Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.—The Great Gatsby
The “2012 Harlequin Romance Report” surveyed single women across the United States to find out how they felt about romance in the twenty-first century. The report also delineated what these women thought the future might hold for romance as both an idea and a practical aspect of their daily lives. The results of the survey clearly indicate that romance is an important part of women’s lives, particularly their mental selves. More than half (55 percent) admitted that romance is “very important” to their overall happiness, which ranked the topic right alongside personal health as the top item.
Despite the importance single women place on romance as a factor in determining their personal happiness, a huge disconnect exists when they assess their current love lives. As a whole, the survey revealed that satisfaction with the amount of romance in one’s life decreases with age. Only 36 percent of eighteen- to twenty-year-olds said that they are “very satisfied” versus just 20 percent of thirty-six- to forty-year-old respondents. Moreover, just 39 percent of the latter group claims that they experience romance when they are seriously dating someone.[1]
Sadly, although single women yearn for romance, these results indicate that most never really attain it at a satisfactory level whether young or old. If popular culture representations of married life carry any truth at all, then one can only imagine the complete deprivation of romance married women experience in their lives. From this rather harrowing news about how women feel about romance and the utter lack of it in their relationships one can only conclude that there is something terribly amiss between the two sexes in contemporary America.
There may be a silver lining, though. Despite the Harlequin findings, single females remain optimistic. Some 84 percent of them believe that romance is out there waiting for them and that they will find it. Wake up, guys! The path to your dream girl’s heart is obvious: in one word—romance.[2]
While it would be impossible to quantify the numerous factors that lead to a person’s feelings about romance, Gatsby’s ubiquity—the meta-Gatsby that exists within our culture—certainly makes it a candidate for a strong impulse in this area. Many people are first exposed to the book at a formative age, as young as thirteen or fourteen years old as high school freshmen, while others read and study it in the subsequent high school years. Then, the ideas and themes are revisited in college, another seminal period when the novel’s premises are studied in a more mature way. Furthermore, the fact that the two most recent film adaptations center on the romance between Jay and Daisy provides additional evidence not only of romance’s centrality in popular culture, but how Gatsby plays a role in dispersing those ideas.
In examining Jay Gatsby, one must assess the character as one filled with romance, both in a loving nature and as an obsessive force. Scholar Ronald Berman discusses the notion of romantic love and how understanding the Jazz Age from a contextual viewpoint helps the reader comprehend the title character better. “Gatsby has many flaws,” Berman says, “but they do not include the conception of sacred love. What is ‘too much’ to be demanded? Not the idea that Daisy is worth devotion nor the idea that life changes profoundly, in its very identity, through love.”[3] And doesn’t this sound like a plausible definition of romance?
Fitzgerald produced a stunningly romantic novel that is at its core completely unromantic. As readers and viewers, we applaud or root for Gatsby’s ideal vision of romance, yet in the real world, it would probably get him a restraining order or at least labeled a “creeper,” which in today’s technology world is the slang term for someone who cyberstalks or acts creepy online.
The notion of granting hope to Gatsby in his quest is also made plausible by the fact that Tom Buchanan is a certifiable scoundrel and an outright hypocrite. In addition, we long for Gatsby’s dream because it is the eternal story of lost love, which I contend is a much more important theme in today’s world, because it has been completely woven throughout culture. In other words, we have more experience with the idea of lost and/or secret love than audiences did in Fitzgerald’s day.
***
This chapter examines the romantic aspects of The Great Gatsby and addresses the notion of romance in the contemporary world. I argue that the two are linked, with Gatsby serving as classic literature’s version of a modern-day romance novel. Over time, the novel has served as a showcase or guide to romance for countless readers, which has only been accentuated by the various film versions.
Readers are willing to forgive Gatsby for many aspects of his secret life and self-created personality in the novel, whether it is his Mafia ties or blatant adultery, because the romance is so overpowering and complete in his mind. Although hardened and always being called to the phone to deal with his faraway criminal underlings, for example, Gatsby is ultimately tender, shy, and anxious when it comes to his initial meeting with Daisy after the many years apart. His giddiness and embarrassment are palpable as he fidgets over the tea and cakes Nick purchased for the encounter and frets over whether or not he has sent over enough flowers. This is a commanding scene in the new Gatsby film and one many critics point to when evaluating DiCaprio’s success as the title character.
In today’s world of twenty-four-hour-a-day Lifetime movies and hundreds of cable television channels featuring romance-based content, in addition to the millions of romance and romantic novels sold annually, one could argue that the twenty-first-century Gatsby would get the girl. He would also deliver Tom the comeuppance he deserves . . . the kind of feel-good ending that audiences favor. Even though we understand that this is not the ending ahead for Gatsby—whether reading or rereading the book or seeing the film—we almost wish it were the case. The romantic impulse is too central to people’s understanding of the world around them to think otherwise.
The sniffling and muted sobs you hear coming from those in the darkened theaters of America as DiCaprio and Mulligan play out the scenes in 3-D demonstrate how powerfully attuned to romance we all are. The Harlequin survey reveals how single females think about romance, while almost any other panoramic view of American culture shows similar results across mass media channels. Romantic love is a key aspect of our lives and a part of the meta-Gatsby influence this book envisages.
Returning to the 2012 Harlequin survey, we understand that romance—both as an idea and practical part of life—is critical in the lives of many single women. Perhaps a logical question is whether or not their responses indicate that the lack of romance is because men do not share in that notion or that (real-life) men simply cannot live up to the dreams of romance women promulgate. Yet, in at least partially answering that question, men are targeted as yearning for love, relationships, and commitment, too. As such, it is no stretch to conclude that romance, love, and all the tangents related to these ideas are significant as people define themselves and the world around them.
Looking across popular culture channels, it is easy to see that love and romance are central tenets of the entertainment business, which infers that the importance is mirrored in people’s daily lives. The quest for romance is imbedded in our cultural DNA.
One simply needs to look to fairy tales and comic books to see the consequences of love and romance as it is presented in these texts. The Disney version of love, for example, almost always has true love winning the day against seemingly unfathomable evil. Thus, what saves the day for Sleeping Beauty and the kingdom as a whole is a prince who can not only defeat the evil witch, but also bring Sleeping Beauty back to life with true love’s kiss, thus thwarting malevolence both physically and spiritually. Even media directed primarily at young boys carries underlying messages about love and romance. Superman, for instance, is largely self-defined by his secret love for Lois Lane, which he battles for with his cloaked identity as Clark Kent.
Jay Gatsby holds an obsessive love for Daisy at the core of his being and creates a world that he believes will wipe away the five long years the young lovers were apart. His commitment to an idealized romance gives new meaning to the old phrase “through hell or high water.” Gatsby’s willingness to fashion this mythic lifestyle to win her hand is more unequivocally declared in the 2013 film. Both the titular character and Jordan Baker directly address the notion, with the latter telling Nick, “He looked at her in a way that every young girl wants to be looked at.”
What Fitzgerald created and Luhrmann emphasized is that at the heart of the American Dream is a significant other that one is willing to risk everything to love. It is ironic that Daisy is not more reviled or viewed as a villainous character across literary studies, because in the end her decision to stick with a sure bet versus taking a chance on love dooms Jay. She chooses a life of wealth, which ultimately costs Myrtle and Jay their lives. And, if we accept the film premise, this judgment also weighs heavily on Nick’s teetering sanity.
According to noted literary scholar Harold Bloom, the deep connection between the American Dream and the romantic instinct exists. He explains, “Whatever the American Dream has become, its truest contemporary representative remains Jay Gatsby, at once a gangster and a romantic idealist, and above all a victim of his own High Romantic, Keatsian dream of love.”[4] Thus, while we marvel at the spectacle of the life the young man creates, it is the vision and dream at the core of the novel that keeps one’s heart racing. Boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, boy loses girl, boy gets girl, they live happily ever after: this is one of the primary cultural equations that occupies our lives and our minds across time.
Financial journalist Ben Stein, who moonlights as a television and film personality, makes an even stronger claim about the new film, explaining, “It’s the best love story since Gone with the Wind. In some ways, it’s better.” While some critics find fault in the large party scenes and the 3-D special effects, Stein sees these items adding to the story line, which “makes everything like a fairy tale about money and love.” For him, the tie between love and money is what fuels much of life, in addition to Luhrmann’s strong adaptation. Referencing former junk-bond king Michael Milken, who later went to jail for his role in insider trading, Stein says, “One of the Milken people used to tell me, long ago, ‘Don’t forget. Money makes women fall in love.’” Though Stein admits that this is the family version of the financier’s X-rated explanation, the thought holds true today, just as it did in Fitzgerald’s day.[5] As a keen social observer and commentator, Fitzgerald knew this revelation about love and wealth intimately since his own lack of money, like the poor Jimmy Gatz, kept him from socialite Ginevra King and nearly wrecked his chances with Zelda.
One central theme that continues to draw readers to Fitzgerald’s novel is that it centers on Gatsby’s obsessive desire to reclaim lost love. At one point, he tells Nick that he has the power to relive the past, as if his aspirations are so immense that they will give him the power to physically yank back the hands of time. This is a feeling or emotion that is fresh in readers’ minds as they contemplate the myriad of ideas contained in Gatsby.
The first time many young people experience Gatsby comes in a high school English class, often pushed on them as required reading. As a result of where they are in their lives and the central fulcrum primarily revolving around friends and the possibility of significant others, the force of Gatsby’s love for Daisy can have consequences on their lives. Scholar Jonathan P. Fegley explains: “For most of our students, the intensity of first love is fresh in their minds, and some might even project a belief in the possibilities of love that rivals Gatsby’s.”[6]
This is the kind of romance that drives young people to romantic dramas directed at them, from The Breakfast Club in the 1980s to The Notebook in the 2000s. In each case, a poor boy gets the wealthy girl after a rocky chase and plenty of heartbreak along the way. These kinds of films have developed into classics that young women watch over and over again, which are often labeled “tearjerkers,” because it is as if they are designed to make viewers cry. “In his love for Daisy, he evokes the love of a serf for a fair and beautiful princess, or of a poor man for the ‘golden girl,’” explains scholar David Minter.[7] This same sentence could be used to describe The Notebook’s Noah and Allie or countless other romance-themed film couples that people can watch over and over again based on the ubiquity of DVDs, streaming capabilities, and the web.
It might be impossible to quantify the overall influence Gatsby has had on American culture, both directly and indirectly as a source of story lines,
characterizations, and aesthetics. Yet, in some instances, the correlation is attributed
and direct. For example, in mid-1990, Gatsby turned up with several other novels (Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises,
D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, and Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary) in a new advertising campaign for Calvin Klein’s Obsession fragrance. Adding to
the oddity, filmmaker and television show creator David Lynch directed the ads at
a time when his quirky show Twin Peaks stood at the height of its popular culture influence. Klein, however, had a long
history of eccentric commercials for Obsession. His madcap vision paid off, however,
as sales at the time rose to more than $100 million annually, making it one of the
top-selling perfumes in the world.[8]
The black-and-white spot opens with a close-up on the face of then-little-known actor Benicio Del Toro with the familiar Obsession logo in large white letters. The music is romantic yet melancholy, wailing horns that then dip behind the narrator. As the logo fades, “F. Scott Fitzgerald” appears in slightly smaller letters. As Del Toro turns his head, the narrator reads a passage about the first kiss between Gatsby and Daisy, the one that would change his life: “He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God.”[9]
Quickly, actress Heather Graham—also before she became famous—appears in the Daisy role. Del Toro attempts smoldering intensity but actually seems scared. As they bend toward each other for the kiss, a sky full of stars is superimposed over the screen. Then, as they meet, a super close-up of their lips touching, followed by a blossoming white flower. As the commercial ends, “Obsession” appears, this time accompanied by a bottle of the fragrance.
Built around an interpretation of the novel it featured, each of the vignettes centered on the idea of passion, according to Calvin Klein executive Carmen Dubroc. “We wanted to use couples in love, so the ads would be more representative of the way more people live and love,” she explained. “We’ve put romance in the place of promiscuity.”[10] The loose idea of Gatsby as a model for passion might not jibe with the idea of a realistic portrayal of love, but the association between the novel and the perfume’s moniker fits perfectly. The link is particularly apt when one considers the 1980s decade that had just ended and the unyielding tie between the obsession for wealth and love in that era.
“So we beat on, boats against the current. . . .”[11] The end of The Great Gatsby is one of the best-known yet most maddeningly perplexing passages ever written. From the surviving manuscript facsimiles—lovingly compiled by the preeminent scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli—we know that Fitzgerald did not engage in detailed editing of the ending from proof stage to publication as he did in other sections of the novel.[12] However, understanding how Fitzgerald pored over the manuscript, whittling each line to perfection, one can imagine the author searching for the exact words to end the book he knew would be his masterpiece. If I could have one conversation with Fitzgerald, the ending of Gatsby would be the topic: “So we beat on. . . .”
In reexamining the book’s ending for details or inferences still unexplored, it is fruitful to interrogate the scene in its relationship to romance. The odd passage trips in and out of time but points to Gatsby’s hope, which he wrapped in his love for Daisy. What made his future livable would be reuniting with Daisy. Yet, as Fitzgerald indicates, hope does not spring eternal: “year by year recedes before us.” People do not give in or give up despite never quite catching up to their dreams, however, believing that the next morning’s sunrise may provide the power and glory necessary for attaining these aspirations. In announcing “And one fine morning—,” the author provides hope but does not complete the sentence, which may be, “—we will grasp the green light of our dreams.” Optimistically, he claims, we continue to row against the tide, while the past remains fresh and our dreams become more remote.[13]
In the end, the optimism and romance at the heart of the novel contributes to its timelessness. Knowing, too, how Fitzgerald’s personal history is sometimes interwoven into his fiction, the legend of the Jazz Age Fitzgerald commingles the line between Gatsby and reality, thus producing a more intense response to the novel. When we think of the green light and what it symbolized, it is not difficult to imagine Fitzgerald with his own beacon, whether it shone on winning the wild Southern belle or writing a major, important novel.
According to Arthur Mizener, there is a strong central link between Gatsby and his creator: “Fitzgerald was a man like Gatsby himself, at least in this, that he had a heroic dream of the possibilities of life and a need, amounting almost to a sense of duty, to realize that dream.”[14] Writing in 1960, Mizener discussed how proud Fitzgerald would have been to know that his book sold well, “not out of vanity, but because his sense of achievement, his very sense of identity, depended on recognition.”[15]
The kind of pride in accomplishment and determination in producing great work links Fitzgerald with Gatsby and also enhances the reader’s understanding of the author’s romanticism. There seems something almost hopelessly endearing about a person who cared so much, yet contained many flaws that made his pursuit of the romantic ideal more difficult. Maybe if there is a historical persona we almost think deserved to grow in stature and reputation after death it is Fitzgerald, who yearned for greatness in his own time but was cut down repeatedly by circumstances, his own missteps, and readers and critics who for the most part did not recognize the genius in their midst.
