Frank Sommers -- Curious Case of Life

  In thinking about the Mark Twain quotation that was part of the prompt
  for this assignment, I think it's necessary to recall that Twain was first
  and foremost a "humorist" and a satirist -- his first goal in almost everything 
  he said and wrote was *to make people laugh* (at others and at themselves) 
  and then to get them to think about how silly a lot of their preconceptions 
  and actions are.   So it seems to me that his idea that aging in reverse 
  would lead to an "infinitely happier life" is not a serious proposal. It's 
  a way to get us to laugh about the indignities of aging.  He wants us to think 
  about whether being young is really any better than being old and whether life 
  really would be any better "in reverse."    

  So I think you are taking Twain's statement a bit too seriously for the way
  he meant it.  But even with that, your essay on the film "The Curious Case of Benjamin 
  Button"  has some very good points.  You do a good job of pointing out 
  ways that it's pretty clear that the film-makers think Benjamin's story 
  essentially shows that what Twain is saying is not true at all on the literal 
  level.  (And in fact, the Fitzgerald story on which the movie was loosely based 
  is even more clearly a sort of "thought experiment" designed to refute Twain's 
  literal claim.) 

  It's good that you also clearly see that the main issue for Benjamin is not 
  only that he is aging "in reverse."  It's that he is an single individual living 
  "in reverse" in a world of people aging in the normal direction.  So he faces 
  obstacles you discuss and many others too at almost every step of the way.  Even 
  though he has many of the same physical-age-appropriate experiences as other people, 
  his physical appearance and condition are always out of step with his mental 
  age *from the point of view of those other people*.  So it's not just the direction 
  of aging by itself that is the really important point.  It's how that direction of 
  aging makes you in step or out of step with everyone around you that really matters 
  for how things play out in this story.

  The writing is generally very good.  I don't think the choice you made of
  introducing a completely different question in the final paragraph was
  that effective (even though it's interesting to see that you reconsidered
  part of the movie after our discussions).  It would have been better to use that 
  for an overall conclusion to tie together the different points you made earlier
  or possibly to relate those points to the CHQ theme.  

  Content -- A-

  Structure/Mechanics -- A-