The One That Got Away: Baz Luhrmann's "The Great Gatsby"

Writing about The Great Gatsby might be like making a film of it. I can hear Mickey Rourke in Body Heat telling me, “There are 50 ways to screw up when you’re doing Gatsby. Figure out half of those, you’re a genius.” And, though you don't have to rub it in, I’m no genius.

I do love F. Scott Fitzgerald and his heralded novel, though I’m not sure I love it for the same reasons a lot of other people do. Reviews of Baz Luhrmann’s new and mostly faithful adaptation of Gatsby are divided, sometimes condescendingly hostile, sometimes suspiciously defensive (they kind of sound like me talking about Godfather III). There’s an inconsistency to what works and what doesn’t, what Luhrmann should have done vs. what he did do, and a lot of it goes back to critics’ impressions of the novel. Did Luhrmann respect the text, or did he trivialize it? My conclusion is that he respected the plot and incidents, but a refusal to let the story breathe along with ignorance to the novel’s stinging ironies and textures has resulted in a gross, even insulting, trivialization.

The themes of Gatsby are repeatedly thrown around: the Jazz Age, class, lost love and lost time, the frenzy before the storm of the Depression, and “America,” whatever that is. Then there’s the iconic symbols and images like the Green Light, the Eyes of Dr. Eckleburg, the Valley of Ashes, the new rich of West Egg vs. the old rich of East Egg, and the unforgettable description of Myrtle Wilson’s detached, floppy breast. There’s the familiar cast of Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio), Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire), Daisy (Carey Mulligan) and Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton), Jordan Baker (Elizabeth Debicki), George and Myrtle Wilson (Jason Clarke and Isla Fisher), spread widely apart in a web of passion across New York and then tragically tied together in the final act. Fitzgerald’s novel carries intimations of transcendence while wearing the costume of hopeless romanticism. It’s about accomplishing aspirations and moving beyond the confines of a given identity, the hero as shape-shifter. It centers on the boy/man “child of God” who moves mountains to win the girl/woman he loves, while she embodies the fantasy anyone may have of being so loved that another would do anything to be with them.

Because of that, Gatsby is misinterpreted as a love story, a kind of Jazz Age Tristan and Isolde (which, with the novel’s references to mythic and medieval images, was probably on Fitzgerald’s mind) with the poor boy trying to win the rich girl, climbing high, grasping for satisfaction, and failing, the lovers foiled by the mores and structures long held in place. Certainly this is pertinent to the tale, especially when one thinks about The Great Gatsby as being set in a world of tribes dictating identity and what a person can legitimately accomplish, an American ideal that is nevertheless repulsive to the ruling class who seem transplanted from European nobility, and who’ve evolved alongside the infrastructures of power.

My assessment of the film might not be fair, because we’re judging something apart from the book, and whether it’s Kubrick’s The Shining, Cuaron’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Davies’ The House of Mirth, or Fincher’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (which addresses a similar point about remakes), the film must be ingested and processed by virtue of its own integrity and consonance.

The problem is that films don’t exist in vacuums, and Gatsby brings with it some great baggage as, um, one of the main contenders for The Great American Novel. Luhrmann relishes the big city verve and delectable vice while neglecting the significance and lost simplicity of the whole nation behind the extravagance — the place that all of these characters are from, and from which they’re running. Luhrmann is also telling a sincere love story, when Gatsby was undermining a love story. A number of critics have alleged that the fault of this film is that old tired trope of “style over substance,” but that’s crap. Even if Baz Luhrmann’s style never hits the right register for Fitzgerald, the problem is his calibration of the (quite) abundant substance.

Bluntly (and with apologies for the cliche), Luhrmann doesn’t know the music, but he certainly knows the words. The aforementioned films, most particularly The Shining (detested by author Stephen King), effectively built atop their source material to become  richly fascinating independent organisms, yet Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby refuses to free itself. The writing is literally scrawled out for us and several passages are spoken with Tobey Maguire’s sludgy narration as Nick Carraway — ironic, because Fitzgerald’s Gatsby could be interpreted as a story about the insufficiency of words, which we use to capture lost time in a script (Daisy must repeat Gatsby’s dictated words to Tom: I never loved you). The structure, even repeated flashbacks, is scrupulously in accord with Fitzgerald’s eight chapter chronology. Luhrmann fetishizes Fitzgerald’s particular details, such as the curtains at the Buchanan residence which blow through the room “like pale flags twisting…toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea,” while literalizing others, like when Nick says that he’s both inside and outside of the decadent world of New York, looking out over the city with the camera falling onto him looking up from the street. Luhrmann throws in most of the plot points, even some details and dialogue from other Fitzgerald stuff (such as “The Crack-Up,” selected letters, biographical data, and Gatsby‘s inferior early draft, Trimalchio) but he fudges with the nuances in between the incidents. It can perhaps be defended then as a dazzling auteur statement, Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, but it’s rather infuriating when you consider how the filmmaker panders for an audience that indulges in blindness and illusion (and yet again — a postmodern reading here justifies this Gatsby entry, what with its 3D cinematography and the motifs of seeing and blindness taken from the book, even including Jack White’s cover of U2′s “Love is Blindness”).

Luhrmann’s made a Gatsby that’s more palatable for audiences, his renowned (or infamous) PG-13 Ken Russellfied visual audaciousness hushed by textual cowardice. The Great Gatsby becomes a Moulin Rouge! tempered love story, a big city tragedy with East Coast decadence doubling for the TMZ Kardashian madness of the 21st century where we’re pretty sure who to root for. The full story, framed by the original device of the now morbidly alcoholic and depressed Carraway writing his reminiscences of 1922 at a sanitarium months after the 1929 crash, warmly blankets the wounds of a crippled and hungover nation after its expired Gilded Age.  The titular Gatsby here is indeed, as the final moments emphasize, great — and not “great.” What would originally conclude with a hushed death rattle of wasted melancholic futility before the future, where longing leads nowhere, is now reverent and consoling.

The problems of the novel — the amoral character of Daisy, the ambivalent presence of Henry Gatz and Gatsby’s relationship to his origins, the symbiotic relevance of George and Myrtle Wilson in relation to the question of marrying for love, Nick’s questionable sexuality and how his adoration of Gatsby might be, as Tom Buchanan tells him, based on the same kind of blindness that’s trapped everyone else in the narrative — are worked out for us or ignored.

In the film, the love between Gatsby and Daisy is total and mutual, without her apathy, privilege, or his resentment that flows between the tenders of his affection. In truth, Gatsby doesn’t simply want to love Daisy, but he wants to control her, an adoring and adored puppet of flesh and blood representative of a world that’s been denied him because of his station. He lied to seduce her initially, and he schemed his way with a variety of other fronts to “earn” her as a wealthy man. There’s a lot of contempt for the object of desire in The Great Gatsby, and one might remember that Fitzgerald wrote it while nursing wounded pride, recently discovering his wife Zelda was having an affair with an aviator (he also apparently called his first love, Ginevra King, the primary influence for Daisy’s character, “an unprintable verbal insult” when they met again).  “Her voice is full of money,” Gatsby says to Nick about Daisy in the novel, something carefully omitted by Luhrmann, a director who wants his (mostly) female audience to identify with her, when in fact her privilege makes her something of another species from the worry-laden lives of Gatsby and Nick — and us.

In the novel, Nick deducts that Daisy is turned off by Gatsby’s West Egg party with the wild outsiders who come without invitation (“She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented ‘place’ that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village–appalled by its raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short-cut from nothing to nothing. She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand”). Not so in the film. Nick also believes that she’s responsible for Gatsby laying off his servants (“So the whole caravansary had fallen in like a card house at the disapproval in her eyes”). Again, this trait which would make us feel differently about her is left alone. And while we know that it’s her behind the wheel, crashing Gatsby’s yellow car into Myrtle, not only does Luhrmann’s Gatsby plan on taking the fall, but he also verbally says in the film repeatedly, “It was my fault.” Luhrmann cuts to a flashback of the accident and amidst the confusion of the wheel, with Gatsby grabbing it away from Daisy at the crucial moment, we are invited to believe him. Luhrmann also gives her the benefit of the doubt that she’d be tempted to call Gatsby after the accident.  No longer does she show off her daughter Pammy as a plaything who is handled by silent servants, but Daisy attends to the child in her closing moments, carefully preparing Pammy for a journey the Buchanans will take. Luhrmann’s Daisy gets a free pass, and I call total bullshit.

