Curious Buttons

I saw The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttons yesterday. I cried. But I don't know why. My difficulty in reading the movie could be just another case of the way I'm filmically challenged. Or it could be an effect of an insubstantial film held together by curiosity regarding how Brad Pitt will look at his next age. Or maybe something else. At any rate, I felt quite emotional at the end of the film. It's almost as if the film elicited feeling without eliciting a particular kind of feeling, a feeling of this rather than that (like the fast food ad that markets 'flavor' without saying anything about the sort of flavor).

The baby dies. The old man is born. The baby symbolizes not an open future (as part of a reproductive, heteronormative social form) but the end of a life. The old man suggests the new, unpredictable, unexpected, the possibility of a life that does not and cannot conform to narrative conventions. What is old is new again.

The future belongs to the old. The young are dependent, burdens, harbingers of certain death. Is this reversal a hint of the geriatric power of the baby boomers? Or does the reversal just confirm the normativity of what it reverses?

What sort of fantasy has the man as his lover's baby, dying in the arms of his lover-become-mother? What sort of fantasy celebrates the prowess of a male body in its seventies or eighties? And what sort of fantasy views abandonment of one's partner and child as an act of noble sacrifice and responsibility?

It would be wrong for me to say I'm disappointed in the movie, although I continue to wonder about the lack of questioning and reflection manifest in Benjamin as he becomes a young man and those around him age. More striking to me was the absence of connection and responsibility, the singularity with which the character lived with the body of a young man and the memories of an old man (not to mention the difficulty there could be of making such a distinction--what kind of relation could there be between a brain inscribed by experience and the physicality of a child's brain?). The separation suggests a vision of mature masculinity as necessarily isolated and separate, as closed of in itself. Is that lack or loss the stress of feeling the film induces?

Or might it also be the woman's loss of companionship. Her lover returns as her child. She cares for him as he becomes ever more difficult and dependent, with no memories and increasingly limited capacity to communicate.

Comments

[mao.mimosa]

Button's lack of responsibility was indeed odd, but he also completely lacked curiosity and ambition -- he spent no time trying to figure out who/what he was or what he could/should do (aside from pursue his love interest, of course). I take this to be an attempt to distill and intensify the conventions of a traditional starcrossed lover narrative (nothing else matters), and is probably why it was so effective at mobilizing a feeling (for you and for me).

But the reversal of aging didn't seem just a gimmicky note that we all end up in diapers. Death is manageable only because it's familiar (it might be unfathomable, but at least we know that it happens to everybody in basically the same way). But button dies in a completely unfamiliar way. And he dies alone. Necessarily. And so he does what we all fear the most -- dying without any real, imagined, or even possible community.

[crgre]

A feel-good parable about Alzheimer's disease, perhaps?

[Jodi]

Mao--I wouldn't say that he dies alone; she is holding him in her arms when he dies.

[Bianca]

I'm taking this comment on a tangent because you're smart and I wonder; what do you make of the weird backstory of the intergenerational continuity of black careworkers - culminating in the highly raced tragedy of Hurricane Katrina at the end? Buttons might have died in Cate's arms, but he was raised by a black mother, who was a caretaker for white elderly, and she had a black daughter, who also kept on working in white elder-care, and at the end of the film, a young black woman seemed to be the privately employed caretaker for a then-elderly Cate Blanchette. This story of a raced-working class as a backdrop of white humanity is all too suspicious for how usual it is. Would you read it as something related to Button's - and to some degree white America's - waking uncuriousness?

[Jodi]

Hi Bianca, thanks for your comment. I think you are right to emphasize uncuriousness: much of the movie takes place in New Orleans during Jim Crow and the civil rights struggle. And this doesn't differ visually significantly from the images of present/Katrina New Orleans. The absence of difference is surely reassuring and soothing to Benjamin and to Blanchette's character. Maybe even to the director. But we should not find this soothing or comforting or part of a practice of 'well, black people just really want to spend their time taking care of white people.'