‘I think my novel is about the best American novel ever written.’
So F. Scott Fitzgerald declared to editor Maxwell Perkins on finishing the manuscript of his partly-autobiographical novel, The Great Gatsby (1925). The new film adaptation by Baz Luhrmann reminds us of the brilliance of a writer who became infatuated with the soulless glamour of the Jazz Age and simultaneously sought to critique it.
‘Gatsby? What Gatsby?’
Nick Carraway is renting a house in Long Island, just across the bay from his cousin Daisy and her unfaithful husband Tom. He soon becomes fascinated by his next-door neighbour, the mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby, known for hosting spectacularly lavish parties in his mansion. Amidst the whirlwind of drinking and dancing, Nick discovers that Gatsby and Daisy had a romantic relationship some years ago. Gatsby remains deeply in love with her and his wildly exuberant lifestyle is a desperate ploy to win her back. With Nick’s help, he hopes he can rekindle their lost romance. But, as his hidden past threatens to spoil his glitzy present, Gatsby may have to rethink his idealistic dreams for the future.
A rock on a fairy’s wing
Streamers and fireworks, champagne and Charleston, shimmering jewels and fast cars. Luhrmann’s film recreates the dazzling, fan-tastical surface of the New York party scene with heady abandon. The music plays, the drinks flow and everyone in New York flocks to Gatsby’s parties. But while they are busy enjoying the generosity of their host, he has more important matters on his mind.
Gatsby is brooding, elusive and charming, with ‘an extraordinary gift for hope’. This hope is that he can rewrite the past, win Daisy’s love, and live with her as his wife in the castle which he has created for her. His obsessive devotion to her is his driving force and his life’s imperative: he has to have her at whatever cost.
In a world of superficial surfaces, Gatsby reaches out for romance as a chance for transcendence and authenticity. Love, he believes, will allow him to find fulfilment and peace. Love will help him to overcome his humble beginnings. Love, ultimately, will make him happy.
Unfortunately, as the novel tells us, the ‘constant, turbulent riot’ of his heart and the ‘universe of ineffable gaudiness’ in his brain are nothing more than reveries which provide ‘an outlet for his imagination’. As a hope to build a life upon, they are unstable, ‘a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing’.
Gatsby is not just an unlucky romantic; he’s a criminal with ridiculous pretensions. He has idealised the idea of the unattainable women to such an extent that Daisy cannot live up to his imagined version of her. He has placed all of his hopes, dreams and expectations on something which cannot fulfil or sustain them, and so he is bound to be disappointed.
Indeed, there is only one place in this world we can go to find a love which can live up to its promises, and that’s by looking to the one who is Love itself.
A fundamental crack
Gatsby is timely, a story for the specific moment in which we find ourselves. Written among the kaleidoscopic cacophony of the 1920s party scene, it showed the strain of endless excess on the financial and moral atmosphere. Producer Douglas Wick says: ‘In a time with a glittering but unreliable economy, and a prevalent sense that we have lost our way, Gatsby could have been written yesterday [...] Fitzgerald sensed a fundamental crack in the moral fabric of the 1920s, that things could not keep going up, up, up, as they were, couldn’t last’.
The economy cannot cope with unchecked greed and reckless spending. Relationships can bring us pleasure, but their power is not limitless. Social mobility is a wonderful ideal, but it so often falls short of becoming a reality. The American Dream does not deliver. At the heart of it all is a spiritual bankruptcy which leaves us feeling hollow.
Gatsby’s situation has a certain tragic grandeur, but ultimately it reveals the shallowness of human endeavour. If we build our lives around things which cannot bear the weight we put upon them, we are heading for a fall. With the party in full swing, it can be hard to hear the warning signs. But Gatsby himself realises that fineries and fictions are a way of masking the vacuum which we find at our very core: ‘You know, I thought for a while I loved things, but the truth is I’m empty. I suppose it’s why I make things up about myself’.
Gatsby is an individual caught up in a world of meaningless superficial glitz, who stretches out his hand towards something authentic only to find that it is illusory. When we stretch out our own hands, what will we reach for?
