“You can't repeat the past!”. “Of course you can, old man.” These are the crucial lines of one of the most significant dialogues of "The Great Gatsby” by Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), who has just turned 100 years old.
Gatsby confides in Nick Carraway, the narrator, on the imposing terrace of his villa, located opposite that of Daisy Buchanan, on the other side of Long Island.
Every night Gatsby stays hypnotized by the green light emitted from the lighthouse on the Buchanan Pier. He reveals to Nick his plans for the woman he loves and has loved: he intends to put everything back the way it was before their forced separation, five years earlier.
What is it? Idealism, madness, or the blissful illusion of a rich man from the Gilded Age? A tragically golden age that today resonates like the refrain of an old swing tune. Or is Gatsby an irremediable loser? A parvenu like Julien Sorel?
Today again, Fitzgerald's novel is striking for its topicality. The description of America in the 1920s surprisingly reflects traits of contemporary American society, evident in the way several characters think and act.
An evergreen novel
According to the database “The Greatest Books of All Time”, which aggregates in real time 582 public rankings and reading lists, “The Great Gatsby” is currently the most recommended book among literary works from around the world.
It precedes James Joyce's “Ulysses”, Marcel Proust's “In Search of Lost Time”, Gabriel García Márquez's “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and JD Salinger's “The Catcher in the Rye”.
Since its publication, Fitzgerald's novel has sold over 30 million copies, surpassing any other literary work of its time. In 1945 it was released in a special paperback edition, with a print run of 150.000 copies intended for American troops.
White Lotus Season 4
La next season of “White Lotus” It could be a contemporary reinterpretation of “The Great Gatsby. I think that Mike White, the creator of the series, might even entertain this idea.
The irresponsibility, superficiality, ignorance and total indifference of the rich towards the consequences of their actions are elements common to these two narrative universes, although distant in time and space.
One, “The Great Gatsby”, immersed in the hedonistic and empty golden age of Fordist capitalism, the other, “The White Lotus” in the glossy, neurotic and chaotic era of post-industrial financial and information capitalism.
The Golden Bliss of the Rich
In both narratives, the wealthy characters appear surprisingly fatuous. Let's take Fitzgerald's novel for which the 28-year-old author had initially thought of the title “Trimalcion in West Egg”.
Where Trimanchio is the character from Petronius' Satyricon sunk in exaggerated and vulgar luxury. West Egg is the fictional name of the western tip of Long Island where Trimalchio/Gatsby's princely residence stands.
Jay Gatsby
Gatsby (new money) bought that house because it faces the mansion of Daisy Buchanan, a girl he loved before going to war, with the sole intention of having her show up at one of his recurring lavish parties.
An idea as romantic and obsessive as it is absurd. Five years have passed since their farewell. In the meantime there has been a world war, a marriage, and Gatsby's meteoric rise thanks to an opaque and mysterious wealth.
The villa also has a large Gothic library, with carved panels, transported from a ruined castle. The librarian confirms that the books are authentic, not cardboard sets as one might believe.
Tom Buchanan
Tom Buchanan, a bigoted, racist, and boastful member of the American aristocracy (old money), on a mere whim, switches cars with Gatsby, despite the possibility of traveling together in the same vehicle.
“I don’t think there’s enough gas,” Gatsby objected. “There’s plenty of gas,” Tom said. He looked at the gauge. “And if I run out, I can stop at a drug store. You can buy everything in a drug store these days.”
The necessary stop to refuel triggers a sequence of tragic events that seal the fate of the “great” Gatsby, who finds his epilogue in water, a recurring element of “White Lotus”.
Daisy buchanan
Daisy Buchanan, Tom's spoiled and fickle wife, is moved to tears as she smells the soft linen, silk and flannel shirts that Gatsby, Louisville's never-forgotten love, throws before her by the dozen.
“I have a man in England who buys my clothes,” says Gatsby with perfect nonchalance. “He sends me a sample at the beginning of every season, spring and fall.” And with that he fills two closets.
Daisy is incapable of taking any responsibility. Running over her husband's lover causes her a disturbance barely stronger than that caused by a glass of warm champagne sipped on a sultry summer evening.
Baby Warren
Another example of the golden dullness of the rich is found in “Tender Is the Night.” Baby Warren, also old money — let’s say a Dupont — wants her sister Nicole, who has suffered a deep trauma, to marry a doctor.
