A Look Back at Me and U2

Occasionally, I like to take a look back at the years through the lens of a music band’s history, and U2’s distribution of Songs of Innocence along with the unveiling of iPhone 6 earlier this week provides a good opportunity to do just that.

I was a teenager when U2’s undisputed masterpiece The Joshua Tree came out in 1987. I had it on cassette and by the time Rattle and Hum came out a year later, I belonged to a small group of musicophiles at school for whom U2 were gods. We passed around VHS tapes of the Rattle and Hum documentary and tried to make our jeans holey like The Edge’s. More than anything, I wanted a hat like his, but the shopping malls in rural Iowa didn’t sell them and my parents wouldn't have bought anyway. One of my friends from that time stuck with music and currently is the lead singer of a successful U2 cover band on the West Coast.

In recent years, I’ve read that Rattle and Hum received mixed reviews and some thought it portended the beginning of the end for U2, but if so, we didn’t know it. Rattle and Hum was perfect in our eyes. More than anything, it was “real” music: real guys on real instruments, meaningful lyrics, and no drum machines or electronic frippery. To quote “Along the Watchtower,” a Bob Dylan tune covered on Rattle and Hum, U2 represented “three chords and the truth.” I didn’t follow the news closely in those days, but I knew when Bono started talking world events, something significant was happening that the music on the radio lacked.

 

Controversy would continue to follow U2’s music. Despite the now classic status of Achtung Baby (1991), there was grumbling even back then that U2 didn’t sound the same. My faith wasn’t shaken, but something funkier, something weirder, was happening, and as U2 went from big to huge, it only continued to get stranger with Zooropa (1993). Then U2’s concerts went from huge to colossal and the band members were beginning to look like celebrity stooges. I remember seeing Bono on MTV wearing a reflective suit and glittery cowboy hat as he showered fans and reporters with champagne and rambled drunkenly.

Where had the U2 I loved gone?

 “Discothèque,” the first single off Pop (1997), turned me off U2 completely. I still remember sitting in the snack cafeteria at The University of Ulster in Coleraine, Northern Ireland and seeing the video for the first time on television. My heroes were dressed like the Village People, grooving under a mirrorball, humping the camera, and busting bad dance moves reminiscent of “Y.M.C.A.,” all to a song that in no way resembled anything I could accept from the band who had once sung about The Troubles in “Sunday, Bloody Sunday.” U2 was sacred for me, its music was sacred, and I felt like the band members themselves had just shat all over it.

 

But I was wrong. A few years later, I gave the album a solid listen and realized U2 had grown musically and I just hadn’t been able to see it. Pop moves among ironic discopop, soaring grandeur, serious issues, foul-mouthed blasphemy, and wry commentary on the band’s own stardom and hubris. And everywhere, Bono’s poetry elevates the music to heights few can attain. With Pop, U2 exploded, pissed off its fans, warned it would do what it wanted, and became legendary.

U2’s albums since have received critical acclaim even if the music has never been as revolutionary or captured as much attention. My wife, whom I met in Ireland when I was disaffected with the band, is also a longtime fan, so when we heard U2 had made Songs of Innocence available for free to anyone with an iTunes account--in what Apple CEO Tim Cook called "the largest album release of all time"--we could barely contain ourselves.

From what I can tell so far, Songs of Innocence is a lot like the lighter music of U2’s post-Pop releases. That is to say, it has all the musicianship, message and magic, but nothing to change the course of popular music or win over younger generations. Some will like it, and some won’t. Music is like that. But when a band with the caliber of The Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin is still in good form and putting out music, you’re missing out if you don’t at least check it out.

 

Postscript: Last night I awoke with a start and bolted from bed in the realization that there would soon be a follow-up album titled Songs of Experience, named like its predecessor after poet William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience. My subconscious had worked this out as I slept and I was certain of it. No doubt plenty of other people had their own suspicions. This morning, a quick internet search revealed that Bono has indeed just announced plans for a companion album titled Songs of Experience. Perhaps it will showcase the more experimental and edgier side of the band.

