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Program Chair, Gerontology Central Piedmont Community College Charlotte, NC 28235-5009

Inside/Out. Video/2000/8 min. Produced by Jennifer Petrucelli in the Department of Communication, Stanford University. Distributed by Terra Nova Films, 9848 South Winchester Avenue, Chicago, IL 60643. 800-779-8491. Online: www.terranova.org. E-mail: tnf{at}terranova.org. Purchase $79, Rental $39.

Terra Nova's online catalog gives the following description for this film:

As a daughter of a movie director, Toni had struggled all her life to feel good about her physical appearance. At 61, she had finally come to peace with that issue. Then, quite suddenly, she contracted Bell's Palsy, a disease that left half of her face paralyzed. Now she is on an internal journey, ... one that is raising the question—as it does for many people as they age: What role does physical appearance play in my self-perception and in my feelings of self worth?

Near the end of the video she concludes: "I'm learning to understand the profound gift of looking inside rather than just seeing the surface." This short but insightful video will trigger feelings and reflection on an issue faced by most of us in a society that has a hard time dealing with the physical effects of aging.

Even though this film is a mere 8 minutes, Inside/Out is evocative and stirring enough to transport one into Toni's experience in a profound way. With the first grainy, blue-tinted images of her reflection in a mirror, to the images of her expressive artwork, the viewer is able to get "inside" her reality immediately through her distorted face and the feelings it evokes for her.

This is an autobiographical piece examining issues of images of aging and self-esteem. Toni first realizes there is something wrong with her face when she is putting on lipstick as she gets ready to go out. Her lips do not match perfectly together, and when she blinks, the right eye does not close properly. She went to look at her reflection in the mirror to discover that the right side of her face was paralyzed. As a 61-year-old woman, she immediately thought she had had a stroke. After subsequent medical examinations and scans, she was told that she had Bell's Palsy. Even though she discovered that 80–90% of people fully recover from this disease anywhere from 3 weeks to 6 months, she uses her affliction as a way to take her "inside" to examine her issues around aging, and cultural images of beauty that are imposed on women, and amplified for older women. Bell's Palsy had given her a new frame to look through. She had always felt awkward and invisible and now found, ironically, that people stared at her, and her response was, "What are you looking at?"

Apart from the alterations in Toni's physical appearance, she experienced challenges related to the paralysis; for example, she had to tape her eye shut at night and apply drops frequently while her eye was open during the day because she could no longer blink. Her speech was affected, and her eating became difficult, with frequent dribbling. For those of us who are gerontologists and have worked with the dependent older population, we might think that this is a relatively mild condition to live with, compared to some effects of chronic conditions. On the other hand, this short film takes us deep into Toni's reality as she expresses eloquently her feelings about it, so it can serve as a metaphor for more severe conditions. In this way it is a good teaching tool for gerontology students who, in a short space of time, can gain understanding for those who are aging under difficult physical circumstances. It makes powerful links between what is happening on the outside and what is churning up on the inside. We live our lives on our faces, in many ways, so disfigurement of the face, compared with other parts of the body, can have profound psychological effects on older women. Our culture's emphasis on physical appearances of women clashes with the image of this woman holding up the right side of her face as she looks in the mirror, in an attempt to regain some sense of equilibrium.

I showed this video to students in a gerontology class (mostly women) and all of them resonated with Toni's feelings of diminished self-worth. They admired her ability to renegotiate with life and her image of herself, to make it work for her, and they found it enlightening that she used this experience to come to know herself better. But they also emphasized that she needed to "get over it!"

The filming uses the frame repeatedly as a metaphor: the frames of the film, her framing of her reality, the mirror as a frame of reflection. And so, as viewers, we look through these frames of Toni's life to view her reality in her expression of art (revealing distorted faces), her reflection in the mirror, and her attempt to frame her life from the inside/out and the outside/in. Overall, Inside/Out is a good humanistic training tool for students in gerontology and women's studies. It may also be helpful for those professionals working with persons living with physical disabilities as a result of strokes. It is a good stimulant for many interesting discussions about aging, disabilities, and cultural expectations of physical appearance at any age.

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