The folks at Miller Brewing Company have done it again. Once more they are using old people to sell beer. Their latest television commercial shows two oldsters in the service of Miller Lite. If you share my low tastes and watch professional sports, you may catch it on the tube as I did last week.

A year and a half ago I wrote a column about a previous ad which showed an elderly couple on a couch late at night making out. Called “Young at Heart,” that commercial was made for Miller by an advertising team from Sweden. I called one of the actors, Marge Lintz then 80 years old, and asked what she thought of the ad.

“I don’t understand how anyone could be critical of it,” she said, as she rejected negative views alleging exploitation of elders. Her only complaint was that at the end of two days of filming her chin was rubbed sore by Hal’s beard.

The current ad, “Old Man,” lasts 30 seconds and has no spoken words. It opens on a cook-out with people milling around. The camera first focuses on an old man who is casting amorous glances toward a woman sitting on the other side of the open space. She is shown animatedly talking to beer-drinking young women, presumably her daughters, sitting on either side of her.

Then we see the old man approaching, leaning on a cane as he walks toward the woman. The older woman’s face lights up with anticipation as he draws near.

When he gets close, he stops, and accepts a bottle of Miller Lite that a young fellow has removed from a cooler and thrust into his hand. Having received the beer, the old man turns around and walks back into the distance. The camera returns to the older woman; her face registers a mixture of disappointment and pretended indifference. The guy obviously had preferred the beer to her.

In an effort to evaluate the ad, I recalled background given me earlier by my favorite advertising guru John Carroll, now at WGBH. Speaking about “Young At Heart” he had told me, “A lot of campaigns are like this .  .  .  outhip the other guy. They’re strictly image ads hip, cynical attitude .  .  . they want to make it edgy.”

He suggested that the older people were being used to grab the attention of young viewers who have grown up so saturated by television ads that, if you are to get them to notice anything, you have to shock them. And what’s more shocking than old men and women feeling sexual passion?

The actress in “The Old Man” is 74-year-old Clara Harvey with whom I talked at length. She turns out to be a remarkable woman, someone who emigrated from the Yucatan fifty years ago and who now lives in Los Angeles. She started acting only two years ago and loves it. Of this particular ad she says, “I thought it was wonderful” and she quotes approvingly her daughter ‘s judgment – “hilarious.”

A wise and witty friend, Mike Shinagel, also takes a straight-out benign position. “Equal strokes for old folks” he tells me approvingly.

For a more detailed view, I talked to an old friend, Joe Perkins, current president of the American Association of Retired Persons. Joe favors analysis of the ad from two angles.

First, he says the ad reflects the humanization of older people in American society. “Neither ad would have appeared a few years ago,” according to Joe. “The woman had feelings, she was hopeful.”

But he also expresses concern about possible toying with elders. “If they intended the ads to be pejorative,” Joe adds, “then they’re bad ads.” Mind you, he was laboring under the disadvantage of not having seen either one. Presiding over the 33-million-member AARP clearly does not leave much time for TV.

My own feelings reflect the tension between the two views. On the one hand, I welcome seeing older people in advertising. Thus far, we have been underrepresented in that medium. When shown, we have too often been portrayed as needing dentures or laxatives. Our image has been usually associated with some form of decrepitude.

However, I also feel the need to take older people seriously. The trouble with both beer ads is that they make old people cute. The ad makers use advanced age to play with viewers, to entertain them with images of older people doing things associated with youth, and ultimately to titillate television watchers with visions of geriatric sex.

Sex at any age has its ludicrous aspects; when shown in elders it is easy to make it look quite ridiculous. The suggestion that an old man who needs a cane to walk could be sexually attractive to a woman his own age is calculated to stir up in viewers complicated emotions.

With no little anticipation, I shall await the judgment of this column’s readers.

Richard Griffin