In an advertising sense, there was nothing fundamentally wrong with the marketing of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Acclaimed as a film that was 'philosophical', 'intriguing', et cetera, because it explored the abstract concept of 'living life backwards', it appealed to people like myself who like to think they are highly intellectual. Crowds and Oscar nominations came, but it is this point beyond which we cannot hail this film as a roaring success. With its self-professed philosophical inclinations as expedient yardsticks against which to measure its achievement, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is found to be still, still, far wide.
The course of philosophy has embossed the word 'life' with a meaning deeper than the mere trajectory of human progression from birth through to death. If I may borrow an allegory from John Lewis Gaddis' The Landscape of History, then I will elucidate. We are all like wanderers, moving in an arbitrarily-defined forward direction. Problem is, we walk backwards (ie we face the landscape from which we have come and have our backs turned towards the expanses into which we go). We are clueless as to what kind of land our next step will take us onto and are similarly unable to see the scenery that surrounds us until the moment we are passing it by. We live a life of memories (anybody wants to join me and my WSC buddies at the National Museum this Sunday for the screening of The Persistence of Memory?) because everything we know about that constitutes our being and existence resides in the realm of the past. It would perhaps be apt to pause here and think about what it means to do all this backwards.
Admittedly there is a range of possibilities. For starters we could have the scenario of the wanderer operate in exact reverse. One faces the direction in which he walks, hence seeing all that he approaches and possessing the power to change his course such that he eventuates wherever he desires to. At the same time, he forgets all that he has done and all that he has been, and lives a life of dementia paralysed by the loss of memory. Alternatively, we could invert the journey (ie have our man start where he should have ended) and have the wanderer walk a pre-programmed route back towards where he should have started, gaining as he moves the understanding of how he came to arrive at the former (ie journeying towards an epiphany).
And yet all this is besides the point, for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is neither. He does not have the psychic ability to foretell his future (and as such remains distinctly human in the movie), nor does he forget about the girl of his childhood years (until the painfully lame bout of dementia he experiences in his 'old age/adolescent' phase; more on this later). Neither does he begin the movie with a consciousness or identity that he spends the plot figuring out how he constructed. There is none of the predestination, implicit in either of these scenarios, in the life of Benjamin Button. His actions all carry unknown consequences, some of which he lived to regret, and others to cherish. Neither would be possible had the outcome been a given (assuming people, given the choice, don't act in a manner that brings an unfavourable end).
Since Benjamin knew nothing of the future he walked into, he must have had his back facing the direction in which he walked. Since he had full responsibility and autonomy over where his path ended (in that this destination would result from the actions he took), he could not have begun walking at the 'end point' towards a known 'start point'. The one thing that differentiated him from a conventional human being was that he was born old and haggard, and died, as a baby, knowing and caring about nothing; but this distinction is a merely physical one that fails to prevent Gaddis' model from being applicable. It alters the condition of the wanderer at each of the two points but fundamentally leaves untouched the nature of the journey itself. This dearth of abstraction makes the character aphilosophical in nature.
A closer evaluation of the film yields the realisation that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button does not merely fail to break new philosophical ground, but also comes up short in disguising its true identity as a conventional flick. At its heart is a romance that is deeply touching, saddening, but vaguely magical. It is the implausible story of two individuals whose paths come together like a dream fulfilled after the nightmares of clandestine candlelight meetings and Parisian mishaps. That the affection begins in spite of an ostensible age gap, blossoms in spite of the numerous tribulations and setbacks, and survives in spite of the ironic (though highly expected) reversal of roles at the film's end, makes it seem immense and moving. And yet its basis is fantasy. We are left under no illusions that Benjamin's peculiar condition underpins the romantic element of the love affair, and yet we realise that this condition is an unrealistic and implausible one. What transpires is an understanding that any statement emanating from Benjamin Button is most applicable only within its own fantastical confines. The odd splash of humour and the inventive juxtaposition of a wizened head and a toddler's torso (which is purely aesthetic in value) are, amongst others, elements which maintain a spirited audience and a nice tally from the box office.
What ultimately damns The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is not that it roughly fits the criteria defining a flick, for this is forgiveable if it proves itself to possess a timeless and universal quality that we can appreciate beyond the immediacy of sensual or emotional enjoyment. Its more critical failing is its interpretation of living life in reverse being unimpressive to anyone well-versed in the parlance of philosophy. Perhaps it is a tad harsh to expect a philosophical dissertation from a work designed simply to rake in the dough, but one would hope that the publicity people cut out the misleading intellectual pretensions, call a spade a spade, and market The Curious Case of Benjamin Button as nothing more than a feel-good flick.
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