syncing

A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: there are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

It’s January 1^st and the 95-year copyright of The Great Gatsby (1925) has expired; the floodgates are open to ‘anything and everything fans might want to do with it.’ Each adaptor, a cartographer before new lands, stands on the shores of the Sound: Gatsby’s pleasure palace beckons with ‘all the iridescence of the beginning of the world.’  In the salted haze of the coastal air, sea gulls squawk and scrabble over loose scraps; the caterwaul along the shoreline the morning after the party.

A spate of retellings blot out the horizon: Gatsby as vampire, Gatsby as shimmering lure to LGBT New York; a Muppets Gatsby, a televised Gatsby, and so on. William Joyce, the proposed director of an animated Gatsby announced just last week, thinks that no longer ‘constrained by live action’ he can ‘finally realize the elusive quality of the novel.’

Such excitement, such a changing of the forms and appetites of Gatsby’s characters is surely appropriate; Fitzgerald made a career of documenting the changing desires that the elusive fairy light of the zeitgeist incited. But, rather than dwell on the eldritch newly rich or the gaze of a gay Gatsby over a rainbow tinged Sound, you found yourself drawn back to the outrage sparked by Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 retelling of Gatsby, which—as one assumes the renditions above will be in due course—was criticised for being too divergent from its source material.

The more generous reviewers found the film an amuse bouche that lacked Fitzgerald’s taste and incision; a nostalgia prevailed for the subtler bouquet of Jack Clayton’s 1974 adaptation. More acerbic, Richard Brody at the New Yorker, found the film ‘under the top,’ declaring that for all the kaleidoscopic ‘lurching and gyrating’ of Luhrmann’s ‘whizzing’ 3D rendition, none of it was ‘remotely alluring, enticing, fun.’ Where the frenzy of the Jazz Age had a ‘diabolical appeal’ for Fitzgerald, Luhrmann’s movie ‘offers none.’ Brody diagnosed the film as holding ‘no seduction’, finding the action ‘turbulent and raucous without being promising.’ He took no quarter for the director either, who, ‘a man of his times, has no patience for mystery, no sense of true and brazen immodesty.’

Others took a different tack, in place of tasteless infidelity, self-confessed ‘pedant’ Charles Moore at the Telegraph took aim at Luhrmann’s constancy:

It often turns out that the one thing worse than infidelity to the book is fidelity to it […] It is a would-be faithful film, and a terribly, terribly bad one.

Lacking ‘Fitzgerald’s gift for making a few words say a lot,’ Luhrmann’s film ‘accumulates detail like a pile-up on a motorway.’ Moore follows up with the standard mid-Transformers-pandemic slur that the director uses ‘computer generation as a substitute for imagination.’ Leaving the cyborgian sterility alone for now though, directly after this our critic inexplicably U-turns, accusing Luhrmann of being an adulterer to place:

Perhaps the oddest thing about the film is that it makes so little of the other subject of the book – America itself. It aspires to make a great American film of a great American novel, but does not locate itself observantly in the culture that fascinated and appalled Fitzgerald. In the end, this is just a film about rich people behaving unpleasantly.

Just how one can be meticulously loyal to the source material and avoid America is anyone’s guess, or Clayton’s adaption.

The remark was symptomatic of a wider discordance which clouds both Moore and Brody’s takes. Both critics fall into criticism which serves inadvertently as praise: both straight up echo and then ignore Fitzgerald’s sentiments on the ‘test of a first-rate intelligence’ being the ability to navigate and occupy both sides of any given dichotomy. Paralyzed by paradox, Moore writes: ‘the movie doesn’t know whether it is looking or taking part, and when it does look, it does not know what to concentrate on,’ as if in a deliberate nod to Nick’s revelation after the party round Myrtle’s:

I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

Brody differs slightly, instead opting for a snobbish, misplaced ontology that ends in denying the film any contradiction whatsoever:

The movie conveys the sense of waste but not of what was wasted, of the superfluous but not of excess, and of the phony but not of the glorious theatre of life. In its reductive way, it not only doesn’t display two opposed ideas; it offers no ideas at all.

In his own reductive way, Brody would have us believe that he holds proprietary rights to Fitzgerald’s rose-tinted g(l)aze.

