I confess I come late to movies–so late I usually catch them for the first time on DVD or satellite. A major reason for this is my disability which makes it distinctly uncomfortable to sit in those bus-sized rooms and bus-like seating that pass for theaters these days. When the size of in-home screens for sale at box retailers starts to approach that of real movie screens in the boxes they call theaters, you have to wonder about the future of movie-going.
My own inability to see films in theaters does have certain advantages, for coming late to a movie you have already heard much about can sometimes provoke interesting insights. A case in point is The Curious Case of Benjamin Button which I saw for the first time last week. Along with most who saw it, I liked it, especially the compelling performances of Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett.
The film’s plot device of growing younger as you grow older was an obvious draw for Boomers that have chased the elusive Fountain of Youth all their life. What fifty-year-old male has not dreamed of motorcycles and Cate Blanchett and what fifty-year-old woman would not like to have Pitt in bed with her every night? The film is now so popular that when you type the word “Benjamin” into Google, the first option it gives you is Benjamin Button, ahead of none other than America’s most famous Benjamin–Benjamin Franklin.
The film purports to be from an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story (not one of his better ones, by the way–which may be good for Fitzgerald who always had a love/hate relationship with Hollywood), but about all the movie uses from the story is the name of the major character and the plot device. Perhaps that is one of the reasons the film left me with mixed feelings and unanswered questions that have grown in the days since I first saw it.
A good film should do that. If movie does not make you think and ask questions it may be fun entertainment, but it is not a great movie. Benjamin Button had me walking away with a lot of what-ifs and whys, but the major one was curiously one no one else has written about–race.
The Real Story
Race plays little role in Fitzgerald’s story other than in a brief, but uncomfortable sentence that comes shortly after Benjamin’s birth as his father struggles over what to do with him. Fitzgerald, who centers his story in Baltimore, writes:
People would stop to speak to him, and what was he going to say? He would have to introduce this–this septuagenarian: “This is my son, born early this morning.” And then the old man would gather his blanket around him and they would plod on, past the bustling stores, the slave market–for a dark instant Mr. Button wished passionately that his son was black–past the luxurious houses of the residential district, past the home for the aged….
In the movie, however, race is injected into the plot from the very beginning of this story about a man/child who is born eighty years old and grows younger instead of older. The film starts out as a fascinating interracial story of a white child raised by an African American mother, then steps away from the deeper implications of that relationship.
Perhaps the film makers felt it would have been one plot element too many or perhaps they believed to have continued it would have disrupted the focus on the relationship between Benjamin and Daisy and its themes of time, life and death. But why, then, insert race at all?
For me that is the most curious question about Benjamin Button and one that makes me want to see the film several times. It also is the question that haunts contemporary America as we experience our first African American President.
When baby Benjamin is literally stumbled over by Queenie, this black woman decides to raise him as her own; explaining his sudden appearance by saying the child is her sister’s. This, of course, means Benjamin is an African American in the eyes of everyone who does not know the truth.
After Benjamin finally learns the truth of his birth, his reaction is to hug Queenie and tell her she will always be his real mother. The scene is both touching and courageous, yet it leaves me with more questions than answers.
The Issue of Race
The life of an African American child born on the day the First World War ended would have been nothing like Benjamin’s–no matter how “white” he looked, for in our still-alive system of classifying people by race Benjamin would have been listed as black on the Census form.
The only short glimpse of this reality we have comes early in the film when the young Benjamin is taken for a jaunt on the town by an African American friend of his mother’s and we see the two riding in the back of a bus. After Benjamin leaves New Orleans race fades from the picture except in brief moments such as Queenie’s funeral in the African American church she–and one assumes, the young Benjamin–attended.
Life for a black child living in New Orleans in those years would have been decidedly different than it was for the movie Benjamin. Growing up in the South in those years the real Benjamin would have experienced the full consequences of segregation. Had an African American Benjamin been caught under the table in the middle of the night with a young white girl it would have resulted in serious punishment.
In fact, such an incident probably would have never occurred, for an African American Benjamin would have been taught from birth there were places he could not go, things he could not say, and things he could not do. He would not have even dared look Cate Blanchett in the eyes–and especially not with what were then termed “carnal feelings”–for that could well have earned him a rope.
The young Cate, who I assume would have believed Benjamin was black since she had given no indication of knowing his true story, also appears to give no thought to the interracial side of their relationship. Like Benjamin she also would have been brought up with the beliefs of her time, which for women in the South dictated that she keep her distance from African American males.
An African American Benjamin would have been socialized by Queenie to behave with deference to whites, to lower his eyes, to speak in a certain way and to, if necessary, adopt a Stepin Fetchit demeanor. Those habits and the complexities of living with what W.E.B. DuBois termed “the color line” were reality for an entire generation of African Americans who came of age in South during the years before the Civil Rights movement.
Passing
Central to a real Benjamin would have been the entire issue of color, for Benjamin’s white skin would have placed him on the razor’s edge of the color line both within African American society, especially in the apartheid that was the 1920s American South which created terms such as “octoroon” to describe someone’s race. As he grew older, Benjamin, like other fair-skinned blacks, would have faced the issue of “passing”–and the uncomfortable dilemmas it presented him.
Thelma Marshall is an African American woman who has experienced that situation as a story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette relates.
During the 1950s and early ’60s, she did what her mother before her had done. What her grandmother and aunts had done.
She passed for white.
“One time I told a woman I was black, colored in those days,” Marshall recalled. “She said, ‘You won’t get the job unless you pass for white.’ ”
So that’s what Marshall did.
“I passed for white on lots of jobs,” she said. “I had to be white to get the jobs.”
