This is a short piece I wrote awhile back when the first Luhrmann Gatsby trailer surfaced.
While
the release of the Luhrmann Gatsby
trailer last week elicited a fairly mixed response overall, the overwhelming
majority appeared to be dismayed, often to the point of disgust, with the
provocative, if not entirely unexpected, aesthetic choices that the trailer
highlighted. Underlying much of the
rancour was a sense of broken decorum – a strongly engrained feeling that
adapting a classic and a period piece is a highly formal exercise not unlike meeting the queen. You approach the queen with an air of
self-conscious frigidity, and then proceed with the elaborate ritual of
courtesies, because that’s how it’s done.
Some of the Gatsby reactions
suggested the kind of horror that might accompany somebody tongue-kissing, or
even goosing, the queen in lieu of the usual formalities. While it’s far too early to say, obviously,
what kind of picture Luhrmann has fashioned out of Fitzgerald’s hallowed
literary classic, it’s worth teasing out some of the attitudes that underlie
this sense of decorum regarding literary adaptations and period pieces.
It’s
often felt that the chief criteria by which we judge literary adaptations is in
terms of their fidelity and faithfulness to the source material. This is an attitude shared, oddly enough, by
literary purists and comic book nerds – though at wholly opposite ends of the cultural
spectrum, both share a kind of fundamentalist fervour for the Holy Writ of the
source material. It’s an attitude not
without some merit – nobody really wants Gatsby with a sci-fi or zombie twist –
but at the same time, it fails to acknowledge that movies and novels are
fundamentally different mediums. All
novels worth their salt defy any kind of direct translation to the screen,
because they are so rooted in language, and in the specific properties and
effects that can only be achieved in the novelistic medium. Those novels, on the other hand, that do
facilitate direct translation are the pulpy page-turners that were never more
than fleshed-out film scripts to begin with – Jaws, Rosemary’s Baby, The Godfather, Jurassic Park, and so on – all vastly superior movies than they
ever were novels. The point is that
novels and their movie adaptations are not joined at the hip – they are
separate entities that deserve to be judged on their own terms and relative
merits. If a perfectly faithful
translation of a novel was possible, it would render the source novel itself
obsolete – as has essentially happened with The
Godfather and the other page-turners.
The Great Gatsby is an unfilmable novel
because its essential character lies not in the surface plot, but rather in
Fitzgerald’s treatment of it. In the
hands of a lesser author, it could easily have been so much forgettable
melodrama, but Fitzgerald – by means of the evocative, suggestive quality of
his prose, and unerring sense of what to leave unsaid and un-shown – turns the
story into a highly compressed, almost ineffable narrative poetry. Any attempt to replicate this effect on
screen is doomed to failure – even to flesh out any of what Gatsby stirs
in the mind’s eye of the reader is to threaten the delicate, tenuous magic by
which Fitzgerald maintains the perfection of his small novel. For this reason, the filmmaker has the
freedom to strike out on his own with source material like Gatsby – to create something congruent with, but not slavishly
faithful to the original – something that is allowed to breathe in its own
cinematic context and its own moment.
This
leads to the question of anachronism in Luhrmann’s trailer. All period movies are anachronistic to a
greater or lesser degree. The idea of a correct way to approach period on film
is as illusionary as the perfectly faithful literary adaptation. How we think period should be approached on
film has little or nothing to do with historical accuracy, or the nature of the
period itself – rather, our ideas about period decorum are simply the set of
anachronisms that have become conventionalised as to how period should be shown on film.
Since the past is only the past relatively speaking, and was the present to those who actually lived it,
the most accurate period ambience would feel exactly like the present moment –
this is the paradoxical realization that made Public Enemies such a formally bold and contentious film.
The real irony here, however, is
that although Luhrmann has eschewed the frigid and fussy approach to period, he
seems to have done so in a way that is conspicuously old-fashioned. The stylized,
almost psychedelic artificiality of the imagery in the trailer seems to me to
be much closer in spirit to the lush, painterly artificiality of the
Technicolor Era – to the Old Hollywood worlds of Minnelli, Busby Berkley, and
Sirk – than to the romanticized realism of the 1974 Jack Clayton version. The 3D orientation and CGI appear heavily
anachronistic to us – only because of our more recent conventionalized appetite
for surface realism and verisimilitude in a period or drama movie. Hollywood in the 40s and 50s made ample use
of sound-stages, matte painted backdrops, crazily phony-looking back projection
for driving sequences, and so on; artificiality and stylization in a movie like
Gatsby wouldn’t have bothered them
the way it does us.
Anyway,
all this is to say that Luhrmann’s Great
Gatsby strikes me as more promising than horrifying. A restoration of Techicolor lushness and Old
Hollywood artificiality – shot through with a brash, energetic modern
sensibility – may well be a context in which 3D is actually aesthetically
justified and rewarding. I’m curious to see
how DiCaprio acquaints himself with the titular role. All movie stars who make it really big have a
touch of Gatsby about them - a touch of the mystery of having everything and
yet remaining unfulfilled – and it will be interesting to see if a star of our
generation finally manages to nail Fitzgerald’s elusive shadow at the heart of
the American Dream.
