Baz Luhrmann’s “The Great Gatsby” is lurid, shallow, glamorous, trashy, tasteless, seductive, sentimental, aloof, and artificial. It’s an excellent adaptation, in other words, of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s melodramatic American classic. Luhrmann, as expected, has turned “Gatsby” into a theme-park ride. But he’s done it in exactly the right way. He hasn’t tried to make the novel more respectable, intellectual, or realistic. Instead, he’s taken “The Great Gatsby” very seriously just as it is.
“Gatsby” is hard to pin down. On the one hand, it’s broadly understood as a classic American novel, which suggests that it must have important things to say about the twenties, money, love, and the American dream. On the other, it seems self-evidently to be about style over substance. It’s short (only a hundred and fifty pages); its plot is absurd; and it examines only the thinnest wedge of American life. It was poorly received when it was published (H. L. Mencken thought it was “no more than a glorified anecdote”), and it continues to be an object of skepticism (Kathryn Schulz, in last week’s New York, writes that “Gatsby” is “aesthetically overrated, psychologically vacant, and morally complacent”). In 1950, in “The Liberal Imagination,” Lionel Trilling predicted that Gatsby’s story would lose its magnetism: Gatsby, Trilling wrote, represented the fantasy of “personal ambition and heroism, of life committed to, or thrown away for, some ideal of self,” while modern society urges young people to find “distinction through cooperation, subordination, and an expressed piety of social usefulness.” (“The Great Zuckerberg” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.) And yet, all the while, “Gatsby” has grown more beloved and resonant. Today the novel, like Gatsby himself, seems suspicious.
A lot of the confusion stems from the fact that “Gatsby” isn’t like other great American books. It’s not a social novel, like “Sister Carrie,” or a novel of manners, like “The House of Mirth,” or a novel about our national destiny, like “American Pastoral.” “Gatsby” is weirder than all those books; it’s more like Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio.” It’s about a spiritual atmosphere, and about the inner life that gives rise to that atmosphere. It’s popular because we still live in that atmosphere today. Fitzgerald’s novel is cool, sexy, stylized, and abstract; there’s a dreamlike falseness, a hollowness, an unreality to it, and that apparent superficiality is part of what makes it fascinating. It’s modernist and European without being arty. The best moments in the novel have the devious, carnal sophistication of high fashion; the characters seem unreal, but are also unforgettable. And, for all its strangeness, it also possesses a glamorous, crowd-pleasing commercialism.
What’s most appealing about “Gatsby” might be its mood of witty hopelessness, of vivacious self-destructiveness. When Daisy says, of her daughter, “I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool,” you can’t help but be drawn in. Perhaps she’s right: look around, and you can easily see the advantages of being rich, attractive, and ignorant. Even if she isn’t right, Daisy’s attitude strikes a chord. This atmosphere of casual, defiant, disillusioned cool is the novel’s unique contribution to literature. It’s the reason the novel’s endured. And it’s to this side of the novel that Luhrmann is attracted: the seductive side.
Fitzgerald understood the pleasures of giving in, and he saw people as desperate to give in to nearly anything—a drink, a person, a story, a feeling, a song, a crowd, an idea. We were especially willing, he thought, to give in to ideas—to fantasies. “Gatsby” captures, with great vividness, the push and pull of illusion and self-delusion; the danger and thrill of forgetting, lying, and fantasizing; the hazards and the indispensability of dreaming and idealization. We often declare our independence, Fitzgerald thought, by declaring our allegiance to a cause that makes what Trilling called a “large, strict, personal demand upon life.” Everyone is always getting carried away in “Gatsby” (not least its narrator, Nick Carraway). They get swept up in big parties. They don’t want to drink, but once the whiskey bottle is produced, they drink too much. They’re led into back rooms where they meet gangsters. They become involved in love triangles. They accept the generosity of bad people; they borrow cars and drive too fast; they adopt mannerisms, and believe in principles which, last week, they didn’t know existed. Everybody is getting carried away—but always in their own way. Daisy, when she sings along, sings “in a husky, rhythmic whisper, bringing out a meaning in each word that it had never had before and would never have again.” Reading “Gatsby,” you think: What could be more pleasurable? You meet someone at a party, and you find that their attitudes exert a force on yours. You become a little more like them, and, also, a little more yourself. It’s a little like the way you fall in love with a pop song. You give in to the same song as everyone else, but in the most private, personal way.