Bloom also draws a parallel between the creator and his creation, explaining, “Gatsby is the American hero of romance, a vulnerable quester whose fate has the aesthetic dignity of the romance mode at its strongest.”[16] While the often vulgar and uncouth Jay Gatsby seemed vastly different from his creator on the surface, their romantic hearts seemed to beat as one.
The final—and perhaps most interesting—romance in The Great Gatsby centers on Nick’s deep love for Jay Gatsby. Despite the narrator’s various claims to the contrary, such as his declaration of holding “unaffected scorn” for Gatsby, one senses deep affection and growing admiration as the events of that summer unfold.[17]
The reader cannot trust Nick’s recollections to be completely truthful, but at the end of the novel after Gatsby’s death, the tone changes. Nick becomes the center of the novel, from serving as a stand-in for Gatsby on various sinister phone calls from the man’s underworld associates to hunting down Wolfsheim at his office in the city. He admits that in the tragic aftermath, “I found myself on Gatsby’s side, and alone.”[18]
After Gatsby is murdered, the story shifts to their relationship, so much so that Nick must set the shaky record straight by writing the book he is describing. Certainly, his story of Gatsby contrasts with the narrative that emerged immediately after his death, which Nick describes as “a nightmare—grotesque, circumstantial, eager and untrue.”[19] Two years later, in retelling the story, Nick is still alone and on Gatsby’s side.
Nick’s love for Gatsby grows after the man’s death, which allows him to express that emotion in a way that he could not when Gatsby walked beside him. Probably, such declarations would have been too much for Nick and clashed with his conventional midwestern manners and worldview. He even goes into the room where Gatsby’s dead body is laid out and talks with him, exclaiming, “I’ll get somebody for you, Gatsby. Don’t worry. Just trust me and I’ll get somebody for you—” He even imagines Gatsby responding, “Look here, old sport, you’ve got to get somebody for me. You’ve got to try hard. I can’t go through this alone.”[20] Yet, with Nick at his side and later promoting him as a great man, Gatsby is not unaccompanied.
Nick’s ability to transfer his feelings to Gatsby—even putting words in the dead man’s mouth—reveals his yearning to do right by him, despite his internal sense of loss and regret. The imagined conversation speaks to the depths of Nick’s emotional turmoil at the loss of his friend. It also addresses the guilt Nick certainly felt in not telling Gatsby how he felt more often. He takes great pride, for example, in telling the reader about the one compliment he gave him when he shouted across the lawn, “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.” But here Nick backpedals a bit, explaining, “I disapproved of him from beginning to end,” even though they had just spent the night talking after the accident and the unraveling of Gatsby’s dream.[21]
Some commentators have interpreted Nick’s love for Gatsby as romantic or homosexual love. In early 2013, for example, novelist Greg Olear concludes that Nick is gay and in love with Gatsby. Olear reads a great deal into the manner that the narrator uses to describe each character, particularly in introducing Tom with “raw carnality,” which can be construed as “decidedly erotic.” From Olear’s perspective, if Nick is gay and in love with Gatsby, it changes the way the novel must be read and assessed. He explains, “Then the entire novel operates as a rationalization of that misplaced love. Nick romanticizes Gatsby in the exact same way that Gatsby romanticizes Daisy.”[22] Olear’s analysis is interesting and sheds light on a new way to interpret the relationship between Gatsby and Nick, but there is a great deal of innuendo at play in his reading.
Fitzgerald’s style using language to simultaneously explain and shroud events in mist and Nick’s unreliable narration contribute to the possibility of one questioning his sexuality. A more concrete example, according to Olear, is the section of the novel that begins with Nick meeting Myrtle, Tom’s mistress, and the party that ensues at the illicit couple’s New York City love nest.
In one of the stranger episodes of the novel, Tom reacts to his mistress’s shouting his wife’s name over and over again by breaking her nose with a sharp, open-handed blow. While pandemonium breaks out in the small apartment, Mr. McKee, the feminine-looking photographer, wakes from his passed-out state and wanders toward the door, attempting to get back to his own flat downstairs. Oddly, Nick flatly states, “Taking my hat from the chandelier, I followed.”[23] There is no rationale given for this, nor much indication that the two men even spoke to one another over the course of the drunken revelry.
On the surface, it seems that Nick is just uncomfortable with the chaos and Tom’s violence. One must wonder, though, why follow Mr. McKee out? After a sexual-innuendo-laden conversation in the elevator (“Keep your hands off the lever”; “I didn’t know I was touching it”), the next time we hear from Nick, some indeterminate amount of time has passed. Fitzgerald’s intervention here is telling, too, since the passage begins with ellipses [. . .] and continues: “I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the sheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands.”[24] One can imagine a scene in which after making love, McKee wants to show off to Nick by displaying his photography, which is the way he structures his world.
It is impossible to know what happened during that time, roughly between 10:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m., however, because Nick jumps from the bedside and McKee in his underwear looking at his photography to the cold platform at Pennsylvania Station, where the man awakes drowsily waiting for the train back to West Egg. All the reader knows for sure is that Nick got drunk and then experiences gaps in time that he does not account for. Perhaps the narrator just blacks out or cannot recall the events of the evening. Yet Olear states flatly that Nick “hooks up with Mr. McKee” and the evidence may suggest that they did.[25] This cryptic scene in The Great Gatsby gives the contemporary reader pause because there are many markers there that would indicate that something took place in those mystery hours that Nick cannot or will not discuss.
Of course, questions regarding Nick’s sexuality lead to similar queries about Fitzgerald’s, since so many readers invert the author and his narrator. Furthermore, there were rumors of Fitzgerald and Hemingway engaged in a homosexual affair in the late 1920s, some of them started by Zelda, who in the midst of her madness used every possible target in attempts to demoralize her husband. She called into question his penis size, too, in a fight, claiming that he was too small to satisfy her. Hemingway later used the latter accusation against Fitzgerald in his posthumous memoir A Moveable Feast, saying that Fitzgerald asked him to look at it to prove Zelda wrong.[26]
Whether or not Fitzgerald held secret homosexual feelings and used Nick as a kind of surrogate to deal with those emotions, according to Matthew J. Bruccoli, “there is no evidence that Fitzgerald was ever involved in a homosexual attachment.” A more realistic interpretation of his feelings about men, the great literary scholar explains, is that: “His close friendships with men were expressions of his hero worship and generosity.”[27] Scholar Scott Donaldson also examines Zelda’s charge, seeing it as a hurtful accusation that caused Fitzgerald to doubt himself, because he had always been considered too pretty and had an inquisitive mind that appreciated the feminine outlook, which he himself identified.[28]
***
One cannot deny the ties between Gatsby and the romantic idea as it has developed in America. Film critic Richard Brody of the New Yorker claimed that part of his fascination with the novel centered on its romantic core, “a vision of a rhapsodic and doomed romanticism that both captures the elusive shimmer of the so-called Jazz Age and rides on the back of another literary generation.”[29]
Readers and audiences have shared this feeling, seeing Jay and Daisy as a kind of latter-day Romeo and Juliet, star-crossed lovers who cannot find ultimate happiness. Obviously, though, Gatsby cannot be boiled down that way, regardless of the way people have interpreted the book or tried to fix the films to emphasize this notion.
Returning to the recent Harlequin report on the state of romance in America, one can see how both the novel and film versions maintain popularity. Particularly in the Redford and DiCaprio movie vehicles, Gatsby’s pining for his lost love gets slathered in Hollywood-style, overblown sentimentality. In putting the story on the big screen, movie types are saying, Do not fear, ladies, there is nothing disturbing about this rich creeper sidling his way into a married woman’s life. Because it is lost love, Gatsby’s actions are justified, particularly when we find that Tom Buchanan is an adulterous oaf.
Although the Luhrmann picture earned mixed reviews from professional critics who could not seem to figure out if they loved or hated the film, the romantic elements stood consistently at the fore, since the director centered the movie on the Jay/Daisy relationship. Ty Burr, reviewing for the Boston Globe, pointed to the “lushly swooning depiction of Jay and Daisy’s affair” as both a strength and weakness: “touching and funny” and also “overindulged.” In the end, Burr concludes that “Luhrmann wants to make the teenage girls cry (and mine sure did, snurfling happily beside me in the dark).”[30]
Perhaps the counterpoint one might raise is whether the focus on the romantic tie works, since popular culture clearly pivots on love, relationships, and romance. Fitzgerald himself could easily be labeled a romantic writer, in both his short stories written for popular audiences and the more serious writing that he felt comprised his novels. One of the most compelling aspects of Scott Donaldson’s biography of Fitzgerald—the telling title: Fool for Love—is that he examines the author’s compulsive need to “attract the attention and admiration of others.”[31] While some might infer that this connoted a weak personality, the upshot is that it made Fitzgerald a skilled interpreter of people and their actions, which, in turn, helped him become a great writer.
The process of ingratiating himself meant that he had to concurrently and quickly assess the person who drew his attention. It put Fitzgerald in touch with others’ emotions, though he also possessed the ability to turn into the devil on a dime when drunk. I contend that Fitzgerald’s personality fueled his romantic vision as he yearned to engage with men and women. Gatsby’s reaching for the green light and rowing against the tide ever hopeful of reaching his dreams is the character at his most romantic, because this is a view of romance at the center of one’s worldview. It was Fitzgerald’s, too.
Harlequin Enterprises, “Harlequin Romance Report—2012 Survey Results,” Harlequin Media Center, February 9, 2012, 1–2.
Harlequin, “Harlequin Romance Report.”
Ronald Berman, The Great Gatsby and Fitzgerald’s World of Ideas (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997), 160.
Harold Bloom, ed., F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, new ed. (New York: Chelsea House, 2010), 5.
Ben Stein, “The Great Gatsby in 3-D, the Third Dimension Is Money,” Forbes.com, May 17, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/schifrin/2013/05/17/ben-stein-great-gatsby-101/ (accessed May 19, 2013).
Jonathan P. Fegley, “‘If I Couldn’t Be Perfect I Wouldn’t Be Anything’: Teaching Becoming and Being in The Great Gatsby,” in Approaches to Teaching Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, ed. Jackson R. Bryer and Nancy P. VanArsdale (New York: Modern Language Association, 2009), 137.
David Minter, A Cultural History of the American Novel: Henry James to William Faulkner (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 111.
Kim Foltz, “The Media Business: Advertising; A New Twist for Klein’s Obsession,” New York Times, August 15, 1990, http://www.nytimes.com/1990/08/15/business/the-media-business-advertising-a-new-twist-for-klein-s-obsession.html (accessed November 15, 2010). The commercial can be viewed at YouTube, either searching via keywords or at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lv_5sVCuXQ8.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 101.
Quoted in Foltz, “Media Business.”
Fitzgerald, Gatsby, ed. Bruccoli, 154.
Matthew J. Bruccoli, ed., The Great Gatsby: The Revised and Rewritten Galleys (New York: Garland, 1990), 189.
Fitzgerald, Gatsby, ed. Bruccoli, 154.
Arthur Mizener, “Gatsby, 35 Years Later,” New Yorker, April 24, 1960, http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/12/24/specials/fitzgerald-gatsby60.html (accessed December 19, 2012).
Mizener, “Gatsby, 35 Years Later.”
Bloom, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, 5.
Fitzgerald, Gatsby, ed. Bruccoli, 20.
Fitzgerald, Gatsby, ed. Bruccoli, 141
Fitzgerald, Gatsby, ed. Bruccoli, 141.
Fitzgerald, Gatsby, ed. Bruccoli, 142.
Fitzgerald, Gatsby, ed. Bruccoli, 134.
Greg Olear, “Ga(tsb)y,” Weeklings, January 8, 2013, http://www.theweeklings.com/golear/2013/01/08/gatsby/ (accessed January 8, 2013).
Fitzgerald, Gatsby, ed. Bruccoli, 45.
Fitzgerald, Gatsby, ed. Bruccoli, 45.
Olear, “Ga(tsb)y.”
Many scholars have written about these incidents, which have passed into general lore about both Fitzgerald and Hemingway. For more details, see Matthew J. Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 2nd rev. ed. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002), 275.
Bruccoli, Epic Grandeur, 275.
Scott Donaldson, Fool for Love: F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Congdon & Weed, 1983), 73.
Richard Brody, “Why The Great Gatsby Endures,” New Yorker, April 30, 2013, http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2013/04/the-great-gatsby-the-raw-material.html (accessed May 1, 2013).
Ty Burr, “Baz Luhrmann’s Eye-Popping Vision of Gatsby,” Boston Globe, May 9, 2013 http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/movies/2013/05/09/baz-luhrmann-eye-popping-vision-gatsby/OZfgTicBuABNo72IRZFh3N/story.html (accessed May 17, 2013).
Donaldson, Fool for Love, x.
The Great Gatsby is relevant for today’s students. It gives us a much more clearer look on America before we were born. It provides us with history. The Great Gatsby does indeed make us think more about our future and what is really important in the end.—Kalee Kesterson, junior, Greenfield (Tennessee) School[1]
The Great Gatsby is not relevant to today’s students for many reasons. One is being that the novel’s themes and meanings are over most students’ heads. It does not correlate or influence anything in the students’ lives.—Anonymous, junior, Greenfield (Tennessee) School
Books abound. There are books about writing books, books about reading books, books about how to read books better, and books about writers who write books. There are an endless number of genres, categories, and topics, yet at the end of the day, many people simply want to know which of these is the best book. Which book stands as the most important book ever?
This question may be unanswerable if one considers that each nation would have its own candidates and there is no cosmic judging body that could shuffle through them all to come up with a selection. For the United States, though, I would argue that Gatsby is that book, yet any number of comparable works could fit the bill. A person’s outlook on such grandiose notions is driven by countless factors, certainly including personal experiences, education, and one’s worldview. Obviously, to even have this conversation, we need to eliminate the primary texts of the world’s major religions, which in my mind are in another category.
From a historical perspective, a rationale in the argument for Gatsby is its ubiquity in America’s high school and higher-education system. As discussed in other places in this book, the way the novel has served as a mainstay in high school language arts classes and on college syllabi virtually guarantees that it is in the conversation about important books. Scholar Paul Lauter explains, “Education—like other cultural institutions—is an arena for struggle, and what is decided there significantly affects the political economy and important social arrangements . . . culture . . . is a significant way of constructing and mobilizing power.”[2] Therefore, the education system is essential in understanding how people create points of view and think about the world around them.
The idea that we need books (and by extension, reading, which seems obvious, but is not if one has been inside a classroom recently) is logical and straightforward on the surface. However, in the public discourse about education, there is a decided lack of logic and sensibility. The victory of standardized management in the nation’s K–12 schools has privileged test scores and worksheets over traditional education, such as deep reading of literature and nonfiction, as well as writing, which is virtually eliminated in the standardized world.