 

Godard’s Brackets: Now You See ’Em, Now You Don’t!

 

Jean Luc-Godard’s Film Socialisme (2010) is a difficult film. It consists of three parts, each seemingly composed of only loosely related bits, so I turned to the internet for help and discovered annotations by David Phelps on a website called Moving Image Source. There, I ran across a passage that opened up for me the film and Godard’s work as a whole:

“When the actor playing Delmas stammers, the filmmaker decides to keep the take, however doubly 'bad' since he himself is heard, from behind, telling the actor to go on. This is what André S. Labarthe noted around the time of A Woman Is a Woman: Godard keeps the accidents and mistakes, even when the takes are spoiled by technical blunders.”

I realized something similar--but staged, not accidental--occurs at the beginning of Godard’s masterpiece Contempt (1963). The film opens with a woman walking along a row of buildings followed by a movie camera and crew. Meanwhile, the voice of Godard himself tells you he has made a film starring Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli, with a score by Georges Delerue, based on a novel by Alberto Moravia, and so forth. Then the on-screen movie camera turns to look at you the viewer before a scene change leading to a movie that unfolds in a more conventional manner.

What is curious about these scenes is how the director and the craft of film-making intrude into the film.

I’m reminded of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological reduction. One of the central questions of philosophy is how we can know that the external world really exists and our experience of it is true. After all, our senses and mind may be deceiving us. Since we cannot resolve the problem by stepping outside our own minds, Husserl suggested we take the world for what it appears but place that belief in brackets, as it were, to designate it an assumption.

This is analogous to watching a film. We know the events it portrays are not real, but we behave as if, for the duration of the film, they are. We identify with characters, gasp, cry, and hope for certain outcomes. This is fiction’s suspension of disbelief at work. Writers, directors and other artists want to bring you into their creation as thoroughly as possible without anything to jar you out.

In Godard’s films, however, the brackets are liable to become visible at any moment. You see a movie camera or hear the director offering cues. The director breaks the fourth wall and addresses the audience. The movie clears its throat and says, “Remember? You’re watching a movie!” And there you are, sitting in a chair, gazing at a screen, with popcorn grease on your fingers.

Godard is high cinema, but Mel Brooks employed similar techniques for low-grade humor. A movie camera pulls back or draws in too far and breaks through a window or wall, causing the characters to stop what they’re doing and look around like “What just happened?” As a kid, I thought it was hilarious in Spaceballs (1987) when Lone Starr and Dark Helmet are battling with their Schwartzes and Dark Helmet accidentally strikes down a member of the camera crew.

 

Godard does exactly that, only seriously and in a bewildering variety of ways.

After the uncanny opening credits, Contempt is an uneasy experience. You keep wondering if you will see that camera sliding along its rails again, dissolving the reality of the film, dissolving your current reality. And it doesn’t help that the movie is about people making a movie, so that you often do see movie cameras and cameramen, but they’re the ones inside the story, not the ones taking orders from Godard. For a moment, though, you can’t be sure . . .

Another example of Godard’s playfulness comes as Bardot’s character Camille lies nude in bed talking with her lover Paul. At first, everything has a pinkish hue, but then suddenly, with the change of a filter, the coloration is natural, and then--new filter--everything assumes deep blue tones.

Even the trailer is arty:

Film Socialisme is more subversive, mixing dramatic scenes with meditative landscapes, stock photos, public-domain film and cryptic titles. The images flit from one to the next with a rhythm hard to discern, and some are grainy and jumpy as if recorded on a cell phone in poor light. The sound is no more conventional. Voices speak from off camera, two voices unfold parallel lines of thought in alternate bursts, and sometimes the recording device is overwhelmed by sound so the result is an acoustic mess.

In Godard, the brackets continually reappear and disappear . . .

