The document summarizes four scholars' perspectives on Baz Luhrmann's film adaptation of The Great Gatsby. Wai Chee Dimock argues Luhrmann lingers on revealing the vulnerability of Tom Buchanan. T. Austin Graham states the film is deliberately anachronistic, mixing elements from different eras to portray how the 1920s influenced future decades rather than stay confined to the novel's time period. John Irwin criticizes some of Luhrmann's directorial choices but acknowledges making the characters more complex. Caleb Smith praises DiCaprio's emotionally expressive performance of Gatsby that transcends the text.

1. What’ s Left to Say? Four Fitzgerald Scholars on Baz Luhrmann’ s Gatsby
by T. Austin Graham, Caleb Smith, John Irwin & Wai Chee Dimock
What’ s Left to Say? Four Fitzgerald Scholars on Baz Luhrmann’ s Gatsby by T. Austin
Graham, Caleb Smith, John Irwin & Wai Chee DimockJune 6th, 2013 RESET – +Wai Chee
Dimock, “ Better Than the Yale Club” THAT’ S WHAT NICK SAYS, at the end of the party in
Tom Buchanan’ s New York apartment. The words are Baz Luhrmann’ s, not Fitzgerald’ s.
In the novel Nick has hated the party, hated Tom’ s shameless flaunting of his affair, and the
callowness of the assembled friends. The evening has wound up with Tom breaking
Myrtle’ s nose when she dares to say Daisy’ s name, a scene Fitzgerald handles with crisp
disdain, with Myrtle’ s exact words and then the bloody towels on the floor all duly
recorded. In the film, the bloody towels are gone; Tom’ s blow to Myrtle is indexed almost
in passing. What’ s front and center is jazz music overlaid with Jay-Z’ s rap soundtrack,
exploding with the kaleidoscopic colors of the bacchanalian scene, and, of course, the
stunning visual effect of the lit-up apartment windows across the street, their interiors
opening up magically one by one and rising out of the façade, with the help of the 3-D
technology.Nick’ s jab at the Yale club comes in the midst of all of this (he and Tom are
going there for lunch before the latter decides on a whim to go see Myrtle). Luhrmann has
not entirely made it up: in the novel, in the following chapter, Nick does indeed say of his
dinner at the Yale Club that “ for some reason it was the gloomiest event of my day.” And
the Yale Club has played an even unhappier role in a short story written just one year
earlier, “ The Rich Boy” (1924). Fitzgerald, of course, had gone to Princeton, so the targeted
school is both a private joke and a need-I-say-more shorthand, the better to make short
work of Tom Buchanan, “ one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New
Haven.” Luhrmann’ s Tom is not made short work of. Superbly played by the Australian
actor Joel Edgerton, this Tom is so raw emotionally, so visibly on edge, and so sensitive to
slights and hurts that we almost forget that, yes, he is indeed one of the richest men in
America, a racist and a bully. He has more in common with Gatsby than we think, a point
dramatized by their remarkably similar behavior while at the wheel of that yellow Rolls-
Royce. He is an in insider who has never been able to internalize that state, perhaps because
it is not anyone’ s to internalize in this movie. It is not just Nick, and not just Gatsby, who is
perched, voyeuristically and revealingly, both within and without. That revealing voyeurism
is Tom’ s as well: even as he obsessively watches others, that very process subjects him to

2. the camera’ s recessional probe, pulling up dimensions of vulnerability and exposing them
to view, over and over again.Luhrmann lingers long over that process (unlike the slender
novel, the film is 2 hours and 23 minutes), and with more tenderness than one would think
possible. He is probably the only director who would tell this jazz age story this way, with
this particular distribution of emotional charge. The film was made in Australia; along with
Joel Edgerton there are two other Australian actors in lead roles (Elizabeth Debecki as
Jordan Baker and Isla Fisher as Myrtle Wilson). Luhrmann had planned on shooting in New