The aspirant glory of the Green Light loses its magic for Gatsby when it appears he’s won Daisy back while Daisy, though not happy with Tom Buchanan, isn’t unhappy. She’s contented enough and electively vapid, devoid of responsibilities while suffering Tom’s infidelities. Her lack of concern for her daughter, who emerges as a plaything to show off to Gatsby, demonstrates a present weightlessness. Time isn’t a burden for her. The Daisy Gatsby loves is in those fading words and promises in Louisville, five years before, a ghost roaming the West alongside the diametrically opposed ghosts of the rejected father, Henry Gatz, in North Dakota and Minnesota. It’s a faint echo that tantalizes while refusing to materialize into clarity.

All this kind of makes me wish that, with Luhrmann’s pop soundtrack sensibilities, the filmmaker would have included Jarvis Cocker and Pulp’s “Common People” from the Different Class album, a song about a privileged girl who wants to walk with the bohemians and stragglers, but will never understand them. (I also can’t help but feel Arcade Fire’s Suburbs album, where the sprawl of youth becomes spoiled with passing time, would fit in better with Gatsby than Jay-Z, Fergie, Jack White and others on this soundtrack, but maybe that’s just my stupid taste). Class is more tribal than race, and just as there have been theories of Nick Carraway’s bisexuality, there are literary theories that Gatsby is black. I don’t necessarily believe it, but there is definitely a racial subtext in the book, beginning with Tom’s praises for eugenic pseudo-science which predicts the end of civilization with the ascendancy of African descendents, and images like the black individuals riding in a limo–driven by a white man. The implication is that anything is possible on this side of the world.

Later on at the Plaza Hotel, Tom relates a roughneck like Gatsby romancing Daisy to “intermarriage between black and white.” This is in the film, followed by some original dialogue where Tom differentiates Gatsby from everyone else in the room, based on his poverty, but Luhrmann omits something Jordan says after Tom’s insinuation: “We’re all white here.” It’s something she doesn’t have to say, obviously, or which the narrator Nick wouldn’t have to remember. But it’s there for a reason, and the irony of Jordan’s line – of which she’s probably unaware – is that for Fitzgerald, the rich are different from “us,” or as Warren Beatty points out in Bulworth (a film remembered this week because of political happenings in the Obama Administration), “Rich people have always stayed on top by dividing white people from colored people. But white people got more in common with colored people than they do with rich people.”  For a viewing audience, the world of the Valley of Ashes feels much more alien than the Buchanan residence. I’m also not sure how I feel about Luhrmann’s casting of Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan as Jewish gangster Meyer Wolfsheim, which is partially a playful reference to deceiving fronts cutting across tribal boundaries, and has been admired by critics as a way of bypassing the perceived anti-Semitic stereotype Fitzgerald created in the novel, Wolfsheim being a stand-in for real-life gangster Arnold Rothstein (played by Michael Stuhlbarg in Boardwalk Empire and Michael Lerner in Eight Men Out).  But it also feels like another refusal of Luhrmann to confront the troubling aspects of Fitzgerald. Is Fitzgerald, who elsewhere seems so sensitive to racism in the book (two characters use the word “kike”: the intolerant Tom and decidedly unlikable Mrs. McKee), the anti-Semite, or is Nick? Or is Wolfsheim’s conspicuous Jewishness another tribal marker in the chaotic power-grab of Gilded Age New York, his illiteracy and barriers requiring him to use the “fine breeding” of Jay Gatsby as his front?

Making matters easier for us, Tom becomes a bigger jerk, less humanely drawn. Fitzgerald certainly doesn’t allot him much sympathy in the novel, but Tom is still unexpectedly grief-stricken when Myrtle is killed, and hurt when confronted with the possibility of Daisy never loving him. Such feeling isn’t afforded him in the film, certainly when the talented Joel Edgerton plays him like a cartoon. There’s a telling alteration in the story during Gatsby’s party, with Tom becoming entranced with a movie actress and following her inside Gatsby’s castle for some certain debauchery (earlier with Myrtle, he is quite loud and impolite with his lovemaking as Nick awkwardly sits and stares at the couple’s dog — in the book he’s more discrete). The scene is different in the novel, as a drunken and suspicious Tom stumbles apart from Daisy and Gatsby’s flirtations. It’s Daisy who has her eye on the actress, the only familiar face for her at the party, and instead of Tom salivating over her it’s the actress’ producer, whose gaze falls closer and closer on her, as if spellbound — and rendered ridiculous — by an obscure object of desire. It’s an image that would be so wonderful for a Gatsby film, reinforcing the story’s paradoxical themes of gazing and blindness, of moth-to-flame obsession with an ungraspable surface of beauty, like a celluloid screen gem or wealthy and beautiful person (Daisy to Gatsby, Tom to Myrtle). But no, obviously there’s still some ambivalence about Tom for Luhrmann, so he makes the hulking husband more of a douche.

And so, faded are complexity and ambiguity. The villain is made worse while the damsel in distress and her knight are made better. A token tip of the hat is given to expectation that the rich are assholes, while the devastating disparity between wealthy and poor remains unexplored. Our ideals of pure love (while it may be quashed by social mores) are validated and unquestioned.  Then there is an all-star cast, a pop soundtrack, the dynamic fast-moving rhythm, and clothes, clothes, clothes that set tabloid radio and TV talk shows afire with delight.  How are we not surprised that Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby is adored by audiences and a solid hit in spite of its reviews?

It’s not that filmmakers can’t lick Gatsby. This new movie is well loved by some, and a commercial success — as was the listless and gauzy 1974 adaptation directed by Jack Clayton and starring Robert Redford, Mia Farrow, and Bruce Dern (who, despite his lack of physical similarity to the book’s Tom, gives an incredible performance that’s leaked into my subsequent readings of the book).  Sumptuously dressed and melodramatic, these two films aren’t Gatsby. They refuse to focus on the mystery of Gatsby and the distance of Fitzgerald, needing us to get close with Gatsby and Daisy through either lovely and romantic montages or scenes of awkward dialogue.  The filmmakers can justify this by citing Fitzgerald’s own dissatisfaction with the way he treats Gatsby too vaguely, and yet, if you read Trimalchio (which inspires the new Gatsby with a revealing scene between Gatsby, Daisy, and Tom), you see why the mystique of the final draft works.  Breaking through the walls to bring us closer to Gatsby, one wishes Luhrmann had completely reframed the story — which means taking it away from Nick Carraway. Luhrmann should have “betrayed the novel to be true to it,” as David Cronenberg repeatedly says of his adaptations, or as Milan Kundera simply told Philip Kaufman regarding the adaptation of The Unbearable Lightness of Being (another seemingly unadaptable book), “Eliminate.”

The truth is several filmmakers could probably give us the Gatsby Fitzgerald deserves, but if you look at my suggestions (Sofia Coppola, Terrence Malick, Terrence Davies, Andrew Dominik, David Gordon Green, Andrea Arnold, and considering the Before trilogy, particularly Before Midnight, Richard Linklater) it’s clear that — what I consider the appropriate sensibility anyway (excluding possibly Martin Scorsese, whose The Aviator with DiCaprio is a fantastic film about predestined apart-ness amidst the whirlwind of a luxurious in-crowd, so akin to Gatsby) — audiences wouldn’t bite and probably be turned off.

