Worshipping at the Altar of Disposable Income

There is a moment, toward the end of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, in which Jay stands outside of Daisy’s window, watching. Myrtle is dead – killed on the road by the very woman she conspires in cuckolding. Daisy and Tom have retreated inside, never to really emerge again. At least, not for Gatsby. Nick departs, Gatsby remains, watching, Fitzgerald tells us, over nothing.

It is no fantastic insight to offer the following: Baz Luhrmann is simply not the calibre of artist that F. Scott Fitzgerald was. Shock! Horror! Blasphemer! Alas, it’s true. And in the balance, his Gatsby suffers most by comparison. Luhrmann is simply not equal to the task of the nuance, the quiet moments in-between the raucous frivolity that make up the soul of The Great Gatsby. In the filling station, as Tom talks down Wilson, even the quiet moment of two desperate men feels like a crazy and confused wheeling, beyond normalcy and control. A riotous party of emotions. The lights shine, to illuminate, nothing.

These quieter, though more passionate, dear, and heart-breaking moments transcend the age within which the story unfolds. Risk and reward, life and death, the illusions we are held by, our inability to transcend ourselves – any story dealing with such recurrent tragedies of the human situation, and the human spirit, ring as contemporary and of immediate necessity. (A contradiction to what I have said: how different is our own time if the relationship between wealth and profligacy does not seem so foreign?) Luhrmann’s Gatsby beats us over the head with certain, simplified points. Yes, Leo, we understand, you think the past is repeatable. The film has selected certain aspects of Fitzgerald’s broader landscape and thrust them upon us. No nuance here. Yet, divorced from the wider pastiche, what remains is flat. Soulless. No, better said, of a different soul entirely. One less variegated and nuanced. Listen to me, the film seems to cry out. In its insistence that we understand, it dooms itself. Fitzgerald’s is a small story about us all. Luhrmann’s is a grand tale of no one.