Despite the current national obsession with reading-test scores, for example, all the attempts to quantify and standardize reading have actually produced little or no improvement in reading ability as a whole. As a matter of fact, many educators would argue that the emphasis on testing has reduced the amount of time teachers can devote to reading without risking backlash for not teaching to the test. Writer Joy Hakim explains the root cause, saying:
What we aren’t doing in schools is exciting children with the printed page and wonders it can offer. We continue to present reading as a boring school subject that can’t compete with television. Yet as any reader will tell you, it is TV that is ultimately boring, and books are what can transport you to other worlds.[3]
Hakim and other curriculum specialists point to the many causes for students not being energized by reading, and the use of standardized curriculum is one of the primary targets, even as other commentators push the blame off on parents, bad teachers, or socioeconomic challenges.
Concurrently, a general anti-intellectualism has swept the nation (though from another perspective, a simple argument could be that it has always existed and is merely more noticeable at this moment in our national history). One sees the devolution rearing its ugliness in public debate over critical issues. The result is that people and political parties are segregated. Rationality and common sense are out the window, replaced by incessant rigidity and shrill shouting.
In response to this state of affairs, I assert that the need for books and deep reading is more important than ever. For example, in contrast to earlier eras when nations had the ability to destroy one another and the planet, and at least worked toward ensuring that outcome would not come about through acknowledgment of the challenges, in today’s world, people and nations would rather bury their heads and pretend that the problems we face do not exist. One simply needs to wade into the environmental battles regarding global warming or fracking to witness the termination of sane examination. It is as if audiences and stakeholders would prefer shouting and theatrics to wisdom.
Rather than realize that people and nations can only overcome problems by uniting against them, adversaries in the contemporary world believe they are scoring points by drawing lines they will not cross. There is no longer give-and-take, which creates a losing environment for the kind of critical thinking and problem solving today’s challenges necessitate.
Noted Harvard professor Marjorie Garber explains that many readers pick up books, particularly older texts, “to shape ideas about identity, politics, gender, and power.” As a result, “readers tend to identify with the major characters and to measure their actions and thoughts by the degree to which they imagine themselves in similar situations or with similar choices.”[4] Deep reading and analysis provides, in part, the tools we need to combat this negative atmosphere.
We cannot deny that Gatsby is a key component in this discourse. Nor can we deny that the nation needs these kinds of texts. Now more than ever, reading is waging a losing battle with the bells and whistles of the Internet, thousands of cable TV stations, on-demand movies and shows, and the ubiquity of downloadable music. If reading a short, compelling novel that encompasses so many socioeconomic and cultural issues can help students deepen and strengthen their abilities to think and reflect about society’s challenges, in my mind that is enough rationale for its continued place on high school and college syllabi now and well into the future.
***
What will become of Gatsby in the future, particularly as a part of the literary canon and its place on academic syllabi in the high school and college classroom? This chapter attempts to answer this important query. The early indications are that the new 2013 Baz Luhrmann–directed adaptation starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Gatsby has energized people about the novel and Fitzgerald. Perhaps, given the excitement regarding the movie, we can expect that it will keep Gatsby in the vanguard for at least the next decade. Undeniably, the new film ensures that language arts teachers and college instructors across the nation will have new fodder for classroom discussion and student assessment, since the novel and film differ enough to make such conversations useful.
This chapter (and the entire book, really) also addresses a classic chicken-and-egg question: Which came first, the canonization of Gatsby or the critical resurgence and enormous sales of the novel? We have ample evidence. For example, novelist and critic John Updike explains in his inimitable way, “Academia, intoxicated by his eternal undergraduate effluvium, has clasped Fitzgerald to its bosom.”[5]
In clasping this question to my bosom, I thought it compelled study with actual students engaged with the book and various film adaptations. Obviously, it is one thing for the researcher to ponder what all this means, but quite stirring to hear from young people. As such, I worked with thirty high school students in eleventh grade at Greenfield School in Greenfield, Tennessee, a small town (population about 2,260) in the northwest part of the state, a far cry from the elite shores of Long Island. Teacher Denise Douglas reports that the small, K–12 school has 165 total students, with about 60 percent on free and reduced lunch.
Quincey Upshaw, a former high school teacher now studying for a doctorate in English and teaching at the University of South Florida, also provided insight into her experiences with the novel.[6] Upshaw taught in a much different environment than small-town Tennessee—an honors English class at East Lake High, a large high school in Florida’s Pinellas County, near affluent Tarpon Springs. The students primarily came from upper-middle- to upper-class families with average incomes in the $150,000 to $300,000 range. A handful of other teachers and former teachers who wished to remain anonymous also contributed to my thinking.
These student assessments provide the reader with additional insight into the novel’s meaning (and the film’s, too) for young people today and its potential role in their futures. The reasons why they make Gatsby part of their pedagogy gives a glimpse at the book’s place in the high school classroom. I find that this material helps us contemplate the centrality of Fitzgerald’s novel in curricula, which is itself under attack in a standardized management education culture. Education does not hinge on whether or not teachers assign Gatsby, but the system must focus on reading and writing, which one hopes the new Common Core Standards will facilitate rather than decimate.
For my money, the Great American Novel must be as elusive and enormous as the country it is supposed to represent. Nothing, then, comes as close to this expansiveness as The Great Gatsby. Yet there are many other contenders for the crown, from Melville’s Moby Dick to the latest sprawling epic by today’s hottest novelist.
The irony runs deep in labeling the novel as the undisputed king of American novels because on paper at least, Fitzgerald—an insecure, drunken, college dropout—had no business writing it. He did not even write it in the United States, for God’s sake! Instead, after retreating to Europe to save money, he ground the text out between benders and attempts to keep Zelda on as short a leash as he could without being reduced to utter madness. The latter effort almost broke the couple into pieces, since her affair with French aviator Edouard Jozan destroyed something in her husband that he could never recapture. The affair and later psychotic breakdown she suffered took part of Scott, too. Scott Fitzgerald, though, is part of Gatsby’s lore. This self-delusional drunk . . . hack . . . writer for the slicks . . . for the paycheck . . . how did he do it?
The answer lies in the brilliance of the ideas contained at the heart of the book. According to scholars Jackson R. Bryer and Nancy P. VanArsdale, although they do not go as far as naming Gatsby the Great American Novel, “It is a great American novel, portraying the traits, admirable and ugly, of an emerging and modern American character and American culture, influenced by the postwar era, the rise of a new generation of business and criminal tycoons, and the modernist movement in the arts.”[7] These related topics come together so well in Gatsby that using the novel in the classroom opens the door to many of the central issues educated citizens must face.
Part of my response to someone who challenges my declaration of Gatsby as the Great American Novel—and many have emerged to question the notion in the wake of the 2013 film—is to essentially say, “Look at the scoreboard!” Tens of thousands of high school and college teachers over the course of the last handful of decades have assigned this novel because it helps them teach some aspect of life or theme that they find important for students to understand. Gatsby’s presence in high school and college classrooms all these years cannot be reduced to less than what it is.
In even addressing the question of a Great American Novel, however, the larger issue at stake is probably centered on the overall importance we place on reading and the humanities in general. We live in an age where these ideas are under attack from conservative and liberal forces that argue against canonization of particular texts.
Certainly, the rise and fall of “the” canon or “a” canon is important. From a cultural viewpoint, the identification or rejection of a common core set of guiding beliefs or principles helps us understand our own uniqueness, as well as the common bonds that tie us to one another. Yet others would argue whether a set of literary texts could hold up under the continual onslaught of new voices and new experiences entering the fray as the nation and world transforms.
There are many good and other not-so-valid explanations for why a writer or specific work goes in or out of fashion at a given moment in history. One solid rationale is that books are part of the mass media entertainment industry and therefore subject to the fickle nature of consumers. Certainly Fitzgerald understood this idea; he continually obsessed over potential audiences, the people who bought books and magazines, and how he needed to shape his work (particularly his short stories) to meet their demands. At the same time, Fitzgerald always worried about his novels being viewed as serious literature and something apart from his short work.
Watershed historical events or moments can also sweep a writer into or out of the spotlight, according to literary scholar Morris Dickstein. His assessment of Fitzgerald’s place in the canon ties it to larger events taking place in the nation. For example, in the Depression and war-filled 1940s, Fitzgerald became “simply irrelevant.” In modern times, Dickstein contends, the move by scholars to recognize traditionally neglected writers has moved focus away from those traditionally associated with the canon: “To many professors Fitzgerald has simply become one of the dead white males, more a burden than a revelation.”[8] These examples demonstrate how large-scale cultural waves impact the fate of particular authors.
I believe that the existence of a literary canon has consequence as we confront the challenges ahead and place the past in context. Great works of fiction assist us in finding commonality within our precious American individuality, even if the work in question does not contain a requisite number of ethnicities, perspectives, or diversity-based views. In other words, I see the literary canon as broad, deep, and adaptable. The keepers of the canon—primarily individual high school teachers and college faculty—should remain under constant vigilance to ensure that it contains books representative of the American experience.
In addition, one should not limit the canon based on the needs of the current education system or individual educators. Or, to put in more pointed language, the canon should not be limited because a seventh-grade teacher or tenured professor feels that he or she only has a certain amount of time to get through some subset of material. As a matter of fact, I would argue that we should base learning around these seminal texts and reading, rather than the school calendar or semester length. Too often in our current education system the success or failure of a school district and its teachers is based on the students’ performance on standardized tests. Thus, the notion of preparing students for the exams trumps teaching them to be productive citizens with higher-order critical-thinking skills.
Scholar Mark William Roche addresses the idea of canonical texts by asking the question, “How does literature help us not only enlarge our individual frames of reference but also enhance our understanding of the collective concerns of an era—in our era, technology and ecology?”[9] This query juts right to the very heart of why a canon is necessary and that exposure to it in the American education system—even radically redefining the system itself—would make for a wiser, more prepared citizenry. Importantly, too, the idea of a literary canon does not mean that only those who possess a “literary bent” partake in the work.
Canonical texts that illuminate ideas or individuals from fields outside literature may have a profound impact on the way the specialist approaches his profession and life’s work. The same effort scholars and educators have made in pushing diversity into the canon could unfold in other areas, too. Roche is speaking primarily about multiculturalism, but his thinking would work across disciplines as well: “We might be especially attentive to works that don’t simply replicate our feelings and anxieties but give us entirely different perspectives, including works from other ages and cultures.”[10]
One cannot properly address the existence of the Great American Novel or the debate about whether or not it exists without thinking about the future of the book, which at this point in history hinges on the e-book. Although books abound, there is also a concurrent diminishing of physical books taking place. The increasing popularity of e-books, spurred by the ability to read books electronically on Amazon’s Kindle reader, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, or Apple’s iPad, is quickly changing the book industry, from the way authors write to the distribution and sales channels. One only needs to think back to the demise of bricks-and-mortar retailer Borders to understand how different the business is from the past.
Therefore, as we ponder education, reading in the future, and the possible role Gatsby may play in this new environment, the fate of books as physical objects is important, as is the transition to e-books. For instance, Publishers Weekly, a magazine devoted to charting the industry, reported that sales of print books dropped 9 percent in 2012. Moreover, the Association of American Publishers reported that e-book sales comprised some 22.5 percent of the book industry’s net revenue.[11] The drop in print books is not surprising, given the ubiquity of handheld electronic devices that enable people to access books via the web. However, the fact that more than one in every five dollars of profit is derived from electronic texts is surprising.
Although it is hard to imagine that Gatsby will not make a successful transition to e-book status, particularly given its importance in college and high school curricula and the boost the novel will receive from the release of the 2013 film and later DVD, other classics might have greater difficulty. E-book buyers, for example, do not necessarily need a librarian’s help in finding titles or the advice of traditional book critics, especially in an era where newspapers are less important in setting the cultural agenda. As a result, e-books and their publishers might draw readers to the latest celebrity tell-all biography or trashy autobiography and away from classic texts by William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, or Ernest Hemingway.
“I remember so vividly the first time I read the book, the language was unlike anything I had ever read (and I read a ton!) and I was just blown away by it,” explains Quincey Upshaw, as mentioned earlier a former high school honors English teacher in Florida. Her personal experience with the novel, as a matter of fact, led her to assign the book later as a teacher, in hopes of getting her students into it the way she experienced it. Sometimes it worked, others not so much. Upshaw explains, “I saw that same reaction in many of my sophomores over the years. Some would tell me it was now their favorite book. Others would contact me about it years later to tell me how reading it had changed their lives. Again, others just slept. Such is the life of a high school teacher.”
If one were to survey high school and college instructors who use Fitzgerald’s novel in their classrooms, Upshaw’s story would be duplicated countless times. Fitzgerald produced what scholar James L. W. West III calls “one very teachable gem of a novel . . . which in form and language fell perfectly in line with the concerns of the postwar New Critics.”[12] The concurrent forces of physically greater numbers of students in the education system, a publisher looking for sales, and scholars driving the intellectual importance of the book makes this outcome seem inevitable, though no one orchestrated these events to take place together.
In 1989, USA Today reporter Dan Sperling wrote about a survey conducted by the Center for the Learning & Teaching of Literature at the University at Albany, SUNY, that revealed that high school reading lists had not really changed much in the last quarter of a century. While Gatsby did not top the list of required reading (the sacred spot reserved for Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet), it placed fourth, which meant that some 54 percent of 322 public high schools surveyed posted it as required reading. Further, the study showed that required texts were virtually the same whether at private, religious-based, or independent schools. At that time, schools with large minority populations also read the same texts.[13]
While some critics question whether a literary canon should or can exist, other thinkers are addressing the primacy of standardized management systems that many argue undervalues deep reading and writing. What has emerged under standardized management in the recent past is a complex bureaucracy that exists to keep the multibillion-dollar system in the hands of corporations. One really cannot comprehend K–12 education without assessing standardized management and its consequences.
In January 2002, several months after the September 11 bombings that rocked the United States and sent reverberations through the global community, President George W. Bush signed No Child Left Behind (NCLB) into law. Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Representative John Boehner (R-Ohio) stood on each side of Bush, smiling among attendees publicizing the new legislation. Television cameras whirred and cameras clicked, broadcasting the event as a bipartisan display of unity for a tense nation still in the grips of the terrorist attacks.
At its core, NCLB seemed logical: the much-ballyhooed legislation implemented a series of reading- and math-based standardized tests designed to measure students’ ability in these subjects versus their grade level (dubbed “adequate yearly progress” or AYP). Under the new program, schools across the country would be able to compare student achievement and get meaningful data regarding learning outcomes. Perhaps more importantly, NCLB set up penalties for districts that did not score well enough. Overall, NCLB proponents believed that the new legislation would concentrate efforts on improving America’s schools, particularly for poor and minority students, while simultaneously providing incentives for good districts to become even better.
Fast-forward to today and opinions regarding NCLB are almost completely negative and range from labeling it merely flawed at one end of the spectrum to an utter failure at the other. Not mincing words, Senator Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), Denver’s former school superintendent, told a national newspaper, “If you called a rally to keep No Child Left Behind as it is, not a single person would show up.”[14] In response to this kind of overt disapproval that Bennet displays and calls from education reform leaders nationwide, President Barack Obama initiated his own standardized test program, called “Race to the Top,” and allowed individual states to seek waivers from some parts of NCLB. The question is whether or not these new actions will simply replace one faulty system with another.
