The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was a film that came out in 2008 that was loosely based on a short story written by F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1922. The film is centered around the diary of Brad Pitt’s character, Benjamin Button, who ages in reverse due to the disease of progeria. So, at the start of his life he is an elderly man and as the story progresses he becomes as young as an infant. Throughout that time, he develops a love interest with Cate Blanchett’s character, Daisy Fuller, despite his strange condition. He must deal with the hardships that come about due to his condition and the occurrences of the attack on Pearl Harbor and World War II. In an article about the film it states that as he gets younger “Eventually, Benjamin is young enough to go kindergarten, and finally too young even for that. As he gets smaller and smaller, he forgets all the things he’s ever done in life. At last, Benjamin can sense only colors and the smell of milk, and finally even those small sensations fade away into darkness.” This is so important because its to the overall idea that the film is trying to display – that life is the same forwards as well as backwards.
A palindrome is a word that is the same forwards as well as backwards. What relates this film to a palindrome is the fact that as said before, just like a palindrome, life is the same forwards and backwards. Benjamin falls in love, suffers, learns, and lives his life although it is going backwards. It is odd, but he makes the most of his life. It shows that even if your life was completely in reverse all the same instances can happen. We all go through very similar things and in the end, we die.
Of course, that’s not the most optimistic way of looking at it, but it is still very true. Regardless of how we start, we all end the same way. Instead of looking at his life as hopeless or too difficult to manage, he appreciates all that he could do, his family, as well as the people he grew to love. Ignoring the strange graphics and visual quality of this movie, one of the things (or elements) that the audience can take away from it is that no matter the circumstance, we all go out the same way, so we must live our lives the best we can.
