Bodies against Time:
Gender, Ageing, and Temporality in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
and The Age of Adaline
Amruta Joshi,
Assistant Professor & Assistant
Head,
Department of English,
Maniben Nanavati Women’s College
(Autonomous),
Mumbai, Maharashtra, India.
Abstract: This
paper seeks to analyze Aging, embodiment, and gender in the films The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
(2008) and The Age of Adaline
(2015) through a comparative analysis. Both films defy linear aging in time,
which centers the body where time, identity, and gender intersect. Drawing on
theoretical frameworks such as age studies, feminism, gender performativity,
and posthumanism, the paper studies how male and female bodies are differently
constructed in society with different values and treatment. These frameworks
study the portrayal and treatment of two unusually aging humans, one a male
body aging backward, whereas the other is a female body frozen in time.
Further, the paper examines the cinematic techniques and aestheticisation of
time, which demonstrates the masculine aging anomaly as experiential, while the
feminine aging anomaly is visualized and aestheticized. Ultimately, both films
challenge linear biological aging, offering a posthuman study of human
existence through a gendered lens, where the body becomes a site of resistance
and memory.
Keywords: Aging, time, gender, body, Adaline, Benjamin
Introduction
Aging, embodiment, and
gender are significant constructs in film studies and philosophy that often
reflect on how bodies mark time, experience, and difference. This paper aims to
analyze two films, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (dir. David
Fincher, 2008) and The Age of Adaline (dir. Lee Toland Krieger, 2015),
that offer different perspectives on the theme of disrupted aging in
association with time. The film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button follows
the trajectory of a man’s life who ages backward, defying the linear chronology
and the expected arc of a life span; while the film The Age of Adaline
portrays a woman who ceases to age, caused by a natural phenomenon after an
accident, gaining perpetual youth while the world moves on. The premise of these
films questions the concepts of corporeality, gendered temporal disruption, and
mortality. It raises questions about how the body marks time and age is
perceived, and whether these different aging processes impact two individuals,
a male and a female, in society.
Both films are strong
bearers of the concepts of life, death, aging, and embodiment. Benjamin
Button’s reverse aging can be seen as a masculine personification of a
melancholic existential journey through time, identity, and loss. In contrast,
Adaline’s ceasing to age is a feminine personification that portrays the
societal burden of beauty and invisibility. The films problematize the linear
trajectory of time and its connection to human existence; however, both films
take a different turn in addressing the gendered portrayal of aging. This paper
draws on several theoretical frameworks to study this premise, including
feminist theories, age studies, gender performativity, and post-humanism. The
paper seeks to conduct a comparative analysis of both films using these
theories to explore how aging and gender intertwine and diverge.
Age studies are deeply
associated with the narratives of productivity, youth, and decline. American
essayist and activist Margaret Morganroth Gullette, in her 2004 work Aged by
Culture, states that “we are aged more by culture than by chromosomes”
(Gullette 101). Kathleen Woodward in Figuring Age: Women, Bodies,
Generations (1999) stresses the visibility/invisibility of aging female
bodies and how cultural and societal ecosystems dictate the legibility or
invisibility of the female body. Lastly, “chrononormativity” is a concept by
Professor Elizabeth Freeman in her work Time Binds: Queer Temporalities,
Queer Histories (2010), which can be explained as the use of time to direct
the human bodies towards productivity. It is also connected to the process of
aging, meaning time itself becomes a discipline, and aging or older bodies may
be disciplined by or resist that linear regime. Together, these theories
provide a lens for studying how these two films stage time and existence
(linear, reversed, suspended) and how the protagonists’ existence enacts or
resists these sequential orders.
Maurice Merleau‑Ponty in Phenomenology
of Perception (1995) propounds that the body is not merely an insignificant
object but a primary site of perception. Iris Marion Young provides a feminist
perspective on the gendered body in her work Throwing Like a Girl and Other
Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory (1990), which elaborates
how bodily behavior and movement are gendered. Similarly, Judith Butler’s
concept of gender performativity argues that gender is maintained, perpetuated,
and embodied through repetition rather than being an innate identity. These
frameworks thus question how gender is enacted through bodily time.
Laura Mulvey’s foundational
essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975), in the area of film
studies, emphasizes how the female body is often an object of visual pleasure
in cinema to satisfy the “male gaze” and how aging women tend toward
invisibility while male aging is glorified. This is fundamental to analyzing
beauty, aging, gender, and visibility in these two films. Contemporary feminist
critics debunk the myth of “ageless beauty” as empowerment; on the contrary, it
often becomes a burden. Finally, post-human theories highlight the disrupted
linear life-courses. One of the most crucial works towards this approach is
Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto (1985), which speculates on
the hybrid, boundary-crossing, and non-linear nature of these films. These
theories together allow visualizing the films’ protagonists not merely as
subjects of aging but as individuals transcending the linear aging structure,
thereby associating aging with embodiment and how it impacts different genders
differently, which provides a speculative lens for studying these films.
