Luhrmann’s Gatsby in all its dimensions

I’ve been awaiting the arrival of Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby for many months with the same giddy excitement that I used to reserve for the Eurovision Song Contest. I’d be hoping for some Abba-esque flash of brilliance, all the time knowing deep down that my enjoyment would be of the cruel and camp variety, gazing on open-mouthed as a bunch of hapless mannequins staggered through ineptly choreographed routines to shudderingly banal music; and there would probably be a clown or two. As such, Gatsby is a disappointment. As an adaptation of Fitzgerald’s novel, it’s not atrocious enough to be funny but it’s certainly not brilliant either; as a movie in its own right, it’s quite interesting. And Bonnie Tyler’s not in it.

To run through the basics, Luhrmann and his co-writer Craig Pearce stick to the basic plot pretty faithfully, with the exception of a framing narrative which had Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) recounting the story from a drying-out clinic; more of that later. A kid writing a book report having only watched this version would at least scrape a pass. Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby is rather good, convincingly swinging between insouciant bonhomie at his bacchanalian parties and quasi-teenage gawkiness as he awaits the reunion with Daisy. Maguire, by contrast, is awful, depicting Nick as a one-note klutz, his Wall Street suit-and-bowtie get-up only reinforcing his resemblance to Pee-Wee Herman. Carey Mulligan can’t do much with the impossible role of Daisy although she does have the acting chops to remind you what a fickle cow the character is; and she looks nice, which helps.

Indeed, the whole film looks nice, but that’s what we’ve come to expect from Luhrmann. The party scenes are suitably brash and energetic (with inevitable nods to Cabaret and Chicago) and some of the big, swooping shots across Manhattan and the yearning gap across the water that separates Gatsby’s mansion from the Buchanans’ place are proper heart-in-mouth stuff. They make good use of the 3D format but elsewhere Luhrmann seems compelled – as do most directors who appropriate this stupid, expensive gimmick – to get his money’s worth. So we get champagne corks and footballs hurled in our general direction, lit cigars and the tumbling characters of Carraway’s typescript; all embodying the paradox that a process that is supposed to make a movie more real, more lifelike only reminds us of the artificiality of the form.

Which, oddly enough, is where things get interesting. Because 3D demands these big scenes, the characters often seem like figures in a diorama, or the inhabitants of a dolls’ house. When Gatsby’s nerve breaks and Carraway snaps, “You’re acting like a little boy”, the viewer can’t forget that, as good as DiCaprio may be, yes, he is still acting – the scene comes over like a high school production of a Noël Coward scene. The film doesn’t find the emotional heart of the novel (the most moving moment in the book, the appearance of Gatsby’s father at the end, is missing) but Luhrmann’s not trying to do that. Instead, he’s taken the most essential component of the main character’s story, the sense of desperate reinvention and pretence, and extrapolated it into a whole movie. It’s postmodernism, stupid.

So we get the nods Hollywood’s past intimations that success and fame don’t bring happiness. DiCaprio’s boyish confidence has more than a little Charles Foster Kane about it and his home is Xanadu; his final exhalation of “Daisy” may as well be “Rosebud”. And then he is found floating, not on a mattress as in the novel, but face down, like William Holden in Sunset Boulevard. Some of the other cultural tips of the hat are more clunky, and seem to play fast and loose with reality. Carraway has a copy of Ulysses, which was published in Paris in February, 1922, so it’s just about feasible that a copy may have evaded the attention of the US censors and made it to him by the summer of that year, when the story is apparently set. But Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue didn’t appear until two years later, so rather than being a useful period detail it feels as if Luhrmann just asked for something familiar and 1920s-y to fill in a gap. 

But hold on; this isn’t real, remember. There’s no room for historical pedantry in Luhrmann Land (and neither Jay-Z nor Beyoncé nor Amy Winehouse were around in 1922 either). If the 3D hasn’t done the trick, the framing narrative should, although at first it appears to be wholly gauche and clunky. Making Carraway an alcoholic just reinforces the fairly banal inference that he might be a fictional stand-in for Fitzgerald himself but no – he’s actually Luhrmann, pushing around these funny little ciphers of people in the vast toy theatres of his imagination, playing the music he wants to play whether it’s historically plausible or not. Who’s to say that the action we’ve just seen played out in 3D isn’t the dredged from his booze-sodden imagination, or just a ploy to get the psychiatrist off his back? Indeed, this may explain the oddest piece of casting, that of Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan as the racketeer Meyer Wolfshiem. When Pete Postlethwaite browned up and took a Japanese name in The Usual Suspects it made no sense until you realised the whole story was an off-the-cuff spiel by a master deceiver. Could Wolfshiem be Indian? Yes, if Luhrmann/Carraway becomes Keyser Söze and wants it to be so. It’s just a story, after all.

