America was positioned as the Land of Opportunity, and the America Dream was the pretty, simple branding of this for folks to consume as part of our National Mythology and to help people who made money off people’s hopes and dreams make a sale.
This book points out a messier version of the American Dream - a guy driven by an immature, questionable quest, exploiting the Land of Opportunity in questionable ways to the point of gaudy excess - and when all is said and done, the silliness of his quest is clear, and the importance of his achieving the Dream is more as an entertainment for the truly rich, who aren’t going anywhere…
For me, I think Gatsby is great because of the prose itself. It’s just such a beautifully written book. It does explore some interesting themes. The story-line and characters however are just standard soap-opera material and quite forgettable. I don’t think Gatsby will ever work well as a movie (and I’ve seen at least one of the older film versions) because movies are almost universally carried by plot and characters, and if not they are carried by visuals but Gatsby isn’t a novel that would benefit from that at all.
The NES game was awesome though Really captured the essence of the novel. Hahahaha.
I love Gatsby. But I’d say it’s basically a poem in prose. The beauty of the language as important or more so than the plot, characterization, and symbolism.
I remember my exact criticism of all of the supposed layered nuances and symbolism in the book back when I was in high school:
“So, the light was supposed to represent him not being able to reach his dreams, but in the end, he was just reaching for a light, right? He could have just been reaching for a light”
About the music – at least some of the songs on the soundtrack are somewhat jazzy in style even if they were written well after the '20s. There’s a version of Roxy Music’s “Love Is the Drug” re-recorded by Bryan Ferry and The Bryan Ferry Orchestra, and Will.i.am’s song “Bang Bang” samples “The Charleston”.
Remember that Gatsby met Daisy when he was a young soldier (and during wartime the uniform was a great, but temporary, class leveler) and she was a very young debutante from a wealthy family. They fell madly in love, but they couldn’t marry because Gatsby wasn’t rich, her family didn’t consider him a suitable match, and Daisy would have been absolutely incapable of living as a non-rich person.
So from Gatsby’s point of view, his love and happiness were cruelly snatched away from him just because he didn’t have money. So he set out with a ferocious determination to make money, money, more money: not only would it somehow win back his lost love but it would rehabilitate him as a man, after the humiliating defeat of seeing another, richer man take away his beloved.
As for Daisy, she was possibly less shallow as a young girl before she’d spent years living with a man she didn’t love and having it constantly rubbed into her that money and the amusements provided by money are the only point life has. But whether she was or not, it didn’t matter, because during the years of separation she had become Gatsby’s immutable idol: the prize whose possession would not only give him happiness but prove his power and success.
I think one of the great things in the book is the way we see Gatsby willfully, desperately refusing to recognize the weakness and frivolity of Daisy’s nature. He had to keep telling himself that they were bound in true love, that everything that seemed to be lacking in Daisy would be set right once he’d freed her from her brute of a husband, that she was worthy of all his adoration. Because otherwise, everything he was and the whole life that he’d built—not to mention everything he’d done in order to attain it, some of which probably couldn’t stand very close scrutiny—would all have been for nothing.
*Gatsby *perfectly captures America’s ambivalence towards Romanticism: all of them, Nick most consciously, feels both contempt for Gatsby’s lack of sophistication and envy for his “capacity of hope”: they are a troupe of bored, angsty teenagers angry at a nerdy younger sibling for not realizing how stupid he is for being happy. It’s like Gastby missed the memo that the rest of them got, the memo that state that after the war the world was different: there weren’t any white knights, there was no happy ever after, everything that used to be right and true is now a lie and a cheat, so what the fuck ever, be a hedonist. And it kills them that he can’t see this simple truth, and kills them that he might might just maybe be right. That little tingle of fear-hope that there might be joy in the world is what keeps Daisy coming back even though she knows from the beginning how this will end, an it is what keeps Nick from calling him on his bullshit. The fact that he’s killed by the one other person in the story who also believes in love despite all evidence to the contrary–and is despised for it–is, of course, another layer of irony there. This is still how we feel about hope in this day and age, and capturing that national internal conflict is what makes it a great novel.
I will spoiler my thoughts on the movie:
[spoiler]
I thought the movie was a competent rendition of a prosaic reading of the book. It really, really bothered me that this Nick wasn’t even a little bit maybe gay, when I think Nick’s raging infatuation with Gatsby is one of the most important layers in the book: Nick hooks Gatsby up with Daisy as a proxy for what he wants to do himself, because, hell, that’s how Nick does everything. And to my mind it’s very clear that Nick and McKee leave the party together and have drunken hookup: the fact that it isn’t even suggested as possible by the movie seems really cowardly to me. Nick is much more interesting–and sympathetic–if you see him as hopelessly in love.
