Abstract
Tourism acts as a catalyst for positive changes in the elderly lives by providing possibilities for socialization, escape from routine, knowledge of new realities and cultures. This paper investigates aging representations and narratives of transformation processes in cinema screenplays focused on travel experiences. Analyzing cultural texts such as music, books, advertisements, television programs and films contributes to an understanding of standards and social norms. This kind of research is quite unexplored on the tourism studies, but it is a fact that cinema has become a universal art capable of revealing deep and intimate aspects of society through its narratives and representations. We have selected four films which links elderly, travel and transformation for content analysis: “The Bucket List (2008)”, “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011)”, “Last Vegas (2013)” and “A Walk in the Woods (2015)”. Right after, we built three categories of analysis: 1) motivation and choice of experiences; 2) consumption; 3) aging and stigma. The final discussion is based on existential philosophy to identify the transformative role of travelling on the elderly lives presented on the movies. Travelling is shown as possibilities to create existential authenticity, as it is capable of decrease negative feelings such as anxiety, depression and physical and psychic isolation.
Keywords
Transformative travels; Consumption; Elderly; Cinema; Existential philosophy