I also think of David Fincher’s most divisive of his recent films, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which was deplored by many moviegoers and critics as overblown Oscar-bait courtesy of Forrest Gump screenwriter Eric Roth, humorously castigated on both The Daily Show and The Colbert Report as a bore in December 2008 (meanwhile, both Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have been quite welcoming to Luhrmann’s Gatsby). Adapted from a Fitzgerald short story with which it has virtually no similarities other than the bare premise (Benjamin Button is born an old man and ages backwards), Fincher and Roth nevertheless were drawing from the author’s well, particularly Gatsby, the golden girl lead (Cate Blanchett) named Daisy, as the film is in tune with Gatsby’s desire to repeat the past.  Kent Jones writes about it, “Every second of Benjamin Button, every shot and every cut, every gesture and every facial expression, every turn in its narrative and every visual effect, is devoted to the contemplation of time’s passing.” He adds, “[It] is easy to imagine the film directed by someone else, anyone else apart from Fincher, and made into a poignant love story about two people who ‘meet in the middle,’ set against the backdrop of the American century. I’ve ready many descriptions of this phantom movie, Roth’s script as directed by Ron Howard or Nora Ephron. They are very far from the mysterious and troubling film Fincher has actually made.”

Fincher’s Button may have its flaws, but Jones is right about how it captures the passing of time, in addition to the “troubling” film Fincher has made. Like Fitzgerald, Fincher dresses up the film as an inspirational “poignant love story,” but reading the film closely reveals a journey toward entropy, about the omissions people make in their reminiscences and the lies they tell themselves in pursuit for an everlasting moment. As Benjamin (Brad Pitt) moves into youth with the future, he throws off connection to the past. A masterly display of digital cinema, Fincher’s Button is about the digital, the posterboards of Citizen Soldiers and inspiration (“You can accomplish anything”) underwritten by the ghastly silence in the final images, a Hurricane swallowing the Blind Clockmaker (Elias Koteas) ‘s clock, alongside the the dissolved memories of Benjamin. As readers misinterpret Gatsby as a love story, so did viewers misinterpret the misanthropic Fincher’s film as inspirational woo-woo, labeling it a Forrest Gump retread.  His next film also seemed to cover Gatsby ground more effectively than what other Gatsby films have offered, as cyborg Mark Zuckerberg invents a virtual world after being rejected by a woman in The Social Network.

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Almost totally excised along with ambiguities about character is the memory of the “Middle West,” the haunting breeze of which gives the novel its wistful ache, a great tangible space that doubles for the prospects of a country and of a romance, though it’s empty with the echoes of what-could-have-been. “I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all — Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.” With that excision of space goes the sense of loss and longing, Luhrmann working on the more familiar and snazzy turf of the Big City, with which Luhrmann relies on a popular pastiche associated with Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age. This Gatsby is more like one of those flapper parties local fashionistas organize than Fitzgerald’s novel. And in presenting us a party, Luhrmann also refuses to make us feel the downside of excess, like the incoherent drunks who people the novel, unable to walk or communicate, their resentments uninhibited. Luhrmann will give us “Owl Eyes,” the old man in Gatsby’s library, but he’s not the bewildered coot from the book, but a funny looking old man who wants to bathe us in the amazement of Gatsby: “He doesn’t exist,” he says in the film, while in the book “Owl Eyes” is overwhelmed by how this “theatrical production” is, in fact, real, as he inspects the volumes on the wall.

Behind the allure of decadent parties and modernity, though, is the Frontier, the hallowed thing around which the American Romanticism of Whitman and Emerson developed, or the river of Mark Twain, leading to a vast elsewhere of possibilities and freedom. With Gatsby, Fitzgerald not only prophesied the end of the time for which he was a sparkling representative (the Crash was four years after the novel’s publication), but, I think more importantly, he sees the end of that Frontier’s possibilities, the emptiness in a space that’s been conquered and canvassed by pilgrims who moved westward against midnight and exhausted themselves with dreaming before tidally curving back to the Eastern shores where they initially landed, or as Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway puts it so much better than I ever could, “I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes–a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither stood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” The Great Gatsby is the death knell of American literary Romanticism.

The “green breast” the Dutch see parallels the Green Light Jay Gatsby associates with his much longed-for Daisy, a woman so disparate from his origins and temperament, yet the only person who can unlock his intimacy. Courting and making love to Daisy in Louisville is presented as a memory of religious significance, a consecration with the moon looking on in benediction, the woman compared to the “grail.” As a grail myth, we can wonder if Gatsby is the fool Parzival, suddenly conscious of himself and searching for the grail castle that’s disappeared from his view, or the Grail King Amfortas, who was overwhelmed with a dream of glory and triumph with the grail instead of humility. The grail is lost and, imprisoned in his own castle, he is maimed and permanently is discomfort, restless (Nick notes how Gatsby is always jittery, never at ease), the resultant world a “Waste Land” much like Fitzgerald’s “Valley of Ashes,” where George and Myrtle Wilson are used and forgotten — by the Buchanans, and by Baz Luhrmann. The rich display vicious negligence with the bodies and souls of others.  Romantic desire isn’t sentimental but amounts to corpulent selfishness and excesses of countless shirts, mistresses, servants, and opulence. The rapturous promise of new discoveries is married to some diabolical transgression. Fitzgerald’s epilogue reminds me of the prologue of Terrence Malick’s The New World, where the wide-eyed enthusiasm of Europeans and Native Americans at the Jamestown landing is scored to Wagner’s Das Rhinegold prelude, referencing the dwarf Albrecht’s theft of the Ring of Power, setting the Ring Cycle into motion, and soon later scores the recognition of love between John Smith and Pocahontas. It’s a dangerous and unquenchable love that can only exist in “the forest,” the magical Frontier. The toll of this enthusiasm will be, on a grand scale, thousands dead, and on an intimate one, broken hearts stirred to look both forward and back to a horizon that beckons silently.

The “green breast” is trampled upon and chewed up, and finds a gruesome parallel with Myrtle Wilson’s breast, “swinging loose like a flap.” A resident of the Waste Land, she also had aspirations for social climbing and was swept up in amorous feelings congruent to that goal.  Myrtle’s corpse is seen in the film, but the grotesque detail isn’t emphasized at all: yet it must be.  It’s another example of Luhrmann cowering to the challenge of Fitzgerald and to confront the corporeal reality of a suffering human being. Myrtle’s “mouth was wide open and ripped at the corners, as though she had choked a little in giving up the tremendous vitality she had stored so long.” The death visage recalls Nick’s thoughts after hearing Gatsby’s reminiscences of Louisville, where he’s “reminded of something–an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.”

The inability to fully articulate a feeling, a memory and longing, the failure of words (in such a well-written novel), connects to the novel’s unbearable ache, a paralyzing longing for something one can never have. The Great Gatsby isn’t simply Horatio Alger gone wrong, but is a wrenching siren song of restless hope writhing to its last breath and beat under the annihilation of hope, F. Scott Fitzgerald interrogating his own desires and appetites, much as he did in This Side of Paradise‘s Amory Blaine and would with Dick Diver in his more ambitious Tender is the Night. Gatsby and Dick Diver are Faustian figures, exposing a devil’s bargain etched into the rock of American dreams, played out in similar variations with Charles Foster Kane, the Corleone family, Noah Cross, and Daniel Plainview. Gatsby, surrounded by “child of God” references (for example, up to “his father’s business” much like Christ in Luke 2:49, the son of God having thrown off his biological parents), is also a Miltonic figure. He’s like the Satan who cannot abide his place in the scheme of heaven, and is resolute in committed and absurd defiance. The American Paradise is lost, and in lieu of a Frontier the American Dreamer (Gatsby, Kane, Plainview — or how about Jack Torrence?) encloses himself hermetically in a self-made compound, submitting to ungraspable dreams and staring out of a magic play-set castle. Out of space, they try to buy time, or “The future!” as Noah Cross puts it to Jake Gittes in Chinatown. Laced in with the dream is dismemberment. The rich don’t only silence the poor, but what Fitzgerald observes between disparate worlds is utter destruction, rapacious, repugnant, and dismembering: literally cutting off the fleshy Myrtle’s organ of enticement.

