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Turning Back Time: Duration, Simultaneity, And The Timeless In Fitzgerald And Fincher's Benjamin Button, Nathan Wagner

English Theses

This MA thesis seeks to apply Henri Bergson’s theory of time to a reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” and David Fincher’s film adaptation of the text, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. By applying Bergson’s notions of durée and simultaneity, timeless moments will be seen to emerge in the text and the film. I place Fitzgerald’s text in context with other seminal modernist works in order to provide a study of the importance of the story within its time period. Through Deleuze’s application of Bergson to cinema, I analyze the evolution of the time-image …