York, but was lured back to Sydney by a 40 percent “ producer offset” offered by Screen
Australia, a federal agency. The location and the cast were fine for him —he had always
conceived of jazz as a phenomenon as significant outside the United States as within. His
previous film, Australia (2008), also had a jazz soundtrack, performed by the Ralph Pyle big
band, with clarinet solos by Andy Firth. It somehow made sense —that jazz should be the
baseline, the sonic horizon and outer limit, for a movie by an Australian director, by this
Australian director.Baz Luhrmann was born Mark Anthony Luhrmann and raised in Herons
Creek, New South Wales, a town with 11 houses; his father ran a gas station. Over the years
he has more or less remade himself (like Gatsby, he changed his name), but Herons Creek
has not completely receded either. And, from the standpoint of Herons Creek, every
emanation from the Jazz Age, from 1920s America, has got to be unimaginably fascinating,
to be gleaned only through visual hyperboles, through a surfeit of signs. Gatsby epitomizes
this. But Tom Buchanan belongs there too. And so, too, do those gathered in that New York
apartment. Maybe even the Yale Club itself. The over-the-top, surreal realism of the carnival
is a tribute to each of these, each the stuff dreams are made of.¤T. Austin Graham, “ Future
Days” The Great Gatsby is usually remembered for capturing the general spirit of a very
spirited age. But in fact, Fitzgerald’ s slim novel rather deliberately limits itself to a
particular time and place, with most of its plot set squarely in the middle of 1922. Nick’ s
catalog of Gatsby’ s guests is written on a conveniently dated train schedule: 7-5-22. The
music at the novel’ s last party, meanwhile, is “ a neat sad little waltz of that year” called
“ Three o’ Clock in the Morning,” an actual pop hit from an actual summer. Why not 1921,
or 1923? According to one theory, Fitzgerald was looking for a way to associate his 1925
novel with T.S. Eliot’ s The Waste Land and James Joyce’ s Ulysses, both of which were
published in the same auspicious year and had made 1922 the pinnacle of literary
modernism. Perhaps Fitzgerald knew he’ d written a masterpiece —Eliot did, and told him
so.And then there’ s Baz Luhrmann’ s adaptation of The Great Gatsby, which turns history
into a swirling, impossible hallucination. Yes, Tobey Maguire’ s Nick has a copy of Ulysses in
his cottage and Leonardo DiCaprio’ s Gatsby invites a period-specific Broadway star to his
mansion, but perhaps the most striking aspect of the film is how flagrantly and
provocatively anachronistic it is. This is the Jazz Age in a remix and mash-up culture. Jay-Z
provides a 21st-century soundtrack on more than one occasion, his rapping every bit as
jarring as the Converse sneakers and post-punk in Sofia Coppola’ s Marie Antoinette. The
contemporary chanteuse Lana Del Rey —a product of YouTube —drifts around in time,
giving a performance that sounds like her internet-era ones until it modulates into an old-
timey foxtrot. Even the film’ s 1920s music can sound a bit strained, as when George
Gershwin’ s Rhapsody in Blue plays two years too soon over Gatsby’ s spectroscopic

3. gayety.This Gatsby isn’ t only a collision of then and now —it’ s a pop cultural vortex, and
the entire 20th century is getting pulled in. The Harlem setting of Tom Buchanan’ s love
nest looks back on —or perhaps anticipates —the album art for Led Zeppelin’ s Physical
Graffiti (1975) and Miles Davis’ s A Tribute to Jack Johnson (a 1971 jazz-rock salute to a
1910s prizefighter). The Manhattan speakeasy where Nick meets Meyer Wolfsheim shares
dancers with a Paris club in the French New Wave film Le cercle rouge (1970). A line of
dialogue and an underwater shot of Gatsby’ s corpse allude to Sunset Boulevard (1950),
one of the most allusive and history-conscious movies ever made. The anachronistic sounds
and images are so striking and so frequent that they don’ t distract from Luhrmann’ s
