Identities and Bodies

 The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)

For identities and bodies, I decided to choose The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. In the movie, we see the life of Benjamin from birth to death. He was born looking like an old man with wrinkles, poor eyesight, and limited mobility. Essentially, he is aging backwards compared to the normative. As Benjamin grows up, his personality changes as well. When he is young but looks like an old man, he is really calm and reserved. When he is 50 years old and looks like a teenager, he wants to find excitement and becomes a fun-loving person. His identity never fully develops since his wisdom fades away with each developmental stage. This becomes a problem when he meets Daisy, his love interest in the film. Since Daisy ages normally, it's hard for Benjamin to actually have a serious, mature relationship with her. It shows that each phase of a person's age-related development, their entire identify tends to shift as well.

While the main characters in The Rider and Under the Skin aren't aging backwards, they face their own identity struggles. In The Rider, Brady gets into a really bad rodeo accident and had to get surgery on his skull. While he was taking some time off to recover, his friends wanted him to get back in the saddle as soon as possible. In their culture, there's a poststructuralist identity where men are suppose to "cowboy up" and be be rebellious since they are young and have no rules. Brady wants to heal right, but being in the rodeo is all he knows and that is what has defined him for so many years. He's really lost and wants to get back riding, but he doesn't want to end up like his friend in the hospital. In a sense, this relates to Benjamin's life when he "ages young." The older he gets, the less responsibilities he has since he's aging to be a kid. He isn't getting wiser and his personality never truly develops. Every stage of life has the power to shape a person's identity and Brady is certainly at a turning point in his life and Benjamin seems to have a personality change every year of his life.

Under the Skin is a very twisted movie that hard to understand, but at the core is our main character who is some sort of alien outsider who embodies a human woman. She gets really comfortable in this body to the point where she feels like she could truly get away with being a human. However, she is not a human when she entices men to go home with her and they end up disappearing into a pool of goo and when she can't eat food. Similarly, for half of Benjamin's life, he embodies an old person. He is aware that he's "trapped" in this older body and he is never totally comfortable in it, but he never really reacts to it either. It's not really a blessing nor a curse and he doesn't show too much curiosity on his condition while it alters his personality so much. 

 We all long to find our identity and place in this world. Our identity has such a big impact on our lives and when something comes and shakes it up, it can be hard to bounce back and find ourselves again. All three of these movies show the struggles of finding their identity and how much it has on having a purposeful life.

'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button': Film Review

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Globalization

 Jobs (2013)

Sometimes, ideas can change the course of history forever, but it takes a determined person to actually put it right to the test. This is exactly what we see in the movie Jobs which tells the remarkable story of Steve Jobs and the creation of Apple. Jobs dropped out of Reed College in Portland, OR and wanted to start a computer company with his friend Stephen Wozniak. They started tinkering with cricut boards and TV screens when lead them to creating the Apple I. Investors started to hear about Apple and Jobs kept inventing products that would "change the world." Today, I would argue that Apple is now a hegemony in the technology world and has since been valued at $2 trillion. While the film does leave out key details about Jobs' journey with the business, such as when Jobs started the failed company NeXT, it does give the audience quite a bit of insight on the company itself.

American Factory and First Cow and some similarities to Jobs. American Factory is about American and Chinese people working together at Fuyao, a glass making company. This factory used to be a General Motors plant where workers made a very good living with high wages, benefits, and safe working conditions. Since the plant was bought out by Chinese investors and has been converted into Fuyao, the American's are working for very low wages with not great benefits and very unsafe working conditions. The Americans and the Chinese workers often clash because both groups of people view work very different and hold different values. To compare to Jobs, there were multiple people who tore Jobs' ideas apart, said he wasn't a good investor, and said that he wouldn't change the world with his technology. Learning how to work with different kinds of people is a skill and some people are better at it than others. Jobs totally believed in his work and he knew that his technology would help people lives for the better. While some of his closest business partners didn't believe in him, a lot of other people around him did believe him and that's how he built such a successful company.

First Cow can also be compared to Jobs as well. First Cow is a story about 2 men wanting to make money and better themselves. This was when cows were first starting to be domesticated so those who were around the cow were wondering how this animal could produce food just by eating grass all day. The 2 men would milk the cow at night so the owner wouldn't see and then make doughnuts with the milk to sell at the market. Everyone was raving about the sweet dough since they have never tasted something so good before. This is very similar to when Jobs created the first at home computer. People were amazed that something that used to take up entire rooms can now sit at your office desk. While Apple computers weren't a huge hit at first, eventually with more tweaking and more product launches, Apple became the largest tech giant in the world.

Jobs (Roger Ebert)

Review: 'Jobs': Career highlights get in the way of human insights (Washington Post)