A defense thrown about for the film is that The Great Gatsby isn’t simply an adaptation, but is Gatsby himself, drawn up of the same imagination, hope, and enthusiasm he’s said to represent. The film’s best scene, the reunion of Gatsby and Daisy, hints that Luhrmann has this in mind when Gatsby asks Nick of the abundant flowers he’s brought over the occasion, “It isn’t too much, is it?” The director is winking, asking us the same question. The film is as garishly affective and clothed as Jay Gatsby, and it’s true that with its opening moments as the green light reaches out to us in 3D that I felt stirred by the associations Fitzgerald’s novel has cemented into my mind over several readings of the book.  When Lana Del Rey’s theme song (which I admit, I kind of guiltily like) asks “Will you still love me when I’m no longer young and beautiful?” I want to think it’s Gatsby asking, and not, as would be supposed, Daisy. His floating corpse is a blatant allusion to William Holden’s in Sunset Blvd, the dead narrating his story in the reflective palace of movie excess, quashed hopes, and faded glamor.

The film then is a glorification of weightlessness, an evasion from its source material as Jay Gatsby runs from James Gatz. Maybe that’s why Daisy comes off so well here, and Tom, his nemesis, so bad. Luhrmann is a filmmaker whose scenarios are hidden in theatrical curtains and art: the ballroom dancing of Strictly Ballroom, the modern stage of a television set that opens William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, the cabaret and written reminiscence of the poet in Moulin Rouge!, and The Wizard of Oz finding correlation with aboriginal Dreamtime and Rainbow Serpent mythology in Australia: love and war are safely enclosed in the filmmaker’s egg, his tools shamelessly on display. The Great Gatsby reminded me particularly of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 adaptation of Dracula, a deliciously over-the-top extravaganza also in love with its artifice; interestingly, Luhrmann has said Coppola — who is credited as adapting the 1974 film — advised him on how to approach writing the Gatsby script.

The weightlessness, though, is aggravating when we consider Gatsby and Gatsby‘s origins, his quest to reclaim the past and fading away as Louisville drifts away into the prairie night from his train view, time and love moving quickly away as forgetfulness clouds the horizon. Luhrmann quotes most of Fitzgerald’s concluding words, “And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him–” but then he cuts the following passage, “–somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.”

Hope relies on the memory of something hoped for. Luhrmann’s sin is to remove that memory, those dark fields of the republic that bore James Gatz, a shape shifter not unlike Robert Zimmerman, and with the filmmaker’s omissions and emphasis on delight, his film can’t be defended as being “Gatsby.” The obsession he’s tried to dramatize is as thin as the paper on which the depressed Nick writes in the picture. The German author Thomas Mann, whose renderings of hopeless longing were so similar to Fitzgerald’s (The Magic Mountain was published within a year of Gatsby), had his bourgeois engineer Hans Castorp pursue the cat-eyed Clavdia Chaucat while saying “Love is an adventure in evil,” later observing in Joseph and His Brothers, “Too much evidence goes to show that [man] is headed straight toward ecstasy and ruin — and thanks nobody who holds him back.”   The haunting “disembodied face” that “floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs” entreating the lover Gatsby to a Danse Macabre is now just a beautiful love story and unboring melodrama — and so the fascination and danger of desire isn’t there.

The Blind Clockmaker: David Fincher’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”

In the first section of Thomas Mann's 1900 novel Buddenbrooks, the family patriarch Johann Buddenbrook, after having run the family's business to its greatest profitability through the late 18th and early 19th centuries, begins to utter a word, again and again, as his eyes drift elsewhere and he retreats into the mausoleum of his dying body: "Curious." Looking into the void, assessing all of one's loves, every original or stolen thought, and the vectors of causality that have led to chance meetings and the blossomings of intimate emotions, and not being burdened by either a sense of fear or a sense of accomplishment: instead, just "Curious."

Mann is too good of a writer to tell us specifically what is going through Johann's head when he says "Curious" to himself; the word is one of the many leitmotifs he embeds within his first great novel, another melody in a rich symphony detailing the decline of a family over the course of nearly 75 years. In the story's context of personages falling away to time and being swallowed by the wave of changes, we compare the final moment, when an elderly hunchbacked woman insists that there must be a heaven, to the opening, where six-year-old Antonie Buddenbrook reads from her catechism, and we too realize how "curious" it all is: the stream of life, existence's weight or lightness in view of a world becoming more technological (detailed in the ascent of the European Union in the 1830s), less personal and more global, traditions crumbling under the pressure of what is emerging. The ego blushes. A single life may be a library unto itself, but those lives snuff out all too easily as the wars, holocausts, and natural disasters of history have shown – books thrown into the fire, never read, not understood, loves unheard, words unrecited, songs unsung. Life experienced in its temporal vastness and limitations (why does time pass so slowly when we are young? Why does it seem to accelerate as we age?) is coupled with the lives we share in geographical space – and—

--And what? Have we experienced our eternal moments? The melancholy "Curious," one of the first words uttered by a dying woman in David Fincher's film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, reminds me of time’ pressures, inducing us to experience ourselves fully, as well as to participate in the sorrow of other people. So, we ask ourselves, what happens when Time and Space are compressed, and instead of trudging slowly through the pages in a library, reading a life or a memory, we compulsively click on Google? The long rope of History, the great line (forming a circle from beginning to end, like a clock) is replaced by instant Recall – or maybe Instant Deletion – of incidents. Memory, neurochemically related to oxytocin, the Love hormone, is integral to our ability to be human, to empathize, to be awed by the simplicity of existence (as opposed to being merely "amused").

Memory is also, I believe, the most important theme in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s work, with his characters, be it Amory, Gatsby, or Dick Diver, self destructively forging their present circumstances to fit a memory, an image once glimpsed in the past, then having that pristine longing crumble to dust. They are burdened by memory because they hold it so dear, turning their backs on the future, spellbound by the beauty of that which is drifting away. Mann once wrote, "Love has ravaged me, but beauty has kept me spellbound," and the same applies to Fitzgerald. These are artists of longing, caught between the urban present and the pastoral idyllic perfection of a time far away. And though Fate would tell Fitzgerald that he can never have his "Daisy" (the heroine of Gatsby), he would remain set against the prudence of passive acceptance. Fitzgerald associates with another Mann quote, from Joseph and His Brothers: "Do not assume the human being's deepest concern is for peace, tranquility, the preservation of the carefully erected structure of his life from shattering and collapse. Too much evidence goes to show that he is headed straight toward ecstasy and ruin – and thanks nobody who holds him back." And then from Gatsby, one of the most famous lines in literature, its ending: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

David Fincher uses this image in the prologue to The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: the blind clockmaker (Elias Koteas) who has constructed a transit station clock that runs backwards, paddling on the vast ocean, longing for his son who perished in the Great War. The clock is a great circle overlooking the hyperreal transit station (trains being an archetypal symbol for the stream of life), each moment visibly connected to the one preceding it. The clock is a tribute to memory and the longing to immortalize it against the gravity of Time. The story of the clockmaker is told by the dying woman, haunted by life's "curiosity," in a New Orleans hospital, circa 2004 as Hurricane Katrina begins to stir towards the shore.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a film about memory. Individuals are buried beneath time, crushed by spatial causality, and questing for dreams while severing ties to the past’s burdens. Their accomplishments wind up eradicating all memory. In the hands of another director, it would be kitschy Forrest Gump magical realism, manipulative, didactically pleading us to "enjoy life while we can." But David Fincher (Se7en, The Game, Fight Club, and his greatest work, Zodiac) gives us no answers, only speculation, awe, and the puzzling sense that Beings experience on the precipice of Death: "Curious...."

The first sound and image of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is Daisy, held to life by technology, the beeping of life support signaling the existence of a human heart-beat, as the frail creature, this open-mouthed gasping woman, clings to (or perhaps is clung by) the machines that keep her in life. She is a prisoner to her biology, something that we all are, though we try to use whatever medical and technological advances to make us less dependent on our given veins and tissues. She has a mouth full of cotton and is allowed all the medication she needs - meaning that she would probably be already dead were these tools of science not surrounding her.

