“The way nature’s been cheating us, I don’t mind cheating her a little:” the fantasy of Cocoon
When former child actor Ron Howard directed Cocoon — a story of retirement home folks whose close encounters with intergalactic pupal sacks leads to their rejuvenation — nearly forty years ago, it came on the heels of a television career that had established him as a household name.
First as Opie on The Andy Griffith Show (1960-’68), and then as Richie Cunningham on Happy Days (‘74-’84), Howard came to embody the good-natured, freckle-faced, clean-cut optimism of those shows’ Rockwellian visions of America. It was an image that stood keenly at odds with most contemporary media, which had increasingly shifted towards the gritty and unsparing; teenagers watching Richie come of age on their living room TV sets could peel themselves off the carpet and go out to see The Godfather, Chinatown, and Raging Bull.
By the age of thirty, Howard’s persona had been cemented in the untroubling past — the good old days. How fitting, then, that one of his earliest efforts as director should be a movie that takes literal figments of the past (i.e., Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy, Maureen Stapleton, and Don Ameche, who would win an Oscar for his performance) and reimagines them as impish heirs to eternity.
This Benjamin Button-like relationship between filmmaker and performers represents the movie’s essential charm, which hinges on a creative sensitivity to a demographic of people that isn’t usually at the center of mainstream entertainment. What’s most striking about Cocoon is its lineup of faded yet spry, “devil-ain’t-got-me-yet” second-tier picture players of yesteryear. Where did they come from, these trim, bouncy old goats who strut along with uncanny lightness? You can just picture Don Ameche or Hume Cronyn on a typical day in L.A. — getting up at 5 AM, going for a jog then drinking a health smoothie before driving out to the country club for a couple of rounds before Bloody Marys and some pastrami on rye.
It’s almost as if their retirements were rudely interrupted by a film crew, as if one afternoon an assistant director knocked on their front doors and asked if they wouldn’t mind swinging by the back lot to step in for Gregory Peck or Laurence Olivier. Cocoon is most delightful for “resuscitating” a handful of former big screen charmers who’d apparently never even slowed down.
Speaking of delights, there’s also the, to this critic’s eye, dubious yet sheepishly magnetic presence of Steve Guttenberg. Here a mere twenty-seven years of age, the actor — who had just broken through to stardom the year before with Police Academy (‘84) — carries himself with the coy yet pushy bashfulness of a ne’er-do-well who is destined to become a dirty old man. He spends the movie ogling the only woman-presenting alien (played by Tahnee Welch), and when all the senior citizens fly off to outer space at the end, it’s silly little Steve, or Jack, who remains on Earth to kick around Florida wharfs, looking for an easy gig and some quick action.
I dwell on this point and my perception of his character because I find Guttenberg frustratingly dazzling to watch. His role in Cocoon prompts me to mourn the fact that male beauty is, for one thing, so sidelined in commercial films, and that, for another, what traces of it end up onscreen are so often trapped within chauvinistic or toxic conceits of manhood. I want to have a crush on Jack, yet I can’t stand the buffoon.
Indeed, “conceits of manhood” could be a sub-heading for this movie’s title. The elder women are really of secondary interest, and when it comes to their mustachioed peers, Cocoon tries to have it both ways — depicting the aged fellows as, alternately, gentlemen, and vulgarians. This means that, on the one hand, Ameche is a debonair representative of a bygone era, waltzing with his lady friend and humming “I’m In the Mood for Love,” but then, on the other hand, he blissfully announces his erection after swimming in magical waters and breakdances in the middle of a nightclub.
Of course, one might argue that Cocoon depicts older people as multidimensional, with various desires, but I get the impression that its characters’ dualities function more as a means of providing shock value or cheap laughter than as psychological nuance. I’ve written before of how children are often co-opted by Hollywood to represent moral principles of colonialist society, and I think the same can be said of old people. Just in the way that a precocious child alleviates audiences’ fears regarding their unresolved traumas, so too does the virile coot signal that we may not have to fear our own pending senility.
We want the elderly to both personify and assuage our fears of aging, to experience pain and loss while making these hardships look effortless. In this way, Cocoon is part of a greater shift that was taking place in American movies at the time of its release; if teenagers were going to see Scorsese and Coppola during the years that Ron Howard was on TV, his earliest years as director were dominated by the names Spielberg and Lucas. Fantasy and special effects had come to the foreground in a landscape that once favored conversation and cinema vérité. Like its contemporaries, Howard’s movie eschews a humbling estimation of old age for the serene possibility that mature souls might revert to a state of permanent infancy.
“We don’t know what ‘forever’ means,” one of the aliens tells a geriatric earthling while tempting him to outer space. Cocoon is a negotiation of our fears or wishes for old age, glamorizing the elderly by providing them with an escape from their own mortality. Just as surely as Indiana Jones survived the jungle or as Richie Cunningham got home safe, Hollywood’s original stars will endure in a firmament of computer-generated imagery. It’s cinema as a nursery rhyme — promising a nation of Peter Pans that they will never have to grow up. Or pass away.
