NOT PYNCHON but The Great Gatsby

[Rev'd Seventy-Six]

Ignore me and like what you like.  I'm just being curmudgeonly because my
flavor of tweaked-out melodrama is in short supply these days.  When I
don't enjoy a thing I see seams all too clearly.  :)


On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 11:42 AM, Rev'd Seventy-Six <revd.76 at gmail.com>wrote:

> "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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