With her is a younger woman, the daughter, Caroline (Julia Ormond), looking out the window at the approaching storm cloaked in grey. "What are you looking at, Caroline?" the old woman asks. Caroline's looking at nothing. She is just optically absorbing matter, the line of her focus directed at the fury of nature rather than the prison-like confines of the hospital, a crossroads of death. The moment becomes sentimental as Caroline turns to her mother, and tells her that she's had friends that never had the chance to say goodbye to their mother or father, and she won't take this moment for granted. Yet the way David Fincher directs the scene is more clinical than kitschy. It is not a statement meant to help pathos, but rather suggests a futility. Though there's always regret for not saying something or doing the right thing at a given moment, the outcome is unchanging. This goodbye is the first gesture in the motion picture, and we still have nearly three hours to go. Should have Daisy died immediately after the "goodbye" it might be different. But the suffering continues.

The old woman relates a story from 1918, about a man named Mr. Gateau, or Mr. Cake the blind clockmaker. The story doesn't begin with an incident, but with a specific sense on a larger canvas – a single detail in the New Orleans of 1918, filmed in such a way to make the image look like a celluloid antique. Film, Fincher is saying, is our collective memory of the 20th century. Cinema is the stage platform able to capture a sense of consciousness more than any other art.

Mr. Cake’s story was told to Daisy by her father, so we do not have a first-hand account of the fairy-tale that follows. He seems a mysterious man, this Mr. Cake, who with great sorrow must see his son off to The Great War, their goodbyes spoken in the train station where constantly moving vessels ceaselessly transport so many lives to predetermined destination. In the meantime, Mr. Cake tirelessly builds his clock for the train station, until a letter arrives and with the news of his son’s death. He picks up the corpse at the same train station. The boy is buried, and one day the parents will join him in the same plot of land.

The clock is unveiled at the train station during a gala attended by former president Teddy Roosevelt, with more than a dozen aiming photographers visible. But the clock runs backwards, as does Fincher’s images, capturing the son's death on a battlefield. Mr. Cake explains the gesture of the clock’s backwardness, "So that perhaps we can go back in time and our boys can come home. Home to farm, work, have children, live full lives." The loss of life during The Great War is something, however, that has been felt by thousands of Americans, and former president Theodore Roosevelt takes his hat off, bowing his head in reverence. Mr. Cake's backwards clock doesn't offend as much as it communally involves the onlookers, most especially the political figurehead. As for Mr. Cake, Daisy explains, he disappeared. "Some say he went to sea," she says, and Fincher beautifully frames the ocean with Mr. Cake rowing away into the distance, into the past, the image that eerily mirrors the final line in The Great Gatsby.

This strange prologue may seem unnecessary fat on an already large story (one of the many criticisms directed against Benjamin Button has to do with its length). But it provides a kind of preparatory backdrop for the whole meaning to the fairytale of Benjamin, who may be the fully-lived reincarnation of Mr. Cake's son, born the night The Great War ends in 1918, scheduled to die in the spring of 2003, the time when an even more absurd war began. His story is told on the eve of Katrina, 2004, where lives and historically-rich spaces will be swallowed by a great flood.

"The blind clockmaker" denotes a very popular phrase coined by the biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins from his book, The Blind Watchmaker. Dawkins got the title from William Paley, an early 19^th century biologist who stated that the complexity of the natural world was evidence of God's existence – or Intelligent Design. Dawkins' approach, however, is an atheistic one that sees the processes of evolution, with embryos constantly coming into contact with different environmental niches, as having its own design. The natural world itself is infinitely complex and it is only a testament to its magisterial wonder that we have eyeballs. There is a natural consonance in evolution, that has taken us from point A to B, be it as lovers, as human beings during one life, as a species, as a planet, or as a cosmos. This is the “curious” factor in living that makes one stand back with a sense of numbing awe. Arthur Schopenhauer, another atheist philosopher, noted in The Foundation of Morality how a life, when looked back upon in old age, has the same kind of semblance in terms of recurring motifs, symbols, and orderly structure possessed by a novel. The writer of the novel is the Blind Watchmaker of nature. The magical realism of Benjamin Button makes several references to God, but I don't believe that Fincher would have us believe that there is a God in this world. The film is a fairytale with mythological motifs, but (much like another mixed-reviewed fairytale of futility, Steven Spielberg's AI) it is a myth born out of an age where science has made the gods unnecessary. In the muddle of evolution’s changes, there are emotions and identities trying to be forged, but they will not endure Time. To help us cope, we have God, we have the belief in Fate (Edgar Cayce's "Kismet" is brought up later on in the picture), and we have Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories (as told by Daisy's grandmother to both Daisy and Benjamin), which have been a great topic of discussion for Dawkins’ colleague and fellow atheist, Daniel Dennett. In evolution, nothing is fixed or static, though as human beings we try to make things so. The peril that loving Beings are put through will become one of the larger topics over the next 150 minutes.

Benjamin Button has been criticized, even by some of its admirers, for bad taste because of the inclusion of Katrina as a frame for the story. It immediately puts Fincher and Roth on the stand for being pretentious. It also may take us out of the fairytale. But it is the bookend to The Great War that begins Benjamin's life, a catastrophic loss of life that in many ways was probably unnecessary, and like The Great War, which we can dramatize in our paradigm of "Good Taste," it was real. Katrina says much more of our culture than we would wish it to. Our arts do not exist in a historical vacuum, and that Fincher and Roth were able to find a modern historical incident that is representative of our age, and that also perfectly ties in with the mythological archetype of the Great Flood, is a brilliant device for "Magical Realism," where the myth dances with the fact. I do not think Fincher wants us to get lost in the fairy tale. Rather, this is a picture that is addressing the collapse of a culture’s sense of connectedness. We might compare Teddy Roosevelt’s reverence with the actions of our own political leaders during Katrina, which was one of alleged apathy. The same apathy applies to those living in the comfortable confines of their distant geographical bubbles, far from New Orleans and its rich culture. Fincher and cinematographer Claudio Miranda emphasize how New Orleans in the 20^th century is a place filled with amazing architecture and spaces. That we know these spaces, never photographed so well, will disappear, makes the passage of time more haunting. That we should resist the use of Katrina in a contemporary film about the transitory nature of life says something about us. Cinema is consciousness, so why should we delete our memories? Delete ourselves? The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is no feel-good fairy-tale, but a deeply pessimistic and ambivalent picture. It is framed as something idyllic, like Forrest Gump, but it is about a man, and a culture, headed on a road to Nothing. If anything, it recalls the last lines of Fincher's Se7en, the Hemmingway quote: "'The world is a good place, and is worth protecting.' I agree with the second part." It also anticipates Fincher’s subsequent picture, The Social Network, where human beings have become fully ensconced within their technology.

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"I tried to read it 100 times," Daisy says of an old diary, written by somebody else. She wants Caroline to read it to her. When the daughter flips it open the first thing she sees is an old wedding photograph. She instinctively flips it over, an action that seems conspicuous, though Fincher chooses not to explain it. We cannot see who is in the photograph, and we cannot know why Caroline would, possibly with revulsion, seem to turn it around, so that the shiny image is replaced with the white. It's the first photo we've seen in this film, and photographs will be an important motif: the decorations of houses detailing the passage of time, while photography is a means by which human beings try to fulfill their longing to stop the erosion of years.

The diary ends in 1985, nineteen years before the present action; in addition to photographs and other scattered papers contained within, there are marked deletions and pages torn out. This is important, because what we will see in the film is all documented in the diary, and the deletions are not innocent. The author of the diary, Benjamin (Brad Pitt), took pains to make a good impression of himself, and we should remember that our narrator is an unreliable one. The written reminiscence is the Mind's habit of housecleaning, such as motion pictures do with reality, and such as our memory does with history.

Reading, writing, and photography relate to the will to capture moments, whether from the labor of our active pens, or the light of space captured by a blinking shutter and lens. In Benjamin Button, these arts translate into the desire to hold onto the past and to communicate sacred information to another person. The author, like any artist, wants his audience to "suffer with" him, an idea that associates Benjamin Button to Zodiac, The Social Network, and Se7en.

Benjamin is born on the night The Great War ends, "a good night to be born," he says. Underneath the fireworks, the camera follows Thomas Button (Jason Flemyng) racing through the streets towards his house, eager to see his newborn baby and wife. Racing up the stairs and into the house, we cannot fail but notice the prevalence of photographs, delicately framed as decoration. Instantly, we understand that this house of Roger Button is rich with history, and that there is a story for every link, every marriage, and every relationship, leading to those moments when a camera steals light.

