Gatsby and the New American Myth.

Okay, okay. Obviously I'm behind the times.

I read The Great Gatsby a few days back. At first I hated it. The first few chapters were filled with wholly despicable people. And then I realized, like T.S. Eliot once did, that the novel is brilliant. It is far more than a time-capsule of 1920's grandeur, but a continual testament of American culture. Naturally, I wanted to watch the new movie that came out this past year. I had been on a Baz Luhrman kick anyhow (I had recently watched both Moulin Rouge and Australia), and it seemed a natural continuation of movie-watching.

I won't do a full explication of either novel or movie; and the movie might be suffice to say that it sufficiently exemplifies the book in every manner.

But something else drew me into the newest Gatsby movie: It fit the time.

What I mean by that is that The Great Gatsby was decidedly not a movie about a 1920's party-scene, but about a 2010's party-scene. A century following the Roaring Twenties, here we are again -- culturally and nearly economically.

And here is Gatsby, again. A man searching for a Past that will never exist in a Present that he doesn't prefer. Gatsby claims again and again that he and Daisy can go back in time, and act as if her marriage never happened. Nick shakes his head and says that this is impossible, but Gatsby is, as Nick describes, a "man of hope". Gatsby has a vision of a different world than the one he lives in.

But his vision is not one of the Future, but one of the Past.

I run into this a lot these days. I hear from people -- conservatives and liberals, Christian and secular -- a longing for "the Good Old Days". The days when gasoline was (as it is in the movie) $1.20 for a fill-up, when America was "good and pure and Christian"... ... A Mythic Past which has become the new American myth.

It is a natural iteration for the old American myth (= The American Dream). When the current generation began discovering that the American Dream was just another mythos, they had to psychologically cope with that idea, and they did so by addressing America's Past as a different Myth. An America that was easy and prosperous, free from governmental regulation (or copious with good regulation, depending on one's party lines).

And these men and women are modern Gatsby's. I believe that they are the people whom Luhrman is targeting in his newest iteration of Gatsby. You see, Gatsby believes that the Mythic Past is something which can be returned to through hard work and effort and realized into a True Future. And he is tragically mistaken.

In this understanding, Gatsby is a man of false hope, and Tom and Daisy (whom Nick despises before the end) are the trampling vision of a just-as-mythic future. In Fitzgerald's time, both people existed: the believers of Mythic Past (ie. unprogressive) and the believers of Mythic Future (ie. superprogressive: see Tom's belief in the White Race). Neither are in touch with reality; both proceed as if the world can be rewound or fast-forwarded.

The true reality lies with Nick Carraway and Jordan Baker, people caught between Past and Future. Perhaps that's actually what attracts Nick to Jordan, even lightly. Her dishonesty is not that of blatant denial, but that of present gain. Both are opportunists and people of the present time. (Albeit, I'll leave off a judgment call as to what good or bad they may imply for the Present.)


All this being said, Gatsby, both as novel and as movie, is simply a diagnostic myth. It never makes a claim at having a solution to the problem of Time in America. It reveals it, in brilliant, flashing fireworks.