Gatsby and the silver screen

I picked up The Great Gatsby for the umpteenth time not long ago, inspired I suppose by the release of the trailerfor Baz Luhrmann’s film that’s due for release later this year. It’s a good clip, one that gets your attention, focusing on the book's dark menace and filled with so many of Fitzgerald's iconic images—the wild party, Daisy’s shirt orgasm, Gatsby’s circus wagon, the Negroes and the white chauffeur, the Eyes of T.J. Eckelburg—that it seems almost self-conscious, as if Luhrmann is telling Gatsby-philes “see, I read the book, I know what it’s about.” Behind it all is Kanye West’s and Jay Z’s ‘No Church in the Wild,” a song that’s not only a compelling musically but shares the book’s theme of a society that worships all the wrong things.

I’m not sure, though, how you can make a movie version of The Great Gatsby and make it work. The book operates on many levels that can be translated to the screen by a talented director like Luhrmann—a love story, the slow unmasking of a mysterious stranger, an historical document of the Jazz Age, a critical analysis of The American Dream. Dozens of movies every year include one or more of those themes. But the level the book operates at most successfully—the level that sets it apart from so many other great works of literature-- is that it’s just a damn good read, and translating that to film seems pretty much impossible. So much of the joy of reading Gatsby is Fitzgerald’s words, his turns of phrase, his sense of humor, the way he says the obvious in a way nobody did before and hasn’t since. It’s so well written it takes only as much time to read as your average bodice-ripper; it’s about as third as long as those idiotic vampire novels but infinitely better.

Fitzgerald’s writing style is ahead of its time, with its irony and droll humor. Even though it was the umpteenth time I read it, I still laughed at Gatsby’s attempt to manufacture a meet-cute with Daisy or the way Wolfsheim pronounces “gonnegtion.” Like all great works of literature, you’re compelled to go back and re-read Fitzgerald’s sentence, but with Gatsby it’s because you do it because the sentence is fun to read, not because you’re trying to figure out what the author is saying. How Luhrmann manages to translate that to the screen will depend on whether his film is successful. It’s one thing to tell the right story and film the right icons; it’s another thing to make it as fun to watch as the book is fun to read.

Eventually, Fitzgerald would wind up in Hollywood himself writing screenplays and re-writing others while he slowly drank his life away. His last novel--The Last Tycoon--was about a Hollywood studio head and was left incomplete when his liver finally blew up. So there's a certain irony at work here, that while he worked on all kinds of screenplays himself, his greatest book is pretty much unfilmable.