Oscars 2022: Licorice Pizza addresses age gap between partners but steers clear of predatory behaviour

“Do you think it’s weird I hang out with Gary and his 15-year-old friends all the time?” the female protagonist Alana asks her sister, in the middle of Licorice Pizza and answers the question herself.

“I think it’s weird I hang out with Gary and his 15-year-old friends all the time.” And when Alana is not asking herself this question, other characters around her are. When Bradley Cooper, playing film producer and Barbara Streisand’s stormy ex Jon Peters, asks the male lead Gary [Copper Hoffman] and Alana [Alana Haim] about their relationship, Alana replies they are not together citing her much older age. Soon after Peters violates Alana’s personal space while helping her steer, and the emotional notes of sex and whatever romance is between Gary and Alana are clearly distinguished.      

Director Paul Thomas Anderson likes to study a range of power dynamics in his films, especially inappropriate ones. His films are magpies for gray, thickly layered areas. In Phantom Thread, fashion designer Reynolds Woodcock stays in his dark, twisted marriage, and consents to being poisoned by his wife Alma. He needs Alma’s love when he is sick, and she needs him to be sick because this is the only window in which she can get his attention in his otherwise busy life. This is where they find stasis, an equal match.

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Anderson’s latest movie Licorice Pizza has been in controversy for bringing to us another improper match – the protagonists’ significant age gap and the minor age of the male lead makes their love forbidden. Gary Valentine is 15 and Alana Kane is 25 or something – this movie is careful to maintain some sort of plausible deniability – Alana is reluctant to go on a date with Gary, and puts up a performance of annoyance as long as she can. As movie critic David Elrich puts it, it is hard to tell if a given scene is a “date or a dare.”  

For a large part of the movie, Alana and Gary are a non-couple. They are chaperone and chaperoned, business partners, friends – it does not matter to them what they are as long as they are something.

Licorice Pizza feels like a coming-of-age film not for the teenage character but the adult Alana, who has been floating through life passively, as the object of one casual butt slap after another.

That is till she meets someone she should not be with. Through the movie, Alana explores other romantic interests but realises that only with Gary is she fully her own person. On the other hand, Gary has his own romantic sojourns with a more age-appropriate partner before he calls back to the declaration he made in the start of the movie that he found the girl he wanted to marry. It is a world where a young woman lives in a state of constant objectification and a teenage boy can become a moderately thriving businessman. In a Roald-Dahl-like way, adults are childish and kids are grown up. It is Gary who hands out opportunities to Alana; he is the one taking the business decisions or coaching her for acting auditions.  

Nevertheless you still cannot unsee some of the romantic coding: that scene where Alana spies on Gary and his age-appropriate partner, and when she insists she is cooler than Gary can make us uncomfortable enough to nudge us into an ethical dilemma. Does an age gap alone signal grooming and sexual harassment? A parallel can be drawn with the age inappropriateness of the movie Call Me By Your Name.

Elio is 17 and Oliver is 24 when they go down a more obviously sexual path. The technicality of the age of consent, which is 14, for Italian men became a key defense against the argument that the movie promoted pedophilia. And while predatory older men commonly justify their actions quoting the extraordinary maturity of underage partners, the story in Call Me By Your Name is not Oliver’s, it is Elio’s. Elio is navigating his own desire in a prosocial way at a time when the stakes of being out were much higher. Licorice Pizza understands that gender and sexuality complicate the ethics of sex across age differences.

Cis-het society has long stereotyped gay men as predatory to deny them civil rights and social inclusion, and perpetuated the idea that one gay man might recruit another one, a younger one, into a gay agenda. Young men often date older men as protective measures. One theme that emerged in psychotherapist Dr Leon Banister Jr’s research with intergenerational gay couples was that they considered discrimination as inherent to the gay experience. So many young gay men have felt isolated from or misunderstood by the community around them, and gravitated towards others who might have been in their shoes before.  

A fair share of derogatory stereotypes exist for single older women too. They are either out there making last-ditch attempts to trap a man into marriage like Blanche [Vivian Leigh] from A Streetcar Named Desire [1951] or they are labeled cougars, drafting young men with the same tactical strategies of predatory older men. It is a certain kind of woman who dates for sex. When older women do not choose children or commitment, which might be a deal-breaker for same-age or older men who expect it from them, she earns a reputation. Never mind that studies show that women dating younger partners find it easier to dodge social norms and barriers that are present in most heterosexual interactions.

Bored of the valley with no way out, Alana, hardly such an older woman, is not taken seriously. Her name, forgotten by men like William Holden, her actions questioned by a shocked father. Contrast this with how easily Gary is seen by the manager at Tail O the Cock, the waterbed salesman and saleswoman and others around him. Gary starts three different businesses through the course of the movie. He is even arrested without a warrant or a word notwithstanding that he was a juvenile.

A story changes entirely when details of age and gender change – its tensions and conflicts shift. The vantage point of a convincing story cannot be interchanged with another. In the end, the age gap in Licorice Pizza does not feel like a gratuitous choice. It lives in that special corner of your heart that believes in soulmates.  

Oscars 2022 will take place on 28 March.

Eisha Nair is an independent writer-illustrator based in Mumbai. She has written on history, art, culture, education, and film for various publications. When not pursuing call to cultural critique, she is busy drawing comics.

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