Over winter break, my family and I saw the movie, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” The film, based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, stars Brad Pitt as a man who is born old and ages backwards until he dies after 80 years, as an infant. I went into the theatre thinking I was going to enjoy the movie. I was wrong. Although I knew the plot was going to be fictional, the acting and plot twists turned out to be so ridiculous that I just laughed during some of the most over-the-top moments of the film. Although the original story was written by a legend of American fiction, the screenplay was written by the same guy who wrote “Forrest Gump,” and about halfway through the movie I started wondering if a shrimp boat might be coming along to rescue Benjamin, and me, sometime soon.
But even though the film was a bust in my view, I still related to one of the larger themes and messages emerging from it: the importance of living your life to its fullest and taking the initiative to find what makes you happy and pursuing it, rather than just waiting around for things to change. I found this message very similar to one conveyed by Emerson and Thoreau: you have to be willing to take risks to pursue a life that makes you happy and is self-rewarding.
What’s interesting to me is, the Transcendentalists of the 1800’s captured the significance of pursuing a rewarding life in a much more hard-hitting, understandable way than the big-budget movie-makers of 2008.
To be exact, it cost the producers of “Benjamin Button” $150 million to make what they hoped was an inspiring and profound film. Thoreau and Emerson? I bet they spent less than one hundred dollars, combined, on their projects. But I was a lot more motivated and inspired by their words: “Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them.”
Something to think about.