While NCLB may be slowly dismantled, refurbished under a different guise, or scrapped wholesale, the challenge for educators—where they have and will continue to face constant attack—is in the new environment that results from ten years of relentless battle between every participant in the fight over standardized testing. Regardless of whether pro-testing or anti-testing forces claim victory, the ghost of NCLB will continue to place standardized testing at the center of all improvement efforts.
In other words, the death of NCLB will not end the battle for educators and others opposed to what scholar Nel Noddings and others call “high stakes testing” or “tests that involve significant consequences.”[15] Among America’s educators and other interested audiences, the wholesale adoption of standardized management is simply defined as “teaching to the test.” The idea is that NCLB testing places enormous constraints on teachers, which results in them teaching to the particular test, hoping that it will lead to higher test scores, thus avoiding the challenges faced if test scores are not met.
The wider criticism about NCLB is that the rigorous preparation and testing program is creating a generation of students so focused on getting the right score that they lose invaluable critical-thinking and creative skills. In addition, there are important areas not tested that can sometimes fall to the wayside in a school’s march toward lifting test scores, such as writing, science, and social studies.
What is taking place in K–12 classrooms, as a result of standardized management, is that teachers have to sneak writing and deep reading into their courses, even though it could have detrimental consequences on student test results. Scholar James G. Henderson’s alternative to standardized management is to emphasize “transformative education,” which centers on teaching students via subject, self-, and social learning. Utilizing this ideology, Henderson and Richard D. Hawthorne see educators teaching the whole student, rather than identifying testing shortcomings. They ask us to imagine an alternative to high-stakes testing and its fruitful outcomes: “Imagine teachers who help their students change into people who can think for themselves, who can engage life imaginatively and fully as life-long learners, and who can embrace democracy as a vibrant way of living.”[16]
The gap between teaching to the test and preparing students to become vibrant community members in a democratic society is enormous. Helping students to perform well on standardized tests tells us nothing about the student’s ability to perform nuanced critical thinking, to problem solve, or to think deeply about subject matter. “Education . . . is a moral enterprise,” according to Philip W. Jackson. Its “bottom line,” he says, “aims at improvement. It seeks to make everyone it touches, teachers as well as students, better than they are now . . . tries to leave the world a better place.”[17]
Transformative education—as a means of redirecting classroom efforts, unifying communities, and battling entrenched standardized management curriculums—is a construct that enables educators to reimagine their work, lives, and consequences on students. Rather than high-stakes testing with punitive negative consequences for educators, Kathleen R. Kesson and Henderson explain, “Education in the United States should be oriented towards the historic problem of preparing citizens for life in a democratic society.”[18]
America’s schools have an alternative to standardized management dictatorship, one that is not only more logical and inspirational but also easily adapted to the public relations warfare necessary within educational reform efforts today. The bottom line is that educating young people for lives as democratic learners who exhibit higher-order critical-thinking skills prepares them for lives in the information age. Contrast this aspiration with scoring adequately on standardized tests (in schools generally labeled as failing) and one can envision the path to a brighter future for the nation’s schools and students.
Perhaps in an era of bullet-point presentations and content created for the short attention span of web readers, the idea that reading is important across a person’s entire life span is as antiquated as manual typewriters and public pay phones. Yet I contend that deep reading and analysis of novels like Gatsby are critical in students’ overall learning, as well as the kind of meaningful writing assignments that enable kids to engage with topics that influence their lives. Scholar Marjorie Garber contends, “So reading any literary work involves a kind of stereo-optical vision: one eye on the image of the past, the other on the present, the two eyes then combining them into a vivid single picture.”[19]
More than just based on how it can be interpreted, Gatsby is also employed in high school and college curricula because of the way it is read as a poetic, lyrical novel. Teachers enjoy Gatsby for its contradictory use of language and hope that students will engage with the writing style itself.
Yet there is an ambiguity that confounds readers used to being given the answers in today’s world of short attention spans. According to writer R. Clifton Spargo, “Fitzgerald’s take on the American dream is, in the end, a cautionary tale. And yet, for all his resistance, Nick starts to sympathize with Gatsby and his quest—and the reader gets drawn in. There may be something pathetic in Gatsby’s class striving, but there’s something innocent about it, too.”[20] Spargo’s summary emphasizes the duality in the novel that attracts (or perhaps confuses) so many readers. Scholar Anthony Larson explains that from a reader’s perspective, the “mystery only deepens as the reader advances in the novel, coming to the increasingly evident truth that Gatsby is a con-man, liar, and small-time gangster.” Yet, according to Larson and other critics, “this contradiction/tension is at the heart of the novel and is its driving force.”[21]
As narrator, Nick is the center of everything taking place and he cannot be trusted. Ultimately, a thoughtful reader might conclude that Gatsby himself is a fiction. Personally, I feel that one way to read the novel is to suppose—like in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club—that the dashing, elegant Gatsby is a persona Nick creates to woo Daisy from her brute husband and unfulfilling life. In this reading, Gatsby is Tyler Durden and Nick is Palahniuk’s unnamed narrator, presenting a quasi-reality in which he gets the girl. Rather than battle Tom Buchanan physically, Nick invents a suave, ideal man who can hold his own via wealth and military heroics. Larson wisely asks, “Where does the voice of Nick the narrator end and where does that of Gatsby, the great liar and thief, begin?”[22]
Rather than provide easy answers, Fitzgerald layers the narrative in ambiguity and misdirection. The novel itself becomes a kind of puzzle, where according to Larson, “the reader is off once again, hunting down Gatsby’s lies and faults so as to better judge him in the end.”[23]
Secondary education played a pivotal role in establishing Gatsby as the Great American Novel. Surely it could not have achieved this status without decades of readers—as a matter of fact, decades of people forced to read the novel as part of their high school studies. Once educators bought into selling Gatsby en masse, it did not take long for others to recognize its importance.
In a standardized education system, one wonders about the future of Gatsby as part of high school curricula. Yet there is hope in that the novel is included as a primary text for high schools in the new Common Core Standards guidelines. The upside here is that teachers will be able to teach the novel, but the downside centers on whether it will be the novel itself or an abridged version of the text or some other form that bastardizes the language and nuance of the book. Often, alternative versions are provided for students deemed “struggling readers,” which many critics believe is exactly the opposite tack teachers should take.
Returning to Upshaw’s experience as a student reading Gatsby, and then assigning it in her classroom, that passion for the text compelled her to use it because she wanted to see the students get that same wow factor. The fact that Fitzgerald’s novel has traversed the fickleness of the general public, stays on countless syllabi over time, and continues to enthuse teachers and students is profound. Upshaw also sees the long-term consequences of reading Gatsby via how past students engage with the text. She explains:
I would urge them to read the book again at 20, then again at 25. I promised they would understand more about it and themselves if they did. The crazy thing is, I have a dearly beloved former student who is now a creative writing MFA student and she told me she did this, and I was right. I love being told I’m right by students as much as the next teacher, but the important part is that, for some students, this book really is life changing. Through the years they can see more of themselves in the characters and they comprehend more of the richness of Fitzgerald’s language as their own minds deepen.
For Greenfield School teacher Denise Douglas, teaching Gatsby in the same small, rural Tennessee town she grew up in is important in an attempt to open her students’ minds to what is taking place around them and will influence them in the future. Her feeling here played out over and over again in the answers the students provided to interview questions. In general, they understood how studying the themes in both the novel and 2013 film might prepare them for facing life’s current and future challenges.
The issue that resonates with her students foremost, Douglas explains, is the emotion and “issue of unfaithfulness,” which they see in their own lives. “This helps some to really identify with the book even though they do not identify with the wealth. It’s the relationships of the characters that get them so emotionally involved in the book,” she says.
Reading over the students’ responses, I am struck by their optimism and general hope for the future, a kind of innocence that as adults many of us begin to ignore. While some of these interpretations are not necessarily in line with what takes place in the novel, Douglas’s students demonstrate that although they are only sixteen- or seventeen-year-old high school juniors, they comprehend how Gatsby’s broader themes might influence their thinking. Jeremy Lannom, for example, claims that the novel “proved to me that anything you want to achieve is possible,” while Taylor Alderson sums up, “Money isn’t everything” and McCall Scates says, “The novel made me think of how I want to plan my future to be the most successful I can be.”
Overall, 33 percent of the students agreed or strongly agreed (four or five on a five-point scale) that the novel changed their thinking about themselves and 50 percent claimed the same on their thinking about society. Interestingly, the figures increased when the students were asked about the Luhrmann film. Some 53 percent said the film changed their thinking about themselves, while the number jumped to 65 percent when examining society. For example, student Savannah Ricketts explains that the book “helped me by being more aware of the people around me and not to get too caught up with someone that you don’t see the real them. Don’t fool success for happiness.” In commenting on the film, her classmate Logan Galey concludes, “The movie gave me a better understanding of the society in which they lived in. The movie put it into real life and gave us a better perspective on that time in history.” However, students also demonstrated keen insight by disliking Gatsby. “I found the characters unlikeable and un-relatable. They are all unhappy, but they refuse to change their current situation,” explains Lauren Rush.
In assessing the novel (70 percent) and the 2013 film (88 percent) overall, a strong majority of students rated them highly. Given the star quality of the Hollywood film, the higher rating for the film is no surprise. These particular students might have also been more attracted to the emotional and romantic parts of the film, since Douglas thought that was the aspect most familiar to them in their own lives. Jessica Boettner pins her assessment on hope, explaining, “To me, hope has always been a grand feeling. . . . Now I understand the consequences of too much hope and idealism. One must be a little realistic . . . and protect oneself from some of the heartache of things gone wrong.”
Clearly, for these students, the combination of reading the novel and viewing both the 1974 and 2013 film adaptations proved important. Douglas explains what she sees in her students’ attitudes, saying:
None of them can ever understand Daisy or how she could stay with Tom over Gatsby, but none of them have been married or have children. They also don’t understand the carelessness of rich people . . . because they have only seen people that affluent in movies and books. They do understand very well how fake people can be and how selfish people can be. They understand how when things are good you have lots of friends, but when things take a turn for the worse you find out who your true friends are. They experience these things time and time again throughout their high school years. And, unfortunately, will continue to experience after because such is life.
Her thoughts shine through the comments by Kayla Totty, who says the novel taught her to “live your life to the fullest and what you do to other people will come back on you.” Her classmate Brody Stanford relates, saying, “I will try not to dwell on the past and focus on the future.” Brittany Ricketts concludes, explaining, “The Great Gatsby is relevant for today’s students because there are people that still think like Tom and Daisy. People still only care about themselves and what is going to happen to them.”
In the end, Douglas hopes Gatsby demonstrates to her students “how important it is to be true to themselves and not live their lives trying to be something they aren’t just because they think it will make them popular.” She sees great significance in the “careless people” theme for the young people, as well as a perspective on the American Dream that remains important: “I hope it also shows them not to let go of their dreams because they are so important, but at the same time not to cling so tightly to the past that it rips away their future.” Wisely, her student Bethany Cole explains, “Some dreams are worth risking everything for, while others are not, and the difficult part of life is distinguishing them.”
Any fan of Gatsby and the K–12 education system will get a smile when they read about one of former high school teacher Quincey Upshaw’s favorite moments in teaching Fitzgerald’s novel. She describes a particular connection a student presented, which showed her how the book helped build students’ thinking skills. The incident took place the semester after the students read Gatsby and then turned to All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) by Erich Maria Remarque. According to Upshaw, “A student said to me once as we were reading All Quiet, ‘Man, I bet Gatsby saw some of this stuff.’” For the class the connection was instant and powerful; she says, “That basically blew the collective mind of the class and we had an awesome discussion that day about how the carnage of World War I would have affected Gatsby’s outlook on the world.” Watching young people make these kinds of links between important texts is incredibly fulfilling for teachers, as well as the students in their classrooms. A student who makes this kind of connection based on critical and contextual thinking is the type of person one would like to have as a physician, business leader, nonprofit executive, scientist, or teacher educating the next generation of students.
There is a long-term benefit for both teachers and students in interactions with works of art like Gatsby. According to famed education scholar Maxine Greene, “Aesthetic questioning heightens awareness.” For the student, “such involvement heightens our consciousness of the mystery . . . discloses possibilities we could not have anticipated before.” Yet it is teachers as guides (and in this call, I would say both formal and informal teachers) “who have thought about their own experiencing, their own moments of joy . . . make significant choices . . . because they know . . . they have ‘been there’; they are committed to opening doors.”[24] Those of us committed to teaching Gatsby are the arbiters of its future and our students’ transactions with the text. We are the guides, opening doors for them to enter into a new world of possibilities that exist for those honed in critical- and contextual-thinking abilities.
***
Although I argue that Gatsby is the Great American Novel, that assertion does not mean that novelists should not strive to replace it or that scholars and critics should discontinue efforts to prove that some past work should rise to surpass it. Some writers, like Norman Mailer, spoke about the desire to write the Great American Novel, while others, like John Updike and Joyce Carol Oates, kept churning away in its pursuit, as if talking about it were too presumptuous. Yet the goal remains central to the national consciousness. In my mind, it is an eternal quest, just as the argument for or against a particular novel can be pursued forever.
While I take this stand, some people wonder if there continues to be a place for the Great American Novel. Those arguing this point often cite the seemingly endless recession that has gripped the middle class since the mid-2000s. The stark reality of millions of homes ripped out from under hapless homeowners is too much evidence supporting the notion that the American Dream is dead. Others claim that the definition of “American” is now too multifaceted to encompass all it implies in one set of ideas. Without the quest for the American Dream, therefore, there can be no Great American Novel.
Another argument against the Great American Novel is that there is no longer a place for it in a world that in many respects now seems so anti-American. Layered within is the notion that America itself really is not all that great anymore. Proponents of this position cite various rationales, spanning from the way the country churns through the global oil supply and its resulting environmental damage to the nation’s global aggression as symbolized by the so-called “war on terror” and its subsequent human rights violations.
Writer Julia Ingalls, however, sees the quest as worthy. She asks, “Is the Great American Novel still relevant? It can be, provided that novelists are able to recapture the spirit of the Great American journey without glossing over the realities of the 21st century.”[25] This answer provides space for contemporary novelists to confront the challenges laid out by opponents, while still acknowledging that the American experience holds many aspects that are unique, even if the system itself seems strikingly divided between the wealthy and the not wealthy, with the supposed middle class shrinking to nonexistence.
Novelist and poet George Garrett does not take a stance for or against the Great American Novel, but he does speak to Gatsby’s importance for writers, explaining, “I have never known an American writer, of my generation or of the older and younger generations, who has not placed Gatsby among the rare unarguable masterpieces of our times.”[26] Garrett’s thinking on this point mirrors the way many academics and teachers perceive the novel. Scholar Nancy P. VanArsdale concludes:
The book requires the reader to consider larger questions of American identity and American destiny. Readers must participate with Nick in questioning whether Jay Gatsby achieved greatness by remaining steadfast to his dream of marrying Daisy, and why, in America, wealth appears to trump other core values: love, trust, friendship, and honesty.[27]
As a result, Gatsby’s place within the American literary canon and as an important teaching tool seems secure. Just as in Fitzgerald’s day, the topics VanArsdale mentions demand to be addressed by an educated public, not only for the ideas that are derived, but as a device in creating an intelligent mind.
