IHT May 18-19, 2013 "Forget morals, cash is king" By A. O. SCOTT The pages of “The Great Gatsby” are suffused with romance and dusted with sexual implication, but perhaps the most intensely and …More
IHT May 18-19, 2013 "Forget morals, cash is king"
By A. O. SCOTT
The pages of “The Great Gatsby” are suffused with romance and dusted with sexual implication, but perhaps the most intensely and disturbingly erotic scene — the one that distills the novel’s seductive blend of desire and sorrow — involves clothes. Showing off his mansion to Daisy Buchanan, the great love of his life, and Nick Carraway, his diffident, dazzled neighbor, Jay Gatsby opens a cabinet in which his shirts are “piled like bricks in stacks a dozen high.”
He throws them into a pile, and as Nick notes the wondrous textures and colors — “stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, with monograms of Indian blue” — Daisy bursts into tears: “ ‘They’re such beautiful shirts,’ she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. ‘It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such — such beautiful shirts before.’ ”
A reader might speculate about other causes of her weeping, but there is no reason not to take Daisy at her word. One of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s points is that beautiful things in abundance can produce a powerful aesthetic response, akin to the sublime. And the sublimity of stuff, of shirts and cars and Champagne flutes and everything else that money can buy, is surely what drives Baz Luhrmann’s wildly extravagant adaptation of “Gatsby.”
The movie has been faulted, not entirely without justice, for its headlong embrace of the materialism that the novel views with ambivalence. Mr. Luhrmann, though following the book’s plot more or less faithfully, does not offer a stable moral perspective from which the world of its characters can be judged. Rather, he immerses the viewer in a sensual swirl of almost tactile opulence. That scene with the shirts is a triumph of production design and 3-D digital cinematography. Really, you have never seen such beautiful shirts before.
But if you have gone to the movies recently you have witnessed similar moments of commodity fetishism. Jay Gatsby is hardly the only character reveling in the palpable, wearable tokens of his good fortune. Harmony Korine’s “Spring Breakers,” released to some bafflement in March, offers an almost uncanny echo of “Gatsby,” when Alien, the South Florida drug dealer played by James Franco, brags about how many pairs of shorts he owns. “Look at all my stuff!” he crows (though he uses another term), jumping up and down on his bed, pointing out guns, bullets, cash and clothes. He also adds a profane twist to a phrase that appears in just about every term paper ever written about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s third novel: “It’s the American Dream!”
Term-paper authors are eager to read irony into such invocations, but this writer is not so sure. Yes, Alien is something of a cretin, and Gatsby was a prisoner of his own fantasies. Both acquired their fortunes illegally, and both meet violent ends. But like Mr. Luhrmann’s dizzy rendering of “The Great Gatsby,” Mr. Korine’s fever dream of sun-baked collegiate hedonism does not attach moralistic warning labels or flags of satire to its images of excess.
Nor, for that matter, does “Pain & Gain,” Michael Bay’s astonishing and misunderstood Florida true-crime story, in which a gang of gym rats — muscle-bound counterparts to the bikini-wearing coeds in “Spring Breakers” — go to violent extremes to secure their share of the dream. Sofia Coppola’s latest movie, “The Bling Ring,” is another American Dream parable, a deadpan, curiously touching story of young people who believe the finer things in life are theirs for the taking.
The 17th-century Puritan theologians debated whether prosperity was a visible sign of election, by which they meant predetermined salvation. Their modern-day descendants have no doubt: “If I deserve it, then the universe will serve it,” says Daniel Lugo, the ringleader of Mr. Bay’s Sun Gym gang. This blatant claim of entitlement may cause discomfort in some viewers, as will the buoyant, aggressive, nonjudgmental tone of this nasty comedy. Much as we may enjoy the spectacle of money, we usually prefer it to be accompanied by sentimental lessons about how there are more important things. We like cautionary tales about the dangers of greed and reassuring distinctions about the sources and uses of wealth. In Fitzgerald’s time, there was an imaginary line between old money and new, and another that separated legitimate fortunes from the kinds amassed by Gatsby and his criminal associates.
