An Opinion

 

The Great or not so great Gatsby

This coming week our Senior Community will be having a weekend party based on the style of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic American novel, The Great Gatsby. There will be live music, drinks, costumes, casino games, and all-around glitter.

Last week, as a part of the PR promoting the event, we were treated to a screening of the 2013 film adaptation of the book by Australian director Baz Luhrman.  It’s main stars were Leonardo Di Caprio and Carey Mulligan. Buried in my own memory bank, however, is a previous adaptation from 1974 starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow. I remember it now because I watched it as part of my research for a production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Nights Dream that I was directing in the 1980’s. I had done the play before in the 1960’s with a sort of Grecian cum Elizabethan look and was searching for a  different production look and hook. What I hit on was to set the production in the roaring twenties with a Gatsby party ambience. The men were suavely suited in sport coats and open necked shirts with ascots; the women sported brightly colored, frilly, flapper dresses complete with feather boas.  I drew the music from classic Charleston tunes and honky-tonk jazz.

Like my 1980’s production the 1974 and 2013 film versions tried to catch all the flash and pzazz of our sugar-coated image of the period.  The 2013 film by Luhrman was by far more extravagant than my theatre production or the 1974 film.  It had frenetic camera movement, intense colors, vistas of McMansions spreading out on Long Island waterfronts, fancy period roadsters careening down narrow roads, and of course blazing Busby Berkely styled images of wild, alcohol fueled parties.

No film adaptation of Fitzgerald’s classic novel can avoid the tragic ending. Most recent attempts to reproduce the “Gatsby style” seem to be more interested in reproducing the atmosphere without the full-scale critique of the era that the original novel focused on.  Literary critics have described the novel as the classic dissection of the peculiar American penchant for flak driven and often criminal self-invention. Think P.T Barnum, Bernie Madoff, and Donald Trump as examples. The Gatsby parties in the book were supposed to demonstrate the emptiness of a life style based on conspicuous consumption without any kind of social conscience.  Our American culture has often fallen for glitz and glitter to the point of dismissing everything else and the result has been, as Fitzgerald saw it, the comeuppance of the Great Depression followed by the Second World War.  

What I did with Shakespeare in the 1980’s and what our party is doing this weekend is celebrating the veneer without scratching the wood underneath. Around us still swirls the racial divide, the political division, the widening income gap, and as of this week the danger of a full scale European War.

I have nothing against parties. Most of us here have lived through enough to deserve a respite from reality once in a while. Yet I do hope that we can spare a few minutes to remember that the Gatsby ambience celebrates the exuberance, the energy, and the decadence of the Jazz Age. Inside the glitter there remains a cautionary critique of a less than savory part of the American Dream.   

Jim De Young,  2/22/2022