I noticed all this as I watched the films, but I couldn’t really unlock what was going on until that passage on Moving Image Source told me clearly what I’d only grasped faintly. This is mind-bending cinema on a scale I’ve never encountered before and I can’t wait to see more.

 

 

Your Favorite Author Is Probably a Jerkwad

No sooner do I start reading Russian fantasy author Sergei Lukyanenko’s Night Watch than I read that he forbids translation of his novels into Ukrainian because he believes Ukraine should belong to Russia. With Putin having just invaded Ukraine and thousands dying in the conflict (explainer), this leaves a bad taste in my mouth and raises a question: What to do when artists have disagreeable views? Do you keep enjoying their work or do you turn away?

I touched on this before in a post on science fiction author Orson Scott Card’s opposition to gay marriage. The world is full of people uncomfortable with LGBT lifestyles, but an acquaintance’s opinion voiced in the office or at a backyard barbecue is one thing and a public figure spreading hate and spearheading a campaign to limit civil rights is another. When you learn that Orson Scott Card is a homophobe and a paranoid nut in politics, do you go see the movie adaptation of his brilliant novel Ender’s Game?

I’ve been on a Brigitte Bardot kick. First I watched And God Created Woman (1956), directed by Roger Vadim and featuring Bardot as a vivacious young woman trapped in a dull marriage. Then there was Contempt, Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 masterpiece about a marriage that falls apart. Bardot simmers and sizzles, flounces and fumes, pouts and purrs, and is, in everything she does, enchanting.

Then I read the French courts keep fining her for hate speech against Muslims.

One might ask what Card’s or Bardot’s political stances have to do with their art, and the answer is perhaps very little. But then again it could be a lot. This question has long surrounded Richard Wagner. His works revolutionized opera to the extent that for a long time composers and critics felt he had maxed out the art form, that nothing else significant could be done with it.  Wagner’s music goes beyond beautiful to sublime, and yet his anti-Semitism is well known. It was a sticking point with some in his day and even now musicians and philosophers continue to debate how much his views permeate his music.

When the connection between opinion and art isn’t clear, surely the decision of how to react is subjective. While I may not hesitate to voice my views on issues such as the Israel-Palestine conflict (recent post), I have no interest in telling you that since Seth Rogen signed his name to a letter in support of Israel during its recent invasion of Gaza that you shouldn’t laugh at his jokes in movies. I also have no interest in telling others what they can and cannot say.

But whether I lend my support to their views is another matter.

For my part, I swore off anything to do with Orson Scott Card, but when it comes to Bardot, I have already ordered more films from Amazon. Bardot’s films have nothing to do with her opinions and they all came out decades before the issues that spark her objectionable views were pressing. She is now an elderly woman in a proud country where many people are dealing with change (globalization, economic uncertainty, increased immigration and radical jihadism) the way people so often do--which is to say poorly.

So she gets a pass.

I’m still not sure about Lukyanenko. So far, Night Watch hasn’t had much going for it in style, character or vision. The series is based on the premise of two forces of Others--vampires, werewolves, magicians and so forth aligned with either Good or Evil--who have entered into a treaty according to which each polices the other to preserve a balance between Light and Darkness. As Putin solidifies his iron rule, enforces backwards social values, expands Russia’s territory, and imprisons his political opponents, is it relevant that Lukyanenko has taken what is usually a subversive genre and made it about law and order?

I’d like to give the book more of a chance before I make up my mind.

When the connection between artists' views and their art is tenuous, I can understand why someone else might decide other than I do, and I have no problem with that. Healthy discussion and debate is always desirable, but if others will respectfully leave me to my decision, I’ll leave them to theirs.

 

Watching Cinema Through the Eyes of the Past (Zizek/Lacan 2)

(For the first post in this series, see "Identifying with Ferguson as Symptom.")

 

This is the second in a series of posts commenting on the ideas in Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek. While the last post applied Zizek and Lacan to the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, this one is about film. Zizek expresses an idea that I was pleased to realize I had once arrived at myself, and then he takes it one twist further.

