Reimagining the American Dream of Aging: Filmic Portrayals and Implications for Transformative Advertising Research

Transformative advertising research uses institutional theory to position advertising as a site for transformative well-being, highlighting the role of ideology in shaping industry practice and output. Our study into discourses of successful aging in three films addressing the lives of older women demonstrates how film uses cinematography, dialogue, and mise-en-scène to discursively create film templates of successful aging. Templates provide cultural ideological frameworks for film audiences in their materialized representations of subject positions, thereby creating consent for the conditions and consumption that symbolize those positions. Although film can offer advertising and its audiences potentially transformative ideological templates of aging and gender, our findings reveal that templates rest on existing power hierarchies, limiting their potential use as a tool for transformative well-being in industry that could contribute to individual and societal well-being.