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