On The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button

For all the folksy sentimentality of The Curious Case of Benhjamin Button, I still find a strange and stirring poetry to it. It’s usually within a science fiction or fantasy construct that I find the most intriguing or poignant lessons about humanity. These bizarre and fantastical situations, and how we imagine we would deal with them, foster a sentiment that feels very real, more real than in many other standard dramas or stories. Perhaps it is in the imagining that we lay bare our dreams and desires, our greatest fears and weaknesses, our attempts to understand how the world works. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button poses a grossly theoretical existential crisis that gets at the very root of mortality and humanity. In Benjamin, humanity epitomizes the deity of time. But not only are we the supreme representation of that formless idol, we are also its single masterwork--its Pieta, its Mona Lisa. We should accept ourselves—the myriad of emotions and experiences that make up a single human lifetime—as a series of brushstrokes on the greatest canvas unimaginable. Our choices, our feelings, our connections with others, bring texture and color and life to this lone work of art that is the ultimate definition of Time. Fear does nothing but make you as the brushstroke less joyful—but the paint meets the canvas all the same. Better to try and hold on to the idea that every moment is worth the same as every other—that they all add to this painting in equal dimension and force. Better to enjoy as many of those moments as possible, so as to make each stroke a little less painful in the application. To see this, it takes an aberration in humanity--a Benjamin Button. When our imagination extends outward, we are finally able to look inward.