Meg, I don’t have a problem with dislikable characters. I have a problem with an author who expects me to share his terribly shocked reaction to pretty commonplace behavior — he’s shocked SHOCKED to find that people get away with murder, and who has the silliness to romanticize the unromanticizable — Gatsby’s stupidity at pursuing that idiotic slag Daisy.
Not seeing the nuance or problematic or enigmatic stuff in GATSBY, but OK. I certainly see that Fitzgerald is doing everything he can to cram a sort of nuance and enigmatic power into what I can only now and forever see as a slimy little story about the assholishness of a bunch of absolutely vile creatures. Now that may be the point, but it has never felt like the point. Instead of satiric edge, Fitzgerald goes for a whining hand-wringing that always puts my teeth on edge.
I don’t have a problem with dislikable characters.
that idiotic slag Daisy.
are you sure?
anyway, people fall madly in love with the undeserving all the time to try to connect to something in themselves, she is just a vehicle and I might say a perfectly wrought one by Fitzgerald
@Roscoe “I don’t have a problem with dislikable characters or behaviors. I have a problem with an author who depicts a pretty slimy little story about slimy people doing slimy things while wringing his hands over how awful it all is and then drawing a sentimental nonsense ending about the nobility of it all.”
So Sophia WOULD be perfect for it then.
yes, 3D is in fact under consideration says Lurhmann. wow
Fitzgerald goes for a whining hand-wringing that always puts my teeth on edge.
fair enough, we all have out shudder zones :)
“are you sure?”
Yup. The problem, as I think I keep saying, isn’t the dislikability of the characters, but the sentimentality of Fitzgerald’s attitude toward them. Faulkner’s characters are every bit as vile as anything in GATSBY, but he never tries to get me all weepy over the fates of the monstrous/magnificent Thomas Sutpen or the vile Flem Snopes.
Well, I think we can all agree that whatever the respective merits of Gatsby, Baz Luhrmann adapting a 3-D version is someone’s idea of a bad joke.
^yes, I think it’s Baz’s idea of a bad joke. The follow-up to Australia had to be big
It’d be worse if it was Rob Marshall.
Or Zack Snyder.
Not seeing the nuance or problematic or enigmatic stuff in GATSBY
I wouldn’t either if I’d recently sat through a 7-hour reading of the novel. Good to know Andy Kaufman’s old joke is being played out on a new generation of theater-goers.
And to be fair, there were some very fine moments. The accident and its aftermath were beautifully done, there’s no two ways about it, and the guy playing Gatsby was most impressive — not the Redford pretty boy at all. But as Carraway’s bromance with Gatsby got to puke-inducing levels at the end, I couldn’t help but think of Kaufman’s old joke.
“Well, I think we can all agree that whatever the respective merits of Gatsby, Baz Luhrmann adapting a 3-D version is someone’s idea of a bad joke.”
X 1,000,0000
sofia is underrated
Alan Rudolph
don’t believe it
watch The Moderns
Z. Bart
I don’t disagree entirely, Roscoe—an arch appraisal!—but the wonderfully nuanced and problematic relationship that exists between Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby (or perhaps only in Nick’s mind) flies in the face of whatever “sugary romanticism” may exist in other aspects of the novel.
“I was reminded of something—an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words. . . [W]hat I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.”
To me, this is the key to the enigmatic figure who chronicles this novel, and it’s a remarkably indeterminate moment. What he can’t bring himself to say—whatever it might be—is what the book is actually about.