In “Classic Movies: Three Levels of Experience,” I posited three modes of interacting with old cinema. The first is immediate experience of a film’s express content--the story, acting, special effects, etc.--the way we would interact with any film. The second is the experience of a classic movie as a representative of the past, with its different cultural context, cinematic techniques, and so forth. But it was the third that I was most itching to express:

“The third level of experience is where it gets really interesting. No longer are we simply experiencing a classic movie for its content, or viewing it as a curious relic from times gone by. Instead, we now see it through the eyes of its contemporaries. We assume, as best we can, the standpoint of movie-goers in the early to mid 20th Century and experience the movie as they would have at the time, as if viewing the past from the past.”

The example I used was Marlene Dietrich in Morocco (1930) wearing a men’s tuxedo and kissing a woman. It doesn’t matter that two people of the same sex kissing each other is no big deal to us today: the scene was shocking then, so it remains electric today. Zizek says much the same thing with regard to classic film noir, only in the more sophisticated terminology of Lacanian psychoanalysis and film theory:

“That is to say, what fascinates us is precisely a certain gaze, the gaze of the ‘other,’ of the hypothetical, mythic spectator from the ’40s who was supposedly still able to identify immediately with the universe of film noir. What we really see, when we watch a film noir, is this gaze of the other: we are fascinated by the gaze of the mythic ‘naïve’ spectator, the one who was ‘still able to take it seriously,’ in other words, the one who ‘believes in it’ for us, in place of us.”

For Zizek, this is the gaze of nostalgia, which the philosopher goes on to say takes its “purest form” not when we watch a movie from the past, such as the 1944 film Double Indemnity, but when we watch a modern film, perhaps even about modern times, that nonetheless borrows an aesthetic from the past (such as the Double Indemnity-inspired Body Heat). Despite all the dizzying Lacanian theory that Zizek employs, this idea of nostalgia is exactly how the word is used in reviews and so forth to describe any movie today that hearkens back to films of the past.

The first example of such a film that comes to my mind is Open Range, the Kevin Costner film based on the novel by Lauran Paine. Released in 2003, it came out long after the heyday of western cinema, at a time when straight-up westerns were not only rare but likely to be mocked. Nonetheless, Open Range is unflinching in adopting the cinematic and narrative techniques of classic westerns to tell its story. It avoids newfangled techniques used in films like The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) to update the genre.

Consider Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse films Planet Terror and Death Proof (2007). These films are grossly obvious examples of films in which, in Zizek’s words, “the logic of nostalgia is brought to self-reference.” These movies aren’t just what they are on their own, they gain something more by recalling the vision and style of their outmoded precursors, the exploitation films of yesteryear.

These posts are learning experiments allowing me to hopefully get a better grasp of the ideas in Looking Awry by turning input (reading) into output (blogging). This time, I enjoyed being able to say, “I knew it! Even before I read it in Zizek!” But the reader is advised to take all of the above with a grain of salt since I’m still figuring a lot of this out.

 

Identifying with Ferguson as Symptom (Zizek/Lacan 1)

For some time, I’ve been contemplating a series of posts inspired by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek’s Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, and today I ran across a passage that seemed perfect for getting started. Most of the posts will concern film, but this one touches on the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and the resulting protests and continuing debate (explainer).

Looking Awry was first published in 1992, but the paragraph I want to discuss reads as if written with the controversies surrounding the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and others in mind. It begins with the following:

“There is, perhaps, an experience in the field of politics that entails a kind of ‘identification with the symptom’: the well-known pathetic experience ‘We are all that!,” the experience of identification when we are confronted with a phenomenon that functions as an intrusion of unbearable truth, as an index of the fact that the social mechanism ‘doesn’t work.’”