These reviews are recounted in passing as an illustration of the widespread distaste that greeted the film’s release. One need but return to Fitzgerald to refute their outlook, with Clayton’s 1974 adaptation standing in as a more than apt (and dull) sounding board that might project the merits of Luhrmann’s Gatsby. The films are near enough the same length–a hefty 2 hours 20 mins plus–yet this is where the commensurate qualities end. One is an at-times, frenetic fugue imbued with some of the unsustainable energy of the Jazz Age; the other: a third-rate costume drama.

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Hysteresia.

Those who continue to vote although there are no more candidates.

Those who continue to watch television when the broadcasters are on strike.

The phantom limb which goes on hurting even after it is amputated.

The man who is made redundant but regularly goes to his former place of work every morning.

The Japanese stubbornly contemplating the sunset at Ayer’s Rock even though there is no sun.

The tightrope walker who keeps edging forwards on his imaginary rope until he realizes it is not there and falls into the void.

The subject who takes himself for a subject even though he disappeared long ago.

Jean Baudrillard, Fragments: Cool Memories III, 1990-1995

In the essay series The Crack-Up, Fitzgerald details how ‘an exceptionally optimistic young man experienced a crack-up of all values, a crack up that he scarcely knew of until long after it occurred.’ This is hysteresis, raw and unforgiving, ‘the subject who takes himself for a subject even though he disappeared long ago.’ Echoes of the Jazz Age, My Lost City, Babylon Revisited… Fitzgerald is a writer of revelations that lag behind the time that evoked them; fairy castles conjured through mists of memory and inebriation. Trawling through Fitzgerald’s prose, fragments offer themselves up as fractals:

I remember riding in a taxi one afternoon between the very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; I began to bawl, because I had everything I wanted and I knew I would never be so happy again. My Lost City (1932)

I was in love with a whirlwind and I must spin a net big enough to catch it out of my head, a head full of trickling nickels and sliding dimes, the incessant music box of the poor. […] This article is about that first wild wind of success and the delicious mist it brings with it. It is a short and precious time – for when the mist rises in a few weeks, or a few months, one finds that the very best is over. Early Success (1937)

So… to address the elephant in the time machine, The Great Gatsby, as in the above, is a recalling of past events. The narrator Nick Carraway refers to the ‘book’ he is working on. He writes, with not a little dishonesty, that the details related are ‘merely casual events in a crowded summer.’ It can be inferred then, that it is only in their recall–in looking back–that these events absorb Nick. In the subsequent unforgiving march of time, events have wrapped Nick in a melancholic, bromide fug.

Luhrmann’s film embraces this, using the device of Nick writing a memoir in an asylum, whereas Clayton’s film rarely leaves a sweat-drenched present. When we interact with Luhrmann’s film we experience the machinations of melancholia and mourning, an immutable past rupturing the surface of the present. Clayton’s adaptation is comparatively flat.

In Nick’s retroactive coming to terms with, he has been accused by many readers of being a consummate politician; his narration is after all eulogising Jay Gatz, fraud, gangster and accessory to Myrtle Wilson’s murder as ‘The Great Gatsby.’ In a letter to Ernest Feydeau in 1872, Gustave Flaubert wrote:

When you write the biography of a friend, you must do it as if you were taking revenge for him.

Nick too, is in the act of taking revenge. Revenge for his friend whose reputation lies slandered by the press after his death; revenge for his friend who is ‘worth the whole damn bunch put together.’ For Nick, Gatsby cuts a tragic figure and is totemic of something unique, something lost: ‘an infernal hope, a hope that leads to perdition.’ Gatsby’s dream is an impossible one that never arrives. It’s a dream reconstituted from a past which lies far behind him. Nick, like Charlie Wales in Babylon Revisited, is caught up in a wistfulness over a bygone character, a lost essence:

He believed in character; he wanted to jump back a whole generation and trust in character again as the eternally valuable element. Everything wore out.

Told from the position of the present meditating on the past, the glitz and glamour is always confabulated, its reminiscence bittersweet. It’s hard to not see some of Nick’s dilemma within Fitzgerald, when he writes in the personal essay Handle with Care:

I only wanted absolute quiet to think out why I had developed a sad attitude towards sadness, a melancholy attitude towards melancholy and a tragic attitude towards tragedy – why I had become identified with the objects of my horror or compassion.

