A Pretty Good Gatsby (B++)

Dramatic Script Analysis, Rule One:  The character who undergoes the most change is the story’s protagonist.  Seems almost self-evident, doesn’t it?  Scout matures in her understanding of racism.  Lawrence grows in his sympathy for Bedouin tribes.  Peter Parker becomes Spiderman.  It is chiefly from the perspective of these characters that audiences experience the plot.

This is, frankly, one of the problems with the Jesus narrative.  Immediately, audiences identify him as the central character.  But one of his chief attributes is immutability.  Indeed, a great many of his followers are comforted by the fact that he is the same yesterday, today, and forever.  He can’t change.  He can’t learn.  No one can surprise him.  So, as a dramatic character, he’s terminally boring.  (Please understand, I’m not faulting the salvific work of Christ.  I’m insulting no one’s Savior.  Don’t write me angry e-mails.  I’m talking only about the difficulty this character presents to storytellers.).

A lot of TV characters similarly threaten audiences with boredom.  Consider Gregory House.  He needs to be the same at the beginning and end of every story arc.  So even if it looks as if he might conquer his Vicodin addiction, he’s obliged to relapse.  Otherwise, he might cease to be the irascible addict that is the show’s reliable anchor.

To keep persons interesting who have a net character growth of zero, storytellers often opt for revelation.  House will always limp, but recollection (as in the excellent episode “Three Stories”) could show us how his leg came to be injured.  The continuous flashback that comprised all nine seasons of How I Met Your Mother demonstrates the principle taken to an extreme.  Such post-modern structural experiments can even make Jesus an interesting character (if you’re inclined to wince your way through Mel Gibson’s 2004 snuff-film-in-sheep’s-clothing, The Passion of the Christ).

Now imagine you’re F. Scott Fitzgerald.  It’s 1924.  Your editor, Maxwell Perkins, has just returned the draft of a novel you’re calling Trimalchio in West Egg.  Despite your attempts to produce "something new—something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned,” Perkins calls it vague and asks you to spend a winter on the French Riviera revising it.

Your idea is to indict the emptiness of addictive decadence.  You wind the story around an increasingly hollow core of people.  You’ve set for yourself a thought experiment, to see if you can actually tell a story showcasing negative character growth.  The more readers learn about the book’s central personality, the less interesting he becomes.

Featuring characters that are neither likeable nor deep, the book is published to mixed reviews and sells a pitiful 20,000 copies.  You die 15 years later, believing your life to be a failure.

We know the rest.  In the wake of World War II, The Great Gatsby (as it was retitled), became the American novel and a must-read for every eleventh grader.  It also became a play, an opera, a Korean web comic, a theoretical economic model, a made-for-TV movie (twice) and a theatrical film (five times over).  Not one of the these re-tellings really wowed critics.  Indeed, the Wall Street Journal referred to Baz Luhrman’s 2013 version as “a spectacle in search of a soul.”  Which is precisely the point of the novel.  Accurately reflecting Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age ennui means, necessarily, making a movie which wins Oscar and BAFTA Awards for costume and production design – and nothing else. 

I once referred to Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient as the sort of book that couldn’t possibly be made into a film.  The threads of its plot were just too intricately woven.  But master editor Walter Murch made a liar of me.  Should have seen that one coming. 

Gatsby (in any of its incarnations) makes me think that perhaps character is a bigger challenge to storytelling than narrative structure.  I won’t say the book defies adaptation, but Jay Gatsby certainly resists audience empathy.  By design, he goes nowhere – neither forward through observable growth nor backward through expository revelation.  As Gertrude Stein famously observed “There’s no there there.”  Gatsby is nobody. 

And he’s a huge nobody.  At the height of his career in 1974, Robert Redford was Gatsby.  Leonardo DiCaprio was Gatsby in 2013.  Leo took home a $20 million paycheck to create a performance intentionally lacking charisma and depth.  To do otherwise would have strayed from the novel’s intent.  Audiences expecting star vehicles for their favorite heartthrobs were rightly confused.

 

Perhaps because of the bold nothingness at its center, I truly enjoyed The Great Gatsby.  I found Luhrman’s structure clearer than the book’s, the lines between people easier to map on screen.  The excesses of Gatsby’s bacchanals evoke the 1920s, yet seem pointedly lifted from “Rich Kids of Instagram.”  I wanted to go to these parties – yet the desire to do so colored me with guilt.  I wanted to visit these extravagant mansions, but only if it were possible to avoid their shallow owners.  I think I was lured to the precisely the scrutiny Fitzgerald hoped to engender.  Many times since (spoilers!) Gatsby’s funeral, I’ve found myself looking for the holes privilege might have dug in my own character.