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Of the life of Benjamin Button between his twelfth and twenty-first year I intend to say little. Suffice to record that they were years of normal ungrowth. (21)'
F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (1922) is told by an anonymous first-person narrator who recounts the life of Benjamin Button from his birth in Baltimore in 1860 to his death in the late 1920s. Benjamin's case is curious because he ages in reverse, this conceit apparendy inspired by Mark Twain's comment that "It is a pity that the best part of life comes at the beginning, and the worst part at the end" (qtd. in Gery 495). In 2008 Fitzgerald's story was adapted into a film directed by David Fincher.2 The film dispenses with the narrator, supplying a frame story set in New Orleans in 2005; as Hurricane Katrina approaches, Benjamin's daughter learns her father's story while visiting her dying mother, Daisy (Cate Blanchett), in the hospital. Benjamin (Brad Pitt) also has a different biographyhe is born in 1918, in New Orleans, and dies in 2003. It is the contention of this article that the narrator's casual attitude, above, dismissing the period of Benjamin's existence probably best described by the term "adolescence," is also "curious," although it has not been noted as such. This article accounts for the narrator's curious attitude. To do so, it is necessary to examine the short story and film's representations of age and aging. This, in turn, opens the way for a reading of Fitzgerald's story and its film adaptation in relation to a key question in studies of adaptation generally-that of what passes from one text to another in the process of adaptation-particularly as this question is framed by Kamilla Elliott;
Adaptation lies between the rock of a post-Saussurean insistence that form does not and cannot separate from content and the hard place of poststructuralism's debunking of content, of original and local signifieds alike. If words and images do not and cannot translate, and if form does not and cannot separate from content (whether because of their mandated insoluble bond or because content is simply an illusion), then what remains to pass between a novel and a film in adaptation? (3)
The adaptation of "The...