All Things Golden and Imaginary: Great Gatsby Trailer Review

So, Old Sport, I've given it some thought, and I think we've concerned ourselves with a touch too much weighty political nonsense over the last few days. Besides, I've just seen the most shocking thing. Well, perhaps it wasn't altogether shocking, but something that made me reconsider closing out my interests in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men, just to give you an honest opinion of a new trailer gracing the scene. Pull on your T. J. Eckleberg glasses, make sure to reserve all judgements, and fix your eyes on this, else you'll be miserably confused, and think me some kind of veteran bore.

Don't worry, I've no plans to babble on in Fitzgerald-ese for the rest of the post, but I couldn't resist myself, just for a paragraph. About a week ago, the trailer hit the netwaves, leaving literary nerds ecstatic (at its existence, if not uniformly at its content) and leaving the uninitiated muttering, "Gatsby? What Gatsby?" whenever they stumbled on a pack of wild squeeers/ranters trumpeting its existence across the blogs.

For a bit of background: The Great Gatsby had a monumental impact on my life, and in terms of self-contained single novels, is probably my favorite English-language work, period. I first read it during my Freshman year, while struggling with homesickness, loneliness, and a touch of depression. While most of you know it's far from uplifting, many of the sentiments Fitzgerald communicated, both in the novel itself and in certain of his companion autobiographical essays - disconnection, the sense of a life artificially constructed, a search for grounded identity, unattainable dreams, the pitfalls of materialism - resonated powerfully with me. Besides the personal connection, tGG is quite simply a master work of craftsmenship, blending themes of vapid extravagance with a formal style laden with glittering descriptions but shifting with plot, deconstructing (or, to some, reconstructing) the classic Alger myth, capturing a snapshot of the riotous, tragic, romantic 1920's in novel form. All of this to say that I was awaiting the traitor with bated breath and none-too-minor expectations.

Overall - I found the trailer remarkably effective at doing its job: transmitting to the viewer the breadcrumbs of a plot, an infusion of the overall feel, and an underlying current of the story's direction. Since I know the plot too thoroughly to sense whether the summary given by the trailer would be adequate for a neophyte (and because other aspects interest me more) I want to focus on two elements of feel and tone that peeved a number of critics in the world of chatter and clicks: the explosive lushness of the production design and the musical selections.

The former came as a shock to me, and, I would have thought, to anyone who came within a mile of F. Scott's original, over-the-top, saturated prose, describing the extravagance and brash luminosity of the parties in grand and often excessive detail. The tone of the trailer is flashy, cacophonous, and, to me, captures the tension of a society spinning faster and faster, desperately throwing themselves into hte music, and eventually towards the book's (spoiler) tragic ending. Yes, earlier films may not have been in technicolor, and they may not have involved zebras (that, I will concede, may have been a bit much) but the trailer communicated to me party scenes with all flash and no substance, no real connection or communication.

When it comes to the music, I've come across a wave of (to me, surprising) backlash against the two songs the trailer utilized - Jay Z's "No Church in the Wild" and a Jack White cover of "Love is Blindness," both modern selections, and one unrepentantly hip hop in its rhythm and tone. The latter drew the most internet ire: mostly along the lines of "Idiots, putting Hip Hop in a JAZZ AGE movie," and "you know the movie industry's going downhill when you see Jay Z in a Fitzgerald film". Whether these stem from concerns over anachronism (legitimate, but limiting when it comes to a modern adaptation) or from underlying racism (Hip Hop? That's dirty, gangster music (whisper: black), it has no place in a film adapted from One Of The Masters, one of the classics!) they come from a place that relies way more on, shall we say, textual originalism, then I do in assessment of adaptations. The entire point of dusting off old themes, old tales, and adapt them, even if you ostensibly set it in the original time period, is to make a statement that this story is still relevant, that it can move and inspire people in 2012 as powerfully as it did in 1930, and 1960, and 1990. In the specific case of Fitzgerald, I think what's most important is to imagine what Jay-Z and hip hop generally represent to the 1990's and 2000's, and parallel it to what Jazz represented to the 1920's: musical cultures grown from African American cultural experiences, loaded with rhythm and base, associated with alcohol, scandalous dancing, eventually appropriated by white culture to sap the feeling of transgression, without really internalizing the origins of the music. Given all this, given how Jazz (the intoxicating, dark, loud music) defined and inflected the the cultural milieu of Gatsby and Co, I think Jay-Z's familiar song recreates some of the distant emotional, aural and cultural aspects of Jazz, bridging the viewer into a distant-yet-familiar world of the self-absorbed 20's, when catastrophe was impending and the restlessness approached hysteria (an era painfully relevant to those of us who would have been the 30's generation back then: the ones growing up after the bubble burst).


All in all, I'm excited to see the final product. Luhrmann's built up capital with me through Moulin Rouge, though I'm unfamiliar with R&J, and since, in my eyes, he's free of major flubs, I trust him, for now.

What did you think of the trailer? What are your expectations of the film? Was it a golden consummation of your glittering hopes, or were your hopes for the trailer a distant green light, never quite matched by reality? At any rate, until tomorrow, we will stretch our arms out further, beating on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into June.

Wishing you all things golden, and green lights that don't frist constantly away from you as the universe expands,
Cody


Arabic World of the Day: المغرب Maghreb. The word for North Africa, taken from the word 'aghreeb, meaning both "West" and "Sunset," as addition to, in adjective form, describing the strange or unknown, much as the English world "oriental" does.

Quote of the Day: " And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night." - The Great Gatsby


P.S. This will be the last blog posted on Facebook before the great hiatus of 2012, so if you want updates/communication, follow this blog and/or add me on Skype at slytherin.phoenix.