The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

How long, dear readers, before the Ass-Head and his army of oppression decides he doesn't like this review either and takes it down, rendering all of its virtues quite cloistered indeed? Despite the poor review of Slumdog Millionaire, Slothrop was impressed by its energy, and colors, and that it was a film made with a lot of passion, which counts for something, still. But if watched carefully, it becomes apparent that Slumdog is mostly sentimental schlock. What's most interesting about The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is that it is even more sentimental than was Slumdog Millionaire, but turns out to be the much better movie. The difference lies partly in the movie's own aspirations. Slumdog wants to be both a story and a political critique and exposé. Benjamin Button frames the story as a story, and even emphasizes in its title--"The Curious Case"-- that suspension of disbelief will be required. The good news is that the premise of aging backwards doesn't require much effort on the viewer's part since the metaphor of aging towards becoming a child again isn't too starkly different from what happens to us in life outside the cinema. It's not a subtle metaphor, but it's a good one because it helps us see our own lives more clearly. Slumdog Millionaire on the other hand compared life to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Can you see the difference? One metaphor is impossible but feels true, while the other one is unfortunately quite possible and is entirely unbelievable ("destiny" is a genuine answer to things, apparently). All of this put more simply: Benjamin Button is more honest with itself and with its viewers than was Slumdog Millionaire. And in movies which ask us to reflect on our lives, shouldn't honesty be a necessary virtue?

Koko: I enthusiastically agree, and well deployed, that bit of Coleridge.

Ass-Headed Bottom: And I just as enthusiastically disagree with Rothslop and the momentarily tame gorilla (the latter usually so wise, but this time mumbling "OK OK" and preferring an arbitrary comparison and some recycled Ridgecole to watching a movie fairly and getting straight what it's about).

   But first things first: my apologies to our entire blog-reading community for taking my unfinished Slumdog post down for almost 72 hours, along with Thropslaw's holier-than-Regis review of it. To correct the fault, please find the unfinished review now posted below, unedited. Obviously the next rhetorical step was to describe how sentimental novelists redeem their characters against all decorous odds, and how the greatest sentimental authors (Goldsmith, Sterne, MacKenzie) earned their characters such implausible, indispensable redemptions through their uncompromising prior punishment of those same characters (that is, they justified sentimentality as an inversely proportional corrective to absolute satire; in real terms this means that optimism can only be defensible after the utmost pessimism has already been entertained, a bullshitey sounding axiom I just made up but which sure sounds like the truest thing I ever wrote). In any case, the delay was due to the airlift of my folks to Dallas (an "army of oppression" by some standards, sure) and my preoccupation with making them enjoy their trip despite Dallas (an impossibility, so you can see how it retarded my blog-posting efforts). But whatevs. I felt I owed it to the Anonymous Commentator, whomever she might be, to put together a proper rebuttal to Sploogemop's ill-considered, paragraph-long smackdown of what I really do feel is an important movie. After all, this is someone whose offhand dismissal of televised popular culture might just have a little something to do with the fact that he refuses to ever watch television.

   About The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: I have not seen this movie, and thus have nothing to say for or against it. Indeed I look forward to seeing it. I will remark, however, that the less I know about a movie before I see it (or a book before I read it), the better, and thus if a title announces a suspension of disbelief I should have to discover myself upon viewing, so much the worse. But I like Brad and I like Kate and I like Hollywood, so maybe together they can save F. Scott F. from the zzzzz... of his times and milieu.

   Now, about Slumdog: it seems the principal objections Ras-al-Throp can find to this film are a) that it employs Who Wants to be a Millionaire--and not something intellectually more estimable--as its thematic/metaphorical/satirical/whatever vehicle, b) that it does not tell us anything fair or remarkable about our lives, c) that it mixed political critique with "a story" in an unpersuasive or unproductive manner, and d) that "destiny" is a bullshit answer. Is all that fair, Slop-slop? Now, I think the basis of all these objections has to do with a misapprehension of the movie: the notion that Slumdog is about our lives, and not about the lives of others and simultaneously about art. Sure, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button might be the best movie about my life ever filmed, but all the same I know that I appear only occasionally in Slumdog Millionaire, and always as an alien. I appear, for example, among the white tourists watching the opera at the Taj Mahal. You will note that I am never exactly in focus. The subjects of the movie, on the other hand--the Indian boys from the slums of Mumbai--remain in focus and steal my wallet, and really, why should they not?

   To assume, then, that the film is about Bass-Headed Autumn, or about Pop-Top, or about the Anonymous Commentator, is to assume that Who Wants to be a Millionaire is now and should always have been irrelevant. On the contrary, precisely because the movie is about the slums of Mumbai, and not about Austin and its trendy live-music scene (or about Dallas and its comfortable postapocalypticism), therefore Who Wants to be a Millionaire is an endlessly relevant organizing principle/metaphor. Let's compare Slumdog for a moment to a movie I hope Plow-Strop deems worthy: Magnolia. Now THAT's a movie about us, and the quiz-show metaphorically central to that movie is the quiz show of our childish intellectual fantasies--the hobgoblin of large and fortunate minds. I plan on going to pub-quiz sometime soon at the Trinity Hall Pub, in hopes that it can reproduce the quiz show from Magnolia, and that I can be the pants-wetting, heaven-sent prodigy destined to win it all. But all of that has nothing to do with Slumdog Millionaire, which is a different movie, requiring as its organizing concept a very different quiz show. Can you imagine the whole subcontinent of India enraptured by What Do Kids Know? Maybe. Can you imagine the whole of India enraptured by an Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? Surely you can. As surely as you can imagine India being captivated by Bollywood, in symbiotic competition with Hollywood.

   And sheeeee-ott! That's another thing: this movie ain't about you and your tiny life, Slave-trope, it's about movies and how movies help us make sense of the world. Now that reality is intolerable and fantasy invincible, why should a socially conscious filmmaker not present us with a union of sentimental "story" and socio-political satire? It seems to me, anyway, having suffered through both Synecdoche, New York (which desperately needed Bollywood) and Mohabattein (which very obviously required some serious Hollywood), that the best of both fake worlds is the only real world. Dunno if you stuck around for Slumdog's credits, Thoth-plop, but maybe you watched the life-affirming Bollywood dance, where all characters meet and rejoice on the train platform? And can you tell me the director didn't earn that dance, having first sliced his characters to ribbons, having blinded children in front of us, having shown us our beloved raped, our brother lost and suicidal, having made our hero wade through the cumulative shit of the world's largest slum for a Bollywood autograph? Having offered us the tragedy of the world for the comfort of fiction? And if you don't think that's enough to earn a sentimental-ass dance, then, pray tell, what exactly would earn the director such a jig (and all tragedies, properly speaking, end with a jig)?

   And then at last there's "destiny." It is long past dinnertime, and perhaps even the intrepid Anonymous Commentator has ceased to read this endless post. Then let me end it simply by asking whether, given the slums of mourning Mumbai, whether there is any more legitimate answer to the movie's questions?