Unless otherwise noted, all student quotes are from students in Denise Douglas’s eleventh-grade English class at Greenfield School in Greenfield, Tennessee. Under Ms. Douglas’s direction, the students studied Gatsby and watched the 1974 film and then saw the 2013 film. The author would like to thank Ms. Douglas and the students for participating in an online survey about the novel and film.
Paul Lauter, Canons and Contexts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), viii.
Joy Hakim, “Rescue the Wonder of the Printed Page,” in The Last Word: The Best Commentary and Controversy in American Education, ed. Mary-Ellen Phelps Deily and Veronika Herman Bromberg (New York: Wiley, 2007), 94.
Marjorie Garber, The Use and Abuse of Literature (New York: Pantheon, 2011), 173–74.
John Updike, More Matter: Essays and Criticism (New York: Random House, 1999), 546.
All quotes from Quincey Upshaw are drawn from an e-mail exchange with her in which she reflected on her experiences teaching Gatsby and shared two student papers. Quincey Upshaw, e-mail to author, May 4, 2013.
Jackson R. Bryer and Nancy P. VanArsdale, eds., Approaches to Teaching Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (New York: Modern Language Association, 2009), xi–xii.
Morris Dickstein, A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 81.
Mark William Roche, Why Literature Matters in the 21st Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004), 251.
Roche, Why Literature Matters, 256.
Colette Bancroft, “Author James Patterson Campaigns to Save Books,” Tampa Bay Times, April 28, 2013, http://www.tampabay.com/features/books/author-james-patterson-campaigns-to-save-books/2117609 (accessed April 28, 2013).
James L. W. West III, “Fitzgerald’s Posthumous Literary Career,” Journal of Scholarly Publishing 28 (1997): 98.
Dan Sperling, “Classics Still Tops in Schools,” USA Today, May 31, 1989, 1A.
“Promise of No Child Left Behind Falls Short after 10 Years,” USA Today, January 7, 2012, http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/story/2012-01-07/no-child-left-behind-anniversary/52430722/1?csp=34news (accessed January 7, 2012).
Nel Noddings, “High Stakes Testing: Why?” Theory and Research in Education 2, no. 3 (2004): 263.
James G. Henderson and Richard D. Hawthorne, Transformative Curriculum Leadership (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Merrill, 1995), 5.
Philip W. Jackson, What Is Education? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 92–93.
Kathleen R. Kesson and James G. Henderson, “Reconceptualizing Professional Development for Curriculum Leadership: Inspired by John Dewey and Informed by Alain Badiou,” Educational Philosophy and Theory 42, no. 2 (2010): 214.
Garber, Use and Abuse, 167.
R. Clifton Spargo, “Why Every American Should Read The Great Gatsby, Again,” Huffington Post, April 9, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/r-clifton-spargo/great-gatsby-rereading_b_3046378.html (accessed April 10, 2013).
Anthony Larson, “Gatsby and Us,” Critical Horizons 4, no. 2 (2003): 284.
Larson, “Gatsby and Us,” 290.
Larson, “Gatsby and Us,” 288.
Maxine Greene, Variations on a Blue Guitar: The Lincoln Center Institute Lectures on Aesthetic Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 2001), 20–21.
Julia Ingalls, “Is the Great American Novel Still Relevant?” Salon.com, November 8, 2012, http://www.salon.com/2012/11/08/is_the_great
_american_novel_still_relevant/ (accessed May 4, 2013).
George Garrett, “Fire and Freshness: A Matter of Style in The Great Gatsby,” in New Essays on The Great Gatsby, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 101.
Bryer and VanArsdale, Approaches to Teaching, 27.
America was going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history and there was going to be plenty to tell about it. The whole golden boom was in the air—its splendid generosities, its outrageous corruptions and the tortuous death struggle of the old America in prohibition.—F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Early Success,” 1937
Although he claims to loathe being labeled a politician while in college, Nick Carraway often serves as prosecuting attorney, judge, and jury in The Great Gatsby. His revision and narration of Gatsby’s greatness includes continual reexamination of the major players involved in the events as they unfolded that climactic summer. At the end of the story, Nick reserves his harshest verdict for Daisy and Tom, calling them “careless people” who “smashed up things and creatures,” and then forcing “other people [to] clean up the mess they had made.”[1] This declaration is one of Fitzgerald’s severest criticisms of the rich and demonstrates his complicated feelings about wealthy people, regardless of Ernest Hemingway’s celebrated and much-discussed accusation that his friend and rival favored or had a sycophantic longing for them.
The “creature” that Daisy and Tom break to bits is Gatsby himself, employing their combined power and wealth to destroy him—first his dream of a future with his lover, and then physically as Tom sells him out to George Wilson. In one sense, the “mess” that is left is Nick’s to clean up by telling the titular character’s story. Yet, here again, Nick assumes the politician’s role, simultaneously recasting Gatsby as great and as someone he ultimately claims to scorn. This equivocal stance adds mystery and nuance to the story and exemplifies Fitzgerald’s skill in keeping the reader guessing throughout the book, essentially forcing the reader to address the basis and validity of Gatsby’s greatness.
Nick assesses his cousin and her husband harshly—as reckless individuals—and by doing so, indicts that generation of the rich, who believed that they could live in a lawless manner with few or no consequences for their actions. What is interesting in Nick’s final encounter with Tom in New York City is that there is clearly a moment where the power structure of their relationship flips. Once Nick correctly surmises that Tom sent Wilson on his deadly journey, he could have provided an account of what actually happened the night Myrtle died, particularly that Daisy was the driver. Given Tom’s self-claimed emotional breakdown at her death and having to clean out the apartment afterward, Nick’s restraint at this juncture reveals itself as another example of his abilities as a politician or the comprehension that delivering this devastating news will not change Tom’s or Daisy’s true nature. In other words, whatever it does to Tom personally, the news will merely serve as another speed bump on their marital road. Wealth is their indestructible bond.
In the end, it seems as if Nick’s secret is also broken up by Tom and Daisy’s basic childishness, which, combined with their wealth, provides a form of insulation in contrast to his “provincial squeamishness.”[2] What Nick quickly surmises is that the rules do not encompass people like the Buchanans. They can act however they want, if they are willing to retreat to the world of the ultrarich at any sign of trouble in the “real” world. In exchange, they must sublimate their emotional lives to that faux society where a different set of rules exists almost beyond Nick’s understanding.
In contrast to the gaudy environs of the wealthy, Nick views himself as a realistic and thoughtful person. For example, he can live among the ultrarich, attending their parties and serving as a collaborator in their intrigues, but justify it all based on his midwestern decency and renting a cheap home tucked into an unnoticed fold. As a result, he does not reveal Daisy’s secret, which Gatsby took to the grave, because in doing so he would become as reckless as them.
Here, Nick’s restraint, Gatsby’s greatness, and the Buchanans’ immorality intersect at the intellectual heart of the novel. Fitzgerald’s condemnation of the rich and their irresponsibility finds no truer home than when Nick decides that no good could come of Tom knowing the truth about his lover’s death. Fitzgerald is basically demonstrating that the narrator’s squeamishness about the rich and their actions (though they often seem glamorous and alluring) can only result in everyone else bending to the will of the wealthy.
***
One could reasonably argue that a novel rarely has the power to rouse great change in its own day (perhaps Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle is a rare exception). Yet, if Gatsby had reached more readers or achieved the sales figures and media attention that Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise attained, perhaps people might have realized the potential outcome of the rampant speculation that took place in the mid-1920s. Much of early twentieth-century history would need to be rewritten to think that the book could have prevented the Great Depression, but looking back now, readers can certainly see it as a warning. Maybe Fitzgerald simply wrapped the book in too pretty a package given the seriousness of its message. The illicit sexuality and promiscuity of Gatsby, for example, obviously did not grab at the public’s heart (or stomach) the way Sinclair did in illuminating the evils of the Chicago meatpacking industry almost two decades earlier.
This chapter looks at the enduring legacy of greed and recklessness in American society, which is a key takeaway from Gatsby. Portraying this aspect of our culture is one of Fitzgerald’s great triumphs. As a matter of fact, Fitzgerald’s impressions and ideas about wealth have often been misconstrued, whether Hemingway’s early miscalculation or numerous students diving into the novel for the first time.
Scholar Ronald Berman, however, deftly assesses Fitzgerald’s thinking, explaining, “He is not concerned with the idea that wealth corrupts: instead, he works with the idea that wealth reveals.”[3] According to literary scholar Brian Way, Nick’s observations about Daisy and Tom reveal the depths of their corrupt way of life. Tom’s racism and Daisy’s melancholy move the reader from comprehending the “restlessness and futility of their lives” to its “element of brutality and arrogance.” Fitzgerald satirizes the rich deftly via Tom and his leaps to action. Way explains, “Tom’s style of physical dominance, his capacity for exerting leverage, are not expressions merely of his individual strength but of the power of a class.”[4]
The power of this class in contemporary society is all but complete. The primary downside to this centralized power is that it breeds a kind of hubris and recklessness that takes shape in entities and individuals that exist only to make money and solidify their power; everything else is inconsequential. In this kind of environment, most people become pawns, a form of walking ATM aimlessly spending money on unnecessary consumer trinkets because some commercial or marketing gimmick exclaimed that life would be better by owning it. This is the mind-set vicious capitalism necessitates. Like Tom Buchanan, one simply takes from those weaker or lower on the financial order then fights like hell to protect what’s gained.
Many of today’s corporate giants exude extravagance and overindulgence. These episodes fill magazines and television news reports and fuel a great deal of popular culture. Yet, vulgar displays of wealth take place in small organizations as well and in small towns across the nation. In a country so fixated on wealth and showing off, there are countless illustrations.
For example, a close friend worked for one of the largest financial institutions in the world as it completed a round of layoffs (dubbed “downsizing” in corporate jargon to alleviate or hide that it stands for mass firings), essentially getting rid of thousands of employees. While these people’s lives went into immediate turmoil, one company executive commenced a leadership retreat at a fancy coastal resort town. While sipping drinks and celebrating the company’s fortunes one evening—since mass layoffs often result in stock price gains—the highlight of the night took place, a $25,000 fireworks show. One’s mind races to Gatsby’s Long Island mansion and the hundreds gathered there, craning their necks as the nighttime sky filled with light. While many friends and associates would cash paltry severance checks, the select few drank champagne and patted themselves on the back for a job well done.
Despite meta-Gatsby and the way it has been employed across culture to condemn such folly, it would be
a mistake to not at least question whether Fitzgerald portrayed the rich so well that
many people misinterpret the novel as championing that lifestyle. In other words,
what percentage of readers, whether high school students or adults, view the book
as an aspirational text, just as many business students idolized the Gordon Gekko
character from Oliver Stone’s film Wall Street, despite its satirizing the industry? The onus for interpreting meta-Gatsby is everyone’s responsibility but primarily falls to the nation’s high school and
college educators. There is a level of vigilance necessary to ensure that Fitz-
gerald’s warnings about wealth and the dark side of the American Dream are central
to readers’ and viewers’ thinking.
An engaged reader need look no further than Fitzgerald’s two masterworks—Gatsby and Tender Is the Night—to understand how he felt about wealth. In each novel, the author clearly does not emulate or venerate those who are fantastically wealthy simply because they have money. This common perception of Fitzgerald—accentuated by Ernest Hemingway’s cruel use of his onetime close friend as a prop in the short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”—launched the wrongheaded idea that Fitzgerald worshipped the affluent, but this idea does not hold up if one actually reads the author’s work. Nor does it come through in examining his life. Fitzgerald had been around wealthy people most of his early adulthood, not only as a teenager in St. Paul, Minnesota, but also as a college student at Princeton. What Fitzgerald held, instead, is a keen insight into the role of money in rich people’s lives.
What is striking is that in writing to Hemingway, Fitzgerald provides the key to his thinking on this issue. In the letter, he bitingly tells Hemingway that he does not “want friends praying aloud over my corpse,” then asks that his name be removed whenever the story appeared in a collected book of stories. After praising Hemingway (certainly Fitzgerald knew his request would have to come with some sugar added given the younger man’s immense ego and competitiveness), the last line, added in after Fitzgerald’s signature, is revealing. The author explains, “Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.”[5]
The exchange and several after it explain the Fitzgerald/Hemingway complicated relationship more than what either man honestly felt about those with money, but Fitzgerald demonstrated again and again in his work what he really thought. Gatsby and Tom seem to represent the two extremes in Fitzgerald’s thinking. Gatsby is heroic, a “Son of God,” because he uses his wealth to pursue an idea. Tom, on the other hand, is a racist xenophobe who shows the abuse of inherited wealth that results in intellectual laziness and self-entitlement.
Famed literary critic Arthur Mizener discusses Fitzgerald’s unique vision of wealth as it linked to greatness (possibly embodied in Gatsby?), saying, “For the rich who made the most of their unique opportunity to live the life of virtue with the maximum imaginative intensity, Fitzgerald felt something like hero worship.”[6] Those who chose not to live a life of integrity earned the author’s complete scorn for what Mizener labels “the brutality of unimaginative, irresponsible power.”[7]
Certainly one of the traits that differentiates Gatsby and Buchanan is the “intensity” of their dreams. The former is driven to unimaginable ends to win his lost love, while the latter is floating through life, yearning for the lost days of Yale football. Nick sees how deflated Tom has grown, explaining that he represented “one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterwards savors of anti-climax.”[8]
Fitzgerald’s special insight into the wealthy is on display throughout The Great Gatsby, which his editor Max Perkins at Scribner’s picked up on right away. Assessing the novel in its earliest form, the famed editor calls it a “wonder” and says it contains “a great deal of underlying thought of unusual quality.”[9] Moreover, after reading it another time, he picks out the creation of Tom Buchanan as a highlight of the novel: “marvelously palpable and vital—I would know Tom Buchanan if I met him on the street and would avoid him.” Ironically, in the same letter, Perkins sees Gatsby as “somewhat vague . . . his outlines are dim.” [10] Fitzgerald continued to transform the central character as the book progressed through galley drafts and proofs, which led to the full embodiment of the vision, but regardless, it is Tom that seems most real to Perkins. Mizener uncovers an alternative way of interpreting the novel through the lens of Tom and Daisy as “a history of the slow but steady decline of Nick’s admiration for them, as the full evil of their moral irresponsibility is revealed to him and he loses interest in their glamour.”[11]
What is striking about Tom as well is that his hubris comes with a large helping of insecurity. His list of fears, like many wealthy people today, runs deep and runs the gamut from minorities to the newly wealthy who like to show off their riches. This reminds me of a story an acquaintance told me about a former chief executive at a large global bank who used to pop into a local bar during the height of the Great Recession. With him were two giant bodyguards in imposing black suits and sunglasses, just like the movies. Even if the bar was virtually empty, the tycoon sat in the corner, nervously looking around the room, by himself, while the bodyguards hovered nearby. The image harkens to a modern-day Tom Buchanan, relishing in his status but also afraid that something sinister might lurk in the darkened saloon. When he got up to use the bathroom, the towering hulks shielded the entry, barring anyone else from using the facilities while Nero did his business.