The movie also went out of it’s way to make sure no one missed a trick; too many symbols were explicitly defined, and too many things were explained. I also feel like some shit was only included to prove to his English teacher he really read the book: there is no point in putting the dog in there if you aren’t going to have time to develop the parallel between the dog and Myrtle, for example. Just cut it and be done with it.
I also don’t think they spent enough time developing Daisy’s dilemma: Gatsby was GONE: what was she to do? Really walk out of a huge wedding because of some guy years ago? And then the tragedy of Tom turning out to be Tom: she really tried to do the right thing, to make a go of it, to soldier on, but it was doomed. [/spoiler]
I figure there’s no need to spoiler comments aboutt he movie in a thread about the movie; is this fair?
Anyway, having only read the book twice, two decades apart, and not all that carefully, I’d never picked up on Nick’s gayness. Nor had my wife–but as we walked out of the theater, she said, “Nick was in love with Gatsby!” and I immediately agreed. I thought the movie gave many clues of that relationship, looking back: his pining looks after Daisy and Gatsby, his shaking hands as he delivers tea, the parallel calls between Daisy and Nick at the end, etc.
See, I saw Nick’s wide-eyed pleasure at Catherine’s kiss in the apartment was an over-the-top “Look! He’s straight! It’s a bromance!” thing–a carefully laid defense against anyone suggesting Nick had actual sexual feelings for Gatsby.
And if you want a carefully text-based argument that Nick is explicitly gay–not just having a once-in-a-lifetime man crush on Gatsby–I can talk about it longer than anyone wants to listen. I’ve taught the novel ten times.
The man-crush seems obvious; I wasn’t reading for Gay (is that a thing?) but would not be surprised to find references.
Manda JO - it would be interesting but I wonder if you could share the major themes/angles you approach the book. Nick’s sexuality seems more of a sidebar curiosity vs. a major theme…
So how does this latest version deal with Meyer Wolfsheim (Gatsby’s business partner)? Wolfsheim was Gatsby’s friend…but doesn’t show up for the funeral “I don’t wanna get mixed up in dis”?
According to Slate the movie cuts Nick’s affair with Daisy’s (female) friend Jordan and has Nick describe her as “frightening”. That seems like an odd choice if the filmmakers actually did want to stress that Nick is totally straight, not gay at all, no siree.
I also can’t imagine that spoilers are terribly required here.
I, like everyone else in the entire world, read the book in high school, but 27 year old me didn’t remember much. I remembered there was a green light and a main character died. Needless to say, I didn’t exactly have a strong book foundation to judge the movie off of.
That said, I loved the movie. I love the bold style Baz does with his films and I think it really added to the roaring 20s aspect of the movie. I liked the use of modern music intertwined throughout the film, but I like the same thing in A Knight’s Tale and Moulin Rouge. Plus, I’m a big Jay Z/ Kanye West/ Lana Del Rey fan, so there was a lot for me to like with the soundtrack. The sets and costuming were out of this world good. Seriously beautiful. So was the general cinematopgrahy of the movie.
The story is unsurprisingly great. They did a good job turning a first person narration into a workable, easy to follow, but interesting film. Leonardo DiCaprio knocked it out of the park with his acting-- the scene where he is waiting for Daisy to show up for tea and the resulting scenes at his mansion were just fantastic. He nailed the blind hope that was being described of his character.
Like I said, I don’t remember much of the book, so I can’t speak to whether or not Nick was gay for Gatsby, but the movie certainly plays it as a fascination and bromance more than anything. In the movie, that fascination turns to genuine care as he realizes he’s all Gatsby has, but again, definitely not homoerotic or anything.
I would like to see that argument. First off, Nick is barely a character, as far as I can tell–an excuse for a limited narrator. Second, he doesn’t really lose anything. Sure, he’s disillusioned of the rich by the end, but it’s not like he had anything remotely at stake. So I don’t see what is tragic about him at all. He thought one thing, learned he was wrong, and moved on.
I believe he’s making the same point I often make. The work has to stand on its own two legs before you start looking for symbolic interpretations. The exceptions are explicit allegories like Animal Farm or The Pilgrim’s Progress, where what everything represents is spelled out for you and thus not up to debate.
If you can’t analyze the work with it just being a light, then, in my opinion, the work has failed. Symbolism alone is not enough for a good work.
And it was Gatsby that first introduced me to this idea. It was so full of symbolism there was barely enough room for the narrative and no room for the characters. It’s not great literature, but a pretentious arthouse film by an artist before he actually doing art.
Really captured the essence of the novel. Hahahaha.