Pushing Forward Back

It may be a little early to start talking about the Curious Case of Benjamin Button by F. Scott Fritzgerald movie adaptation by David Fincher. but the idea of reverse point-of-views have been coming to my attention a lot lately. Most recently Shaun Inman posted a passage from Slaughter House Five By Kurt Vonnegut that has really resonated with me.

It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. […]

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating day and night, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody again.

The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby. Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn’t in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.

And lastly George Carlin’s unique perspective of how the life cycle should be.

“The most unfair thing about life is the way it ends. I mean, life is tough. It takes up a lot of your time. What do you get at the end of it? A death! What’s that, a bonus?

The life cycle is all backwards.

You should die first, get it out of the way. Then you live in an old age home. You get kicked out when you are too young. You get a gold watch, you go to work. You work forty years until you’re young enough to enjoy your retirement. You do drugs, alcohol, you party, you get ready for high school. You become a kid, you play, you have no responsibilities. You become a little baby. You go back into the womb, you spend your last nine months floating. Then you finish off as an orgasm.”

Classic.