"Gatsby? What Gatsby?"
-Daisy, The Great Gatsby
Before I write another word, let me start by saying that audiobooks are damned amazing. I regret not trying this medium sooner but the truth was I was being snooty and enjoyed looking at audiobooks as something made for illiterates and peasantry. Oh ho, I couldn't have been more mistaken. I found I actually understood and enjoyed the book much more thoroughly. It also helped keep my mind off the jerks on the highway during my morning and evening commute. A win on all fronts.
So why The Great Gatsby ?
Here are some of the more obvious reasons:
- The movie is coming out.
- It has Leonardo DiCaprio in it.
- It's directed by the same guy who did Moulin Rouge.
- It's an American classic.
- Here, go watch the trailer:
The not-so-obvious reasons:
- I didn't remember anything about the plot or why Gatsby was "Great." Something about eggs and billboards with eyes...
- I was a silly, young thing when I first read it.
- I rebelled against it later because I thought it ragged on wealth and capitalism.
- I like reading the book before seeing the movie .
The book was excellent. But not just excellent from a "well written" perspective. It was so painfully human at times that it just makes you ache. Let me bring up one of the main themes of the book, hopefully without throwing too many spoilers out there for people who haven't read it and plan on doing so.
<spoilers>
Perhaps the most striking of Gatsby's desires, the thing that propels him and ruins him, is his desire to relive the past. Actually, let me rephrase. It's his desire to recreate the past.
As with most things, it comes back to love- Gatsby's relationship with Daisy, the beautiful beginning, the fantasy, the intruding reality. In a nutshell? He's dirt poor and she's wealthy and he has no means of supporting her. So the inevitable happens and Daisy marries a rich man while Gatsby is off at war. He returns to find out the crushing news and dedicates his existence to becoming a the man he wanted to be for her.
But the subtleties are lost in this summary of Daisy and Gatsby's love.
First off, Daisy isn't a complete gold-digging tramp. She waits for Gatsby but becomes nervous as time passes and the situation fails to be resolved. Feeling uneasy about her future, she picks what is most concrete to her- Tom, a man of extremely good means who has the intent of marrying her. Daisy briefly loses herself to grief over her betrayal to Gatsby a few days before her wedding, but she marries Tom, secures her future and enjoys a few happy years of marriage before trouble creeps into their relationship.
Second, and perhaps one of the most heartbreaking and important aspects of this book, is that when Gatsby finds out about Daisy's marriage he begins to dwell on their relationship to the point of obsession. His memories are reimagined and redecorated. A summer love becomes the love of a lifetime, a thing made beautiful and precious if only because of its brief life and the possibility it once held. It's what makes stories like Titantic so moving- a blooming love cut short by the circumstances. And our imaginations feel robbed of the "happily ever after" which would have undoubtedly followed had not empty pocketbooks or frigid waters ruined it all.
I can't help thinking that we are all guilty of this in some form or another. We take those moments of our lives which seemed hopeful and full of promise and remember them greater and more wonderful than they actually were. They take on that halcyon glow which memories accumulate like dust. And somehow when we try to relive them or to reconstruct them it feels false and offensive. Memories are dead and distorted things. They cannot be reanimated.
Gatsby creates the world he wanted to live in and he builds himself into the man he wanted to be but the moment has already passed. In the story, you feel his anxiety increase as every expectation falls short. He's nervous upon meeting Daisy again for the first time in years and the reunion is not quite satisfying. Something seems off. It's not like it was 5 years ago. She's different now and not just because she's married. But she's not the girl he kissed under the light of a full moon. So we watch painfully as his desperation grows. They have an affair (that is certain) but you know it's not what Gatsby wants and not what he's been working for after all these years. And then you realize he's grasping at what cannot be and that he'll always be the man standing before his mansion, staring at the light at the end of Daisy's dock, imaging what could have been had he been a different man when the time was right.
In film class we talked about the difference between horror movies and tragedies. The former is best summarized by "too soon." We're taken by surprise. Events transpire too quickly, our pulse shoots up and we feel fear.
But tragedies are the "too late." The things which were forgotten or missed or never came to pass until it didn't matter any more. The emotion we get is sadness, evoked by some barbed combination of loss and disappointment and irony. This is The Great Gatsby.
It also makes me think that we don't always fall in love at the right time. The right person, the wrong moment. I'm sure there are volumes written about such things but it's still enough to make you wonder.
TLDR;
To finish things off I leave you with another comic, old sport.
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| </spoilers> |
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