Longevity or the desire for eternity?

Today more than ever, longevity has become a buzzword. Everywhere people talk about how to live longer, better, healthier, more beautifully. It is not just a medical issue: it has become a full-fledged industry – the “well-aging” movement, “biohacking,” miracle supplements – all promising eternal youth and prolonged performance. But what do we really imagine when we dream of longevity? What shape does the desire to “never grow old” take? And most importantly: who profits from this dream?

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Cinema – a mirror of our fears, dreams, and obsessions – has anticipated, portrayed, and critiqued the collective obsession with eternal youth. Films often show what dominant narratives hide: the cost, the solitude, the alienation, the identity loss that accompany the frantic quest for eternal life. In this article, we explore how cinema deconstructs the contemporary myth of longevity, revealing its complexity, ambiguity, and critical potential.

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The myth of Tithonus: living forever, aging forever
The Greek myth of Tithonus is one of the earliest reflections on immortality: a man granted eternal life but not eternal youth. The love of the goddess Eos and her oversight in asking Zeus for youth too becomes a cruel punishment. Tithonus eventually becomes a cicada – a symbol of a hollow, whispering existence. The message is clear: longevity without meaning, without body, without relationship, is a tragedy, not a triumph.

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Dorian Gray: aesthetic as moral condemnation
In Wilde’s novel (and the film adaptations), Dorian’s eternal youth is not a gift but a trap. His body remains untouched while the portrait – the mirror of his soul – decays. This split between appearance and truth resonates deeply in our age of social media and digital bodies, where the cult of youthful beauty erases every trace of time and vulnerability. Eternal image, as with Dorian, is a toxic hallucination.

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Death Becomes Her: irony and the disintegration of desire
In the black comedy Death Becomes Her, two women take an elixir to remain forever young. But their immortality is only skin-deep: their bodies rot, fall apart, shatter. The film tells us that the shell is not enough, that beauty without life is a parody. Behind the satire lies a fierce critique of extreme plastic surgery and the fetishization of the perfect body.

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The Substance: the posthuman double and the loss of self
The recent The Substance (2024) radicalizes the discussion. A mysterious formula creates a “perfect” version of oneself – younger, more desirable. But this double gains autonomy, rebels, escapes control. It's a narrative hyperbole that perfectly captures posthuman alienation: the subject is split, multiplied, reduced to pure performance. The dream of regeneration becomes a nightmare of identity loss.

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Benjamin Button: living backwards, dying in childhood
The film based on Fitzgerald’s story proposes another variant: a man who grows younger instead of older. But living “in reverse” means always being out of sync with others, unable to form lasting relationships. When life is stripped of its natural rhythm, it loses coherence. Temporal anomaly generates isolation.

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A critique of the longevity imaginary: life as commodity
All these films, in different ways, speak to the same paradox: the obsession with endless time breeds monsters. Living forever is not synonymous with living well. In fact, the more we strive to extend life, the more it risks becoming artificial, fragmented, inhuman.

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Today, the concept of longevity is at the heart of a vast economic-cultural operation. The anti-aging, cosmetics, and regenerative medicine industries promote a mythical narrative of long life: easy, happy, reversible. But true longevity – as observed in Blue Zones communities like Sardinia – is something else entirely: slow, relational, grounded in the land, shaped by everyday routines and community bonds.

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Cinema offers a critical space to imagine alternatives. But beyond storytelling and satire, a fundamental question remains: how is our idea of longevity shaped? Is it a cultural construct? A collective projection shaped by media, science, and industry? And above all, who has an interest in proposing one vision of longevity over another?

Longevity is not a univocal concept. It is a symbolic battleground, a contested imaginary, an aspiration molded by power, ideologies, and narratives.

It is up to us to learn how to recognize it.