“Now here’s a good one:
you’re lying on your deathbed.
You have one hour to live.
Who is it, exactly, you have needed
all these years to forgive?”
—Margaret Atwood, “Up”
Just some thoughts on Baz Luhrmann’s trailer:
I might be at odds with every other English student on the planet with this, but, well…. Like so many of us, I loved The Great Gatsby as a novel, but at the same time I honestly think the trailer does it justice.
All the things that people take offense to—the over-the-top flashiness, the historical caricature, the choice of “No Church in the Wild”, even the romantic fluff—it all works.
Except on a very superficial level, I don’t think this adaptation is even about “reinventing Fitzgerald” or adding in modern music and flashy scenes to sell Gatsby to the 2012 Hollywood audience. Yes, the excesses of the trailer do, one the one hand, play up Gatsby’s own extravagances, the idea that his American dream is no more material than the senselessness, the futile build-up that Luhrmann presents. But it runs so much deeper than that.
On the other hand, the caricatured Jazz Age portrayal, the choice of music that borders on ridiculous, the fevered tempo, they’re all so very Baz Luhrmann, and so appropriate.
The absurd juxtaposition of old and new, faux-20s style against what’s a God to a non-believer, it all pushes his Gatsby out of Fitzgerald’s time and place and into a much less realistic and much more universal one. What is Luhrmann up to here?
The truth hurts. Our American dream? It’s every bit as immaterial as the one Fitzgerald offers us. If we’re willing to look deep enough, we realize that Luhrmann gives us that reminder, that slap in the face that tells us that we are no better than those figures on the screen. Luhrmann’s message is powerful, but only if we recognize what it implies about ourselves.
I loved the 1974 adaptation because it was precisely what I imagined when I read the novel. But I love the idea of Luhrmann’s film—or what little we’ve seen of it so far, anyway—because his message is strong enough to stand on its own.
Don’t take me seriously, though; I’ve never so much as studied this novel in class. I guess I’m going to be that teenage girl that Hollywood targets, I’m going to go in for the shimmer and the beat—and I am going to go right ahead and get excited about Baz Luhrmann’s Gatsby.
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Where are you from?
Where are YOU from? |
“My daughter plays on the floor
with plastic letters,
red, blue & hard yellow,
learning how to spell,
spelling,
how to make spells.
I wonder how many women
denied themselves daughters,
closed themselves in rooms,
drew the curtains
so they could mainline words.
A child is not a poem,
a poem is not a child.
there is no either/or.
However.
I return to the story
of the woman caught in the war
& in labour, her thighs tied
together by the enemy
so she could not give birth.
Ancestress: the burning witch,
her mouth covered by leather
to strangle words.
A word after a word
after a word is power.
At the point where language falls away
from the hot bones, at the point
where the rock breaks open and darkness
flows out of it like blood, at
the melting point of granite
when the bones know
they are hollow & the word
splits & doubles & speaks
the truth & the body
itself becomes a mouth.
This is a metaphor.
How do you learn to spell?
Blood, sky & the sun,
your own name first,
your first naming, your first name,
your first word.”
—Margaret Atwood, “Spelling”
(Source: poemhunter.com)