So how can we explain Luhrmann’s Gatsby? Well, not really by reference to the original novel, or to previous adaptations thereof. Nor to Hollywood’s previous ruminations about the downside of riches, or even to its depictions of the Jazz Age and all its debaucheries. Baz has cherrypicked them all, but with a level of discretion and decorum that may surprise his detractors and none of them tells the whole story. No, the closest connection I can see is with a British movie, one that failed as an adaptation of a beloved book, that didn’t even bother to depict the time in which it was set, but later came to be seen as a wry satire on the culture and society that prevailed at the time it was made. And it had some fun party scenes. Luhrmann won’t thank me, but his Gatsby is a kindred spirit to Julien Temple’s Absolute Beginners. I wonder what that would have been like in 3D...

PS: Oh hell. I’ve just realised that the gap between 1959 (when Colin MacInnes’s novel Absolute Beginners was published) and 1986 (when the film appeared) is the same as the gap between 1986 and now.

Zadie Smith and the phantom child of Brigitte Bardot

I’m reading Zadie Smith’s NW at the moment and a single sentence leaps out from the Willesden grime:

If only the man were like Brigitte Bardot, who never had children, preferring animals.

The thing is, Brigitte Bardot did actually have a child, a boy named Nicholas-Jacques, by her second husband Jacques Charrier. She may well prefer animals – she said as much in her autobiography – but the child does exist.

Now of course NW is a work of fiction and the author is entirely within her rights to create a parallel world in which Nicholas-Jacques was never born. And even if she hasn’t exercised that right, she’s allowed to create characters who believe things to be true even if they’re not. Her character Leah never claims to be an expert on the family life of any particular French sex symbol, so this isn’t as much of a cock-up as the music fan in Kazuo Ishiguro’s story ‘Come Rain or Come Shine’ who refers to the composer Howard – rather than Harold – Arlen; or the suggestion in Julian Barnes’s Arthur & George that the Stonyhurst-educated Conan Doyle might not know the difference between the Virgin Birth and the Immaculate Conception.

But because of the quasi-Joycean narrative technique that Smith employs, blurring the distinction between an omniscient narrator and the inner thoughts of the characters, it’s not clear if this is what Leah thinks, or what the author/narrator thinks about the situation that Leah is in. And if we give her the benefit of the doubt and assume the latter, is the reader expected to know that Leah is wrong? And since I’m only a few chapters in, am I going to discover that whole Bardot’s child thing is going to be explained and resolved by the end, leaving me looking utterly stupid? I’ll let you know.

The Met Gala: “My dog ate a safety pin”

The witterings of various F-list slebs at the Met Gala in New York earlier this week have attracted much scorn. But to be honest, wasn’t the event itself just asking for trouble, with the theme ‘Punk: From Chaos To Couture’? There was no point asking the red carpet crew about punk because the whole shebang was about the end of punk, the death of punk, the absorption of punk into the belly of the money beast. In Situationist terms it was about recuperation, the act of taking something revolutionary and making it safe for capitalism. And it’s not as if the gala itself represents any kind of major movement in that process; punk as a potent visual genre was already mortally gored in 1977 when Zandra Rhodes tarted up an evening frock with safety pins. The likes of Madonna and Sarah Jessica Parker had been invited not to celebrate punk but to dance badly on its grave; surely they can be forgiven if they couldn’t get it together to improvise a coherent funeral hymn at the same time.

PS: And here are three things that are more punk.

Branding: realty and reality

I’ve written before about the time of my professional life when I had serious responsibility for what was felt to be A Major Global Brand and how unfortunate it was for everybody concerned that this coincided with the time of my cultural and political life when I read Naomi Klein’s No Logo. I didn’t win that argument, as can be seen from the news that a New York real estate company that has offered staff members a 15% pay rise if they’ll allow themselves to be tattooed with the firm’s logo.

