What do Topeka and the new version of The Great Gatsby have in common?  It seems that the director, Baz Luhrmann, was stuck about how to work in Nick Carraway's observations, since it is Carraway who narrates the novel but plays only a peripheral part in the story.  In Fitzgerald's version, Carraway says that he writing his narrative as a book, and Luhrmann, wanting to avoid a simple voice-over, was looking for an audience for Carraway's writing.  An editor?  A confessor?  It was then he thought of a psychiatrist, so he consulted Walt Menninger, who is cited in the final credits, about writing as therapy and settled on putting Carraway in a sanitarium with scenes of his writing for his doctor bookending the movie.  Supposedly, the sanitarium in the movie is modeled on the Menninger Foundation. 

We've been bombarded for weeks with promos for the movie.  Each time I've seen one, I've cringed at how false to the spirit of the novel that movie seems to be.  I can't think of a director less temperamentally suited to Fitzgerald's delicate and understated sensibility than Luhrmann.  (Well, that's an exaggeration: there is no shortage of directors in Hollywood who would be wrong for the movie version.)  While it's true that the novel is about the very rich, about conspicuous consumption and ostentatious display of wealth, that's only the background for Gatsby's unfulfilled desire for the shallow Daisy Buchanan.  It's not meant to be a gaudy, 3-D display of what modern technology can do.  Indeed, underlying the excesses of the parties Gatsby gives is his loneliness, his isolation, and his longing.  Even when he finally "wins" Daisy, his terrible mistake is to try to undo her past, to get her to say not only that she loves him but that she's never loved her husband, the despicable Tom Buchanan.  That she cannot say.

In the generally mixed reviews of the movie that I've read or seen on TV, one of the statements that occurs over and over is that the novel is read by almost every high school student in America.  I doubt that that's entirely true, but one of the qualities that makes Gatsby a good choice for younger readers is, frankly, that it's short.  Fitzgerald once said that all writers could be divided into the putter-inners and the taker-outers.  He was among the latter.  Compression was usually among his virtues as a writer.  Luhrmann is definitely in the other camp: the kitchen sink variety of director--and in his case, the kitchen sink would be an ultra-sleek, bold look of Kohler or whatever is most fashionable.  It's another reason he's the wrong director for Fitzgerald.

Another comment that is often heard is that when Fitzgerald died all of his novels were out of print.  In 1946, when Edmund Wilson published Viking's collection The Portable Faulkner, all of Faulkner's novels were also out of print.  How can this be when writers like Fitzgerald and Faulkner are now so firmly established in the American canon?  We have to consider, however, what exactly the "canon" is, how it's established, and how books are distributed.  Until roughly the 1880s, you wouldn't find Shakespeare or Milton on a university curriculum, not even in England.  Universities were devoted to the classics; it was only the Greeks and the Romans who made it onto the curriculum.  Once universities began teaching British writers, American literature still wasn't considered worthy of study.  When Fitzgerald and Faulkner were alive, no students were reading their novels.  It wasn't until after WWII and the passage of the GI Bill that the curriculum changed for a second time.  Now it seems perfectly normal to take classes in the American novel (or American literature in general); seventy years ago, that wasn't a possibility.  Now Fitzgerald and Faulkner are taught in every university, and their works are available in many different editions.  Now it's almost inconceivable that their works were once out of print.  But before universities made them household names, who exactly would their audience have been?  (A third major change appeared in the late 1960s and 70s when African-American writers suddenly became part of the curriculum.  When I was an undergraduate, I don't remember reading a single Black author; now an American literature syllabus without a number of minority writers would be considered unacceptable.)

In 2013 when the gap between the haves and have-nots is greater than it's ever been (the six Wal-Mart heirs are worth $90 billion, the same amount as the bottom 140 million Americans), the time would seem right for a movie about wretched excess and the failure of the American dream.  Unfortunately, The Great Gatsy, isn't that movie.