Kauffmann, Fitzgerald, & P's characters

[terrance terrance]

There exists a Film Generation: the first generation that has matured in a 
culture in which the film has been of accepted serious relevance, however 
that seriousness is defined. Before 1935 films were proportionately more 
popular than they are now, but for the huge majority of film goers they 
represented a regular weekly or semiweekly bath of escapism. Such an 
escapist audience still exists in large number, but another audience, most 
of the born since 1935, exists along with it. This group, this Film 
Generation, is certainly not exclusively grim, but it is essentially 
serious. Even its appreciations of sheer entertainment films reflect an 
overall serious view.

There are a number of reasons, old and new, intrinsic and extrinsic why this 
generation has come into being. Here are some of the older intrinsic ones.

1. In an age imbued with technological interest, the film art flowers out of 
technology. Excepting architecture, film is the one art that can capitalize 
directly and extensively on
this centuries luxuriance in applied science.

In an era that is much concerned with the survival of the human being as 
such, in an increasingly mechanized age, here a complicated technology is 
used to celebrate the human being.


2. The world of surfaces and physical details has again become material for 
art. Just as the naturalistic novel seems to be sputtering to a halt, over 
described down to the last vest button, the film gives some of its virtues 
new artistic life.  A novelist who employs the slow steamroller apparatus of 
intense naturalism these days is asking for an extra vote of confidence from 
the reader, because the methods and effects are so familiar that the reader 
can anticipate by pages. Even when there is the interest of an unusual 
setting, the reader is conscious that different nouns have been slipped into 
a worn pattern.

[...] both the old and the latter-day naturalism must strain in order to 
connect.



Gatsby "sprang from his Platonic conception of himself." He creates "the 
Great Gatsby" from the raw material of his early self, James Gatz, and from 
a boundless imagination, an embodied spirit capable of anything it chooses 
to do. But when, at last, Gatsby kissed Daisy and "forever wed his 
unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp 
again like the mind of God." The ideal world, in Gatsby's case, shatters in 
the face of the real one. It has, of course, happened before with Dutch 
sailors who "for a transitory and enchanted moment" contemplated the "fresh 
green breast of the new world." And, as Nick knows, it will happen as long 
as there is a human spirit to contemplate mystery.
        The intricate weaving of the various stories within The Great Gatsby 
is accomplished through a complex symbolic substructure of the narrative. 
The green light, which carries meaning at every level of the story--as 
Gatsby's go-ahead sign, as money, as the "green breast of the new world," as 
springtime--is strategically placed in chapters one, five, and nine. The 
eyes of T.J. Eckleburg "brood on over the solemn dumping ground," which is 
the wasteland that America has become, and their empty gaze is there at 
crucial moments such as that of Tom's visit to his mistress in the Valley of 
Ashes and before and after her death, a reminder that God has been replaced 
by fading signs of American materialism.

http://www.people.vcu.edu/~bmangum/gatsby.htm

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