According to Zizek, successful psychoanalysis sometimes ends with the analysand clinging to something that represents the very problem. This is what is meant by “identification with the symptom.” He makes the example of a character in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West. Robbers force the character in his youth to play the harmonica even as he must participate in his own brother’s murder. The incident emotionally unhinges the boy, and from that time forward, the only thing that holds him together is playing the harmonica, the very item that ties him to his brother’s death.

Zizek draws an analogy to a similar phenomenon on a social scale and Ferguson is exactly such a traumatic event. Discomforting yet undeniable truths have come to light, showing us that our society is broken. The original event presents us with our broken justice system, especially with regard to young black men, and the resulting controversy brings out the worst American society has to offer: fetishization of violence and enduring racism. Even now as more evidence has come to light and the police themselves have admitted Officer Darren Wilson shot Mike Brown as he was running away, the trolls are out there blaming the victim.

Zizek uses anti-Semitism as an example to elicit a number of attitudes one may take when faced with such an “unbearable truth,” and eventually arrives at one that has been openly adopted and employed in the wake of the Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown shootings:

“Let us take, for example, Jew-baiting riots. A whole network of strategies—simple ignorance; treating it as some deplorable horror that does not, however, really concern us . . . ; ‘sincere compassion’ for the victims—allow us to evade the fact that the persecution of Jews pertains to a certain repressed truth of our civilization. We attain an authentic attitude only when we arrive at the experience that . . . 'we are all Jews.' And it is the same for all traumatic moments of the intrusion into the social field of some ‘impossible’ kernel that resists integration; ‘We all live in Chernobyl!,” “We are all boat people!,” and so on.” (boldface mine)

This is exactly what we have seen in the “I am Trayvon Martin” and “I am Mike Brown” movements, whether it be hashtags using those words on Twitter, wearing hoodies, or confronting the police with your hands in the air. In all these cases, a number of people confronted with the usually hidden dark side of their society react not by denying the reality of the dark side, but by identifying with it, recognizing that it belongs to them, too.

The passage continues with a return to more psychoanalytic terminology:

“Apropos of these cases, it should also be clear how ‘identification with the symptom’ is correlated with ‘going through the fantasy’: by means of such an identification with the (social) symptom, we traverse and subvert the fantasy frame that determines the field of social meaning, the ideological self-understanding of a given society.”

In other words, we abandon the fantasy version of our society, the one that we usually hold, according to which police officers are always kindly gents who lend a helping hand, the courts never fail to deliver a just sentence, and people of all races experience equal opportunity and success. Instead, we recognize--because some blight that was always there has raised its ugly head--that this vision of our world is a fiction that serves as palliative. In reality, sometimes police officers shoot unarmed teens as they run away and that is just the beginning of the disgrace to our systems of power, to our nation, and to ourselves.

This transformation of consciousness is integral for positive change and healing.

My posts on Looking Awry are likely to be more of a learning experiment than any statement of my own original ideas. I find both Zizek and Lacan to be difficult to grasp, but hopefully I can learn something while writing about them, and without mucking up the concepts too much. In any case, the above passage of Zizek’s seemed so applicable to Ferguson that I felt compelled to return to this troubling event.

 

A Gatsbean Odyssey: The American Dream (7/7)

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” –F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

 

1925. 1968. 1971. 2014. Here we are 92 years after the publication of The Great Gatsby, 46 after the crest of the 1960s countercultural movement, and 43 after the appearance of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and what of the American Dream now?

If we define the American Dream as the ability of anyone to become anything they want and we measure that dream by upward mobility and a growing middle class, the obvious answer is that it is endangered. Every statistic that hasn’t been cooked by a conservative think tank so it can be pushed by a con-artist politician indicates a now decades-long trend of the vast majority of folk working harder for less. Meanwhile, the upper crust are looking a lot more like their counterparts in Gatsby’s day: beyond reach.