Nick relates Gatsby’s melancholia for the lost object of Daisy, its still to be decided whether Nick’s malaise will pass over as in mourning, or like Fitzgerald, be a melancholic entombing within of the lost object.

Luhrmann’s film benefits from taking the book at its own temporality. Recalling Sigmund Freud’s guidance as to how to evoke free association in a therapy session, the director stages Nick in the act of trying to remember, trying to make sense of the past which flashes by like the landscape seen from a train window. The film rarely goes ten minutes without reminding us of this process. It frequently steps away from the spooling past and puts us back in the asylum, be it the doctor’s office, or in Nick’s room as we watch him working over a typewriter, or looking wistfully out of a window. We are aware of the passing of the seasons. It is spring when Nick finishes the memoirs he began in the frostbitten blizzard of winter.

Life moves on interminably, we see the cruelty of the changing seasons which have no respect for man’s passing. In these backdrops we witness a nature that has the heartless insistence to persist. Echoing Keats’ Ode to A Nightingale (this passage was used as an epigraph in Tender is the Night), Nick is left only with memories to cling to, as he is forced by the necessity of the present to keep treading ‘through verdurous glooms.’

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Hunter S Thompson famously typed The Great Gatsby in its entirety to get the feel of writing an American ‘masterpiece.’ Francis Ford Coppola not so famously transcribed the same into ‘a meticulously faithful’ screenplay. This generous epithet given by the YouTube stream blurb seems a stretch for this Russian doll; several layers of lacquered wood away from the kernel; Hunter S Thompson blasted into the Colorado skies by an obsequious Johnny Depp.

Other than its staging of temporality, where does Clayton’s film go so wrong? Surprisingly, the blurb implies, ‘Theoni Aldridge’s costume design and Nelson Riddle’s nostalgic musical score won the film its only Oscars.’ This seems a bit of a stretch for the sometimes cheesy, sometimes clumsy soundtrack – the end credits stand out: a riotous blast of chorus girls supplying cardiac arrest in place of heartbreak– and the costumes, which through some failed miscegenation with the camera come across drab and laboured. See Mia Farrow’s washed-up-jellyfish of a tiara for the second party at Gatsby’s.

As above so below, one need look no further than the dullness of the opening sequence. After an opening credits of empty sets and empty promise, Nick zigzags across the choppy waters of the Sound, clumsily losing his hat in the process. This scene–an addition by the filmmakers–does nothing to advance the plot and comes across as merely lazy blocking. In this regard, it is typical. Fitzgerald’s novel, now held almost universally to not have a wasted word, a single sag, is a moth-eaten bean bag in the hands of Clayton; it envelops you within its folds; the experience is one of opaque boredom. Take for instance, only moments later, the depiction of the room in which Nick is first entranced by Daisy. In Fitzgerald we have:

A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the celling, and then rippled up over the wine coloured rug, making a shadow on it as a wind does on the sea.

This passage translates merely as a fumbled itinerary for set dressers; there is nothing magical or enticing about it, no enveloping billowing of the curtains. Mia Farrow, like a convalescent in a musty retirement home lays back, gauche on a dun couch. The framing is lazy and without excitement; there is none of the incandescence one expects from the start of Nick’s reverie. The eye is not invited in, nor does anything stimulate the senses in a way evocative of memory. If good film can be approximated to the Fitzgerald’s description of personality–‘an unbroken series of successful gestures’–then this sequence is surely a failure. There is none of the ‘heightened sensitivity to the promises of life’ at work, there’s nothing ‘gorgeous’ about it.

By contrast Luhrmann’s technique is rhythmic and visually gripping. After a succinct framing of the story within the past via Nick’s memoir, the director jumps straight into the action. We’re led by an impetuous Tom through the grand Georgian grounds of his estate. In place of the anaemic Bruce Dern is a snarling Joel Edgerton. A motor-mouthed, larger-than-life sportsman, ‘Life is something you dominate if you’re any good,’ he bellicosely bounds ahead, recalling his past achievements which are mirrored by the extended trophy cabinet along the walls—and then—flowing curtains flapping in the wind—cinema’s capacity for magnification and enumeration of lavish detail—everything snaps together with choreographed precision—Daisy’s sultry voice whispers ‘Nick’ and an enticing hand from behind a sofa beckons us in, evoking John Berger’s sentiment:

Love treasures hands like nothing else, because of all they have taken, made, given, planted, picked, fed, stolen, caressed, arranged, let drop in sleep, offered.

