The Green Light

Ever since I saw Baz Lurhmann's adaptation of The Great Gatsby I've been obsessed with figuring out exactly why I didn't like it. I hadn't read the book in a while, and yesterday I reread it and now I think I understand why - it's because Baz and I both made the mistake of thinking of both Nick and Gatsby as tragic heroes, two naive young men ruined by the excess of the Jazz Age.

I identify extremely closely with Nick. The opening lines of the novel really true with me. I feel as though my inability to assert myself while among unwanted company and my fear of confrontation means I often listen to unwarranted and unsolicited confidences. I also end up in situations I don't want to be in out of fear of offending someone and my shyness in strange situations means I end up sitting through weird events unable to really say anything. And perhaps I was feeling sorry for myself, because I started to feel that The Great Gatsby was a cautionary tale about an easygoing young man who, through the thoughtless actions of one group of people, is reduced to a negative, judgemental, critical person. He sees Gatsby punished for his dogged pursuit of a dead dream and it makes him sick.

But upon rereading I was reminded why I identify so closely with Nick Carraway and found that I was wrong to have romanticised him so much, to the point that I'm now embarrassed for all the times I bemoaned Nick's fate even more than Gatsby's. Because Nick isn't a naive, forgiving young man when we meet him - he's trying to tell us that following a piece of his father's sage advice lead to all of this trouble. He thinks now his father's advice stemmed more from a natural snobbery than any real need to understand other human beings and as a consequence, Nick was unwittingly pulled into the worlds of rich men afraid of losing their kingdoms and revealing their weaknesses to someone who didn't really want to know.

The Buchanans, Jordan Baker, Gatsby - they all use Nick to serve their own purposes, and whether Nick realises this early on I'm not sure, but I think some part of him always has a sense of Deja vu, that he's been here before. That though he might be at a fantastic party with fantastic people drinking fantastic champagne, he's still somewhere else pretending to be asleep while forced to hear too much information about someone he doesn't really know. Not only that, but he knew that this 'sharing' would be done in such a false, melodramatic way. Nick likes to believe he's that person who refuses to judge people immediately ("Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth."), but it seems as though it ends up being more trouble than it's worth.

He likes Daisy, Jordan and Gatsby and this is why he forgives them those moments he sees straight through them, Gatsby most of all. He's drawn to this man whose speech "just missed being absurd," his romantic dream of having built a magnificent life all for one girl, and his neverending hospitality. But it all seems so shoddy, and as a consequence it falls down so easily. The girl was never that interested - once all of the other girls started getting married and having fabulous lives Daisy grew impatient and rather than wait for Gatsby she married the first rich man who caught her eye. Gatsby's entire life is built on one invention after another; he's a poor farmer's son who runs away; joins a rich old sailor whose scheming wife pulls the rug out from under him when the sailor dies; he lies to a rich girl in order to get what he wants; he builds his empire on gambling and bootlegging and lies about it. Gatsby must have honestly believed that this was all just a shortcut to success: once he had Daisy in his arms again he could start a real, proper life and be a gentleman. But as Tolkien said, shortcuts make long delays.

And the trouble was, he never would have that life. And just as he wasn't the man he liked to think he was, Daisy wasn't the girl he thought she was, either. It suddenly seems obvious, perhaps maybe not to Nick, that none of Gatsby's guests turn up to his funeral. He never cared about those parties or those guests; it was just a desperate need to be loved by someone who never showed up to them, and when she did she hated them and he cut them and all his guests out just like that. Why Nick expected any loyalty only serves to show how much he actually liked Gatsby despite the fact he "disapproved of him from beginning to end." But Nick couldn't help but be drawn to these people (even when he's angry with Jordan he's still half in love with her), which is probably why the events of those months leave him feeling like the whole of the East will haunt him for ever.

There are a few moments when Nick sees straight through all of them: he guesses at Tom's desperate need to assert control over his life at that first dinner party; he figures out Jordan's a liar who will do anything to maintain her facade of bored iciness; that Daisy has perfected the art of seducing everyone to get what she wants. It's in the way she pretends at being cynical and that she stays with a man who so obviously cheats on her - it's how she escapes the reputation she probably deserves. This is also why she will never leave Tom for Gatsby. With Tom she's assured protection or at the very least, a status akin to being a victim. When she realises Gatsby's good name can be so easily torn away with a few well-placed questions, she sees there's no way she'll be protected from the scandal of running off with a 'bootlegger.'

