Question: What is the Link between e.e. cummings’ "anyone lived in a pretty how town" and David Fincher’s "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"?

This is a comparative piece I wrote way back in 2008, when I had just arrived in Kuala Lumpur and seen Fincher's film. At the time I was also teaching Cummings, and it had instantly struck me that the film and the poem had a lot in common. Though I discovered later that the poem could have a different interpretation from the one I have given below, the comparison still stands.

The full poem can be found here: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15403

Tentative answer:

More than half a century separates the publication of "anyone lived in a pretty how town" (1940) and the release of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), starring the incomparable Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. The former is a maddeningly unorthodox poem that makes linguistic purists wince; the latter is a wildly imaginative portrait of a man whose life defies linearity. Neither the poem nor the film appeals to those who have been conditioned to think that life comes in easily digestible chunks.

Cummings’ omniscient speaker has but one thing in mind: To sum up all the big and small things happening within the “pretty how town.” He talks of the four seasons (“spring summer autumn winter”) and natural phenomena (“sun moon stars rain”). He talks about the things the townspeople do (“laughed their cryings and did their dance/(sleep wake hope and then)they/said their nerves they slept their dream”). He talks about what they do to each other (“she laughed his joy she cried his grief”). Then, with a convincing demonstration of poetic mastery, he tosses all the above-mentioned ideas together and mixes them as if they were salad ingredients in the last stanza of the poem:

                           Women and men (both dong and ding)

                           summer autumn winter spring

                           reaped their sowing and went their came

                           sun moon stars rain

Though it still remains to be seen what “dong” and “ding” really are, the overall impression of the stanza is one of fragmentation. The words are bits and pieces of a larger canvas. Alone they mean nothing; together they mean everything. Like any impressionistic work, you need distance (objectivity?) to truly appreciate the methodicality that has gone into its composition. The appreciative reader of "anyone lived in a pretty how town" is rewarded with a message of gargantuan proportions: That this life is organised chaos.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button flags a similar message. Benjamin Button begins his anti-chronological life as an unwanted baby. Adopted by the sympathetic caretaker of a home for the aged, he observes the chaos in the world from within a protected environment. As he grows younger and the world grows older, he notices that nothing in life stays the same. People live and die from one day to the next; lovers adore and hate in a single heartbeat; wars are fought and forgotten as soon as the dead are committed to the ground. He moves through the wilderness of life seemingly untouched – until the appearance of Daisy, who, though not always present in his life, becomes his one true love. The unusual circumstances (his being too old, her being too young) initially prevent them from declaring their feelings for each other. But the audience is permitted a glimpse of their inchoate love, which, in the second half of the film, when both characters are physically ready for each other, transforms into a full-blown affair. Like all great romances in cinematic history, this one is not meant to last. Daisy realises that Benjamin and she are going in opposite directions age-wise. While she is losing her battle against ageing, Benjamin is winning his against youth. The happiness they have shared, just as everything else in the film, is ephemeral and will be tarnished by Time.

The pivotal moment of the film comes towards the end, when Daisy - now middle-aged, married and running her own ballet studio - is reunited with an even younger Benjamin. Even though his face is partially disguised by merciful shadows, we still get an adequate sense of the absurdity of his “youthening.” The contrast between the former lovers’ appearances is jarring. Had Benjamin and Daisy remained as a couple, things would have appeared even more nonsensical. We, as well as Daisy, fully recognise that there is no stopping Time; that for each and every single one of us, there is only a small, narrow window of opportunity to do something we are passionate about. Once that window is closed, nothing in the human realm could force it open again. 

We return to Cummings’ poem. The seventh stanza of the poem is as follows:

                             one day anyone died I guess

                             (and noone stooped to kiss his face)

                             busy folk buried them side by side

                             little by little and was by was

The rhythmic and visual balance of “side by side,” “little by little” and “was by was” gives the impression of steady progress. These pairs of words bring to mind the slow trickling of liquid Time. Little by little, life gets drained and all you are left with is a “was” – a past that may or may not be remembered.

Remembrance is also a theme shared by the two works. In the sixth stanza of the poem, line three, to be precise, Cummings writes: “how children are apt to forget to remember.” This suggests that memory is a tricky thing. You are what you remember, but what if you no longer remember? In The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, we get to see the inevitable when the film comes to an end: Benjamin as a “senile” toddler, unaware of the world around him, severed from his eventful past. We suddenly understand why the author (F. Scott Fitzgerald) chose to write about a man who ages backwards. It is because there is no difference between ageing normally and ageing the Benjamin Button way. In both cases, life is but a blink of an eye.  When it is over, only the glory of love remains.