Now, there are a number of interpretations that could be applied to this. New York’s an expensive town, the US economy’s not doing that well, so maybe the employees simply decided that the temporary pain and lasting embarrassment were worth it if the cash were right. They’re estate agents, right? We’ve all seen Glengarry Glen Ross. And then of course it could be that the whole thing is just a light-hearted publicity stunt for the firm, relying on the fact that most news media operations these days don’t have the time or resources for proper bullshit detection.

But let’s take the whole story at face value and believe what the CEO of Rapid Realty says, that his employees were happy to accept the inking because they are “passionate about the brand”. The thing is, I can understand the cold, brutal, business logic of encouraging consumers to believe in a brand, to want to belong, to buy into some kind of collective identity that transcends the empirical quality of the products being sold. That’s where the profit margin lies. But do you really want your staff to be quite so detached from the real world?

Cloud Atlas: the two-sentence review

At its heart, the subject matter of Cloud Atlas (the novel) is the core component of all fiction, the story.

At its heart, the subject matter of Cloud Atlas (the movie) is the core component of all cinema, the less-than-convincing facial prosthesis.

Posterous: I’d never join a club that would let me forget I was already a member

I received an e-mail the other day advising me, with great sadness, that Posterous was closing down and that I should make efforts to transfer my data to another site. I was a little confused because I don’t remember signing up for a Posterous site or putting anything on it. In fact, I’m not entirely sure was Posterous is. Sorry, was.

I’m sure I’m not the only person who leaves fragments of himself around the social media landscape without realising it. I suppose I first got involved around the turn of the millennium, when I started prattling under various pseudonyms on Guardian Unlimited and then had a look at FriendsReunited. I started blogging in late 2005 and although my posts have been less frequent of late, I’m still in the same place. The following year I joined Twitter – about the only time I could have been accused of being an early adopter. I’m also on Facebook and LinkedIn; and Delicious, Flickr, Quora and Google+, although in some of those cases I can’t remember the last time I logged in. I started a blog on WordPress during an odd couple of days when Blogger refused to work, but I only did one post. I think that’s it. Oh yeah, and Posterous. Apparently.

It’s inevitable that some of these products will die off, neglected, forgotten; they were the future once. And those that remain lose something of their shine. Facebook is increasingly the domain of the middle-aged apparently, as ver kidz desert it because they don’t want their parents spying on them; Twitter is just out of control; and oh yeah, blogging’s dead. Again. Maybe instead of culling sites as they’ve done with Posterous, they should rest them for a while, then reissue them under new names after a couple of years, when we’ve all forgotten about them.

It’s not all gloom though. My younger friends (the ones who still worry more about zits than wrinkles) swear by Instagram, although as the world’s most inept photographer, I don’t think it’s really for me. MySpace? Yeah, right. I have been snooty in the past about Tumblr, because its picture-driven vibe feels like a surrender to a post-literate zeitgeist but to be honest, there are times when I don’t feel like writing that much either.

So I decided to set up a Tumblr, to see what it was all about. At which point, I discovered – with sickening inevitability – that I’d already set one up a year or so ago and promptly forgotten it, and I’d used it to post nothing but the following picture, which suddenly seems rather apt in the circumstances:

PS: Further corroboration of the Facebook age divide from Radio One. Apparently they prefer something called Keek, although I reckon that's a made-up site, like a drug in Brass Eye.

PPS: Or Pheed, or Incredibooth. More here.

In which I turn into The Great Gatsby

For some time now, the first site to come up when you Google “The Great Gatsby” has been the one heralding the much-delayed movie version rather than anything directly related to Fitzgerald’s novel per se. It’s easy enough to be sniffy about this, but at the same time it’s almost certain that Baz Luhrmann’s version of the book will prompt many people to read it for the first time; and the experience may well nudge some previously reluctant readers into a better appreciation of the written word overall. As such, there’s a new paperback edition available, featuring Leonardo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan and the other stars on the cover; but at the same time, a version with the original cover art is also selling very well. As the New York Times reports, there’s a neat socio-economic divide when it comes to which version is stocked where: indie stores in SoHo only stock the old style; WalMart restricts itself to the Leonardo variant; Barnes & Noble has both. Reaction to the new cover has been a little vociferous; as one bookseller squawks:

It’s just God-awful... ‘The Great Gatsby’ is a pillar of American literature, and people don’t want it messed with. We’re selling the classic cover and have no intention of selling the new one.