But the birthing bed is bloody, and his wife (who looks Creole, much like the wife of Mr. Cake, the blind clockmaker) is dying. She pleads with her husband that the baby has a "place." Thomas approaches the crib and gasps on seeing the unnamed child. He instinctively grabs it and runs out of the house.

Fincher and Miranda quickly track alongside Thomas running through the city to the shore, where he is obviously contemplating infanticide. The opening decoration, where lineage is celebrated, is now broken with Thomas' willful rejection of his bloodline; the baby will be deleted as a mistake. A police officer spots Thomas and pursues him through the alleys of the city; Thomas hushes the baby and tenderly leaves it on the steps of an old-folks home, placing $18 in the baby's blanket, and then creeps back into the shadows. The African-American woman that runs the elderly estate, Queenie (Taraji P. Henson), discovers the child along with her lover, Dizzy Weathers. Barren and compassionate (we can never be entirely certain of one's motives here), she takes in the child, even though Weathers believes the baby might be demonic.

The audience is finally privy to the child's appearance: with wrinkled skin, cataracts, and liver spots, it is an old man in miniature. "He looks just like my ex-husband," one of the elderly residents notes. Queenie, who is told by a doctor to expect the baby to die soon, names the child Benjamin, just as a clock chimes. "The Lord has done something here," she says, countering the doctor's remark that "His body's failing him before his life's begun."

Queenie will be the face of benevolent religion and faith in a divine plan through the picture. "You never know what's coming for you," a mantra in the film first uttered by her, which is to say that we cannot construct our own destiny. History comes to us ineluctably. To explain life's miracles, we require "Just So Stories," and so when Queenie brings Benjamin, wheelchair bound and looking like an elderly dwarf, aged five or six, to be healed by a preacher so that he may walk, the explanation must be the divine miracle, and not that Benjamin is aging in reverse and would inevitably learn to walk anyway. During the same event, Queenie has the preacher's hands laid on her to heal her infertility (which appears to not have worked). Then the preacher dies suddenly of cardiac arrest. "The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away," Benjamin notes in his diary. For everything in the complexity of life, there must be a meaning for our feeble species, there must be a purpose. Fincher, to his credit, does not judge these characters for their beliefs and superstitions. They simply exist in his frame, either suffering or succeeding. Soon we will meet an interesting character that brings brief comic relief at a few moments in the film, an old resident of Queenie's home who stares blankly into space and tells Benjamin, "You know I've been struck by lightning seven times?" and then states the specifics of how he came to be struck. What is written into this character's temporal destiny that he should have this odd happening occur to him so many times? He is innocent in each instance ("One time I was just walking my dog"; "One time I was just going outside to get my mail", etc). Fincher films each lightning strike in old-fashioned black and white, as if it were a Thomas Edison experimental short, again linking our memory and consciousness to the available forms of popular communication.

Thanksgiving 1930 is the day that changes Benjamin's life (there's a thing for exact dates in the picture, an element alluding to the importance of memory), when he first meets Daisy (Elle Fanning), who is perhaps seven, the beautiful blue-eyed, red-haired granddaughter of one of Queenie's residents, an elegant old woman who reads Kipling's Just So Story about how Old Man Kangaroo came to be the way he is from Father Time. At the dinner, Daisy says that turkeys aren't birds because they cannot fly. A pygmy friend of Mr. Weathers mentions that he loves birds that can't fly because they taste so good. Birds become an important idea in the film, particularly birds that can fly, as we will see in Captain Clark's fascination with the figure-8 (a symbol for infinity) created by the wings of a humming-bird. The film also may trouble and annoy us at this point: Daisy's voice is obviously Cate Blanchett's voice dubbed onto Elle Fanning's face. Why would Fincher do something that feels so clumsy? It is linked to the film's romanticism of memory. We are seeing the picture from Benjamin's written words and filtered through Caroline and/or Daisy's cerebral cortex. Individuals retain a certain kind of immutable static essence in our memory, because we evolved that way (human beings don't deal well with change, or at least change that they can see). Thus Daisy must be presented not as she was, but as she was constructed by the collective memory of the motion picture.

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I mentioned earlier how photographs are an important part of Benjamin Button, and not simply sumptuous decor geared towards winning an Art Direction Oscar (which it should, nonetheless). The role of photographs in the film is part of the theme. This is a story of eighty years of regression; the walls of photographs will eventually be replaced by generic and store-bought art, until finally there is nothing. Photographs communicate lineage, and lineage is another important issue in a film where there is so much severance. Benjamin's story begins with severances: Benjamin's birth kills his mother, after which his father abandons him to Queenie’s doorstep. Queenie is infertile and raises this adopted son as her own, regardless of his skin color (she says it's her sister's child, "the worst part about it bein' it was born white!") and Benjamin's strange condition. As Benjamin grows older, Queenie finally is blessed with the ability to have her own children, which seems to dismay Benjamin. As Caroline reads from the old diary to dying Daisy, she notes that there are pages ripped out, around this period of the birth of his siblings. Consequently they are scarcely mentioned, a deletion that we should not take for granted. In fact, nothing at all is said about Queenie's biological children, and any attitude Benjamin seems to have towards them is spiteful (Benjamin has a streak of silent jealousy). When he is finally "senile" in his old age/early childhood at the end, bearing the semblance of an eight-year-old, he identifies them as "fucking liars."

As Benjamin ages/regresses, Fincher shows his father keeping an eye on him. Thomas is haunted by his actions, and after a chance meeting with Benjamin in a brothel (a realm of simulated linking, far from biological procreation of which it is a simulation - also indicating that the father and the son have some similarities, including the abandonment of children), the two bond, though Thomas is unable to bring himself to reveal his identity. We learn that his business is buttons. "There isn't a button that Button's Buttons can't make," Thomas remarks, though his main competition and threat is B.F. Goodrich and his "infernal zippers" (the threat of new and faster technologies are linked to the devil). The individual is linked, in Benjamin Button, with the body, which is a prison for Identity, inescapable (Benjamin's own attitudes act in conjunction with his changing body growing more youthful). Buttons are what fasten the clothes that present that body to other Beings, just as photographs are a kind of representative sign for what somebody wishes to project about themselves. After WWII, Thomas, who is dying, decides to come clean. Thomas shows Benjamin photographs of his dead mother and how their story came to fruition. Thomas is tormented by his sins, and by his memories both vile and beautiful, his one desire being to see the dawn come over the shore once more, just as he experienced while courting Benjamin's biological mother, Thomas is obsessed with specific dates (April 25, 1918), and cannot cut himself free from history; that thing that he seeks to evade is also his home, his experience with the Infinite, the figure-8. Benjamin will forgive his father, and Thomas will be buried next to his mother, though Benjamin insists to Queenie, "You're my mother," which is a gracious sentiment, but also indicative of how much easier it is for Benjamin to cut himself off when compared to Thomas. It is an ambivalent statement, tender and yet something that bespeaks the era, post WWII, post New Deal, with the emergence of the great Middle Class where life will become increasingly generic, as we will see with the decor changing in Queenie's house, gradually looking cheaper, the real faces replaced by painted plants; nature is a false nature. Geography is becoming cheapened, lineage is hazy, and with that, new values materialize

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Benjamin is offered work by Capt. Mike Clark (which sounds like "Clock" when characters pronounce it), a drunk tug boat captain who is adamant about his life's passion to be an artist. His canvas, appropriate in the context of this film where the body is so important, is his own flesh. A tattoo artist, Captain Mike rebelled against his own family by embracing his artistic side. The years of his life are well worn on his flesh, so that when he meets his fate, in a collision with bullets (marvelously created by Fincher and his visual effects team) during a late night shootout with a German U-boat, his shredded body is like a devastated masterpiece. Clark says, "Tell my family that I was thinking about them." Whatever consolation an afterlife or heaven holds is inconsequential in the face of an actual existence, which crushes the Self and its memories, and which the ego is resistant towards. Another theme in Schopenhauer deals with how we should not fear death, being that what happens after death is just as it was before we were born (something seemingly pertinent in this picture, with the main character born in death and heading to die in birth, nothingness on both ends). But human beings are naturally selfish, even though they must surrender themselves to the "Infinite" (the hummingbird’s figure-8). "You could swear, curse the Fates, but when it comes to the End, you have to let go," the captain says while dying.

