NOT PYNCHON but The Great Gatsby

[Mark Kohut]

Rehab hit me like Catcher In The Rye framing at first but I think it worked--his disease was alcoholism--which we, I, saw as 
the way Nick lost his midwest anchoring----partly contained in his relationship with Jordan and why it ended---
Nick does write the book!
the foretelling set it up as more Greek tragedy-like...and so many know the book, why not? Liked that risk taken. 
And the book is famously symbolic, so Baz hammered them home. Maybe heavy-handed there but I just felt them
deeply embedded. 
Toby Maguire was my main quibble. Too wide-eyed for me. 
 

From: Rev'd Seventy-Six <revd.76 at gmail.com>
To: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>; "pynchon-l at waste.org" <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
Sent: Monday, May 13, 2013 10:42 AM
Subject: Re: NOT PYNCHON but The Great Gatsby



"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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