treatment of the 1920s, exactly —the anachronism is the treatment.We could decide that
this is yet another specimen of weightless postmodern pastiche, compare Luhrmann’ s
Gatsby to Quentin Tarantino’ s artfully sloppy historical films, and be done with it. But we
might also conclude that Luhrmann has found a unique way to address what was surely one
of the project’ s greatest challenges, namely, responding to the inevitable criticism that his
movie couldn’ t possibly get Fitzgerald’ s novel “ right.” The very first shot establishes the
antique quality of the subject matter and then refuses to respect it: a flickering, black-and-
white title sequence with tinny monophonic music gives way to 3-D patterning and
multichannel sound. From there, the movie speeds through its exposition in hyperactive,
quick-cutting, surreally colorful sequences whose landscapes owe much to video game
design and whose car trips recall chase scenes from the Star Wars films (not the older ones,
unfortunately). Luhrmann sometimes mixes in saturated, herky-jerky film reels of
doughboys and flappers for period flair, but he always follows them up with CGI and
virtuosic camera movement to prevent the history from becoming too settled.The film’ s
aesthetic has annoyed many viewers, but it’ s strangely liberating to watch an adaptation of
Gatsby that encourages its audience to think about the future as much as the past. It often
seems that Luhrmann doesn’ t especially care for these characters from 1922, and instead
wants to showcase the trends and forces and dynamics that this long-gone generation
would set in motion for decades to come. When the jazz vanishes from the Jazz Age and gets
replaced by hip-hop, for example, there’ s a glitch but also harmony, a reminder that the
former would eventually lead to the latter. From there, it’ s not hard to see that Luhrmann
is also interested —just as Tom warily is —in the “ intermarriage between black and white”
that would come to define the American century, even if the film can only demonstrate that
intermarriage in terms of art. So too is the film about an accelerating car culture, and about
the expansion of finance capitalism, and about a polluted world where “ the sun’ s getting
hotter every year,” and about the triumph of the movies, of course. Other versions of
Gatsby have captured the novel and its details more faithfully, but this may be the only one
that approaches it as a myth that can be reshaped and suited, as myths usually are, for the
future days in which they’ re remembered.Being ahistorical isn’ t the same thing as being
timeless. Jay-Z’ s “ 100$ Bill” is a disorienting presence in the film now, but audiences to
come will probably regard its dubstep production as a dated, quintessentially 2010 sound.
Luhrmann’ s flashy 3-D rendering of the silent film era might eventually age in similar
ways, coming to look less shocking and more like an early 21st-century novelty. But that’ s
no matter, for Fitzgerald’ s famous, deeply paradoxical final meditation in The Great Gatsby

4. understands Americans to be a people who pursue “ an orgastic future that year by year
recedes before us” even while being “ borne back ceaselessly into the past.” If Luhrmann’ s
unsettling, contemporary take on a nearly century-old classic eventually drifts into history
as well, it will be a fitting tribute to the novel indeed.¤John Irwin, “ Someone Has Crayoned
Donald Duck into ‘ The Last Supper’ ” Baz Luhrmann’ s film The Great Gatsby is not an
ignorant movie. Clearly Luhrmann or his co-scriptwriter Craig Pearce knows something
about Fitzgerald’ s fiction. So one is puzzled to explain why at so many moments in its 143-
minute running time it is such a stupid movie, why at so many points it makes a nod to some
aspect of the novel and then unimaginatively mangles it on screen.In adapting Fitzgerald’ s
book, Luhrmann and Pearce faced the same basic problem that the novel’ s three previous
film adaptations faced, and like those previous adaptations the present one doesn’ t know
how to solve it, though Luhrmann’ s film at least indicates that he knows what that basic