Comparative Overview of
Both Films
While studying the
cinematic techniques, narratives, and gendered premises, the films contrast and
complement their portrayal of aging and gender. The central idea of reverse
aging in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button becomes an existential
phenomenon. Born with the body of an old man, Benjamin, the protagonist
physically becomes younger over time, consequently distorting the expected arc
of life and death. Benjamin’s body and mind travel in opposite directions,
which deeply impacts his developmental years of identity, experiencing wisdom,
loss, and transcendence. The body’s disjunction with aging emphasizes life’s
fragility and temporal distortion.
The Age of Adaline, on the contrary, suspends
aging rather than its reversal. After an accident, Adaline remains twenty-nine
forever, caused by a lightning strike. A natural phenomenon that stops her
aging process. This stagnation alienates her from a linear society, showcasing
the irony of female existence. A society that expects women to look
effortlessly young also scrutinizes the female body that does not age, which
compels Adaline to change her identity and remain invisible to speculation
constantly. Thus, these films offer a
rich comparative frame as one portrays the hardships of a man aging backward in
time, while the other portrays the feminine burden of being frozen in time.
A. The Curious Case of
Benjamin Button: The Masculine Temporal Body
The film begins with
Benjamin Button, the protagonist, born with the appearance of an old man and
physical frailties. The film showcases a scene in which Benjamin wakes up in
the maternity ward, expressing dissatisfaction with the style of the
“youngster’s” environment, inverting the notion of innocence, which is
typically associated with youthful vigour and physical robustness, and captures
it in a decrepit form. This inversion renders the body as a temporal vessel
rather than a static social object. Thus, Benjamin’s male body becomes a site
of philosophical viewing of time’s flow, detachment, and reversal.
According to the embodiment
theory, especially by Maurice Merleau‑Ponty in Phenomenology of Perception,
the body is not merely an object among objects but the central means of our
being-in-the-world. Benjamin’s identity develops through his embodied
perception. Paradoxically, although Benjamin’s body grows younger, his
chronological age keeps increasing. His life experiences are shaped by his
physical form and its imbalance with social time. As Benjamin says, “while
everybody else was aging… I was getting younger… all alone.” Therefore, the
male body functions not merely as a masculine subject in time but as one that
dismantles linear temporality.
However, gendered privilege
is an undeniable element that cannot be overlooked. Although Benjamin’s body is
atypical, he is subject to curiosity and fascination rather than social
exclusion. Benjamin’s backward aging is met with more awe than derision,
suggesting a masculine privilege that allows him to navigate these irregular
age boundaries without complete seclusion, unlike Adaline, who is always
running from her own identity to avoid societal speculation. Thus proving the
male body retains agency even with age-related discrepancies.
B. The Age of Adaline:
The Feminine Ageless Body
In some scenes from the
film, such as the library or Adaline getting pulled over by the police because
of her age on her ID, Adaline is in her late forties, yet she still appears to
be in her late twenties. This displays her female body as socially visible but
temporally surveilled. According to Kathleen Woodward in Figuring Age,
aging female bodies navigate an ambiguous space of visibility and invisibility.
They are seen while also expected to neutralize and age gracefully. Adaline’s
“ageless beauty”, therefore, becomes a site of anxiety and societal policing.
Simone de Beauvoir’s notion
of becoming a woman and Iris Marion Young’s Throwing Like a Girl, which
explores gendered bodily comportment, draws a feminist study of Adaline’s
constant self-surveillance and forced mobility, which can be seen as a
containment of movement. Adaline has to relocate and reinvent herself to avoid
constant scrutiny. Young argues that the feminine body limits its mobility and
spatial freedom as it gets accustomed to viewing itself as an object under
surveillance. Adaline’s body, in this sense, becomes performative in
nature. Her youth conceals the wear of
time and the societal beauty norms.
The film repeatedly reminds
viewers that Adaline‘s agelessness is an imprisonment rather than a gift. The
cultural expectation for women is to age gracefully or invisibly. Adaline’s
notable signs of agelessness become a reason for policing. She cannot grow old
and age visibly and gracefully, thus becoming isolated. Thus, unlike Benjamin’s male body, Adaline’s
female body cannot simply age into subjectivity and attain temporal mobility.
Gender, Temporality, and
Identity in the films:
A. Gendered Temporality:
The Curious Case of
Benjamin Button establishes
a “masculine” temporality that provides experience and existential agency.
Benjamin’s reversed growth, which is most evidently visible in his reunion with
Daisy (Cate Blanchett). His youthful body juxtaposes with her aging one,
exposing the temporal disconnect that enables continual masculine reinvention.
This reversal of temporal existence is absurd, for Benjamin becomes a
“philosophical” traveler, escaping judgment by the conventions of that temporal
structure. Judith Butler in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of
Identity (1990) asserts that gender operates as a repeated, performative
structure. Although Benjamin’s body contradicts chronological time and his
bodily inversion is temporally “abnormal,” it still permits him to perform
masculinity through detachment and reflective autonomy, allowing him to
maintain agency.
