The Great Gatsby by F.S.Key Fitzgerald

Expanded Critical Analysis

Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby (2013) as Adaptation

Part I: Frame Narrative, Authorship, and Mental Health

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1. The Sanitarium Device: Narrational Authority and Modernist Anxiety

Luhrmann’s sanitarium frame fundamentally reconfigures narrative reliability. In Fitzgerald’s novel, Nick Carraway is a controlled modernist narrator: reflective but not hysterical, morally observant yet restrained. His authority derives from his self-positioning as someone who “reserves all judgments,” even though this claim is repeatedly destabilized.

By relocating Nick to a sanitarium, the film medicalizes modernist alienation. What is existential unease in the novel becomes diagnosable trauma in the film. This shift reflects a broader 21st-century tendency to explain moral or philosophical crisis through psychology rather than ethics. As a result:

Nick’s narration becomes therapeutic rather than ethical

Memory becomes a symptom rather than an interpretive act

Writing becomes recovery rather than judgment

The symbol of telephone 

From a narratological standpoint, this risks weakening Nick’s epistemic authority. If Nick writes Gatsby’s story as part of treatment, the narrative risks being read as projection or catharsis rather than moral testimony. Thus, while the sanitarium device succeeds in visualizing interiority, it arguably replaces Fitzgerald’s ethical ambiguity with psychological causality.

This is an example of what adaptation theorists call medium-induced motivation: the need to justify voiceover through visible narrative logic. Yet the cost is a reduction of modernist uncertainty.

2. Floating Text and the Problem of Intermedial Excess

The floating text sequences function as a form of hypermediation (Bolter and Grusin): the film draws attention to its status as an adaptation by foregrounding the written word. Rather than concealing its literary origin, Luhrmann insists upon it.

This approach raises a fundamental question in adaptation studies:

Should cinema translate prose, or cite it?

The Valley of Ashes scene demonstrates the danger of semiotic redundancy. The image already communicates desolation through mise-en-scène (grey palette, industrial ruins, mechanized movement). The superimposed prose does not deepen meaning so much as anchor interpretation, reducing polysemy.

For “knowing” viewers, this creates reverence; for others, it may feel pedagogical. The film risks becoming what critics label an illustrated novel, rather than an autonomous cinematic text. Instead of allowing the spectator to see meaning, the film instructs them how to read it.

Thus, Luhrmann’s “cinematic poem” succeeds aesthetically but falters semiotically—it foregrounds fidelity to language at the expense of cinematic suggestion.

Part II: Fidelity Reconsidered Through Theory

3. Omission of Henry Gatz: From Social Tragedy to Emotional Melodrama

Henry Gatz’s appearance in the novel serves several crucial functions:

It rehumanizes Gatsby beyond myth

It exposes the class divide between aspiration and inheritance

It intensifies Gatsby’s posthumous isolation

By omitting Gatz, the film seals Gatsby within Nick’s memory, eliminating alternative perspectives. This narrational closure shifts the text from social realism to emotional melodrama.

For Hutcheon’s “knowing” audience, this omission flattens the novel’s critique of American self-making. Gatsby’s dream is no longer exposed as structurally impossible; instead, it is merely unfulfilled. For the “unknowing” audience, the film becomes a story about loyalty and loss, not ideology and class.

This aligns the film more closely with the conventions of tragic romance, reducing the sociological reach of Fitzgerald’s novel. Gatsby is remembered not as a failed social experiment, but as a misunderstood lover.

4. Hip-Hop as Truth Event: Fidelity Beyond Period Authenticity

Badiou’s concept of the Truth Event allows us to defend Luhrmann’s anachronistic soundtrack on philosophical grounds. Jazz, in the 1920s, represented:

Racial transgression

Youth rebellion

Economic excess

Moral panic

Hip-hop occupies a parallel cultural position today. In this sense, the soundtrack operates as a functional equivalence, not a historical imitation. This is a textbook case of intersemiotic translation (Jakobson): meaning transferred across sign systems rather than preserved formally.