In a 1999 Slate article, Brent Staples writes:
Convincing estimates show that by 1950 about one in five white Americans had some African ancestry. This inheritance most often arrived at the bedroom door in the form of a fair-skinned black person who had slipped over the color line to live as white.
There is also the famous 1967 case of Loving v Virginia in which the Supreme Court overturned laws against interracial marriage. In a brief submitted for that case, sociologist Robert Stuckert estimated that that during the 1940s alone, roughly 15,550 fair-skinned blacks per year slipped across the color line–about 155,500 for the decade.
A 2006 study by Charles Hirschman and Anthony Daniel Perez updated Stuckert’s findings, beginning with a stunning opening paragraph:
Although the melting pot metaphor generally applies to the descendants from Europe while the racial divide is symbolized by a “one drop” ideology that designates most persons with partial African ancestry as black, there is little consistency in the logic of how subpopulation boundaries are created, maintained, or erased.
The Cultural Dimension
It is the cultural part of the film that really leaves me uncomfortable. The strengths and nuances of African American culture that any black child raised in 1920s New Orleans (which for many was one of the epicenters of African American culture) are touched on only briefly. In short, Benjamin, who would have been raised as an African American, shows little of that experience as an adult, even if he had chosen to pass as white.
In the end the movie evidences an underlying ambiguity about African American culture, African American mothers and the African American family. Benjamin Button could have been a great movie about the intersections between black and white, but after having twisted Fitzgerald’s story, it white-washes these issues.
The only echoes of African American culture are the funeral service for Queenie (there is a whole article for someone to write about white America’s fascination with the Black Church) and the jazz we hear in the background. When I saw the film my ears detected the distinct coronet sound of Bix Beiderbecke–who was white. A look at the score for the film confirms this. Why didn’t the film use an New Orleans African American such as the obvious choice of Louis Armstrong, whose early recordings are still rank as one of the most impressive and important statements in American culture–so impressive in fact that Beiderbecke intentionally copied Armstrong?
The 1920s and African Americans
Watching the film you would not know that the 1920s were a seminal decade in African American history. We all know about the famed Harlem Renaissance, but in fact the decade of the 1920s represented a national African American Renaissance. Economically those were times when many African Americans made their first significant inroads into the middle class. They were also times of cultural ferment and enrichment in which jazz played a major part. Those were years when the young mass media gave birth to a truly national African American culture.
All this promise was cut short by the Great Depression and then World War II. There would not be a decade like it for African Americans until the Civil Rights movement.
Barack Obama
That this movie should come to America almost in parallel with the election of our first African American President is no accident. Barack Obama had a childhood that except for the reverse aging plot device is even more complex and interesting than Benjamin Button’s. Benjamin was raised by a black mother. Barack’s mother–who died in 1995–was white. Instead of living in the polyglot community of New Orleans, Barack Obama spent much of his childhood in the polyglot community of Hawaii.
Obama has spoken on many occasions about how this heritage has made him sensitive to America and the world’s modern multicultural global society. Yet for Barack Obama, unlike Benjamin Button, race has been central to his life. Where you might say Benjamin–and the film–spend the entire time passing– the color of Barack Obama’s skin has made race impossible to ignore.
Many Americans have an image of the Obama Presidency not unlike that of the film–one in which race no longer is a problem in part because we ignore culture. Yet African America is a culture as well as a race as all those suburban whites wearing their hats backward, their pants low and their radios blasting hip hop realize even though they may have little understanding of the meanings of these things for black people. Contrary to the film’s choice to diminish it, that culture has a deep, rich and important history that is also America’s history.
When Barack Obama makes it clear that his identity is as an African American he is not merely talking about his skin color, but also about his culture. As the comments about Aretha Franklin’s hat at the Inauguration testify, very few Americans were aware of the cultural significance of that hat.
But Obama was–as were most African Americans. That illustrates that for all our trying to bridge the gap between cultures, we still have a long way to go. It is hard to be too critical of Benjamin Button because by giving him an African American mother–and treating her with respect–it does extend a hand out to bridge the cultural gap. That is why I believe the movie resonates with so many Americans.
The questions it leaves are the questions we wrestle with today, questions of culture, race, identity and time. A major metaphor in the film is the backwards clock–a device that does not even appear in Fitzgerald’s story. That backwards clock is not only about time, but also race, for America wishes it could erase the bad parts of its past the way the movie envisions World War I reversing itself. As the movie tells us, this is more difficult than we realize.
Still, twenty years ago few script writers would have thought about casting a black woman as Banjamin’s mother and even fewer Hollywood executives would have bought the script and produced the film. Twenty years ago few would have imagined Barack Obama would be our President–not even Barack Obama himself. That shows how far we have come, but the film’s questions show us how far we have to go.
The Future
In the coming years it will be interesting to see how culture plays out at the White House and in America. We have not seen someone in the White House for whom culture in its broadest sense has played a major role since the Presidency of John F. Kennedy. If Americans will open their eyes and ears–and especially their minds–the next few years will be an exciting time.
The central word in the movie title is an apt one for our times, for we NEED to be curious–and openly so. What the movie gets right and what it made it fun to watch was the curiosity that lay at its center. Those of us in the audience were curious about where the story would take us and Pitt and Blanchett did an excellent job of instilling the film with their own curiosity about Benjamin’s situation.
Curiosity, though, can entail some awkward moments because inevitably we will ask disconcerting and even embarrassing questions. But we cannot be afraid to do so, especially when it comes to culture. In many ways our future as a nation and certainly the course of the Obama Presidency will depend on the honesty of our curiosity.
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