However, Lee Toland
Krieger’s The Age of Adaline situates female aging with appearance and
social coherence. Adaline’s inability to age becomes a burden, distancing her
from linear belonging. In one scene from the film, Adaline tries to be intimate
with Ellis (Michiel Huisman) but hides her true age, believing her body will
become a site of scrutiny. This insecurity of Adaline arises from her lack of
self-freedom, built on deception and self-policing. This narrative unveils the
double standards surrounding aging, that men “age like wine”, whereas women
“age like milk”. Adaline’s inability to age does not even allow her to age like
milk, but just into invisibility. This serves as a tragic metaphor for female
temporality shaped by beauty standards. Her agelessness is not transcendence
but an exile from humanity.
B. The Aestheticisation of
Time
Fincher and Krieger
construct contrasting visual grammars of time and existence. Fincher chooses a
melancholic yet realistic portrayal through subdued palettes, diary narrations,
and slow pacing. The reverse aging becomes a meditation on the inevitability of
decay, rendering time melancholic. In contrast, Krieger opts for mythic
romanticism in The Age of Adaline with glowing cinematography and soft
lighting to aestheticize eternal youth. The camera lingers ethereally on her
face, visually idealizing Adaline’s agelessness through her temporally static
beauty. This distinction can be studied through Laura Mulvey’s concept of the
“male gaze” from Visual and Other Pleasures (1989). Fincher’s camera
captures Benjamin as a phenomenological subject, and Krieger aestheticizes
Adaline as spectacle, rendering time visually gendered. Masculine temporality
is empirical and philosophical, whereas feminine temporality is aesthetic.
'Eternal Youth' and 'Reversal of Time' are utilized as examples of social
anxiety over aging of bodies, yet both films sharply diverge in ways the
culture and society define and assign meaning to female/male bodily
experiences.
C. Embodiment and Memory
Elizabeth Grosz, in her
book Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (1994), argues that
“time is inscribed in the body,” meaning that memory and its relationship with
time and body are not abstract but fleshed. Both films posit this connection by
depicting how memories are embodied through recollection. In The Age of
Adaline, flashback sequences with her daughter (played by Ellen Burstyn)
unveil memory as cyclical through maternal relationships and affective in
nature from Adaline’s denied time and experience with her daughter. On the
other hand, Benjamin’s diary entries and retrospective voice-overs depict
memory as introspective documentation, creating a rational order between memory
and legacy. Adaline’s feminine memory nurtures, while Benjamin’s masculine
memory documents, demonstrating a gendered experience of time. Both narratives
place ‘aging’ at the centre of philosophical and social discourse. While
Benjamin’s journey privileges him with a lack of a chronological sense of time,
Adaline’s journey is confined within time. Both films expose how gender, as a
construct, impacts how individuals perceive themselves and their relationship
to time and agency.
Philosophical Synthesis
Both films transcend
conventional notions of time and existence, reconfiguring the body as a locus
for philosophical and technological rupture. Donna Haraway, in her work A
Cyborg Manifesto (1985), blurs the boundaries between human, machine, and
organism with her concept of posthuman hybridity. Benjamin and Adaline embody
this cyborg-like existence, severing their linear biological relationship to
time, yet remaining attached to human emotion and the essence of life and
death. Benjamin and Adaline, being anomalies to the natural process of aging,
deviate from it through reverse and stagnant aging, respectively. Yet, as
Haraway points out, such deviation does not allow escape from mortality but
reshapes it within the existing networks of affectivity.
From an existential
perspective, both characters dramatize the absurdity of life. The cosmic irony
in Benjamin’s reversed chronology allows him to gain youth at the cost of
wisdom. Similarly, Adaline's temporal stasis becomes a curse, leading her to an
existential dead-end, while her body resists decay. Both protagonists live in a
state of suspension from time and existence, yet within the confines of life
and mortality, reflecting the severed linear time and gendered embodiment of
the posthuman era.
Conclusion
Both films, The Curious
Case of Benjamin Button (2008) and The Age of Adaline (2015),
explore the profoundly gendered tropes of aging identity and embodiment,
uncovering the cultural politics and its agency over male and female bodies in
relation to age and time. Benjamin’s male body aging in reverse is portrayed as
an existential site that gains wisdom on its journey toward self-knowledge,
while Adaline’s ageless female body is stuck in time, mirroring society’s
discomfort with female aging. This is a commentary on society’s hyperfixation
on women having to look young forever, a notion often dramatized in films,
often catering to the male gaze.
Both films challenge the
biological linear aging, one through reversal and the other through suspension.
However, ultimately reaffirm the universal cycle of life and death. Benjamin,
although aging backwards, meets death and completes his life cycle, asserting
masculine transcendence through wisdom and memory, and Adaline's temporal
stasis ends, restoring conventional femininity through wisdom and love,
providing her the pathway to linear aging. The life journey of both characters,
one being a male and the other a female, thus becomes a gendered experience of
embodiment, identity, and time. Yet,
both films deal with the concept of posthuman non-linear aging, where the body
itself becomes an object of remembrance and resistance, which offers a glimpse
into an alternate pattern of aging juxtaposed with gender and time.
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