problem is. In most novels the protagonist and the main character are the same person, but
in another class of novels, like Fitzgerald’ s The Great Gatsby, these roles are filled by two
different people —while Gatsby is the protagonist, Nick Carraway is the main character. The
whole emotional point of Fitzgerald’ s novel is the psychological and spiritual impact on
Nick of Nick’ s becoming involved enough in Gatsby’ s life to understand the protagonist
and his imaginative quest better than anyone else in the novel (even including Gatsby
himself), and then to write that understanding as a kind of ultimate redemption of Gatsby
and their friendship. By beginning the film with Nick recovering from alcoholism in a
sanitarium, where he is writing Gatsby’ s story as a kind of therapy, Luhrmann and Pearce
suggest that they understand the centrality of Nick to the story, understand that where
Daisy is Gatsby’ s romantic illusion, Gatsby is Nick’ s romantic illusion, that where Gatsby
wants to possess Daisy, Nick wants to be Gatsby, wants to possess Gatsby’ s “ extraordinary
gift for hope,” his “ romantic readiness,” his “ gorgeous” imagination. And where Gatsby is
disillusioned by Daisy and dies, Nick is disillusioned by the failure of Gatsby’ s quest and his
death and yet lives, marked for life. And indeed Luhrmann and Pearce also demonstrate
here a broader knowledge of Fitzgerald’ s fiction, for though this scenario of the narrator
recovering in a sanitarium and writing the story doesn’ t occur in Fitzgerald’ s The Great
Gatsby, it was what Fitzgerald had planned to use in his unfinished novel The Last Tycoon
where the narrator, Cecelia Brady, would write the story of Monroe Stahr while she was
recovering in a sanitarium from a mental and physical breakdown.But Luhrmann’ s film,
like its predecessors, never solves the basic problem of depicting Nick as the main
character, because once the director casts the star actor in the role of Gatsby and an actor of
less prominence or dramatic gravitas in the role of Nick, it sets up a fatal imbalance from
which the film never recovers. Tobey Maguire may be a perfectly fine actor, but he comes
across in this film as a juvenile, and what is important for the working of the story is that
Nick be a serious person, a substantial person, in effect, an adult, whose good opinion means
something both to Gatsby and the film’ s viewers, for the key moment in the movie is when
Nick gives Gatsby his unconditional absolution the last time he sees him: “ They’ re a rotten
crowd […] You’ re worth the whole damn bunch put together” —a judgment that though it
may use the language of, and sound at first like, a monetary evaluation is in fact a spiritual
evaluation. When Sam Waterston playing Nick delivered that line in Jack Clayton’ s 1974

5. film version of Gatsby (with a script by Francis Ford Coppola), his performance had
established both Nick’ s seriousness and his initial skepticism about Gatsby, so that when
he paid Gatsby that final compliment, it meant something, it confirmed for the viewer
Nick’ s special sense of Gatsby’ s imaginative “ greatness.” Though Luhrmann may have
understood the problem caused by casting the star actor as Gatsby, he probably could not
have convinced the studio or the star to cast Leonardo DiCaprio as Nick, or to cast a star of
equal magnitude to DiCaprio (say a Matt Damon or Ben Affleck) as Nick. And of course since
the movie is called The Great Gatsby it would probably require too great a stretch in the
mass movie-going public’ s imagination to accept anyone other than the male star in the
title role, and thus too great a risk for the film’ s advertising and marketing to that public.If
one were to list the stupid moments in the film, moments reflecting the director’ s and/or
screen writers’ wrong-headed decisions, the list would be almost interminable. The first
half of the movie, which concentrates on depicting Gatsby’ s possessions, his lavish lifestyle,