Which I suppose leads me back to Baz. With the exception of Strictly Ballroom and a teen crush on Leonardo DiCaprio that resulted in a temporary obsession with Romeo + Juliet, I'm not a huge fan of Baz Lurhmann's films. There's just something I can't warm to - the excess, the frantic pacing, the theatrical acting. It's just not my jam. Maybe it will be one day. But I can't say his style doesn't lend itself to Gatsby's tale of excess, because in a way it does. All of the characters in one way or another embody that excess and that melodramatic flair. But I think it only works if you assume that The Great Gatsby is a romantic tragedy, which I'm sure can be read as such. But I don't, not at all, and I think it took seeing the film to remind me that for me at least it's not a romantic tragedy, and Nick isn't a poor, naive sap whose life is ruined. It's why the framing device of having Nick in a sanatorium, encouraged to work through his anger, alcoholism and depression to write about Gatsby just doesn't work for me. I actually hate it. And it's why I feel that even when the film is incredibly faithful to the book it manages to get it wrong, somehow. Perhaps I feel the spirit the film is trying to capture is the wrong one. And for me, the moment Nick has while drunk at Tom and Myrtle Wilson's secret apartment in the city seems, to me, to give it all away:

"I wanted to get out and walk southward toward the park through the soft twilight, but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild, strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life."

Nick isn't drawn into this world, unwilling to leave. He's pulled in, always trying to leave, a tiny part of him wanting to stay but feeling as though he shouldn't. His disconnection from the events seems to stem not only from his father's advice but also from his literary nature (he wrote in college and hopes to take it up again by documenting the time he spent in the East), and perhaps that's why I feel so much like Nick Carraway is my spirit animal. But it's also the reason Nick would never be in a sanatorium - he always knows he's not really part of that world. He's the only one who ever seems to work, who ever has a sense of the need to work hard to achieve something. He likes that world, he has fun, but he never feels like he's fully engaged in it. There's never a sense that he entirely likes any of these people. Guests he has fun with at one party reveal themselves to be self-destructive bores at the next. His descriptions of some of them suggest disdain or indifference, momentarily brightened by a certain manner of speaking, or an unexpected act of valour, or a realisation that they genuinely believe what they're doing is right. He despises Daisy and Tom's actions but he can't bring himself to hate them. He remembers, "without resentment, that Daisy hadn't sent a message or a flower." When he meets Tom some time later he refuses to shake his hand and tells him off, but when he hears Tom's side of the story he realises that he will never change Tom's mind and doesn't see the point of bearing a grudge. He even concedes, in a way, that Jordan Baker nails his character the last time they speak:

"'You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver? Well, I met another bad driver, didn't I? I mean it was careless of me to make such a wrong guess. I thought you were an honest, straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride.'"

He can't even tell her she's wrong, replying, "'I'm thirty,' I said. 'I'm five years too old to lie to myself and call it honour.'"

I suppose Nick can be accused of being an unreliable narrator, or being reprehensible in his actions, and I can see that Baz has softened the blow by making him a little tragic. I suppose to me, however, it feels like a cop-out. Nick's not perfect; it's obvious his detachment from the events can make him seem a little cold and unforgiving, but I feel that Nick is deeply affected by what happened, but in his own way. I think this is his apology for pretending to be forgiving when deep down he isn't. Maybe he feels that he might not be much different from them after all, especially after Jordan's reprimand. He could be unreliable, or secretly in love with Gatsby, or an arsehole, but putting him in a sanitorium feels too melodramatic. The writing in and of itself is the therapy - Nick doesn't need any outside encouragement to think of it in this way because he already has that literary bent.

Perhaps it's never so obvious that Baz has perhaps misjudged Nick Carraway than it is at the end of the film. Maguire's delivery of the final paragraph of the novel seems to show a misunderstanding, or rather a need to think better of, Nick's character. He talks of infinite hope early in the novel but is sceptical it can ever be achieved. And rather than Gatsby being a celebration of infinite hope, he's proof for Nick of its non-existence:

"Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter - tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... And one fine morning -
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

We'll endlessly pin our hopes on the future, assured that tomorrow is that mythical day when everything we've ever wanted to happen will come to fruition, never realising that while we're looking ahead we're desperately trying to drag the past with us and never succeeding because of this dim belief that what we wanted back then will happen soon, and more to the point, that we'll still want it even now. I can't really think of anything more depressing than that, and I get the sense that Luhrmann and Maguire think that perhaps Nick feels a little better about this than we do. That said, the film's ending is quite affecting, if it weren't for that narration and Luhrmann's constant need to remind us of the story's literary roots by scattering text across the screen as though they're enchanted stars. But there is much to like there, if you can enjoy what film adaptations are - the filmmaker's subjective interpretation of the book's essence. It's not always the same as yours, and it's not always a well-made film, but that doesn't mean filmmakers should stop trying. I suppose my main concern that Tobey Maguire was the wrong choice to play Nick even stems from my interpretation of his character - and a relatively passive protagonist like Nick Carraway goes against every screenwriting rule in the book, so it was never going to be an easy task.

I suppose all of this really only leaves me with one question: if I identify more with this colder, less passionate, more detached Nick Carraway, I wonder what I think of myself now?