The books you read in high school are unique - it might have been the first time in your life you were told to do something that you didn’t want to do, but unlike when you were younger, being a teenager grants a certain independence - you don’t just ignore the work, but may become actively annoyed at the fact that Jane Austen or William Shakespeare or Samuel Beckett or, in my case, F Scott Fitzgerald is being foisted upon us. Of course, now I regret not taking the time I had - for free! - to read ‘Sense and Sensibility’, ‘Hamlet’, ‘Waiting for Godot’ and ‘The Great Gatsby’ when a teacher was there to explain them to me. Strike that, for as I write I remember that ‘Godot’ was pretty short, and therefore ideal territory for the schoolboy’s mind. At any rate, I’ve had a relationship with ‘Gatsby’ for nearly 20 years now - first skim reading it in school, then seeing the 1974 Jack Clayton-directed, Coppola-written film version, and finally last year enjoying a plane ride with Tim Robbins reading it in my ear.
I’m not a literary critic, so at the risk of exposing the vulnerabilities in my analysis, let me say this: I shoulda read it when I was a kid. The elegant sparseness of the language, the colour of the dialogue, the political implications of a narrative in which none of the characters - rich or poor - is likeable..that’ll do for starters.
So I sat down to re-watch the movie the other night and was sad to find it creating a new category for this blog: Old Films That Look Better Than They Actually Are. There may never have been a film set in this period that looks more authentic - from Gatsby’s mansion to the gas station to the Eckelburg sign to the vehicles to the costumes. Add a little Robert Redford/Mia Farrow/Bruce Dern - BRUCE DERN! - /Karen Black/Scott Wilson (another new category: Actors Whom Nobody Can Name But Everybody Likes); some cool old jazz standards; and frankly astonishing photography and what have you got? A series of still images any one of which deserves to be hung on a wall, in the guise of an utterly flat film. Maybe they were making a point about Gatsby’s personality, or about the shallowness of the relationships in the story; or maybe something went very badly wrong with the direction and the script.
So - dear listener - anybody out there want to contribute a suggestion for your own ‘Old Films That Look Better Than They Actually Are’? I could get the ball rolling by proposing every film that Quentin Tarantino has made, but it’s a Friday, and I’m in a good mood, so I’ll just keep that to myself.
