The new Gatsby film

[Reed John]

The new Gatsby film

La Lanterne Rouge wrote: Do we think Tom is really "old money", given that he's just bought his mansion, that he's another mid-westerner? Aren't we meant to assume that his frontier arrogance shows that he is also striving for a status that he can never achieve?

Not quite. Here's how Tom is first described.

Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven — a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax. His family were enormously wealthy — even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach — but now he’d left Chicago and come East in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance, he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that.

Why they came East I don’t know. They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it — I had no sight into Daisy’s heart, but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.

(New Haven there refers to Yale, BTW, for those unfamiliar. These were still the days when money alone could get you into a University like that.)

So it seems that Tom and Daisy are just floating around to wherever the "scene" is. In the 20s, especially, the scene was in New York. I imagine that at some point later they'd probably go to LA.

Recall that Daisy and Jordan are from Louisville. Kentucky was a Border State during the Civil War, but it is still regarded as The South, so her upbringing would have probably included Debutante Balls and Old South nonsense like that which is patterned after upper-class European nonsense.

American aristocracy, such as it was, did defer to its established European counterparts to a large extent. That's a major theme of Downton Abbey. Her Ladyship (I'm blanking on the name) comes from American money but married an English lord with a title and a house. Without her, he isn't really rich. Without him, she doesn't have a title. They all wanted both. And, as the show portrays, that was kind of a dumb move for the family bringing the money because there was always a possibility that the Lord/Duke that you married would blow it all on a stupid investment.

But the American wealthy felt like just being rich wasn't enough. They had to have pedigree too. That is a betrayal of the original founding premise/myth of the USA. Not only do we not allow aristocratic titles, the idea that one isn't bound to family tradition and can chart one's own destiny here is cherished by many (not all, but many) people of all classes and ethnicities - including my greatgrandfather who changed our name from Kaier to Miller.

[Lucia Lanigan]

The new Gatsby film

I think you'd have to bung Walt Whitman in that list of important American voices too. For the plurality he represented as much as anything: there's never been one American myth. His style of nonconformity echoes all the way down to recent counterculture really. The Gatsby myth - a decent arriviste seeing high society for what it really is - has been a keeper too. It's certainly a staple of indie filmmaking (Metropolitan, Rushmore &c.).

Not that I've read it for 15 years or so. It's as great as Reed says, beautiful writing.

[Lucia Lanigan]

The new Gatsby film

I dipped into his essays for the first time in ages this morning. Very influential on the best of 20th century cultural commentary I think. Here's the fantastically quotable Echoes of The Jazz Age.

(Love the way contradictory notions naturally follow one another without any attempt at reconciliation:

"By this time contemporaries of mine had begun to disappear into the dark maw of violence. A classmate killed his wife and himself on Long Island, another tumbled 'accidentally' from a skyscraper in Philadelphia, another purposely from a skyscraper in New York. One was killed in a speak-easy in Chicago; another was beaten to death in a speak-easy in New York and crawled home to the Princeton Club to die; still another had his skull crushed by a maniac's axe in an insane asylum where he was confined. These are not catastrophes that I went out of my way to look for - these were my friends. Moreover, these things happened not during the depression but during the boom."

"But in those days life was like the race in Alice in Wonderland, there was a prize for everyone"

Mind you, that's where he begins in The Crack Up, isn't it: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.")

[E10 Rifle]

The new Gatsby film

The main brake on the rapacity of capitalism was the growth of organised labour; what's taken the brake off is its decline.

Key per-lit-ical point in a thread full of fantastic, well argued points. So much so that I've got practically nothing to add, but this all has made me think about re-reading something I last read 20 years ago and still rate as one of my all-time favourite pieces of writing.

One of the things I liked about TGG, which I found comparitively rare for novels of the time (and earlier times) is that it kind of makes you side more with 'new wealth' than 'established/establishment wealth'. You're on Gatsby's side, kind of, while one of the most cast-iron certainties in a novel full of exquisite shades of grey is that Tom B is a 24-carat cunt.

