benjamin button's lack of curiosity

As one of a packed crowd at a Christmas night showing of the “Curious Case of Benjamin Button” in Dallas, I watched an approving audience enjoy a film with a terrible, though predictable racial message. As the message began to emerge, the fact that the audience was uniformly white made a lot of sense. So what’s the story of Benjamin?

The overt story, recounted in all the reviews, is that a man is born old and then spends his life becoming young; we watch the old baby transform to middle age and then age on into infancy and death. This reversal of the normal order intrigued viewers and led to much post-film philosophizing about profound human questions of “mortality and fleeting love,” as one web reviewer said.

But the covert, secondary story was an old and familiar racial tale: black people exist in America, or at least in American cinema, to serve, protect, and humanize dominant white people who have lost their way or been abandoned by their rightful families. The protagonist Benjamin, a white child abandoned by his well-to-do father when the mother dies in childbirth and the offending baby looks like a gnarled piece of gristle, survives only because a black woman finds the newborn and takes him into the nursing home where she cooks and cleans and cares for the white residents. This is, after all, New Orleans in 1918, and in its natural order black people do the work to sustain white people’s daily lives.

Taraji P. Henson gives the character of Queenie a religiously devout woman who sees God’s creation in the infant, depth and believability, but is helped by white audience expectations that white infants will be nurtured by such women. My white audience laughed everytime this black woman embraced the growing Benjamin, metamorphosing into Brad Pitt, and called him “my son,” but the laughter was comfortable. Of course Queenie was deluded to fancy herself his mother, but she was also saving his life.

My distress at the early appearance of the old pattern of black subordination to white turned to perplexity at how the movie could manage to have this black savior at its center while depicting the racial order of segregation and white dominance of the interwar and immediate postwar years in America. And how would it handle Civil Rights? Not to worry. When a touring African Pygmy arrives at the nursing home and takes old/young Benjamin on the trolley, the two sit together, but in the back of the bus. There are no “white” and “colored” signs visible to remind us of the rules of segregated transport, but Benjamin and his friend talk to white youngsters who are seated towards the bus driver in front; they’re talking from the back. When Benjamin arrives home after the war and enters the nursing home, he calls down the stairs for Queenie – who inhabits the lower reaches of the large old house, where the kitchen is – while he himself has a room on the upper floors with the white residents. What gives? He doesn’t sleep with his “family”? When he meets the daughter of Queenie and her husband Tizzy, (what was the screenwriter doing with this 1930s plantation name?), played by Devyn A. Tyler, she might be considered his half-sister, for whom he would take some care and responsibility, but the character vanishes as quickly as she enters the film. What would it mean for a white man to claim a black woman as his sister in the late 1940s and early 1950s? Trouble, with a capital T, but that’s not the kind of trouble this movie cares about. Ultimately, of course, Benjamin’s father experiences guilt, reclaims his son, and grants Brad Pitt an inheritance that allows for financial comfort. Do Queenie and her kin gain any aid from this? College tuition, perhaps, to a state university, which couldn’t be LSU, which was still segregated? No. There’s no hint that the white Benjamin will give back personally to Queenie and her kin or that he will support the Civil Rights movement to change the system that constrains them politically.

Thinking about the difference between a post-racial society and a multiracial one – does Barack Obama’s election signal that race no longer matters or that we’re committed to living with lots of racial differences? – I view the film as a perfect example of the satisfactions available to white people in a post-racial society. If we pretend that race no longer matters, then we can continue to tell stories in which black people care for white people, who remain dominant and reassured that other groups exist to serve us. I emerged from “Benjamin Button” with the horrible sadness that this well-intentioned white audience had enjoyed the movie not because of its visual beauty, clever effects, and philosophical puzzles – “having your heart warmed,” as one web reviewer put it – but because the movie affirmed the implicit racial promise Hollywood has so often offered up since 1939’s “Gone with the Wind”: white people are good, black people are better, and their appointed purpose, at least in popular movies, is to serve the lives and even to save the souls of white people. It’s time for white Americans to give up the idea that we can have a feel-good, post-racial society where, nevertheless, white people will continue to be in charge. That’s not post-racial; it’s delusionary.