Between birth and death, there are the beings we meet in between. In Russia, Benjamin has a poignant relationship with the wife of a British spy, Lizzie Abbott (Tilda Swinton). The two speak while stationed in Russia, night after night, sharing experiences (or rather Benjamin mainly listens, and Lizzie speaks; Benjamin is a very passive character, almost Chauncey Gardner-like). The two fall in love, which addresses the problems of causality. She admits that she's made many mistakes in her life, and while she tells him that if she could go back in time she would undo all of her mistakes, it is precisely whatever mistakes she has done that have brought these two together, at this moment. The affair ends suddenly when the war begins, and Benjamin is left with a handwritten note: "It was nice to have met you." And that is all. This curious infinity of life, with other selves incessantly coming into contact with us, and how fortunate we are to have tasted an experience with another person (which is an experience you cannot forge; it can only happen) is one of the main feelings Benjamin Button attempts to communicate. As James Joyce notes, we are all in all in all of us, coming into contact with all sorts of "Others," but always meeting only ourselves.

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Benjamin Button is not really much of an “adaptation” of the original F. Scott Fitzgerald story, published in 1921 and featured as one of the Six Tales From the Jazz Age. Fitzgerald’s conceptual premise of a man aging in reverse serves as a springboard for a glossy chronicle wherein Fincher and Eric Roth explore a cycle of entropy, more appropriately suited for one of Fitzgerald’s novels. The original story is very slight, very sardonic, and very entertaining, its theme seeming to deal with how the elderly are very much like children. The differences between story and film are vast: for one, in Fitzgerald's story Benjamin can speak the moment he's born; the mother lives; Benjamin marries, but loses attraction to his wife after she turns 35; He has a son and not a daughter, and grows young/old with his child. The melancholy element of the story happens only at the end, with the eradication of Benjamin's memory, his consciousness drifting away as he enters elderly infancy. The story covers another period in history, beginning in 1860 rather than 1918.

A.O. Scott noted that Fincher’s Benjamin Button, with its philosophical quandaries, resembles Borges more than Fitzgerald's story. This is only partially true. I think it's all too apparent that the film, more than anything, is Fitzgeraldian. The key theme in Fitzgerald is Time and its relationship to Memory. The agent by which this theme is carried in his work is through his love stories, and the love stories of Fitzgerald are really one love story, forever repeating itself in both his life and his work, Tristanian in nature. The name of Fitzgerald's first noteworthy protagonist was Amory (Amore!), in This Side of Paradise, for whom love is ultimately not enough (he is rejected because of his social circumstances; his lover tells him, "The things for which I love you are precisely the things which make you a failure!"). The most famed of his protagonists, Gatsby, was a modest Midwesterner who turns his back on his family, home, and name, becomes a bootlegger so that he may construct an entirely new identity based on his wealth, and thereby win the love of the woman who would not marry him because of his inherited social status, Daisy. These struggles mirror his own life with Zelda Sayre, whom he would marry, but never be at peace with (due to her mental illness and his alcoholism, meshed with the moral bankruptcy – which Fitzgerald acknowledged – of the social life to which they had willfully clung). Fitzgerald's protagonists live for "amore" love, dwarfing family ties. And if they cannot have it, they will either hurl themselves into hell while chasing it, or they will drift into the fog, just as nihilistically. In both cases, there is no compromise. Fitzgerald died of a heart attack at age 44, probably brought on by endless drinking, but also probably owing just as much to a heart that has dealt with a lot of duress.

In Benjamin Button this love is present. There are absurd gestures of love, such as uttering a "good-night" to the beloved who cannot hear it, but which one utters nonetheless; or a diary written which probably never will be read; a photograph taken which will never be appreciated by anyone else; a postcard sent, tucked away and skimmed over with the eyes, but nothing more. The characters in the film, much like the characters in Fitzgerald's literature, long to be absorbed by and connected to their objects of desire, but ultimately they are alone, their enigmas being carried with them to the grave (much like Benjamin's piano teacher, who is the first person to also teach him how to miss somebody).

Benjamin's love for Daisy has the quality of a fairytale from the first meeting, where they share secrets lit by candlelight under the table, and in the differences within their personalities which indicate that one is the completion of the other. He is cerebral, passive, introverted; she is outspoken, communicative, active. For her, when he leaves in 1936 to go to sea, he vows to send postcards, bridging the emotion through any geographical barrier. But he stops writing when he meets someone else, indicating that writing itself is representative of his love for Daisy. Daisy, meanwhile, has moved to New York, and has become a dancer of note, working with great choreographers and embracing a rococo lifestyle.

When the two meet again, in Queenie's house now full of generic clocks and painted nature (replacing the old clocks and more lush photographs), they appear completely different but are very much the same in the sense that neither is saying much. Though Daisy cannot stop talking about New York, there is no substance to her words. There is no substance to Time itself here. As the two go to eat in a restaurant, Fincher cuts the moments together through a series of dissolves with Daisy's words disappearing into themselves, Benjamin narrating, "As she told me about this new world, I didn't hear a word of what she was saying." Indeed, as Daisy talks about New York or the latest fashion, be it related to clothes or literature, she does not seem like a genuine person. Rather, she seems to be spouting chic ideas spoon-fed to whatever participant in a hipster elite. She speaks about being naked, but Daisy is wearing more clothes now than ever before. She offers herself to Benjamin (who now looks like he's 60), but he turns her down, perhaps because she seems so different and pretentious. Daisy has become much like Daisy in Gatsby, a woman held captive by her own advantages and freedom, paved by economic freedoms and the temporary beauty that Time and Luck give. Benjamin, however, is just as selfish as Fitzgerald’s great male protagonists.

When Benjamin surprises Daisy in New York by turning up unexpected, she is worse. Daisy is polite to him, but offers no real conversation. He is an unwanted dweller from her past, with no place in her life populated by interesting people. In spite of this disparity between Benjamin and Daisy, the two still bid each other goodnight, though separated by hundreds of miles of geography, or, as given in Daisy's last words before she dies ("Goodnight, Benjamin"), mortality.

The two are brought together – and torn apart just as quickly – by the destruction of Daisy's body. Fincher puts together an excellent sequence detailing the myriad of vectors that come together by real space and real time dictating how Fate – or causality rather – writes itself into our lives. The story begins with a woman in Paris on her way to go shopping, forgetting her coat, and going back inside her apartment to pick it up; she gets a ride from a cab driver who stopped earlier to get a cup of coffee; the woman had to pick up a new piece of clothing which she purchases later than expected, because the saleswoman at the clothing store is breaking up with her boyfriend, etc. The end result is the cab crashing into Daisy as she leaves the theatre after a rehearsal, her leg getting crushed in five places. Her body is her livelihood as a dancer. And now her purpose for living, which has enabled her for so long to dance through life with "interesting people," is stolen from her. Benjamin comes to see her, but is once more rejected. The Daisy here is as vain and narcissistic as she's always been, but now wounded and not wanting her scarred body to be seen. The image of her is to be compared to the Daisy we have seen dying in the hospital. In 1950, she is injured, but still beautiful; in 2004, she is a breathing corpse, held together by technology, more machine than human.

