Posted on 06/03/2013 8:38:49 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Another decade, another Gatsby. The actors change but the message put forward in the adaptations of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 book stays the same. The 1920s were as ephemeral as a Champagne bubble. A fake stock market, an illicit liquor business and other falsehoods made Jay Gatsby and others like him into correspondingly false millionaires. The pleasure of the rich, “careless people,” as a character calls them, came at a cost to the rest, especially the middle class, the small people, mere ants in black tie to be trampled by giants like Gatsby at their parties.
The inaccuracy here starts with the cinematic detail. The new Gatsby is set in the early 1920s.
The narrator, Nick Carraway, informs us that the stock market is hitting extraordinary levels. But in the early 1920s stocks did not roar ahead like Gatsby’s car. In the summer of 1922, around the time when the heroine Daisy visits Gatsby in West Egg, the Dow Jones industrial average actually stood lower than it had in the summer of 1919. Even the car prop in this film yields anachronism: the Duesenberg model Gatsby drives in the film is a copy of a 1929 version, not an early 1920s vehicle.
And the view of the middle class? The central premise of the Gatsby films, that the rich got rich faster than the others, is true. Decades ago, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Simon Kuznets pointed out the increase in disparities in a much-admired paper, “Shares of Upper Income Groups in Income and Savings.” Other scholars, seeking precision, suggested a key ratio: the top 7 percent of the nonfarm population gained at a cost to the rest, the bottom 93 percent.
But whether the new gains of the rich did come at a cost to the rest is not clear.
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com ...
A NYT analysis on anything is intellectually equal to a quantum physics lecture by the Obamadork.
This author happens to be conservative.
Amity Shlaes wrote a definitive book on the Coolidge Presidency and the horror that was the FDR administration ( that PROLONGED and EXCACERBATED the Great Depression ).
Interesting article. Thank you for posting.
That was just funny! And also true.
I know what you mean. I am completely skeptical of anything that appears in the NYT, and just as skeptical of any author.
I cannot comment on the article, as I will not visit any page of theirs, even if it only gives them one more mouse click.
As for the Great Gatsby, like many, I found the book a huge bore, but it has always been difficult for me to distinguish whether is indeed a bore, or the fact that I had liberal, boring, english teachers who could speak at length about the symbolism of the eyeglass sign, the green light and so on. Blah, blah, blah. Perhaps I will just have to read it again on its own and treat it like a...novel. What a novel idea.
When there is so much crap around a story read into it by others that the author never talked about, it makes me want to roll my eyes and it brings to mind Freud’s comment about a cigar sometimes just being a cigar.
And, as much as I think DiCaprio has played some pretty good parts in movies (The Aviator, and I know this opinion makes me a distinct minority around here) I won’t see any damned movie about “The Great Gatsby” that has rap music in it.
Not gonna do it.
They should have used the tunes actually mentioned in the novel, such as Beale Street Blues, The Love Nest and Ain't We Got Fun?
It was not true. I suggest you read up on Amity Shlaes especially her book “The Forgotten Man” which was an indictment of the FDR thirties programs.
Not necessarily. How exactly does a bootlegger, for example, differ in whether he creates wealth or not vs. any other distributor or retailer?
He performs exactly the same function, except in a black market instead of a free market. If the free market distributor creates wealth by moving desired goods from where they are available to where they are wanted, then so does the bootlegger.
Same applies, obviously, to today’s drug dealers.
Now there are enormous negative externalities for bootleggers and drug dealers created by the necessities of their illegal businesses, but that doesn’t mean they don’t create wealth.
This is very different, of course, from crooks who just steal stuff, run extortion rackets, etc.
Thanks...maybe I will watch it on Netflix...:)
Perhaps I will listen to the book as well, too. I think I have the audiobook somewhere.
I don’t remember. Fitzgerald say he was a bootlegger? Been a long time since I read it.
The movie is from the guy who had 19th century Parisians singing choruses from "Lady Marmelade" and "Smells Like Teen Spirit" -- the same guy who set a scene from "Romeo and Juliet" at a gas station.
Baz Luhrmann's Gatsby may be awful, but people going to see it know what to expect. If you hate rap and techno, you have an inkling of what Fitzgerald's elders thought of his generation.
In The Blues Have Got Me (1924), Jane Green responds to criticism from classical music fans and vigorously defends her taste for jazz, blues, ragtime and the Charleston Strut.
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