Economists tell us economic collapses are cyclical, so there will be more. As the Great Recession that began in 2008 taught us, the individuals and institutions where wealth has accumulated the most are largely immune. A couple years later, the very designers of the crisis begin posting record profits and raising executive compensation to new levels. This isn’t the old money of the Buchanans in The Great Gatsby, it’s the new money of Wall Street, but in the 21st Century, those with it are much like the Buchanans in that they ruin lives and then withdraw behind their money.

But seeing the American Dream in terms of money and what it can buy, whether goods or good times, is part of the problem. Against it, Fitzgerald offers Gatsby’s incredible self-control and aptitude for self-reinvention, and Thompson offers the liberating movements of the Sixties. Neither seemed to believe the orthodox American Dream--the pursuit of money--had much to offer in the way of personal fulfillment.

What is available to us today as a counter-American Dream? Money and technology dominate our lives more than ever, and ever since the rise of capitalism, increasingly the only means of fighting back are part of the very system that is the problem. Many intellectuals of the left, since at least the Frankfurt School, have been skeptical that any significant revolution, even spiritual, is possible under such conditions, but perhaps social improvement can be made in small increments.

It’s better than nothing. And if I learned anything wrestling with Cornel West’s The American Evasion of Philosophy, it is that progressive change is part of that peculiarly American brand of philosophy known as pragmatism. So perhaps there is hope for us as Americans and we are not doomed, like Gatsby reaching for the green light on Daisy’s pier, to never grasp what we seek.

 

And with that, I return to Ithaca, hopefully having achieved a better understanding of The Great Gatsby. Odysseus had a lot of work to do after his return, and I doubt I am done with The Great Gatsby, but for the present, I’m content to put the book back on the shelf.

 

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A Gatsbean Odyssey: Where the Beasts Roam (6/7)

“He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”  –Dr. Johnson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

My copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas looks like this:

 

And it says it right there on the cover:

“A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream”

This is the essence of The Great Gatsby, and I guess I knew it all along. I knew Jay Gatsby was a man in search of the American Dream because English teachers had told me so, as had every introduction to every copy of the book I’ve ever read. I knew it, but I didn’t really know it. I didn’t grasp it. I didn’t have it by the ears.

At least not until I embarked on this study.

The Great Gatsby presents two visions of the American Dream, one ideal and the other real. The ideal vision is exemplified by Gatsby’s superior characteristics. Taking him for a superman wasn’t entirely wrong, for he truly is a marvel of intelligence, talent and optimism. Given an honest chance, he would certainly succeed. To this extent, he represents what every good American is told from birth: with hard work, you can be anything you want.

But Gatsby also represents the reality of the American Dream: money and fun by any means. His astronomical wealth comes from illegal activities conducted with the likes of Meyer Wolfshiem, a man with whom you would not trust your children. As for fun, Gatsby himself has little of it, but he provides it for others through his parties, where everyone behaves like there’s no tomorrow. They get drunk and dance wildly, they make out and fight, they ogle and gossip, they collapse in piles of giggles and sweat.

In short, they act like beasts.

I was stunned when I realized that this is exactly what occurs throughout most of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Hunter S. Thompson was showing us the same reality of the pursuit of the American dream--only 50 years further down the spiral. The alcohol is still there, but now there’s a lot more to mess you up:

“The trunk of the car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab. We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers . . . and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.”

And the effects on human dignity are no better:

“There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. And I knew we’d get into that rotten stuff pretty soon. Probably at the next gas station.”

Just as in The Great Gatsby, Thompson’s novel shows us a nation teeming with the frenzied pursuit of money and fun by any means. Alcohol, drugs, sex, gambling, hustling . . .  This is how you attempt to reach out and grab the American Dream by the nuts. But it seems to do about as much good as the hijinks of Fitzgerald’s revelers. Like all roads to Las Vegas, these means lead nowhere.