What individuals and families lost in the Great Recession will be debated and scrutinized by economists and business analysts for a long time. Currently, the standard line is that trillions of dollars of personal wealth disappeared. While no one has determined the exact amount of loss, the reverberations continue to rock the nation from both socioeconomic and cultural perspectives. Unfortunately, in the six years since the Great Recession took hold, little evidence exists that demonstrates the world could not again fall prey to the forces of greed that sparked the catastrophe.
The subprime mortgage crisis placed an anchor around the neck of an otherwise teetering American economy already groping under the weight of a costly overseas war against terrorism in Iraq and other parts of the Middle East. “Recession”—the dreaded r-word—crept back into the national consciousness. While the experts debated whether the country had already entered a recession or not, politicians devised “stimulus packages” designed to force spending money into the pockets of cash-strapped Americans. On a daily basis the news never seemed to improve, ranging from massive layoffs at various global corporations to declining numbers of jobs created. People who turned to Wall Street for some indication of the nation’s economic status found themselves in the midst of roller-coaster swings.
As with most aspects of popular culture, perception soon became reality. The more the media reported on the recession, the more steam the idea gained. People’s fears about their jobs, the economy in general, and an unsettled situation in Iraq and Afghanistan made them apprehensive about spending money. Historically, when consumers turn off the spigot, the national economy reels. In early 2008, the gloomy outlook forced President Bush to address the situation: “Obviously the housing market is creating deep concern. And one of the real problems could be that if people, as a result of the value of their homes going down, kind of pull in their horns.”[12]
A poll conducted by the Associated Press in February 2008 revealed that 61 percent of the public believed that the United States stood in the midst of its first recession since 2001. The facts provided evidence to the national mood. In 2007, the economy had its weakest year overall since 2002, expanding a mere 2.2 percent. The real estate fiasco triggered the anemic growth, with builders dropping spending by almost 17 percent. People also took home less pay in 2007, with average weekly earnings actually falling 0.9 percent when adjusted for inflation.[13]
Despite mounting hard evidence, many economists joined President Bush in stating that the American economy was not in a recession. However, the threat of more fiscal challenges on the horizon led Congress and the president to work on an economic stimulus package that would provide tax rebates for individuals and tax cuts for businesses. In the rush to “solve” the monetary problems, however, relatively few people questioned how the nation would pay for the $168 billion rescue package. It turned out to be via costly overseas loans from foreign countries and by printing money by the truckload.[14]
Writer Matthew O’Brien, looking back on the economic crisis, lays the blame at former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan’s feet. If one reads between the lines, greed is the culprit, not necessarily by Greenspan personally, but among the legions of players in the financial market that benefited from creating the housing bubble. O’Brien explains:
Where the Fed really failed was as a regulator. It could have gone after the predatory lending in the subprime world, if it had wanted to. At least one Fed governor suggested doing so. Greenspan rebuffed him . . . if the Fed had clamped down on the endemic fraud in the mortgage market, it’s not difficult to imagine the run-up in housing prices being much more muted. After all, if the problem had been low interest rates, prices should have skyrocketed across the board. That prices only skyrocketed for housing tells us that something peculiar was going on there, namely an abdication of any regulatory oversight.[15]
Repeated efforts by the Federal Reserve to manage the economy, through interest rate cuts and other cash-infusion measures, had little consequence on individual households distressed by layoffs, credit challenges, and real estate woes.
The industries suffering the most widespread job losses during the Great Recession indicate the state of the overall national economy: construction, financial services, manufacturing, retailing, and business services. The snowball effect of the housing crunch, combined with costly overseas wars, stretched the economy’s effort at stability. In an increasingly unstable environment, executives reacted by cutting overhead, which usually resulted in massive job losses.
What Fitzgerald identified in the 1920s, according to scholar Brian Way, is the Wizard of Oz qualities of Gatsby, a flimflam man of the sort that has since only grown and dominated the nation, from the door-to-door salesmen of the 1950s to the late 1990s web gurus with dreams of paper millions piped together on little more than a hope and a prayer. Way explains:
That Gatsby should have brought to life all this miraculous shimmering ephemeral beauty and excitement places him among the great artist-showmen of America—the architects who designed the World’s Fairs and Expositions; the circus ring-masters . . . directors of Hollywood epics and musicals . . . and media men who . . . turned the Apollo moon-shots into the best television entertainment ever made.[16]
The contemporary business world is filled with the kind of hucksters that Fitzgerald anticipated in the novel. There seems to be a touch of the sinister even in sources we are educated to trust, whether politicians or businesspeople. For example, from the mid-1990s until its financial collapse in late 2001, Enron stood as a darling of the business media, ranging from one of Fortune magazine’s “World’s Most Admired Companies” to an organization studied in business schools nationwide for its innovation and success. Enron, led by chief executive Jeff Skilling and chairman Ken Lay, also fooled finance professionals, receiving glowing reports from analyst firms that bought and sold enormous blocks of stock for investors, retirement funds, and 401(k)s. Billions of dollars were at stake in these decisions, and Enron duped all the major players in perhaps the largest Ponzi scheme in history. Enron’s stock, which at one point traded for ninety dollars a share, plummeted to fifty cents a share, not really even worth the price of the certificate it would have been printed on.
When the Enron collapse began, it unraveled faster than anyone could have imagined. Bankruptcy and mass layoffs took place quickly, while some employees lost their retirement funds in the meltdown. On May 25, 2006, a jury found Lay and Skilling guilty of conspiracy and fraud. For journalists Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, who helped break the Enron fraud, the guilty verdicts had “positive implications,” including offering “a measure of consolation—or retribution—for those employees who lost everything in Enron’s bankruptcy. And it reinforces a critical notion about our justice system: that, despite much punditry to the contrary, being rich and spending millions on a crack criminal defense team does not necessarily buy freedom.”[17]
At the heart of Enron’s criminal activity was the deliberate manipulation of company stock to make the company more valuable on paper than in reality. Top executives then sold millions of dollars of essentially worthless stock for profit, when they knew the price was a sham. The unfortunate aspect of every underhanded financial plot is that someone is left holding the bag. In this case, it turned out to be Enron employees and investors.
The Enron scandal serves as the most shocking downfall in an era of high-profile corporate collapses. The others spanned a variety of industries and included some of the more prominent corporations in America. Like Enron, these were considered top-notch businesses. Accounting firm Arthur Andersen fell apart in the wake of serving as Enron’s public accounting agency. Although the company collected revenues of $9.3 billion in 2001, some eighty-five thousand Andersen employees either left the firm or lost their jobs in the downfall.
Adelphia Communications, founded by the Rigas family, grew into the fifth-largest cable company in the United States. Members of the Rigas family hid debt and essentially allocated themselves millions of dollars in undisclosed loans. John and Timothy Rigas were found guilty of securities violations after federal officials determined that they stole $100 million in company money. Other stunning disintegrations included Tyco chief executive Dennis Kozlowski and WorldCom founder Bernard Ebbers. Both leaders, seen as innovative leaders prior to the scandals, ended up in jail for bilking investors. Ebbers, for example, had $400 million in undisclosed loans.[18]
In 2006, on average, these leaders at the nation’s largest five hundred corporations made $15.2 million. Countrywide, which is well known for its television commercials and web advertising pushing home financing, paid executive Angelo Mozilo a $1.9 million salary and $20 million in stock awards based on performance, while he sold another $121 million in stock options. This took place as the company lost $1.6 billion in 2007 and its stock dropped 80 percent. Mozilo told the committee, “As our company did well, I did well.” Representative Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) viewed the disparity between company results and CEO compensation as “a complete disconnect with reality.”[19]
The greed and hubris of so-called leaders like Skilling and Mozilo is shocking under any microscope, but perhaps more important, these types of individuals pull entire companies with them into fraudulent activity. Writer Gerald Russello, for example, discusses the consequences of Enron within the broader context of contemporary America, explaining:
Enron is in many ways the quintessential American story. It joins a rags-to-riches tale of a company and its founders (Mr. Lay, for example, was a preacher’s son from the Midwest) to a Gatsby-esque fall from economic and political grace. It also has a lot of lessons to teach as American corporate culture recovers from the shock of a chain of disasters, of which Enron remains the most resonant.[20]
While it is difficult to comprehend, people continue to be duped by such charismatic, yet evil, leaders. Part of the ongoing value of Gatsby and meta-Gatsby ideas across culture is that we should know better.
As the 1990s rushed toward an end, Time magazine writer Adam Cohen wrote an article comparing and contrasting two of the era’s towering figures: President Bill Clinton and Bill Gates, Microsoft chief and then the world’s richest man. At the time, despite their combined power and wealth, both faced intense scrutiny, Clinton on the heels of the affair with intern Monica Lewinsky (perhaps a modern-day Myrtle Wilson?) and Gates fighting antitrust allegations that threatened his company’s stranglehold on the nation’s computer software.
Interestingly, Cohen discloses that the two iconic figures did not get along well, which the writer identified as growing out of generational differences. Clinton and Gates, although of the same generation, were born at each end of the baby boomer era. The president represented the hippie mentality of the 1960s, while Gates stood for the me-first and antigovernment mentality of the 1970s.[21]
Cohen also examines where the two paralleled, particularly a shared and legendary internal drive to get what each wanted. Each man understood from an early age the parameters of power and went about attempting to attain and keep it. “Both have limitless drive and self-absorption, and a willingness to push the rules to the edge—or past it—to get what they want,” Cohen writes. However, too often their determination led to circumventing existing rules and what Cohen calls “a strained relationship with the truth.” Clinton’s need to connect with people, according to the writer, led to the affair with Lewinsky, while Gates’s desire for power led to his company’s monopolistic actions and the resulting fallout that would weaken Microsoft at the dawn of the Internet age.[22]
Given their shared single-mindedness and blatant grabs for power, Cohen compares both Gates and Clinton to Gatsby. He even notes that the Microsoft head had a quote from Fitzgerald’s novel inscribed on the ceiling of his library in the $60 million mansion he designed and had built outside Seattle. Ironically, Gates seems to have totally missed the point of the quote, which signifies Gatsby’s inability to achieve his dream. Cohen, however, concludes, “The two Bills are already modern Gatsbys of a sort, having achieved their very different versions of the American Dream. Whether their flaws, like the original Gatsby’s, pull them down remains to be seen.”[23]
In hindsight, we realize that despite the great challenges Clinton and Gates faced in the late 1990s and early 2000s, both men emerged essentially unscathed. As a matter of fact, in contemporary America, Clinton and Gates have achieved iconic status, both revered in many quarters for their philanthropic and humanitarian work. Perhaps in comparison to Gatsby, each real-life leader might be an example of a potential “what if,” typifying the kind of life the fictional character might have aspired to if real and having undergone a change of heart from his criminal past to a do-gooder future.
More important for this study, Cohen’s use of Gatsby as a barometer for Clinton and Gates demonstrates the cultural significance of the novel. In his use, “modern Gatsbys of a sort” means that one is Gatsby-esque if one has achieved one’s personalized version of the American Dream. The article also reinforces the notion that even if one rises up, any “flaws” might pull him or her back toward earth.[24]
Yet it is primarily in where their dreams lead that separates would-be Gatsby figures from Fitzgerald’s creation. Many celebrities, whether in business, politics, or another profession, actually seem more like Tom Buchanan types. Their ruthlessness—both Gates and Clinton flaunting the system for their own gain—dictates that they win and others bend to their will, just like Tom’s manipulation of those around him. Tom is so controlling that he is able to convince Nick that he should feel sorry for him, which justifies the narrator not telling Tom that Daisy actually drove the death car that killed his mistress. Nick condemns both the Buchanans for their wanton behavior, but he does not deliver the blow that might rock Tom from his self-entitlement bubble.
***
One of the lasting images of the Great Depression in popular culture is that Wall Street traders in gleaming skyscrapers jumped from their office windows en masse as they realized that their fortunes were lost. Over the years, researchers have discovered that the image does not necessarily fit reality.
Rather than an epidemic, suicide in New York City and nationwide spiked upward, just slightly more than the trend that had been on the rise since the mid-1920s. Examining census statistics for 1925, for example, revealed that 12.1 people per 100,000 across the nation committed suicide and 14.4 in New York. By 1932, the year with the highest overall average, the nationwide figure rose to 17.4 (up 44 percent) and New York reached 21.3 (up 40 percent). The data are not insignificant, particularly if one factors in many other suicides that were probably reported as deaths to save the surviving family members from shame. Yet researchers looking deeper into the topic have provided greater clarity on the issue. Overall, less than 2 percent of the deaths during the Depression were from suicide.[25]
Jumping ahead to the Great Recession of the late 2000s, researchers have concluded that the suicide rate in the United States accelerated, totaling about 1,580 additional suicides per year on average from 2008 to 2010. Sociologist Aaron Reeves and his research team also discovered that the unemployment rate corresponded with increased suicides. As a result, they deduce that “there is a clear need to implement policy initiatives that promote the resilience of populations during the ongoing recession.”[26] What these figures further indicate is that there is a human price to be paid when preoccupation with power and money outruns logic, compassion, and dignity.
As a nation, we need to address the corruption of individuals and entities and how that relates to the broader capitalist system. One of the most pertinent questions is simply this: Is there morality in such a system?
Innovation fuels America’s global military and economic power, as well as the nation’s culture. Yet, the constant demand for “more” and “faster” ratchets up anxiety. In the new millennium, general nervousness about the economy continues to spread like cancer a little bit more each day. Small signposts are all over that indicate large problems on the horizon. Soaring gas prices, for example, serve as a daily yardstick. For sale signs and the empty homes they mock fill the nation’s streets, cul-de-sacs, and suburban enclaves, constantly reminding hardworking (but scared) citizens that chaos is an inch away.
In examining the heady topics of this chapter, one asks that the full power of Fitzgerald’s novel be appreciated for its deft examination of the issues at the core of a consumer capitalist society. While many aspects of our current economic system would baffle Fitzgerald, he provided insight into people’s motivations and aspirations as if we could in some way chart how and why a person would act given the opportunity to fulfill his or her version of the American Dream. Gatsby demonstrates that Wall Street is no less corrupt than the Mafia underworld (and both are greased on illegal bootlegged alcohol), America’s aristocrats are as lowly as its dirt poor, and dreams are attained and lost based on consequences that seem like fate but are more likely at the hands of human nature. Here, Fitzgerald tells us, here are the keys to understanding it all. He asks that we use them wisely, but still we careen off the road, axle destroyed, and wheels off the track, yet mesmerized by the loud splash of horns filling the night sky.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 153.
Fitzgerald, Gatsby, ed. Bruccoli, 153.
Ronald Berman, The Great Gatsby and Fitzgerald’s World of Ideas (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997), 147.
Brian Way, F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Art of Social Fiction (New York: St. Martin’s, 1980), 102.