his parties, is ludicrous. It is so over-the-top that it looks like the aftermath of an explosion
in an Art Deco factory. An experienced film viewer with a memory that goes back further
than 10 years knows that when a film places so much emphasis on what Hollywood calls
“ production values” (lavish sets, 3-D color, special effects, a soundtrack that mixes 1920s
recordings with contemporary hip-hop) someone somewhere (either the studio or the
filmmaker) has lost faith either in the human value of its story to move the audience or in
the emotional maturity or empathy of that audience.Here are some of the dumbest
moments in the movie:1. The drunken party in Manhattan at the apartment Tom Buchanan
keeps for Myrtle Wilson becomes in Luhrmann’ s version something resembling an ancient
orgy in a C. B. DeMille film.2. The actress who plays Myrtle is made up and costumed in such
an extravagantly trashy manner that when the final encounter comes between Myrtle and
Gatsby’ s Duesenberg, the viewer is rooting for the Duesenberg. In the Clayton version,
Myrtle was played by Karen Black, whose performance of the role conveyed not just
Myrtle’ s commonness but also her human longing for something better.3. Who knew that
Meyer Wolfsheim (whom Fitzgerald based on Arnold Rothstein) was either born in India or
of Indian descent? But the actor who plays him in Luhrmann’ s version, Amitabh Bachchan,
is so clearly Indian that the people sitting around me in the theater laughed out loud when
Gatsby introduced him to Nick as Meyer Wolfsheim. It couldn’ t have gotten a bigger laugh
if Gatsby had introduced him as Paddy O’ Rourke. In Clayton’ s 1974 version the actor who
played Wolfsheim was the admirable Howard da Silva, whose performance along with Sam
Waterston’ s as Nick was one of the few bright spots in a dreary movie, though not as
dreary a one as Luhrmann’ s.4. The character of the diffident freeloader Ewing
Klipspringer, who plays “ The Love Nest” on Gatsby’ s grand piano when Gatsby gives Nick
and Daisy a tour of his house, is transformed in the film into someone with the frenetic
fluidity of one of the toons in Who Killed Roger Rabbit? The grand piano is transformed into
a Wurlitzer organ that is two stories high and more suited to the old Paramount theater
than a Long Island mansion. This frenetically fluid toon also sings and dances at the first
Gatsby party Nick attends.5. The character of Slagle is transformed from a voice on the
phone, who mistakes Nick for Gatsby and tells him that young Parke has been arrested for
trying to cash in stolen bonds, into a gangster who shows up with his mob at Gatsby’ s last

6. party, is forcibly ejected, and then beaten up by several of Gatsby’ s waiters at the gates of
the mansion.6. At several points in the film there are montages of front page newspaper
headlines that ask who this mysterious Gatsby is, and news stories showing his picture and
asking where and how he made his wealth. In Fitzgerald’ s novel, Gatsby is at great pains to
make the local celebrity of his parties just great enough so that Daisy in East Egg will hear
his name mentioned or wander into one of his events, but not so well known that the
newspapers will become interested in him and ferret out the story of his association with
Wolfsheim and bootlegging. The high level of newspaper attention that the film depicts
Gatsby as attracting would vitiate the sense of the confrontation scene at the Plaza Hotel
when Tom reveals to Daisy what he has learned about Gatsby’ s business dealings, for
clearly this comes as a complete revelation to Daisy —which it would not have done if the
newspapers had been full of it.I could go on indefinitely. Though individually these
instances of dumbness might not seem that damaging, considering the overwhelming
number of them in the film, they reveal a depressing pattern: it is one thing for a mature
artist to depict the vulgarity of a fictional character, while it is a far different thing for an
essentially juvenile artist with a vulgar imagination to try to depict a fictional character.