It is Daisy's narcissism that calls the love story into question. The next section of the picture is one of complete erotic fulfillment for Benjamin. As Benjamin, now looking like Brad Pitt circa 2008, is "perfect," she on the other hand has lost her reason for living. Would she have come back to Benjamin in New Orleans if she still had her talent for dancing? And doesn't Benjamin hold her attachment to dancing in contempt? He rejects making love to her in 1946 after she dances on a fountain; her life in dancing has given her more "interesting" lovers that have torn her apart from any intimacy with him. Later on, as she regrets her body's demise, he tells her that she had taken a career path that would have ended quickly anyway, so she would have always ended up here with him. Critics and audiences have taken for granted the ambiguities here, and Benjamin Button is hardly a manipulative love story, moving as it is. In the terrain of David Fincher, much as the terrain of F. Scott Fitzgerald, love is definitely beautiful, but it is also very selfish and destructive, driven by a hungry ego (this is one reason one must be suspicious of a Baz Luhrman adaptation of The Great Gatsby). The love story between these two is one of the better ones I have ever seen in a movie, precisely because of its imperfections and ironic delusions, and erotic fulfillment is Faustian in nature: it is the soul's longing and yet may also require a great piece of the soul be sacrificed. Benjamin and Daisy come together, and it is pristine but also fragile. There is a reluctance to speak "for fear of ruining it," he tells her when they stand face to face in the bedroom where they will finally make love. He undresses her (it is significant that he unzips her dress, signaling new clothing and a New Self, a severance from Benjamin's "Button"-esque roots) and the two come together. She asks him about his aging, and he admits that he's afraid that some things don't last. Death is unavoidable.

With Benjamin and Daisy becoming lovers, his adoptive mother Queenie dies, and he sells his father's house. The buyer admires the photographs on the wall, detailing the Button history. "They come with the house," Benjamin says. This is a significant moment, because the house, which Daisy says she loves, carries Benjamin's link to history, just as it is our link to the Old New Orleans and to the beginning of the film. Photographs are individual (versus mass-produced) links to the past, to cherished moments, to the mystery of our private identities, and so have an aura. With Benjamin's wish fulfilled, the price he pays for happiness with Daisy is his sense of history. He falls into the 1950s and 1960s much like the American middle class in that period, existing in something of a hermetical vacuum, residing in a generic duplex with Daisy. There are no traditions or authentic pictures, but only generic decorations. The one picture that thrives here is a television set. He is happy with the bourgeois life he has created (or rather, which circumstances and history have given to him; the money came from his father's company, from which he has disengaged himself willfully). When Daisy regrets the past and what happened to her leg, he tries to console her. "Even if nothing ever happened, you'd still be here." This is not wisdom on the part of Benjamin, and Fincher has fooled both admirers of his picture and those that accuse it of being generically manipulative. Benjamin wants to hold time still, demonstrated as he stands in front of a mirror with Daisy, elongating the moment, but no photograph of him exists. "As we are now" will always pass away, and the nihilism that comes after disillusionment is itself a kind of "letting go." Like his father, Benjamin Button will walk out on his family. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is detailing the eradication of identity and the death of culture.

***

In a New York Times editorial, David Brooks discusses memory and how memory's capabilities seem to work in direct proportion to the technology one uses to log information. One's memory seems to work better for those who don't log in all the time and use the gadgetry of convenience at their fingertips, whereas the affluent individuals processing information in electronic banks have the slightest short-term recall. "The Sophie's Choice of the 21st century," writes Brooks, "may be My Memory or My Blackberry." The digital age, this reactionary viewpoint fears, may feature a civilization trapped in the forever present moment, with no sense of time, tradition, lineage, or consequences. Without regret, there is no reflection, no character, no identity, and no morality.

Are these a Luddite’s claims? David Fincher is not a technophobe, having embraced the best in digital filmmaking to make his pictures. But he’s also a keen observer of how information technology works and evolves, if we look at his survey of history, beginning with Zodiac, continuing with Benjamin Button, and ending with The Social Network. Communication between human beings has always been cloudy, just as the longing to communicate and to be heard has always been powerful. But the "way of the future," the last lines of Howard Hughes in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator, has placed us into a flux of non-stop acceleration and technological dependence, which is only further taking us out of any spiritual depth whatsoever. Some neuroscientists believe we are losing our ability to empathize, or simply to think beyond the concrete. Why do we need to read an entire book? The peripheral information absorbed while reading a newspaper becomes disjointed as we are more accustomed to clicking on web hyperlinks, giving us even more information, though we only skim the surface of a particular topic.

The crossroads for Daisy in Benjamin Button, where she is more machine than human in her hospital bed, has to do with her request to have Benjamin's story read to her. She's tried to read it before, and we can assume that perhaps she's been distracted. It is ultimately the imminent reality of death that drives the human being towards authentic living, and usually it comes too late.

The most troubling moment in the film has to do with Benjamin's departure from his family. Is it altruistic? Or selfish? Because of Benjamin's youthful body, perhaps he simply wants to be free from any relationships that keep him tied someplace. Fincher gives us images of Benjamin travelling across the world, living a rough but rewarding life of self-reliance. But he is alone, and he wishes he could go back to see his daughter grow up, though he only keeps on marching into the future and nothingness He writes his daughter post-cards, hoping that he will be heard, but the fact that Caroline has never read these bits of information feels significant, and ties into the idea of lost dreams carried along the tide of time. As Caroline, Julia Ormond herself seems, with the lines forming around her mouth, a walking station of regret, being that in 1994, with Legends of the Fall – Brad Pitt's first box-office drawing starring role – she was going to be the next big leading lady, something that never came to be. Benjamin tells Caroline that it is never too late or too early to be who you want to be—

But how are we to take this? We could take it as genuine wisdom spoken by a magical realist motion picture, or is there something more to it? Remember, we are seeing a film through Benjamin's perspective. In seeing parallel events, we should rather relate Benjamin's actions to his father: he has selfishly abandoned his child (leaving behind money, so that the offspring will be taken care of) while starting over (Thomas Button's starting-over led him to brothels). The child in both instances is described as being "lost." Gradually, Benjamin loses his memory. He is found, an angry twelve-year-old with acne, unable to communicate, lost in the echo of a song he can play on the piano, but cannot remember learning. His stagnation mirrors a certain social stagnation, of a time losing its memory and further isolating itself (Benjamin doesn't like to be touched). Daisy takes on the role of caring for the baby Benjamin, holding him in her arms as he looks at her one last time, then closing his eyes to die.

Does he remember her with this last look, as she does? We would love to believe 'yes,' as Daisy does, but again Fincher is questioning our sentiments. Just as Benjamin's memories are edited, so are Daisy's. That is the nature of art, of memory, to make it a sculpted chaos, with the psychological need for semblance and harmony in a curious, nonsensical world.

With Benjamin's demise is the electronic age's dominance. The gears of the complex clocks are replaced with batteries, the crowning bookend of the film being Mr. Cake's clock coming down and being replaced by a digital clock in 2002. We notice to the left of the clock is an advertisement: Citizen Soldiers. The world is becoming more militarized, where things are mechanical to the extent that the ordinary citizens are soldiers, in contrast to the sorrow of war when the analog clock took shape in 1918. Benjamin dies in the spring of 2003, when the Iraq war, an apocalyptic quagmire, begins.

Analog time – the hand clock – where time is visibly circular with every moment in view, every number related to the one preceding and following it, has vanished, and what follows is the constant present, with no reflection, memory, or regret. The diary, information of a Life stating that I Am, I Was, and I Loved, cannot endure. It must not, which is why it is important that the story be told. The deepest regret is that the words go unnoticed. It's not enough to say that the theme of Benjamin Button amounts to facile humanism. The film, like Fitzgerald, is obsessed with changes, with Time, with Erosion and Entropy, and with the longing for the Eternal Moment to be forever frozen and beautiful, lost within itself and unburdened by the ghosts of the past or anxieties of the future. Memory breaks this gilded moment, but memory is also the Holy Grail in Fitzgerald. Losing memory is death, as Benjamin loses it, and Fincher emphasizing the infernal sirens of Hurricane Katrina relates to our digital age losing its own memory. Fincher and Miranda's use of HD digital cinematography, but being reverent to cinema's past (the scratched celluloid), also carries this anxiety where the cinema itself is at risk of losing its sense of lineage and memory in a CGI world.

"Goodnight, Benjamin" are Daisy's last words, a delusional prayer to nothing, an absurd statement that is defiant and beautiful. It prompts the appearance of the hummingbird, the symbol for Infinity. There is a great and terrible awe in those hurricane sirens at this point, as the flood swallows the clockmaker's tribute to memory, showing how vast and fragile the pillars of the Self are.