Great Gatsby Revisited

But, after I had written that, I came across this great newspaper clipping I had cut out and saved for all of these years. A lovely work of art, and I wish I knew the name of the artist who rendered it, so I could give credit where credit is due: And, yes - I told you that I had the movie and the paperback: But I didn't even remember that I also had this! Another paperback, purchased in , this one about the filming of the movie.

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Found it packed away in a box of books I unearthed in my storage space - books I have had since I was in high school. So, one more piece in my little collection: Maybe one of these days. Posted by Heidi Ann at 5: Authors , Favorite Books , Movies. Nick's generation has come home from war to a booming economy. Nick himself is in New York to get rich in the bond business rather than stay in the family hardware firm. He has been doing everything right: Now he's ready to move up.

Gatsby, by contrast, has done everything wrong. He comes from a working-class background.

He's exploited chance contacts with the wealthy to become wealthy himself, but on the wrong side of the law. He's met Nick's cousin Daisy, a southern belle, fallen in love with her, and then lost her to Tom Buchanan, old American money. He's made something of himself, in an ironic Horatio Alger way, but only so that he can win her back -- and thereby fulfill his version of the American dream.

In the summer of , everyone is on the rise, and Nick doesn't always approve.

He mentions driving across a bridge and being passed by a car with a white chauffeur and two well-dressed black men in the back. Gatsby's wealth is largely thanks to Meyer Wolfsheim: Nick also takes the trouble to list those who attended Gatsby's parties, a brilliantly snobbish set piece that catalogues the range of social climbers:.

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From farther out on the Island came the Cheadles and the O. Snell was there three days before he went to the penitentiary, so drunk out on the gravel drive that Mrs. Ulysses Swett's automobile ran over his right hand. As for sexism, Nick's world takes it for granted. Women are almost a different species, more symbolic than real.

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That's why winning Daisy back is so important to Gatsby, who doesn't seem to have a clue who she is as a person. Nick, meanwhile, casually mentions a brief summertime affair that ends when the girl's brother threatens him. He also ditches the "small-breasted" tennis player Jordan Baker. Clearly, social mobility has gone too far in s America. Nick describes Tom Buchanan, the young millionaire, worrying about a junk-science book called "The Rising Tide of Color" that warns of the decline of the white race.

The source of Tom's own family wealth is unmentioned, but is likely as dubious as Gatsby's. Nick feels as threatened by the Buchanan wealth as by that of the well-dressed blacks on the bridge and the freeloading parvenus at Gatsby's parties. The movie versions of the novel have all emphasized the glamour of the characters and their time: Judging from the trailers for the latest version, the glamour-meter has been cranked up beyond 11 through the magic of over-the-top art design, computer graphics and 3D. But the novel itself shows only the horrifying tackiness of social mobility.

Gatsby's mansion was built by another parvenu pretending to be a British lord of the manor. Wolfsheim admires Gatsby because "he's an Oggsford man. Nick commutes to work through an industrial wasteland he calls the valley of ashes.

In that wasteland, the wife of a gas-station manager has become the girlfriend of Tom Buchanan, who one day drags Nick along on a sordid outing with her. The narrative of that afternoon and night in the aspiring lower middle class makes horror fiction look tame, though the only violence is in the moment when Tom breaks his girlfriend's nose. Fitzgerald, an immensely successful young writer, achieved his generation's dream in the act of grasping its failure. Gatsby's vision of "the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us" was his own, but Fitzgerald already saw that vision turning to ashes and the blood in Gatsby's swimming pool.

The whole brief novel is a portrait of a nation duped by its own fantasies, and the movies made from it have only reinforced those fantasies with their emphasis on quaint fashions and expensive cars. Fitzgerald understood what was happening, both to himself and to fiction.

He saw literature in print being gradually destroyed by the "more glittering medium" of movies, and Hollywood has paid him the fatal compliment of loving him to death. Version after version of Gatsby has followed his plot and dialogue, but what lives on the page is invariably dead on the screen. All that glitters is not gold. When subscribing to a newsletter edition you'll also get early notice on Tyee events, news, promotions, partner messages and special initiatives.