Well, that told us, although I think his definition of “people” could do with a little examination. And remember that the original cover (the disembodied face of which, I’ve long maintained, is a nod to Aubrey Beardsley’s hovering Oscar Wilde caricature in The Platonic Lament, but maybe I overthink this stuff) divided opinion when it appeared in 1925; Hemingway hated it, for one. But the tension does remind us that, Kindles notwithstanding, buying a book is often about far more than a simple desire to peruse the text within. Some people will be nervous about even purchasing The Great Gatsby and the appearance of DiCaprio et al reassures them that, yes, this is the book of the film you saw and enjoyed at the weekend. Others of course want to make it quite clear that their choice of reading matter has absolutely nothing to do with Hollywood and they were aware of Gatsby’s centrality to the American literary canon well before the movie was even contemplated; although if they know this, shouldn’t they be sporting the battered, scribbled-upon copy they’ve been reading and re-reading for the past 15 years, rather than some spanking new simulacrum of the first edition? Nevertheless, both purchasers may want to use their respective covers to communicate their choices and feelings to others; and to demonstrate the fact that, whatever their differences, they both feel superior to desperate journalists who think that one of the most melancholy tomes of the past 100 years is just an excuse for a party or a way to sell hair care products. Hey, whatever the cover looks like, at least the words inside are the same. Unless you pick up this version by mistake.

I don’t have a dog in the fight, if there needs to be a fight. I’ve said for some time that I came to Gatsby relatively late in the day, as its literary significance wasn’t so crucial in the rather Eurocentric environment in which I was educated. But is that really the case? A browse of this blog’s archive reveals that at the end of 2007 I was shouting about having read it for the first time that year, although I was aware how tardy I’d been. And yet, a mere six months before that I’d written:

For some reason, I’d convinced myself that I’d never actually read The Great Gatsby. So I picked up a second-hand copy and, of course, the point at which I realised that I had actually read it was the sentence that made me think “wow” the first time round.

Apparently I did read it at some point (the earlier post makes a couple of references to the age of 19, so maybe that’s it) but forgot the fact, then remembered, then forgot again within a matter of months. Or maybe one of those states – the having-read or the not-having-read, I genuinely don’t know any more – began as a lie, an affectation, that I somehow came to believe in. Maybe, like Gatsby, I’ve invented a whole identity for myself, although I’ve gone one further and started to think it was all true, getting lost in my own creation. Remind me never to pretend to be driving; talking of believing your own stories, do you think the Huhnes ever read Gatsby? That may not make any sense to you, of course; you’ll just have to read the book. One of them, at least.

Sofyen Belamouadden and the perils of pixels

I was interested to read in the Telegraph the remarks of DCI John McFarlane about the events that led to the horrific murder of Sofyen Belamouadden at Victoria Station in 2010:

People are playing games on computers in which people are getting stabbed and shot... Where is the real world? For them there is a blurring between the real world and those in the computer world. There was a blurring of the reality. 

I appreciate that McFarlane’s words are probably being used selectively and out of context (more reality blurring at work, then) but there are a few things that need unpicking here. First, it has to be pointed out that scare stories about violent entertainments predate computer games by a century or more. 19th-century penny dreadfuls, 1930s gangster movies, horror comics in the 1950s and so-called video nasties in the 1980s all prompted moral panics about the degeneracy of contemporary youth and were tied, with varying degrees of accuracy, to specific crimes of violence. Computer games are just the latest bad guys.

But McFarlane then appears to move seamlessly from the violence depicted in the games to the uncertain border between the real and virtual worlds; kids believe, it is implied, that if they can dismember 20 ones-and-zeroes bad guys in an afternoon with no comeback, they should be able to pull off a similar stunt amidst the bricks and mortar of a London rail terminus. So what’s the real problem; the Baudrillardian detachment from reality or the virtual violence they experience in that space? I ask because it’s later revealed that the investigation into the murder required sifting evidence from 80 mobile phones, 30 computers and over 1,000 hours of CCTV footage. If anyone’s in danger of getting lost in a hyperreal screen dream it’s the poor saps sitting through that lot.

And I can’t help thinking that conservative scaremongering about stylised violence and/or blurred realities is a wee bit rich since they’re both manifestations of globalised capitalism; which, since the arrival of the Blessed Margaret – now, there’s a simulacrum to think about – has been the only game in town.

Oh, one more telling sentence from the Telegraph report:

The attackers were all A-level students from St Charles Catholic VI Form College in West London, with many coming from respectable middle class homes. 

I don’t get it. Is that supposed to make things better or worse?