Virtually every character in Luhrmann’ s film has been coarsened from its original in the
novel, so that we end up less with human beings than caricatures, almost cartoon figures,
until one wonders why, among the film’ s carload of “ production values,” they didn’ t
include animation (probably because the word “ animation” derives from the Latin word
meaning “ soul,” and this film is relentlessly about gaudy surfaces that lack any interior
depth). Perhaps Luhrmann and Pearce were led astray by Nick’ s comment about the
youthful Jay Gatsby, that his quest involved “ the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious
beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a 17-year-old boy would be likely to
invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.” But the whole point of Gatsby’ s
endeavor, once Nick meets him, is precisely Gatsby’ s growing awareness of the vulgarity of
West Egg, his sense that Daisy is repulsed by the commonness of the people present at the
Gatsby party she and Tom attend, and thus his sense that if he wants to move into the world
of East Egg society and win Daisy back, he must shed that vulgarity, must use his friend
Nick’ s background and social expertise to train him in the customs and accepted usages of
Daisy’ s world. One particularly savage review of the film described it as being made not for
children but for idiots. I would describe it as a film made for 17-year-olds, for mental and
emotional adolescents of any age —which seems to be the target audience of so many
Hollywood films today —and that the kind of people who think that Luhrmann is an
interesting director are the kind who think Quentin Tarantino is an auteur.But let Fitzgerald
have the last word. In one of the Pat Hobby stories, “ Boil Some Water —Lots of It,” the
down-at-heels screenwriter Pat Hobby describes his sense of outrage when, in the studio
commissary, an extra presumes to sit down at the lunch table reserved for the studio big
shots: “ It was as if someone had crayoned Donald Duck into ‘ The Last Supper.’ ” I think
that is the reaction any fan of Fitzgerald’ s novel will have to this movie, which is to say,
don’ t futz around with a national treasure because there are lots of 17-year-olds who
haven’ t yet read Fitzgerald’ s novel and it would be a shame for them to be put off of The
Great Gatsby by this tawdry film.¤Caleb Smith, “ A Spectacle in Love” One of the strangest

7. things about Baz Luhrmann’ s spectacle is that it really does seem to be in love with F. Scott
Fitzgerald’ s sad, beautiful little novel. Most of the dialogue is taken right from the book,
and the filmmakers use the lamest of all cinematic tricks, the voiceover, to bring in long
reveries in prose by Fitzgerald’ s narrator, Nick Carraway. In the movie’ s conceit, the ex-
bond trader, suffering from alcoholism, insomnia, and other maladies of the spirit, has
repaired to a treatment facility in the Midwest. His therapist, a grandfatherly amateur
gardener, encourages Carraway to do some writing. Why not? It might soothe his nerves.
Following the doctor’ s advice, our narrator begins to recall a summer of mystery and
dissolution in jazz-age New York City. And thus, improbably, Luhrmann’ s fantastic carnival
of a 3-D movie turns out to be, in part, a story about the typing and correction of a
manuscript. In the recollection of violence and loss, a lovely book is made.But love, in The
Great Gatsby, is not the same as fidelity. What gets loved is some distortion of the object,
some projection of the self. And Luhrmann does take a few liberties with the text. I’ m not
saying that he shouldn’ t have, but in a movie that otherwise stays so close to its source, in
substance if not in style, small changes are conspicuous. I noticed, for instance, that
Luhrmann left out two of my favorite passages: the ones where Carraway and Gatsby talk
about Daisy Buchanan’ s voice. In the first, Carraway is asking himself what Gatsby likes so
much about this girl. It’ s a tough question! He comes around to this answer: “ I think that
voice held him most, with its fluctuating, feverish warmth, because it couldn’ t be over-
dreamed —that voice was a deathless song.” In this line, as elsewhere, Carraway imagines
himself as a kind of analyst, interpreting Gatsby’ s desire. He concludes that Gatsby hears, in
Daisy’ s voice, a living presence, which is not his own invention, not “ over-dreamed” but
real, essential, belonging to his beloved and justifying his extravagant devotion.Meanwhile
Fitzgerald, behind the scenes, is plotting to show how Carraway’ s interpretation is itself an
invention, casting his own fantasies, like shadows, onto the screen of Gatsby’ s character.
When Gatsby hears Daisy’ s voice, as a matter of fact, he doesn’ t hear a deathless song. In
the second of my favorite passages, he gives his own account: “ Her voice is full of money.”
