Anging Backwards

“While, everyone else was aging, I was getting younger... all alone.”- Benjamin Button, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. This weekend I went and saw Benjamin Button on campus. While there I ran into Amy, who jokingly told me to blog about the movie. But funny story by half way through the movie we both realized that blogging about it was actually a legitimate option this unit. I know. I know I’m blogging about another movie. So shoot me, they’re good examples. For anyone who does not know the movie is about a man who is born an old man and gets younger as he grows older. His body is getting progressively younger while his mind is growing as a normal mind would. This is a perfect example of time and space and how people’s circumstances and so on can drastically change the way they relate to and think about time and space. Throughout the movie there are many instances where this relationship is displayed and examined.

The movie opens with the story of a clockmaker who was commissioned to make a clock for the new train station. Before the clock is finished his son dies in the World War 1, devastating the clockmaker. On the day the new clock is unveiled we find out that he made it so that the hands move backwards. The clockmaker says that he did this on purpose, that his hope is that time will move backwards and bring his son, and all the other young men lost at war back home safely. This brings up the movies first interesting point. When we have suffered a loss we tend to dwell in the past, wishing we could go back and change things or not take people for granted. Rather than moving forward we. Like the clockmaker, will time to move backwards instead. We fight a losing battle against time because it will never do what we so wish at those times that it would. Sometimes we are like the clockmaker and let that battle consume us, becoming almost unable to function because of our anger, frustration and pain caused by time trudging forward no matter what happens to us, no matter how much we wish to stop it or make it go back.

Later in the movie we meet Benjamin, who was born shortly after the clock was unveiled. We are left to assume that his backward aging is somehow connected to the clock. As Benjamin grows up he has to start facing the truth that he is different, that time and space mean something different to him than they do to others and that his relationship with other people. When Benjamin is about 10 or 12 he meets a little girl about the same age named Daisy. They become close friends because despite what Benjamin looks like on the outside, they are both children. It is clear that Benjamin is able to relate more to her than to the older people he lives with and looks like. One night the two sneak downstairs when they should be sleeping and sit under the table and talk, like a fort. Daisy’s grandmother catches them and harshly scolds Benjamin for getting so close to a girl Daisy’s age. Benjamin’s mother comes to console him and explains that people don’t understand because he is a ‘man-child’. Benjamin’s outward appearance and the way time is moving for him (backwards) is affecting where he can go and what he can do. His space is limited and different from everyone else’s.

Benjamin’s relationship with Daisy is severely impacted by his growing younger. It is fairly easy to tell that they are in love for most of the movie. But a relationship at the beginning of the movie when they meet is not exactly socially acceptable because of the apparent (though false) age difference and at the end of the movie it becomes impractical as Benjamin becomes a teenager, then toddler, then baby. So in order to have the relationship they desire they must meet in the middle for the few years there ages are close both in appearance and actuality. There time together is limited. Unlike a normal couple they cannot grow old together, nor can they raise children together. When Daisy becomes pregnant Benjamin feels forced to leave because he wants his child to have a father, not a playmate and as he says, Daisy cannot raise both of them. Daisy eventually marries someone else and they agree it is for the best. Benjamin’s time with the woman he loves and with his child are both limited because of his reverse aging.

Time itself is a completely different thing for Benjamin than it is for us. Most of us don’t know when we are going to die and could live to be very very old. But Benjamin, being born in the body of a man in his 80’s has a limited time. He is almost like a ticking clock. He can only live until he becomes a baby, and in that way his entire life is limited to a certain possible time span. The quote I opened with makes a big point. He was going through all of this alone. Benjamin was the only one growing younger, the only person whose time and space is affected in that. This puts him in a different space than everyone else. He is alone. Kind of a bummer. But it shows how just one factor can totally change how someone relate to time and space. Like Juffer and Klein both point out, time and space are by no means constant or universal. They are different for everyone. And yet at the same time they never really change. Only our relationship to them changes. That being said, I’ll leave you with a quote from the trailer (you know, one of those things they show in the trailer but you realize later was never in the movie…):

“Life can only be understood looking backward. It must be lived forward.”