NOT PYNCHON but The Great Gatsby

[Rev'd Seventy-Six]

"Imagination is what we are supposed to have faith in. Gatsby did."

So why didn't the director--  or the scriptwriter, for that matter?

The re-jiggering of the novel's plot may have been necessitated by the
framing device of Nick's rehab, but I'm not convinced Carraway In Therapy
was a particularly imaginative solution to the 'problem' of explaining the
Lost Generation to contemporary audiences.  For starters, it undercut any
surprises for us by giving away Gatsby's history prior to his grand row
with Tom.  Where's the imagination there?  No hinting, just straight-up
infodump.  That one decision deflated a great deal of the tension in their
argument.  In place of tension we were given scenery snailkissed with stale
saliva & buckshot with toothmarks.

Making Nick focused on Jay to the exclusion of his iffy romance with Jordan
also imbalanced the relationship dynamics which, in my girlfriend's
opinion, Made the novel.  She didn't appreciate how Jordan was reduced to a
golf caddy, ferrying Nick from one plot point to the next, and I have to
absolutely agree.  All the female roles were ciphers, even by the
admittedly tipsy standards of *une génération perdue*.  The beautiful,
hollow people of Fitzgerald's story were cored to the rind by Baz's
hysterical-realist efforts to recontextualize them.  Objectification &
abuse of pretty young girls was romanticized but as far as actual
consequences style usurped story.  No one got a hangover from bathtub gin.
Mascara ran and people died beautifully and even if Nick's therapy didn't
take at least he got a book out of it.  Nice moral.  Roll credits.

Like I said, I know the GG wasn't for me.  I tend to pick these things
apart to see how they work, and in the case of this 'un it had more visual
frosting than Danny Boyle's 'Trance' but even less insight.  Putting on the
glitz in lieu of putting forth an actual Mystery of Jay served only to make
it more anonymous in my eyes.

"The more closely you look at Gatsby, the more mysterious he becomes.  Was
he actually psychotic, a split personality, one hand not knowing what the
other hand was doing?  It doesn't seem likely.  You need both hands to
function in Wolfshine's area.  Were these emotions and this improbable
dream skillfully grafted onto him by the author--  is that the real
secret?  That he was a hybrid, a synthetic being, literally created by
Fitzgerald's prose, who could not possibly have existed in any other
medium?"

--William S. Burroughs
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