[Nefertiti2]

The new Gatsby film

Whitman was agreat writer and did as much as manyone to change the ace of writing and give it a distinctly American feel. But mark Twain was read at the time on a scale that noone of the others were. He was a star, a universally recognised figure whse work was sold door-to-door and whose white suit as instantly recognsiable

It was Twain as cultural phomenon which I was referring to as much as the quality of the writing-which is, at its best stupendous.

Interesting that both Twain and Whitman worked as typesetters for some of their life.

[Edie St Pierre]

The new Gatsby film

Reed John wrote: Not really. As I understand it, the pre-columbian population of all indigenous people in all of the Americas (from Argentina to Alaska, I guess) topped out at around 100 million. So, compared to Western Europe, it was always pretty empty.

Ah cool, I put that qualification in just in case someone pulled me up on it, I know it was far from being always the case.

[Edie St Pierre]

The new Gatsby film

Nefertiti2 wrote: I think Dickinson, Poe, and Wharton could have appeared anywhere. Twain as Faulkner said was "the father of American Literature" and deal with pan-American mythologies and technologies.

See, I completely disagree with that. They were the first three names I thought of admittedly, but I see them as purely American writers. Emily Dickinson is the foreunner to me in lots of ways of that small-town, isolated wierdness that you see in Harper Lee, Carson McCullers, Truman Capote and so on. I know she was lots of other things too.

Poe's short stories, even the ones set in Europe never feel like they are, unlike say Fanu or MR James, they're sort of set in some strange, rootless wilderness, the kind of Old Europe that Americans have nightmares about. The same sort of place HP Lovecraft set his stories. They're entirely American, I think.

[sw2borshch]

The new Gatsby film

For those in BBCland, there's a Culture Show special on F Scott Fitzgerald tonight at 8.30.

[Reed John]

The new Gatsby film

Conan O'Brien suggests the 3-D was unnecessary.

[Gerontophile]

The new Gatsby film

Thanks for that sw2boro. Set to record. I think there might be something clashing on the other BBC channel...

[Lucia Lanigan]

The new Gatsby film

Saw this last night and agree with Reed, though I probably liked it a little less. Luhrmann is like a spoilt child playing with the characters and settings as if they're the latest dolls and dollhouses his dad bought for him. He hasn't recognised (or doesn't care) what made them noteworthy in the first place. You can't help but wonder how this one fell in his lap really. The set design, party scenes and 3D elements conspire to turn one of the most stylish novels ever published into a rococo upchuck visually (great as some of the cast look in passing). You can do that to "fin de siecle musical theatre" (Moulin Rouge) but not to Gatsby, if you want anything of Gatsby left in.

I remember the novel being a subtly uncanny read (in line with the quotation from one of Reed's links: "a new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about"). The excess is in the illusion, the evanescent facade we know it takes an obscene amount of money to maintain even as we watch it recede. Luhrmann makes everything larger than life, when it should be just aside from life.

But I guess a film has to be either "an extravaganza" or "realistic" to get made. It did feel as if they had to get the fashion tie-in showpieces in first, so they could get on with the film. Which, unfortunately, is one of those "worst of both worlds" films-of-books. It keeps nodding to key lines and scenes that don't quite work out of context (for the benefit of those who've read it, who'll immediately clock the shortfall) while also having quite a ploddy, messy pace (which leads those who haven't read it to wonder what the point of all this is). It's a good job the characters keep telling you what they're thinking and feeling and what their motivations are all the time, or else you might not guess.

[MsD]

The new Gatsby film

That's interesting. I should see this during the week.

I love FSF, love Luhrmann, suspect I'm not going to love them together quite as much.

And I fucking hate 3D, makes me feel sick.

[RobW]

The new Gatsby film

I watched it yesterday and I admit i'm no fan of the book (besides the prose).
Everything is of course bigger and brasher in Luhrmann's world, and whilst this works in the party scenes (despite the awful contemporary music), in some instances it was just too OTT.
When Tom and Nick go to the city with Myrtle and her sister, isn't it just those two pairs present? I don't recall it being as raucous as depicted in the film in any case.
I didn't like the scene in the speakeasy either. Maybe it was just a little too Moulin Rouge for me, with all the chorus girls.