In “The Great Gatsby,” there are a few large ideas, a few common dreams, to which everybody is attracted. Gatsby’s romantic fantasy, his love story, exerts the most force in the novel. Gatsby’s organized his life around one big idea: that love, at its best, is permanent and impersonal. This is his dream, his song. A love affair seems like something that happens between two people at a particular time and place, but, Gatsby hopes, if their love is strong enough, it becomes a law of nature, a rule of fate that can’t be changed by circumstance or even by choice. It’s a familiar wish—we all want to be loved perfectly and forever—and it makes for a great story; there’s something admirable in it, and, along with Nick, you wonder whether a Great Romance might complete your life. (“Unlike Gatsby and Tom Buchanan,” Nick says, “I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs, and so I drew up the girl beside me, tightening her in my arms.”)
But “Gatsby” isn’t really a novel about love. It’s more interested in the act of fantasizing than in any particular fantasy. Much of “The Great Gatsby” is spent watching as many dreams and fantasies as possible, including Gatsby’s, rise and fall like the tides. There’s the compelling dream of youth, with its parties, songs, and dances, with its sexuality, beauty, and athleticism. There’s Nick’s dream of the old America: the place to which you go home for the holidays, “my Middle West . . . where dwellings are still called through decades by a family’s name.” There’s the vague dream of art (represented, dismally, by the photographer Mr. McKee, and by Gatsby’s shirts, and by jazz). And on the margins are the dreams of intellectual life, business success, and family happiness. Gatsby is magnetic in part because he accepts everyone, no matter what it is they idealize: with a smile, Nick says, Gatsby “understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that he had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.” Only later do we realize that Gatsby is so open-minded because he is the ultimate dreamer and pretender.
“Gatsby” isn’t an argument in favor of fantasy, though. It’s about the costs of fantasy—inevitable costs, since our dreams and fantasies are part of who we are. It’s through fantasy that we edit out the parts of our lives that make us uncomfortable, as Gatsby edits from his own story the criminality of the business he runs with Meyer Wolfsheim. And every fantasy has an apex from which it recedes. Every dream is both seductive and insufficient. Like a trader in the markets, you have to know when to get out of one and buy into another. (Gatsby, Nick concludes, made the mistake of “living too long with a single dream”; this makes him admirable, but also unwise, even delusional.) A kind of fatigue sets in. Eventually, nothing seems permanent or precious; everything becomes temporary and disposable. “It was all very careless and confused,” Nick says, later. “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they made.” Carelessness, the novel suggests, is one of the costs of fantasy. Often, to dream up a new life, you have to destroy the old one.
The real achievement of “Gatsby,” in other words, is that it shows us a state of mind. It’s a state of spiritual hunger and dissatisfaction, of restlessness and curiosity, of excitement and anticipation, in which one is, as Nick puts it, “within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.” All this unfolds beneath that disillusioned surface. This is how you feel when you understand that there is no obviously right way to live, but find that you must choose anyway. It’s pessimistic and ironic, in the sense that you are always only half-committed to your way of life. But it’s also exciting, because you are always on the edge of discovery. There’s always something at stake. The main thing is that you are never settled. You are always hungry, always searching, always throwing feelings away in order to make room for new ones.