Now here is a demystifying interpretation. All of the fluctuating, feverish, immortal music
that Carraway wants to hear, or wants Gatsby to be hearing, in Daisy’ s voice —all that
glitter is exposed as the naked appeal of cash. It’ s not Daisy herself. Daisy herself is just a
cipher. She is the medium through which money becomes so gorgeous and so feminized
that men begin to dream about possessing it in a permanent way (rather than, say,
exchanging it or spending it). And Gatsby, of all people, is the one who knows the
secret.When Fitzgerald attributed this insight to his title character, he did something
perverse and wonderful. Thanks to Carraway’ s willfully romanticized depiction —which,
strange to say, colors the film even more strongly than it shapes the novel —we tend to
think of Gatsby as a dreamer, a figure of innocence and hope. We are invited to see him as a
tragic hero who wishes to recapture lost time. But when he gives his own appraisal of what
he is after, when he says that Daisy’ s voice is full of money, he shows that he is nothing of
the kind. He is just the opposite: he is the most cynical man in the book. And that’ s why, in
the end, it is Gatsby himself, even more than the caricaturized shylock Meyer Wolfsheim,
who has to be disavowed and despised. There are lots men and women in The Great Gatsby
who understand, more or less, that money makes the world go around. Some of them

8. learned it in poverty. Some of them learned it at Yale. But Gatsby is the only one who says it
out loud, the only one whose life story testifies to the fact. And therefore everybody turns
away from him. Everybody, anyway, except for Carraway, way off in Minnesota, conjuring
an unreal Gatsby.Fitzgerald’ s characters are notoriously shallow creatures, but one way to
make sense of the story is to understand each of them as building a particular dream world
on the repression of Jay Gatsby’ s cynical truth. For Tom Buchanan, the fantasy is the
bigotry of race and class: he thinks that social stratification is a matter of blood, not cash.
Luhrmann’ s movie makes the most of Buchanan’ s buff elitism. In the climactic scene,
Gatsby asserts that the two rivals are equals, since they have the same amount of money,
and the Yale man humiliates “ Mr. Nobody from Nowhere” by insisting that there is a
“ difference” between them. Gatsby takes the bait, raising his fist and losing, for a crucial
moment, his practiced “ cool.” But what, finally, is the substance of the difference? One rich
man has bought a stately house that belonged to an oil tycoon; the other has bought a fairy-
tale castle across the bay. One has polo grounds; the other has a swimming pool. One drives
a blue car; the other drives a yellow one. The movie, like the book, makes these distinctions
seem significant. Luhrmann seizes certain styles (retro, hip-hop, indie rock) in the magic
hour of their ascension from subcultures to the mass market. But the very weight given to
these matters of taste shows how inescapably The Great Gatsby is situated within the new
world of consumer capitalism, not in the waning days of any feudal aristocracy. You might
as well try to erect a caste system on the difference in preference between Coke and
Pepsi.As for Carraway, with his dopey grin and his literary ambitions, his love for Gatsby
depends on other distortions. Think of the elaborate party scenes in the film. (These are
about as good as the recent ads for Heineken, directed by Fredrik Bond. The rest of the
movie is worse). It takes Tom Buchanan to explain that the parties are really schemes for
social mixing, occasions for Wolfsheim’ s gangsters to gain access to politicians and
respected businessmen. These events belong to a new kind of entertainment culture that
blurs the boundary between the hustlers and legitimate power. Carraway, though, persists
in dreaming that the parties are an attempt to lure Daisy into Gatsby’ s presence, to draw
her like a moth to his shimmering lights. Of all the drunks, queens, swindlers, and
opportunists in the house, the bond trader is the only one who feels sentimental about these
hallucinatory carnivals. Carraway’ s most romantic dream, in short, is that of a love so pure
that it stands in defiance of the economy. And just as Carraway indulges in this escapist
fantasy of true love, Luhrmann ends up idealizing a perfect, unspoiled literature.At the end
of Fitzgerald’ s book, Carraway rides a train out of New York. What is this “ Middle West”
into which he has decided to withdraw? Is there no capitalism in that hinterland? At the end
of the movie, the same character finishes writing his story. He changes the title from
“ Gatsby” to “ The Great Gatsby.” He places the manuscript into a box. He closes the lid. The
writing is done, but it hasn’ t been turned into a book for sale. (It might never be —the
analyst has suggested to Nick that he could burn the pages.) And in this strange, quaint way,
with a glimpse of a work of memory and imagination that has not yet been bound for
circulation, the spectacle ends.