I totally agree with Reed, concerning the altering/dumbing down of Fitzgerald's prose. I know the 1974 version is often cited for literally taking chunks of the novel and putting it in the screenplay, maybe they didn't want to the same, I dunno.
I re-read it recently and the line that stuck for me was;
"Thirty--the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair."
Now, I think in the film, I may be wrong, but Nick alludes to this line, but then it's truncated or altered.

Anyway, I can't really fault the performances of the actors. Aside from Mia Farrow, I thought the 1974 leads were magnificently cast, and the same can be said of this adaptation. McGuire can appear a bit too childlike at times I suppose, but I loved Elizabeth Debicki as Jordan. Just wish she could have been shoehorned into more scenes.

The 3D, as it is in most films, was completely unnecessary, and (MILD SPOILER)

I was a little disappointed that Mr. Gatz doesn't make an appearance. On the whole 2.5/3 stars out of five is probably right.

[Reed John]

The new Gatsby film

Not Gatsby, but I've been listening to a great reading of FSF's Tender is the Night Audible and this bit struck be as especially quoteable bit about how the economy works (or doesn't, depending on your point of view).

Context: Nicole is a rich American in France whose wealth is from her family and her husband. Rosemary is a young actress who came from modest means but has made some money in Hollywood. In this bit, Nicole takes Rosemary shopping.

With Nicole’s help Rosemary bought two dresses and two hats and four pairs of shoes with her money. Nicole bought from a great list that ran two pages, and bought the things in the windows besides. Everything she liked that she couldn’t possibly use herself, she bought as a present for a friend. She bought colored beads, folding beach cushions, artificial flowers, honey, a guest bed, bags, scarfs, love birds, miniatures for a doll’s house and three yards of some new cloth the color of prawns. She bought a dozen bathing suits, a rubber alligator, a travelling chess set of gold and ivory, big linen handkerchiefs for Abe, two chamois leather jackets of kingfisher blue and burning bush from Hermes — bought all these things not a bit like a high-class courtesan buying underwear and jewels, which were after all professional equipment and insurance — but with an entirely different point of view. Nicole was the product of much ingenuity and toil. For her sake trains began their run at Chicago and traversed the round belly of the continent to California; chicle factories fumed and link belts grew link by link in factories; men mixed toothpaste in vats and drew mouthwash out of copper hogsheads; girls canned tomatoes quickly in August or worked rudely at the Five-and-Tens on Christmas Eve; half-breed Indians toiled on Brazilian coffee plantations and dreamers were muscled out of patent rights in new tractors — these were some of the people who gave a tithe to Nicole, and as the whole system swayed and thundered onward it lent a feverish bloom to such processes of hers as wholesale buying, like the flush of a fireman’s face holding his post before a spreading blaze. She illustrated very simple principles, containing in herself her own doom, but illustrated them so accurately that there was grace in the procedure, and presently Rosemary would try to imitate it.

Another bit:

But after dark all that is most satisfactory in French life swims back into the picture — the sprightly tarts, the men arguing with a hundred Voilàs in the cafés, the couples drifting, head to head, toward the satisfactory inexpensiveness of nowhere.

The Satisfactory Inexpensiveness of Nowhere (SIN) would be a good name for an album by a band called the Sprightly Tarts.

[anton pulisov]

The new Gatsby film

Jay-Z being played in the 1920s. Hmm, yeah, that was the whole Romeo+Juliet schtick again Baz.

This is the first 3D film I've seen. And I only saw it in 3D because I was offered a free upgrade. What's the point? It's not 3D at all, it's a headache inducing circus gimmick. The most annoying thing about 3D is when there's subtitles. They're way out in front, almost attacking you. Even if you don't need to read them, like me, they are still really distracting. I watched most of the film without the glasses. It was still pretty watchable that way.

Rubbish film though.

[Efficient Baxter]

The new Gatsby film

I've seen the film and it annoyed me so much it inspired me to read the book. I haven't yet, but I've started the intro and already it has explained to me the reason for a scene which I found largely incongruous and is a huge marker that Bazza just didn't seem to 'get' the book. How odd.
Didn't mind the new music and the only scene that actually felt like it worked was the meeting of Gatsby and Daisy in the cabin. And I wanted to slap Toby Maguire's character, if indeed he had any.