It’s possible to believe, as many critics do, that this is a uniquely American state of mind, and there’s a sense in which “Gatsby” is describing what it’s like to be young in America. Youth is when we do the most weighing and choosing, when we try out new personalities until they become exhausted or destructive. And in a consumer society, youth is extended. We’re increasingly free to pursue our fantasies, to buy the costumes and accouterments of the lives we’d like to have. The result is a kind of national carelessness that realizes itself economically, ecologically, and politically. Luhrmann’s “Gatsby” gestures toward the link between our period and Fitzgerald’s. Our pop hits take place “in the club,” and, Luhrmann shows, so did theirs. We love cocktails and speakeasy bars, and so did they. As in the twenties, we tend to admire wealth, no matter how it’s made.
But the real strength of Luhrmann’s movie is that it turns inward—not toward psychological realism, exactly, but toward fantasy. “Gatsby” is, to the end, defiantly unrealistic. (The same is true of Fitzgerald’s novel: it ends in the most lurid way possible, with a hit-and-run and a murder-suicide.) The best sequence in his movie is a montage of Daisy and Gatsby after they’ve gotten back together. They laugh and swim; Daisy dives into Gatsby’s spectacular pool. She tries to drive a golf ball off Gatsby’s dock, and, laughing, breaks the club. It’s filmed like a photo shoot, and set to an arresting song by Lana Del Rey called “Young and Beautiful.” The lyrics of the song exactly sum up Gatsby’s wish. (“Will you still love me when I’m no longer young and beautiful? Will you still love me when I’ve got nothing but my aching soul? I know you will.”) Del Rey, with her self-consciously retro sound, look, and pseudonym (her real name is Lizzy Grant), is the perfect singer to put at the center of “Gatsby.” And the scene, which shows Daisy and Gatsby living out their fantasy lives, also shows them to us as fantasies. When Daisy, at Gatsby’s party, asks, “Was all this made entirely from your own imagination?,” her question is directed not just at him but at us. It captures one of the strange facts that “Gatsby” reveals: that even when we imagine our fantasy selves, we imagine them with unfulfilled fantasies of their own. We are watching the fantasies of fantasy people. We think: if only we could dream their dreams.
And there’s another sense in which I think Lurhmann gets “Gatsby” exactly right. His movie, which is presented in 3-D, seems streamlined and pre-packaged—it’s presented, self-consciously, as mass entertainment—and his characters feel flat, smoothed-out, uncomplicated. Many critics have charged the movie with flatness, too. In his excellent essay on the film, my colleague Richard Brody writes that “there’s no roughness whatsoever to [DiCaprio’s] character, none of life’s burrs or scrapes, no tinge of real power”; Carey Mulligan, similarly, “doesn’t invest the character with style or with substance.” The director, he concludes, is “unable to take society seriously, to recognize the extraordinary character that extraordinary manners both hide and (for those attuned to them) display.” These are legitimate, discerning objections, and yet I can’t help but feel that the film’s flatness is a deliberate choice; that what seems like a failure of Luhrmann’s imagination is actually a faithfulness to Fitzgerald’s. The characters are like that in the novel, too; that’s why Lionel Trilling, in “The Liberal Imagination,” compared them to “ideographs.” Flatness, after all, is the state to which all of Fitzgerald’s characters aspire. Even Gatsby, whose life thrums with secret ambition and desire, manages to be the cool man in the pink suit. “You always look so cool,” Daisy tells him. In a moment of admiration, she says that he resembles “an advertisement” of a man.
The flatness of the characters in “Gatsby” is, I think, part of what makes it so insightful. It might seem as though, if we were to live out our fantasy lives, we would become more creative and expansive; we would be unfettered, alive, and truly ourselves. But “The Great Gatsby” doesn’t think that fantasies work that way. In “Gatsby,” everyone wants to be simpler than they really are. Everyone wants to give himself up to something that will define, constrain, and explain him—to be swept up into a fantasy that’s narrower than the life he really lives. Everyone is a fantasist, and, therefore, an actor, a “beautiful little fool.”
