Gatsby: you can’t repeat the past, old sport
Baz Luhrman’s adaptation is visually rich but otherwise flawed
Is it going too far to assert that The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 masterpiece — the indisputable Great American Novel, that Holy Grail critics are still on the lookout for — is mostly concerned with production? After all, Fitzgerald’s formative years were spent at the dawn of the 20th century, a new era full of promises as mass, chain production methods churned out goods for massive consumption, instant gratification and quick disposal. In a broad sense, Fitzgerald, born in 1896 and consequently coming of age in the late 1910s — a decade that breezed past to the sound of jazz, glitter and glamour, and decadent extravaganzas, was brought up to a more relaxed lifestyle, an orgiastic outburst like America had never seen before. It was debauchery and grandeur, being wealthy and shamelessly exposing your riches while hundreds of thousands stood in the background or, worse still, toiled in the coal furnaces that allowed New York City to shine in all its glory. America was changing, and change was coming fast, too fast for many to catch up. The invention of electricity and its multiple applications may perhaps be considered the early 20th century prefiguring the 1990s rise of the digital age, of Silicon Valley, when fortunes were made and lost at the snap of a finger, at the drop of a digit on NYSE’s electronic billboards. In Fitzgerald’s accurate imagination, Gatsby’s worldly preoccupations included electricity, as shown by the strict daily schedule he had drawn for himself as a young man: Rise from bed, Dumbbell exercise and wall-scaling and, third on the list, Study electricity, etc. Completing the list were Work, Baseball and Sports, Practise elocution, pose and how to attain it, and Study new inventions. Born to a family of indecently poor peasants that offered the young Gatz — his real surname — little or no opportunities, the child, unknown to himself, pioneered and became the master of reinvention, that most American obsession accompanying social mobility. The American Dream was possible, within reach, if you strove hard enough. Gatsby — as the reinvented young man chose to call himself — was the perfect, shiny embodiment of that dream. ALL THAT JAZZ. It was an era of celebration and excess. The Jazz Age, in fact, was a term coined by Fitzgerald himself, as the prescient observer (in retrospect) and integral part of that endless night of wild partying and infinite possibilities. Fitzgerald was boldly flirtatious, approaching the ideal of success and achieving it in his mid 20s with the publication of his first two novels, This Side of Paradise (1920), and The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), crowned by The Great Gatsby in 1925. After countless rewrites and restructuring, Fitzgerald knew — like Tennessee Williams would two decades later, in 1947, that A Streetcar Named Desire was destined to be an immortal classic — that Gatsby was to be his crowning achievement.