The “plan” is to introduce the charming sister to the university environment of Chicago so that she may happen to “fall in love with a good doctor” who can “watch over her for a few years.” Fitzgerald writes:
“A fit of hilarity broke out in Dick [Diver]. The Warrens were going to buy Nicole a doctor. There was no point in worrying about Nicole when they could buy her a nice, freshly painted little doctor.”
Gatsby's "Idealism"
We are grateful to Fitzgerald for his lucid attempt to redeem his charming character, transforming vanity into ideality and reality into dreams, just as crypto exchanges convert real currency into abstract value.
Fitzgerald writes: “The truth is that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, had sprung from a Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God – he had to put himself at the service of a gaudy, vulgar, prostitute-like beauty.”
And he continues: “So he invented with Jay Gatsby the type that could be invented by a seventeen-year-old and remained faithful to this conception to the end.” It is a mythological type that the author sees as the realization of the American dream.
The force that animates Gatsby is not the missionary and universal idealism of Fitzcarraldo, who wants to climb a mountain to bring Caruso to the natives of the Amazon, but a solipsistic, narcissistic, childish impulse.
The Great Fortune
Perhaps it is precisely the ability with which the novel tones down the sense of tragedy that makes it so current. In a century of editorial success, it has known 4 film adaptations, countless television adaptations, aopera and two musicals.
Since entering the public domain four years ago, it has spawned a wave of sequels, prequels, and amateur rewrites, further proof that the aesthetic of the broken dream continues to exert an enduring allure.
Gatsby survives as a myth also because tame disenchantment: masks greed with nostalgia, ruin with glamour, and turns self-destruction into a romantic, seductive, and as such socially defused gesture.
In reality, Fitzgerald's rich, beautiful and damned, careless and irresponsible, destroy everything around them and then turn away. This is precisely the thematic core of the writer's poetics.
The film adaptations of 1926 and 1949
In 1926, just two years after the novel's release, Hollywood made an 80-minute film out of it, now lost. Fitzgerald found it disappointing: spectacle and festivities, but no psychological depth.“It’s terrible,” he wrote.
In the postwar era, American popular culture became a nostalgia machine. The 20s, a time of optimism and lightheartedness before darker times set in, provided an ideal breeding ground for the novel.
In 1949, Paramount produced a new film adaptation, directed by Elliott Nugent, which accentuated the noir side of the story. alan ladd he is the perfect interpreter of a cold, disillusioned, tormented and hard Gatsby.
Gatsby's obsession with Daisy is less idealized, more desperate, almost guilty. This film, like the 1926 one, was long considered lost, but in 2012 a copy was fortunately recovered.
The 1974 classic
In 1974 Paramount proposed a new adaptation entrusted to Francis Ford Coppola and Jack Clayton for the direction, with a notable cast, including Robert Redford like Jay Gatsby and Mia Farrow with Daisy Buchanan.
Redford plays a measured, romantic, elegant and consciously tragic, almost sacred Gatsby, while Farrow is perfect in rendering the evanescence and neurosis of Daisy. Coppola creates a clear contrast between the two.
The settings and costumes, of exceptional quality, earned the film two Oscars for "Best Production Design" and "Best Costume Design", but Coppola's overly lyrical screenplay did not convince the Academy.
…and the hip-hop one of 2013
In 2013, the Australian director Baz Luhrmann confronts the novel, giving us a baroque, deafening and Trimalchio-esque adaptation, which spices the story with musical elements that enhance its impact.
“The key to that Gatsby,” writes critic AO Scott, “is the music. The soundtrack is a collage of contemporary pop and rap—by Lana Del Rey, Florence and the Machine, Beyoncé, and more—executive-produced by Jay-Z.
The interpretation of DiCaprio, vibrant with energy and vitality, is nevertheless marked by the melancholy of the character, consumed by the search for an unachievable dream. The settings are visually powerful.
The sequence in which DiCaprio brandishes a glass of champagne and appears to offer it to the audience with a wolfish smile has become an online meme. The film is a “hip-hop reading of the character,” writes AO Scott
Fitzgerald has it all
Luhrmann makes an interesting intervention, making the narrator Nick Carraway a sort of alter ego of the author, with memories told to an analyst, a style that refers to Fitzgerald's psychological instability.
A writer who was able to invent some of the most beautiful titles in world literature: “This Side of Paradise”, “The Jazz Age”, “My Own Private Idaho”, “The Great Gatsby”, “Tender is the Night”, “The Last Tycoon”.
Dream, love, money, fall, hope, ambitions, search for identity, loneliness, disillusionment, frustration, broken aspirations and social criticism: Fitzgerald really has it all.