July 16, 1936, F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli with the assistance of Judith S. Baughman (New York: Touchtone, 1995), 302.
Arthur Mizener, “The Real Subject of The Great Gatsby,” in Readings on F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Katie de Koster (San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1998), 77.
Mizener, “The Great Gatsby,” 77.
Fitzgerald, Gatsby, ed. Bruccoli, 22.
November 18, 1924, Life in Letters, 86.
November 20, 1924, Life in Letters, 87.
Mizener, “The Great Gatsby,” 81.
Quoted in Jeannine Aversa, “Many Believe US Already in a Recession,” Associated Press, February 10, 2008, http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hJjzb-73g6-mEmgvyixbf7Vzw2lgD8UNNUBO2 (accessed February 11, 2008).
Aversa, “US Already in a Recession.”
Aversa, “US Already in a Recession.”
Matthew O’Brien, “Happy Birthday, Alan Greenspan,” Atlantic, March 7, 2012, http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/03/happy-birthday-alan-greenspan-the-housing-bubble-wasnt-your-fault/254089/ (accessed March 30, 2012).
Way, F. Scott Fitzgerald, 114.
Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, “The Guiltiest Guys in the Room,” Fortune, July 5, 2006, http://money.cnn.com/2006/05/29/news/enron_guiltyest/index.htm, (accessed September 15, 2006).
Penelope Patsuris, “The Corporate Scandal Sheet,” Forbes.com, August 26, 2002, http://www.forbes.com/2002/07/25/accountingtracker.html (accessed November 15, 2007).
Quoted in “CEOs Defend Their Paychecks,” St. Petersburg Times, March 8, 2008, 2D.
Gerald Russello, “The Smartest Guys on the Cell Block,” New York Sun, April 22, 2005, http://www.nysun.com/arts/smartest-guys-on-the-cell-block/12708/ (accessed January 2, 2013).
Adam Cohen, “A Tale of Two Bills,” Time International (South Pacific Edition) no. 4, January 25, 1999, 52, MasterFILE Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed February 1, 2013).
Cohen, “Tale of Two Bills,” 52.
Cohen, “Tale of Two Bills,” 52.
Cohen, “Tale of Two Bills,” 52.
For a more detailed discussion of suicide and the Great Depression, please see José A. Tapia Granados and Ana V. Diez Roux, “Life and Death during the Great Depression,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106, no. 41 (2009): 17290–95; and Steven Stack, “The Effect of the Media on Suicide: The Great Depression,” Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior 22, no. 2 (1992): 255–67.
Aaron Reeves, David Stuckler, Martin McKee, David Gunnell, Shu-Sen Chang, and Sanjay Basu, “Increase in State Suicide Rates in the USA during Economic Recession,” Lancet 380, no. 9856 (2012), 1813.
My big job was to try to illuminate the book. It’s fascinating to me, the power of that book . . . the story is aspirational. Gatsby’s a sign, a symbol, for us all.—Baz Luhrmann, in an interview, April 2013
Holed up in a passenger car on the Trans-Siberian Railway, more or less detoxing after the glitz, glamour, and spotlight of a new movie opening, famed director Baz Luhrmann drank red wine and listened to a recording of The Great Gatsby on his iPod. By the end of the audio version, he realized that someday he had to bring the novel to life on film, despite what many observers believed were lackluster adaptations in the past.[1] Jump ahead more than a decade and Luhrmann’s film—starring Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role and Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan—opened in the United States on May 10, 2013, prior to its starring slot launching the Cannes Film Festival a week later.
Like many big-budget films, the whispers and rumors of how Luhrmann would cast and shoot the film swirled and flowed through Hollywood and across the globe in the year before the film flickered across the big screen. The anticipation grew steadily, along with an aura of wonder, particularly after rumors leaked that Hollywood golden boy DiCaprio would star. Another wave of publicity and titillation sparked when people learned that the movie would feature a sound track of current artists reinterpreting and performing 1920s music—those close to the film let it be known that rapper and mogul Sean “Jay-Z” Carter would serve as musical director.
Commentators speculated from the beginning about what a Luhrmann version of Gatsby would look like and how his influences would transform the film. The director himself added to the intrigue since his films are often sweeping epics or over-the-top historical pieces that mix anachronistic music with larger-than-life visuals. The Australian director, for example, had great success adapting one literary icon for contemporary viewers—William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (starring a young Leonardo DiCaprio)—and won both critical acclaim and box office financial success with the romp Moulin Rouge! Adding to the suspense in the lead-up to the release, people also debated the use of 3-D in the film, which Luhrmann thought would intensify the relationships between the characters and heighten their emotional responses to situations.
Known for meticulously recreating his historical films, Luhrmann and wife Catherine Martin spent countless hours drawing on images and photos of the 1920s to ensure that the movie would replicate the era. Hundreds of extras, for example, fill the party scenes with exuberance, dancing, and drinking. One writer called the film “visually stunning,” while Mulligan explains, “The way Baz portrays the disgusting, overblown insanity of these parties is perfect. . . . It’s exactly representative of what people were doing in the mid-Twenties. They were going crazy.”[2]
It is not a stretch to proclaim that the new Gatsby film sparked a wave of Gatsby mania, particularly in the time between the film’s original release date in the December 2012 holiday season and its eventual distribution in May 2013. Yet, amid the craze of product tie-ins and screaming fans slobbering over DiCaprio or Mulligan, others raised significant points about the role of the new film as a reflection and interpretation of contemporary American culture.
***
I contend that the 2013 film and its subsequent DVD release will reinvigorate global interest in Gatsby (and to some degree, Fitzgerald), which makes it critical that this chapter examine the wave of Gatsby mania washing over the globe. While this entire book is an argument for why the novel has been so central to interpreting and establishing the themes at the heart of American life, one would be remiss in not recognizing how influential big box office films are in contemporary culture. The Luhrmann version is a case study in the significance of film as a cultural touchstone.
For example, my own viewing of the film took place at the very first showing on a Friday afternoon at a large multiplex in a Cleveland suburb. Although the theater stood relatively empty—it was a Friday afternoon, after all—a small busload of urban high school students flowed into the stadium seating just before the string of trailers began. Clearly, they were on a school-sanctioned field trip, since their teacher reminded the group about cell phone use and proper manners while the film played.
From this concrete evidence and other anecdotal examples drawn from teachers around the country, countless teachers and college instructors led authorized or informal group trips to see the film the first weekend it opened. I have heard from many teachers that they purposely paired the reading and study of Gatsby in their classrooms with the film opening to add a bit of extra incentive for their students. In addition, when the DVD is released and people can purchase the disc, one can only imagine how extensively it will be used in the nation’s classrooms. There is little doubt that a generation of Gatsby readers will also be Gatsby viewers. The teacher in my heart of hearts just hopes that students continue to read the novel, not just attempt to crib its contents by watching the film version.
The sense one gets from talking to teachers and college professors who have assigned the book to coincide with the film release is that they believe that the novel addresses meaningful issues. Therefore, by extension, the film will also play a role in students’ overall learning processes. I think we can also move this line of thinking beyond the high school or college classroom and surmise that moviegoers will reflect on the film’s subject matter as it relates to the wider world.
Many critics and commentators view Gatsby as particularly important at this point in history, a significant era that features challenges internationally and domestically, from post-9/11 society and the wars in the Mideast to the lingering economic difficulties worldwide and America’s real estate and banking meltdowns. In a newspaper interview several weeks before the opening, for example, Luhrmann discussed the timing of the film and its relevancy for current audiences, claiming, “In that moment before the financial crisis of 2008, I remember thinking that something wasn’t quite right. The greed and wealth were very reminiscent of The Great Gatsby. I thought, ‘The time is right to make this film.’”[3]
As soon as Hollywood stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire were rumored to play the lead roles in Gatsby the picture took on an aura of glamour, intrigue, and expectation. This Gatsby had to be truly great, which meant everything associated with the film had to be bigger than life. While filming took place in Australia, stills were released showing scenes from the Wilsons’ garage in the valley of ashes, heightening the great expectations and setting off a new wave of chatter. It was as if the talk about the film grew into its own industry.
The celebrity media drove the fascination, especially after Warner Bros. decided to push the release date from December 25, 2012, to the following summer. Initially, the speculation turned negative with wags determining that the delay must be based on bad internal reviews. Soon, though, reporters learned that pushing the film back allowed Luhrmann to get the 3-D special effects right and continue building the star-studded sound track. In addition, a summer release with its high-profile status enabled Warner Bros. to bulk up its list of films, which included The Hangover: Part III and the rebooted Superman film, Man of Steel.
Gatsby fever grew astronomically as time progressed toward opening night. While the general U.S. release occurred on May 10, 2013, nine days earlier on May 1 fans could watch a star-laden premiere at the Lincoln Center in New York City via a streaming web feed. In this celebrity-obsessed age, such events not only give consumers anywhere in the world access to the hoopla, but also create new and interesting content that will then be used to fill the marketing and social media buckets, which demand fresh content at all times. Both during and after the event, clips were in heavy rotation on several social media sites and available on YouTube.
Instead of the traditional red carpet, celebrities and others associated with the film sallied down a black carpet with gold trim that matched the marketing theme for the film posters and trailers featuring an art deco, gold “JG,” the main character’s monogram. While fans lined up on-site to watch the stars arrive, virtual fans saw it all via streaming video. Organizers and marketers planned the event to feature the film’s corporate partners. So, the backdrops where stars, musicians, and others were photographed were sponsored by Brooks Brothers and Tiffany & Co. Moreover, the entire world premiere event and streaming video was sponsored by the new Samsung Galaxy cell phone (quite an anachronistic touch in advertising a film set in the 1920s).
The mix of today’s technology juxtaposed against a film set in the early twentieth century remained on display at the gala. Repeatedly, hosts Asha Leo and Marc Istook referred to the film’s Instagram site, Facebook page, and Twitter feed, the latter using both @GatsbyMovie and #GatsbyPremiere to direct fans to the scrolling comments. Throughout the show, Asha Leo used an iPad to keep track of the social media as it unfolded, quoting Twitter feeds and basically announcing the online material as if she were doing play-by-play at a sporting event. For example, one fan on Twitter said that she read the novel the day of the red carpet affair and cried in anticipation of the film version. Many of the thousands of other tweets focused on fashion and how the celebrities looked. A similar tweeting tidal wave took place around the debut of the film at the Cannes Film Festival a week later.
While the hosts used information gathered from the web to fill airtime until the stars appeared, not only did the many fans gathered at the site watch themselves being broadcast on giant video screens, but they also were shown holding their cell phones high above their heads to film the actors. The synergy of watching via the Internet as Leo and Istook talked about streaming feeds and comments and then seeing the fans onsite watching themselves on-screen and taping the gala with their cell phones created a surreal moment of life in the twenty-first century.
In another interesting twist, the way the hosts spoke about the film revealed the way Gatsby is woven through culture. For example, Leo had already seen the film, while Istook had not. While glancing up and down from the ubiquitous iPad she held throughout the show, at one point Leo declared the film “a tragic love story.” Since he had not viewed the movie, however, Istook focused on the special effects, which seemed to interest him more, emphasizing that 3-D gave Luhrmann the “technology necessary to bring F. Scott’s vision to life.”
One wonders how much of their reactions were based on each playing a specific gender role and what commentary like this portends for Gatsby in the future. For her, the love story aspect of the film took center stage, while he highlighted the 3-D filming, which one might expect—the female focusing on emotion, with the male sticking to technology. Will the Luhrmann version in some ways usurp the novel as a quicker and easier method of engaging with Fitzgerald’s ideas versus the actual process of reading the novel?
Gatsby mania surfaced all over the globe, not just in the United States. The film scored major media coverage as it opened the Cannes Film Festival. In addition, numerous special events around the world took place to celebrate. In London, for instance, Harrods department store announced that it would open a unique cocktail bar to celebrate the film’s release in the United Kingdom. From May 9 to 20, Harrods shoppers could sip 1920s cocktails in a vintage bar setting reminiscent of the era. Another, the nightclub Libertine, in London’s West End, held a Gatsby-themed party hosted by official film sponsor Moët & Chandon champagne three days before the film opened in the UK on May 16, 2013. The party, which the club deemed a “saucy, alluring evening of glamour and excess,” required 1920s attire and featured live jazz music, dancers doing period numbers, and a burlesque performance.[4]
The explosion of interest in Gatsby as a film starring DiCaprio and filmed by director Luhrmann colliding with the utter pervasiveness of the novel itself and then adding on top the intense historic interest in the 1920s adds up to a unique popular culture phenomenon that may never again be rivaled. I am not sure if anything else could rival the combined effect of Gatsby, which begins for many people as early as ninth grade (at thirteen or fourteen years old), carries into college, often includes one or more of several film versions at some point, may involve CliffsNotes, and rereading as an adult.
The utter craze the movie accelerated is evidenced by the way the novel itself sold before and after the film release. Scribner’s reissued a paperback with the original cover art, as well as a film-inspired version with the cast and gold-and-black film logo. As a result of interest driven by the movie, the novel spent time atop Amazon’s best-seller list before being dropped to number two by megaseller Dan Brown’s new novel Inferno. One needs to look no further than the global media world for further evidence of the Gatsby rage. For example, a Google news search conducted several days after the Cannes opening resulted in 116 million hits on “Great Gatsby.” While much of this content centered on the film and reviews from all around the world, many writers and commentators set out to reexamine or analyze the novel and/or the film for contemporary audiences. Clearly from this research we find that what the Luhrmann and DiCaprio picture will do is further enhance and solidify the many meanings (and misunderstandings) about the novel, opening the ideas up to current and future generations of readers and viewers.
The images are splashed across popular culture: short skirts, sequins, bobbed hair, double-breasted suits, and slicked-back hair—the Roaring Twenties, the height of the Jazz Age. Unlike some decades that go in and out of style, the 1920s have remained fashionable, whether the era is the setting for a movie or novel or a person dresses up as a flapper or gangster at Halloween. The Hollywood/Internet hype machine and the enduring popularity of the 1920s collided as the Luhrmann film opened. As a result, the merchandising and product launch machine went into overdrive.
Yet, even with a blockbuster film, there seems to be a limit to how much marketing people can take. Writer Misty Harris contrasted those who called Gatsby “the most stylish movie ever made” with “the film’s multi-channel marketing [that] has demonstrated all the subtlety of Liberace’s piano.”[5] Numerous high-end brands created partnerships with the studio, such as Brooks Brothers and Tiffany & Co., as well as Moët & Chandon champagne and the Plaza Hotel in New York City. In the new world order of blockbuster films, though, these splashy product tie-ins are necessary to offset the massive costs of making movies.
A film release in today’s popular culture world is an event. Yet it is much more than celebrities and stars walking the red carpet. Countless divergent forces compete with one another, from video generated for YouTube and the inevitable CD release to the mountain of product tie-ins mentioned above and content driven by interviews and commentary. What the movie studios hope is that the resulting media convergence will overcome the typical white noise produced in a culture that churns on and on nonstop.
