied to the fact that Meyers is herself an older woman director, an unlikely conjunction in which Meyers is discursively constructed through an ageist/sexist lens that has debarred her from ‘the exclusive realm of celebrity directors’. Through interrogating the cultural positioning of ‘Nancy Meyers’, her work and her older women fans together, one uncovers how these sites are interwoven junctures in a shared matrix. The article’s multi-perspectival method brings to light both the breathtaking spectrum of intertwined ways in which older/ageing women are undermined across culture, and how the agendas of celebrity studies, audience studies and cultural gerontology might productively intersect.