 

Nowhere good, anyway.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas also presents the ideal of the American Dream. Thompson touches upon it in random, brief, melancholy moments of clarity. His vision of it, however, shares little with Fitzgerald’s. Instead of Gatsby’s industriousness and self-control, it is freedom of spirit, a spirit Thompson had glimpsed in the 60s and seen disappear in the Nixon years:

 

 

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A Gatsbean Odyssey: Fear and Loathing (5/7)

 

I feel closer to understanding The Great Gatsby now, but first the journey must get weirder. Our odyssey has reached the land of the Lotus Eaters, only instead of idylls, the drugs here induce paranoid ravings, for the legendary substance abuser Hunter S. Thomson held The Great Gatsby in the highest regard. His own attempt at the Great American Novel was Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, so now I turn to this unlikely companion for help in understanding Fitzgerald’s work.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is another book that I failed to understand at first. As with The Great Gatsby, my difficulty stemmed from authorial intention. In The Great Gatsby, I thought Fitzgerald intended Jay Gatsby to represent the ideal man, but he turned out to be a crook. On my first reading of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, I thought Thompson was presenting a nightmare America he despised, yet in his own life he exemplified the drug-induced lunacy of his alter ego Duke in the novel.

Two books. Two mysteries.

And yet, with the connection to Hunter S. Thompson I feel my first frisson of understanding. It comes with a simple and perhaps not even essential insight: Fitzgerald liked fantasy, specifically modern fantasy.

In this, he is like Hunter S. Thompson, whose love of fantasy--often hallucinatory--is hard to miss. The bat scene on the first page of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is one that has crept into the popular consciousness, if only through the film starring Johnny Depp and homages like “Bat Country” by Avenged Sevenfold:

“And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: ‘Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?’”

At first glance, F. Scott Fitzgerald would seem leagues from this. We associate him with early 20th-Century America, expats in Paris, the Roaring Twenties, Prohibition, swingin’ jazz, and swank parties where everyone drinks highballs or absinthe.

For me, however, there has always been a fly in this ointment. Gatsby’s mansion, his parties, his staggering wealth always seemed unbelievable, even by pre-Black Tuesday standards. I now suspect this is because Fitzgerald was presenting a fanciful picture of wealth.

This made Baz Luhrmann, visionary director of Romeo and Juliet (1996) and Moulin Rouge! (2001), a fitting choice for a new film adaptation. The parties at Gatsby’s begin as one hell of a house party, then morph into an MDMA-infused rave on a downward spiral to lethargic nightmare. Women wearing massive plumage, giant champagne bottles that pour glitter, a “dubious descendant of Beethoven” emoting on a gilded pipe organ, poolside dance parties with blow-up zebra pool toys, trapeze artists drifting through seas of balloons, a jazz history of the world accompanying fireworks . . . Luhrmann lets it all out.

 

That Fitzgerald wrote fantasy should be obvious. After all, he wrote The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, about a family living in extravagant wealth atop a secret mountain-sized diamond, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, about a man who ages backwards. The Great Gatsby is not as fantastical as those stories, but it has a dash of that aesthetic, and identifying that removes one of my biggest obstacles to feeling as if I understand the book.

 

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A Gatsbean Odyssey: American Modernity (4/7)

We tend to see The Great Gatsby as a picture of the 1920s, but backwards through the lens of the present. We focus on what characterizes the past for us in retrospect, but we might try to see what was significant to Fitzgerald writing from within those times. The introduction by Guy Reynolds to my copy of The Great Gatsby does this nicely:

“Fitzgerald was born into the America of the horse, gaslight and railroad, but by 1925 the world was made of electricity, cars and telephones.”

When we encounter The Great Gatsby, we focus on bootleggers, speakeasies, flappers, big-band jazz and kooky dances, but Reynolds shows how Fitzgerald was also focused on technology: telephones, photography, cinema, home appliances, motor cars, skyscrapers and artificial illumination. Whereas Georgie in Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons could scoff at horseless carriages as a newfangled invention that would soon fade away, cars in The Great Gatsby are undeniably here to stay, they are ubiquitous, and they are part of the pulse of city.