In our own time, we have no problem admiring the innovators and entrepreneurs who give charitable contributions and TED talks. And our screens are always full of predatory financiers, bad bosses and scheming scam artists. There are plenty of movies about heroic entrepreneurs clashing with unscrupulous capitalists, two sides of the same coin and thus part of a cultural currency of mixed feelings and wishful thinking. Sometimes we can’t tell the good guys from the bad guys: Is the Mark Zuckerberg of “The Social Network” a visionary or a scoundrel — or a latter-day …
By A. O. SCOTT
The pages of “The Great Gatsby” are suffused with romance and dusted with sexual implication, but perhaps the most intensely and disturbingly erotic scene — the one that distills the novel’s seductive blend of desire and sorrow — involves clothes. Showing off his mansion to Daisy Buchanan, the great love of his life, and Nick Carraway, his diffident, dazzled neighbor, Jay Gatsby opens a cabinet in which his shirts are “piled like bricks in stacks a dozen high.”
He throws them into a pile, and as Nick notes the wondrous textures and colors — “stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, with monograms of Indian blue” — Daisy bursts into tears: “ ‘They’re such beautiful shirts,’ she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. ‘It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such — such beautiful shirts before.’ ”
A reader might speculate about other causes of her weeping, but there is no reason not to take Daisy at her word. One of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s points is that beautiful things in abundance can produce a powerful aesthetic response, akin to the sublime. And the sublimity of stuff, of shirts and cars and Champagne flutes and everything else that money can buy, is surely what drives Baz Luhrmann’s wildly extravagant adaptation of “Gatsby.”
The movie has been faulted, not entirely without justice, for its headlong embrace of the materialism that the novel views with ambivalence. Mr. Luhrmann, though following the book’s plot more or less faithfully, does not offer a stable moral perspective from which the world of its characters can be judged. Rather, he immerses the viewer in a sensual swirl of almost tactile opulence. That scene with the shirts is a triumph of production design and 3-D digital cinematography. Really, you have never seen such beautiful shirts before.
But if you have gone to the movies recently you have witnessed similar moments of commodity fetishism. Jay Gatsby is hardly the only character reveling in the palpable, wearable tokens of his good fortune. Harmony Korine’s “Spring Breakers,” released to some bafflement in March, offers an almost uncanny echo of “Gatsby,” when Alien, the South Florida drug dealer played by James Franco, brags about how many pairs of shorts he owns. “Look at all my stuff!” he crows (though he uses another term), jumping up and down on his bed, pointing out guns, bullets, cash and clothes. He also adds a profane twist to a phrase that appears in just about every term paper ever written about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s third novel: “It’s the American Dream!”
Term-paper authors are eager to read irony into such invocations, but this writer is not so sure. Yes, Alien is something of a cretin, and Gatsby was a prisoner of his own fantasies. Both acquired their fortunes illegally, and both meet violent ends. But like Mr. Luhrmann’s dizzy rendering of “The Great Gatsby,” Mr. Korine’s fever dream of sun-baked collegiate hedonism does not attach moralistic warning labels or flags of satire to its images of excess.
Nor, for that matter, does “Pain & Gain,” Michael Bay’s astonishing and misunderstood Florida true-crime story, in which a gang of gym rats — muscle-bound counterparts to the bikini-wearing coeds in “Spring Breakers” — go to violent extremes to secure their share of the dream. Sofia Coppola’s latest movie, “The Bling Ring,” is another American Dream parable, a deadpan, curiously touching story of young people who believe the finer things in life are theirs for the taking.
The 17th-century Puritan theologians debated whether prosperity was a visible sign of election, by which they meant predetermined salvation. Their modern-day descendants have no doubt: “If I deserve it, then the universe will serve it,” says Daniel Lugo, the ringleader of Mr. Bay’s Sun Gym gang. This blatant claim of entitlement may cause discomfort in some viewers, as will the buoyant, aggressive, nonjudgmental tone of this nasty comedy. Much as we may enjoy the spectacle of money, we usually prefer it to be accompanied by sentimental lessons about how there are more important things. We like cautionary tales about the dangers of greed and reassuring distinctions about the sources and uses of wealth. In Fitzgerald’s time, there was an imaginary line between old money and new, and another that separated legitimate fortunes from the kinds amassed by Gatsby and his criminal associates.
In our own time, we have no problem admiring the innovators and entrepreneurs who give charitable contributions and TED talks. And our screens are always full of predatory financiers, bad bosses and scheming scam artists. There are plenty of movies about heroic entrepreneurs clashing with unscrupulous capitalists, two sides of the same coin and thus part of a cultural currency of mixed feelings and wishful thinking. Sometimes we can’t tell the good guys from the bad guys: Is the Mark Zuckerberg of “The Social Network” a visionary or a scoundrel — or a latter-day …