The idea behind convergence is that lines between media channels and consumerism no longer exist. One might ask, for example, how viral marketing on YouTube differs (if at all) from traditional advertising. What is clear, though, is that all these channels are now essential marketing tools. The goal of the marketers is to deepen and extend the tie between fans and brands. Scholar Quentin Vieregge explains, “Brands do not simply label products anymore, they define our identities and help us relate to our communities.”[6] Given the enduring fascination with the Jazz Age and the hype surrounding Gatsby, the opportunity presented a dream scenario for companies hoping to gain from the synergy.
People do not just interact with brands they cherish; they consume them, particularly if the item is linked to a celebrity. Thus, the idea that a person could dress like Jay Gatsby or wear jewelry similar to Daisy’s compels consumers to buy. The companies that produce the merchandise, in turn, use events like the film release in an attempt to stand above the seemingly endless cloud of marketing, advertising, sales, and informational touch points demanding something from consumers—their attention, money, memory, or engagement. Imagine the millions of impressions that were created just in the release of Iron Man 3 and Gatsby in successive weekends as the early summer season kicked off. Not only is the resulting blur of information stultifying, but these franchises are also competing against one another for space on the viewer’s mental screen.
As we all know, the Internet plays a central role in how brands interact with consumers and potential stakeholders. Every artist, actor, musician, and brand ambassador in a converged culture operates in a setting that enables constant interaction with consumers across numerous media outlets, but the idea that everyone is always adding to the system creates a situation in which people cannot decipher or distinguish the messages.
What Gatsby had going for it in this high-stakes setting is that millions of people had read or at least heard of the novel, so the film’s marketers did not have to start from scratch. Furthermore, the use of established film stars basically ensured that people would pay attention to some degree. Vieregge sees storytelling as a central element here, saying, “The brands that catch our attention are those that tell stories about who we are, our community, and how the brand ties us to our community.”[7] In other words, the story already existed, as did people’s relationship with the book or an earlier film, which then strengthened the marketing efforts. In total, these influences lead to greater exposure, thus greasing the marketing gears that keep the popular culture industry churning.
In addition to playing up the star-filled cast and timeless story, Gatsby marketers launched a Facebook page that just after the movie hit the box office tallied more than six hundred thousand “likes.” More importantly, the page gave fans a way to engage with the film, from taking part via commenting to running special contests and giveaways. A fan art contest, for example, allowed participants to create their own versions of Gatsby, which resulted in beautiful pieces that were then shared on the Facebook page. Another tool gave fans the ability to create themselves as 1922 avatars. From the perspective of consuming the brand, these opportunities gave people the option of engaging with the film in a number of ways, based on one’s own preferences.
Pulling fans into the creative process and then giving them a chance to interact plays on the general narcissism of Americans today. With YouTube, for instance, consumers realize that they can create and recreate their own versions of popular culture items. Movie execs then walk a thin line between protecting copyright and artistic integrity versus the chance to drive viewers, listeners, and others interested in the work.
YouTube also played a significant role in advertising the film, as it does with all new work these days. Some 760,000 videos appeared when searching “Great Gatsby” the day the film opened the Cannes Film Festival. These results ranged from brief clips made by fans discussing their eagerness to see the film to authorized trailers and the entire sound track. Many clips were interviews with various stars and musicians associated with the Luhrmann film. Others were tangential, hoping to play off the hype, such as the piece demonstrating “Daisy’s Dance” as a cardio workout (received about ninety thousand views). Another video showcased a makeup tutorial that promised to help women look like flappers from the Jazz Age and it rang up more than sixty-five thousand views in just six days. A competitor in the makeup video category hit thirty-one thousand in the same time frame. Some companies also sponsored videos/ads, including Tiffany & Co., which forged a close relationship with the film based on the jewels featured in the movie.
From my perspective, the critical reception of the Luhrmann film corroborates the thesis of this book. First, I think the wildly undulating reviews demonstrate not only that people have deep-rooted ideas about the book and movie, but also that balancing their expectations against these notions produces rather strong opinions. Second, since everyone seems to have a judgment about what Gatsby means or how it should be interpreted, the mass media commentators are adding a level of both analysis and misinformation into the overall gist of the idea of meta-Gatsby. In this view, the critics are acting as educators, both interpreting the film and adding to the reader’s or viewer’s sense of what it all suggests. As a matter of fact, I think the film is going to become more central to how people think about meta-Gatsby, regardless of what the critics conclude are the strengths and weaknesses of Luhrmann’s version.
The distance between a novel of ideas and a novel of action is what makes Fitzgerald’s masterpiece so elusive and difficult to film. Gatsby’s place in the action is at the core here. In the novel, Fitzgerald keeps the titular character submerged. However, Hollywood requires that his story be central. For some readers, too, this dichotomy either results in one loving or hating the book. People simply do not realize that Gatsby is a novel of ideas masked within a novel of action. Thus, we have a story that begins in flashback and seems to end with the main character’s death and funeral, but even here Fitzgerald takes us back to Nick from a current perspective.
Just like a person would experience memory in reality, Nick is haphazard with times and dates, which accentuates the timelessness of summer and the ideas at the heart of the book. The cloaking that occurs is the result of Fitzgerald’s ability to manage these intricacies, as well as his beautiful writing style. Using Nick as a narrator enables Fitzgerald to emphasize the storytelling aspects while concurrently casting the unreliability in that recounting. Because Nick is all over the place in retelling the story and weaving it with his own judgments of the action, the reader finds room for interpretation that other novels try to force. Thus, Gatsby lives on into the twenty-first century in a way that other books of that era have not.
As a result, the film versions of Gatsby look beautiful and are shot brilliantly, but yet they still collapse as the physical depiction of the romance between Jay and Daisy takes precedence over the idea of romance. The former is what filmmakers create in an assessment of what filmgoers want to see, but the latter is what Fitzgerald actually produced and has kept readers returning to the novel.
Certainly the Hollywood star system has an impact here. Movie producers cannot hire actors like Robert Redford and Leonardo DiCaprio for millions or tens of millions of dollars to play iconic roles and then keep them offscreen for two-thirds of the film, as Fitzgerald does in the novel. Thus, adapting the book to film necessitates that Gatsby becomes the central figure in the story, much more concrete and “real” than the author ever intended.
In the latest adaptation, critics generally applauded DiCaprio’s performance and felt that it is one of the film’s highlights. At the other end of the spectrum, though, commentators see Tobey Maguire’s Nick as a weakness, as well as the new asylum story line Luhrmann introduced to show him telling the story. But, even here, the reviewers are mixed in assessing these specific scenes and characters. Perhaps noted film critic David Edelstein’s review sums up the general consensus: “Why I Sort of Liked The Great Gatsby.”[8] Richard Lawson, reviewing for the Atlantic, stands in for many commentators, declaring, “His [Luhrmann’s] Gatsby ultimately proves an overly simple, and decidedly unthoughtful, stagger through familiar territory. It’s not without its merits, though.”[9]
For other reviewers, the film’s flaw was structural and centered on the notion that the 3-D special effects and wild party scenes detract from the seriousness of the work. For example, reviewing the movie for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Joanna Connors discusses her frustration, explaining that under Luhrmann’s direction, Gatsby
is what you would expect. . . . It is all spectacle, and no introspection. It’s gorgeous and overwhelming and packed to the very edges of the frame with activity and lush, showy production design. . . . I found the 3-D distracting and completely at odds with the material—except, perhaps, during the extravagant bacchanals at Gatsby’s mansion.[10]
While generally liking the scenes, Edelstein still chimes, “The Deco extravagance of the big party scenes is enthralling. Luhrmann throws money at the screen in a way that is positively Gatsby-like, walloping you intentionally and un- with the theme of prodigal waste.”[11]
The reason I find the critical reception of the latest adaptation so important is that it demonstrates how smart people both interpret and misinterpret the novel (as they have in print and other media for many decades). For example, Slate’s Dana Stevens calls Gatsby “the story of a supremely unsubtle man given to bold gestures and flashy set pieces.”[12] From my perspective, every aspect of this statement could be challenged, yet in having Slate as a platform for publishing this review, Stevens is influencing a large audience of readers who may or may not have the ability or experience to evaluate such statements.
I do not want to place too much emphasis on the judgment of a handful of reviewers, but the collective reviews across traditional and online media in widely read venues have a shelf life of their own. Just as a good or bad teacher could irrevocably harm or benefit a student, reviewers have power. The influence of thousands of reviews of the film and comparisons to the novel will shape the conversation about meta-Gatsby in our culture.
This book is not about my evaluation of Luhrmann’s Gatsby or the novel itself. However, some insight into the film might be valuable as readers think about its place as a part of meta-Gatsby. While most reviewers read the novel (ironically, those that did not often admitted so or claimed that they had not read it in a long time), I think a scholarly assessment is useful, particularly since I have read the novel upward of a hundred times, listened to it narrated a couple dozen times, and read much of the academic criticism produced about Fitzgerald and his work.
Personally, my epiphanic moment came while watching the streaming video of the movie premiere described above. Something clicked and I determined right then and there that I would watch the movie as a movie and attempt to divorce myself from my scholarly interest. In other words, I would look at the film as its own distinct entity. What I found by getting out of my own way intellectually is that the film was breathtaking in its sweep, particularly from an emotional perspective. The cast, under Luhrmann’s direction, nailed the power of Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, ultimately bringing the novel to life in a way that had not been done previously.
Luhrmann and cowriter Craig Pearce add many details to the film in an attempt to flesh out Jay Gatsby, which accentuates the dark side of a 1920s gangster. For example, Gatsby lashes out or reacts in several instances that demonstrate he is barely keeping his façade together. More specifically, in the famous scene at the Park Plaza Hotel when Daisy ultimately chooses her life with Tom, Gatsby attacks Tom Buchanan, screaming wildly and raising his fist and ready to strike before regaining his composure. Beautifully, though, while Gatsby attempts to rein himself in, his hair is disheveled and symbolizes his violent streak and wildness just below the surface. At another point, it seems as if Gatsby is having difficulty maintaining his place as Meyer Wolfsheim’s figurehead leader and balancing his affair with Daisy.
In what I see as a nod to contemporary culture, Luhrmann and Pearce also emphasize Gatsby’s celebrity, making his fame and fortune front-page fodder. One headline zips across the 3-D screen and asks: “Where Did the Money Come From?” Without diluting the mysteriousness surrounding the main character, the film invites the viewer to question the link between wealth and fame, as well as the centrality of celebrity in the modern world.
This version of Gatsby also plays to today’s moviegoers by serving up many details in a more heavy-handed manner. One glaring example focuses the way Tom repeatedly points out that the newly rich Gatsby and his faux friends are different than the respectable, patrician old-money East Eggers who have pedigree and class. At one point he declares that he and others like him are “born different” because money is “in our blood.” Perhaps the most direct demonstration involving Tom is that the film shows him telling George Wilson about Gatsby and insinuating that the garage owner should kill him. The change from the way Fitzgerald portrayed the events leading up to Gatsby’s death does not make Tom any less guilty or complicit, but it does give the filmmakers a chance to quicken the film’s pace. Personally, while I understand the need to explain the action more directly (after all, before films even begin, audiences are told half a dozen or more times to not talk and silence their cell phones), removing the subtleties allows viewers to outsource their thinking more than I would like to imagine.
What this new version of Gatsby nails is the grandiosity of the novel and its deep emotion. When Jay enters Nick’s bungalow to see Daisy for the first time, the character’s nervousness and anxiety surge like an electric shock through the theater. It is a palpable emotion, nearly making the viewer uncomfortable at his ache. And, while some critics thought that DiCaprio overplayed the use of “old sport,” coming off a bit too smart-alecky, the awkwardness of the phrase harkened one back to Fitzgerald’s declaration (via Nick) that Jay Gatsby was a young roughneck with just enough fake formality to be simultaneously laughable, yet convincing.
***
Undeniably, the Luhrmann version of Gatsby is now the standard adaptation of the novel. This status is weighty, because viewers now and in the future will use the film as a means for interpreting, assessing, and contextualizing the book and vice versa. One can imagine generations of high school and college teachers lamenting the differences between the two, collectively smacking their foreheads each time a student makes reference to an aspect of the film in a paper about the novel.
From a broader perspective, however, a more positive outcome is that future readers and/or viewers will have additional tools to engage with the ideas contained in each. Scholar Arthur Frank, discussing the role of storytelling, explains:
To think about a story is to reduce it to content and then analyze that content. Thinking with stories takes the story as already complete; there is no going beyond it. To think with a story is to experience it affecting one’s own life and to find in that effect a certain truth of one’s life.[13]
In the case of Gatsby, we have already identified the multitude of ways it has become a cultural touchstone. Thus, the new film not only adds to the folklore but extends and broadens its many meanings—it is a new and critical part of meta-Gatsby that people all over the globe will have at their disposal as they rethink its meaning in their lives.
Andrew Wilson, “Has the Moulin Rouge Director Created the Starriest, Glitziest, Greatest Gatsby of All?” MailOnline (U.K.), April 20, 2013, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/event/article-2311016/The-Great-Gatsby-Has-Moulin-Rouge-director-Baz-Luhrmann-created-starriest-glitziest-Greatest-Gatsby-all.html?ito=feeds-newsxml (accessed April 21, 2013).
Quoted in Wilson, “Greatest Gatsby of All?”
Quoted in Wilson, “Greatest Gatsby of All?”
“Libertine Presents Gatsby,” Press Release, May 13, 2013, http://www.libertineclublondon.com/ (accessed May 18, 2013).
Misty Harris, “The Great Gatsby Is a Branding Phenomenon,” Canada.com/Postmedia News, May 2, 2013, http://www.canada.com/entertainment/movie-guide/Great+Gatsby+branding+phenomenon/8326042/story.html (accessed May 15, 2013).
Quentin Vieregge, “Whose Brand Is It Anyway? How Brands Become Cults by Becoming Inclusive,” in Cult Pop Culture: How the Fringe Became Mainstream, ed. Bob Batchelor (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger, 2012), 71.
Vieregge, “Whose Brand Is It Anyway?” 71.
David Edelstein, “Why I Sort of Liked The Great Gatsby,” Vulture/New York Magazine, May 7, 2013, http://www.vulture.com/2013/05/movie-review-the-great-gatsby.html (accessed May 15, 2013).
Richard Lawson, “The Tragic Emptiness of The Great Gatsby,” review of The Great Gatsby film, Atlantic Wire, May 8, 2013, http://www.theatlanticwire
.com/entertainment/2013/05/great-gatsby-review/65020/ (accessed May 18, 2013).
Joanna Connors, “Gatsby in 3-D Is a Manic, Three-Ring Spectacle,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 5, 2013, http://www.cleveland.com/books/index.ssf/2013/05/gatsby_in_3-d_is_a_manic_three.html (accessed May 6, 2013).
Edelstein, “The Great Gatsby.”
Dana Stevens, “The Great Gatsby,” review of The Great Gatsby film, Slate, May 9, 2013, http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/2013/05/the_great_gatsby_directed_by_baz_luhrmann_reviewed.html (accessed May 15, 2013).
Arthur Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 23.