Carey Mullígan has a sensual allure as Daisy. When she giggles and whispers, Nick is taken aback, made nervous, put under the spotlight; he must perform for her, hold an attention that may leave at any moment. With her companion Jordan, who coquettishly sneaks looks at Nick, there is a fun about them, a promise of the excitement that these rich, young women hold. In their movement and poise, a dance of predation ensues, they circle the increasingly disorientated Nick.

Here we are granted inner access to the beginnings of Nick’s idolatry of Daisy Buchanan, Fitzgerald’s most Keatsian interpolation. A ‘chrono-morphism’ pervades The Great Gatsby, you can read time elapsing in most passages, but nowhere is this more acute than in the rendering of Daisy’s voice. Recalling Heraclitus: ‘No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man,’ Daisy’s voice is a continually transforming and transformative elixir to Nick. Take this from their first meeting:

It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered “Listen,” a promise that she done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.

And then from when Daisy goes to a party at Gatsby’s:

Daisy began to sing with the music in a husky, rhythmic whisper, bringing out a meaning in each word that it had never had before and would never have again. When the melody rose, her voice broke up sweetly, following it, in a way contralto voices have, and each change tipped out a little of her warm human magic upon the air.

By contrast Mia Farrow has none of the composure, nor music of Fitzgerald’s prose. Idolatry is impossible when she delivers her lines a shrill Miss Havisham channeling The League of Gentlemen. Where in both the book and Luhrmann’s adaptation Tom is seen as a relative outsider from the first gathering, excluded from Nick, Jordan and Daisy’s sophistication and wit; in Clayton’s film Farrow’s hysterical delivery of her lines places her squarely as Tom’s victim. She has no power over Tom, Nick or the audience. Where in the former Daisy toys with Tom’s Nordic race theories, mocking his attempts at intellectualism, Farrow has nothing sardonic about her; she comes across a brattish teen whose party is being spoiled by a racist uncle. There is no self-assurance to her performance, none of the ‘thrilling scorn’ when she announces that’s she’s ‘been everywhere and seen everything,’ or when echoing Edmond de Goncourt’s comment ‘We are dying of civilization,’ she erupts ‘Sophisticated—God, I’m sophisticated!’ As a result, it’s equally impossible to have the reaction Nick records of:

The instant her voice broke off, ceasing to compel my attention, my belief, I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said. It made me uneasy, as though the whole evening had been a trick of some sort to exact a contributory emotion from me. I waited, and sure enough, in a moment she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face, as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged.

How to doubt her sincerity, when what we’re presented with is so glib it invisibilizes the question? Ultimately we do not believe Farrow either to have the mystique or to be conniving enough to exact a contributory emotion.

As with the lie of the painting above, as with the lie of photography–a photograph but a freeze of a thing thawing in time–in the novel Daisy’s voice is a transient wonder that ultimately lies. Nick is never quite able to put his finger upon this elusive quality of Daisy’s voice; he is always trying to rope in new signifiers to grasp at it. It is only when Gatsby opines that her voice is ‘full of money,’ that he concedes its essence has been bottled. This voice full of money, which goes to the highest bidder, that’s exciting, excitable, whimsical, that’s impermanent, catatonic, capricious, that’s attention-deficient, disloyal, the great driver of tragedy etc. Farrow never beguiles us thus. Why should we care? Why would we allow our lives to be torn in two for her? We are indifferent. Ulysses’ conundrum is never staged:

He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God.

The Promethean power of love aside, how to come to terms with an unfeeling insincerity? Nick is unsure. As in when Daisy tells him how much she loves to see him at her table, comparing him to a rose, ‘an absolute rose’. Nick reacts:

This was untrue. I am not even faint like a rose. She only extemporising, but a stirring warmth flowed from her, as if her heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling words.

It is surely no coincidence that this rose imagery returns right at the moment Gatsby’s death is recalled:

No telephone message arrived […] I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn’t believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.

What a grotesque thing a rose is. The corolla withers brown, the petals rot and are plucked away by gravity in time to reveal a sordid tuft and a thorny cane.

In Nick’s eyes it’s clear, it would seem, who’s done the plucking:

Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.