Fitzgerald is also focused on money, class disparity, the fabulous excess of capitalism high on financial speculation, and the dishonest who thrive in such a climate. Reynolds sums up as follows:

“In The Great Gatsby the American is a [cheating] sportsman, a stockbroker or a crook inhabiting a fluid, mobile, society.”

Fitzgerald’s attitude toward his times was cynical. Reynolds has a number of great phrases describing what the author saw: “dizzying, narcissistic wealth and its sudden corruption,” “febrile superficiality,” “glamour, allure and ultimate artificiality,” “consumerisation of the self,” “trickery, imposture and conning,” “fetishisation of good clothes” and “conspicuous consumption.” Luhrmann highlights these themes by adorning his film with hip-hop music from artists like Jay-Z who are known for their celebration of extravagant wealth.

 

Jay-Z's "$100 Bill":

 

The use of a music genre that didn’t even exist in Fitzgerald’s day doesn’t clash with the subject matter because America today is so similar. The technology may have changed, but the powerful role played by technology and money in our society has not. If there is a big difference, it is that we the normal people are more jaded than the characters in Fitzgerald: We know their world crashes.

 

And soon.

America had bought the ticket, and beginning with the stock market crash of 1929, it had to take the ride.

 

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A Gatsbean Odyssey: The Compact Marvel (3/7)

Structurally, there is no doubt The Great Gatsby is a compact marvel. Watching Baz Luhrmann’s film, I was struck by the mirroring love triangles. One is the married couple Tom and Daisy plus Tom’s lover Myrtle. The other is Tom and Daisy plus Daisy’s love Gatsby. Each extramarital couple engages in a tryst, and Nick Carraway is an observer on both occasions.

These similar affairs are also contrasted. Socially, Tom reaches down to Myrtle, while Gatsby reaches up for Daisy. When the former meet, it is a haphazard and drunken affair that, at least in Luhrmann’s treatment, includes noisy screwing. When Gatsby arranges to meet Daisy, the reunion is tightly choreographed and leads to quiet conversation. These encounters show the difference in the two men’s characters: Tom loses his temper and grows violent, but Gatsby maintains control even under duress.

Fitzgerald and his cinematic interpreters also make heavy use of echoes. Tom and Daisy’s marriage is regularly interrupted by phone calls from his mistress. Daisy and Gatsby’s relationship is disturbed by phone calls from his business partners. When Nick first attends a party at Gatsby’s mansion, he witnesses a fender-bender involving drunken revelers, and of course, this is foreshadowing for the deadly accident toward the end.

The latter accident is a good car accident. The Car Accident has long been a deus ex machina for many a pretentious author and filmmaker. Just when all the plots and subplots have tied themselves into a knot--bam!--one of the characters is in a car accident. It’s shocking, tragic, easy and can cut through any dramatic impasse. Say what you will about Ayn Rand, but in The Art of Fiction she wrote that random accidents are the perfect tool for a lazy writer, and she was right.

The Car Accident in The Great Gatsby is coincidental, but it doesn’t come out of nowhere for the reader because Fitzgerald has laid groundwork. As mentioned, a previous accident foreshadows it, and automobiles and the danger they present appear as a motif throughout the book, such as when Gatsby takes Carraway for a wild ride into the city. Decisions made by various characters lead to the victim running out into the street, as well as to who is riding with whom and who is driving when the hit-and-run occurs. Then, the accident itself leads the characters to decisions that further define them.

Also skillful is the pairing of opposites through which Fitzgerald pulled within this book as much of Roaring-Twenties America as possible: fidelity and infidelity, self-control and self-abandonment, true love and false, city and country, black and white, rich and poor.

All of that is very well and good, but marveling at the structure of a book isn’t the same as grasping its essence. Like Odysseus, I’m still trapped in the darkness of the giant’s lair, wracking my brains for a way into the light.

A cover from 1925:

 

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