However, the risk lies in temporal collapse. By substituting historical specificity with contemporary affect, the film risks universalizing capitalism’s excess, flattening the distinct conditions of the Jazz Age into a generalized spectacle of decadence.

Thus, Luhrmann is faithful to rupture, but not to context—a choice that prioritizes affective immediacy over historical nuance.

Part III: Character, Performance, and Ideogy

5. Gatsby’s Criminality and the Spectacle of Innocence

In the novel, Gatsby’s criminal dealings are revealed obliquely, reinforcing modernism’s distrust of surface appearances. The film, however, delays or softens these revelations and reframes them visually through glamour.

DiCaprio’s Gatsby is emotionally transparent, his vulnerability foregrounded through close-ups and physical gestures. Criminality becomes incidental, almost circumstantial. This visual strategy aligns with what Guy Debord terms the society of the spectacle: moral complexity is absorbed into aesthetic display.

The result is ideological softening. Gatsby’s downfall appears imposed rather than self-generated. The critique of the corrupted American Dream is diluted as Gatsby becomes less a dreamer complicit in illusion and more a victim crushed by class power.

6. Daisy Buchanan: Emotional Softening and Gender Politics

The film’s reconstruction of Daisy reflects contemporary discomfort with morally ambiguous female characters. By removing scenes that emphasize her emotional detachment—particularly her relationship with her child—the film repositions Daisy as internally conflicted rather than ethically careless.

This revision has two consequences:

Gatsby’s obsession appears justified

Daisy’s responsibility for her choices is minimized

In feminist terms, Daisy becomes passive affect rather than active agent. Her inability to choose is framed as emotional paralysis, not moral failure. This maintains Gatsby’s romantic centrality but weakens Fitzgerald’s critique of privilege and irresponsibility.

Part IV: Visual Style, Spectacle, and Capitalist Critique

7. Party Scenes: Dialectics of Critique and Complicity

Luhrmann’s party scenes operate through sensory saturation—rapid montage, swirling camera, amplified sound. In theory, this excess could function as critique by overwhelming the spectator.

However, spectacle is inherently seductive. The viewer is invited to enjoy excess before questioning it. This produces what Fredric Jameson calls waning of affective distance: critique collapses into consumption.

Thus, the film performs a contradiction: it condemns excess while profiting aesthetically from it. Fitzgerald’s irony becomes Luhrmann’s ambivalence.

8. The Green Light After 2008: Dream or Mirage?

Post-2008, the American Dream is no longer aspirational but suspect. Luhrmann’s Green Light reflects this shift—it flickers, recedes, and is framed as endlessly deferred.

Yet the film’s lush visuals ensure the dream remains seductive. The impossibility of attainment is acknowledged, but the beauty of pursuit is emphasized. This mirrors post-crisis capitalism itself: discredited yet irresistible.

The Valley of Ashes, similarly, becomes a visual shorthand for economic fallout, echoing recession-era imagery of industrial decay. However, it remains symbolic rather than systemic—felt, not explained.

Part V: Plaza Hotel Scene – Creative Adaptation Decision

Keeping Gatsby non-violent preserves the novel’s most radical idea: illusion, not force, is Gatsby’s tragedy. His faith in repetition—“Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can”—is more devastating than any physical confrontation.

Luhrmann’s addition of aggression simplifies conflict into melodrama. While effective cinematically, it risks betraying Gatsby’s core identity as a man destroyed not by rage, but by belief.

Thus, fidelity to character outweighs fidelity to spectacle.

Final Critical Position

Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby is a postmodern adaptation that privileges affect, immediacy, and spectacle over ambiguity and restraint. It succeeds as cultural translation but falters as ideological critique. The film does not misunderstand Fitzgerald—it reinterprets him through the lens of contemporary emotional logic.

 Conclusion

Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby (2013) is a visually extravagant adaptation that prioritizes emotional intensity and spectacle over Fitzgerald’s subtle social critique. While the film creatively translates the novel for a post-2008 audience through psychological framing, musical anachronism, and heightened romance, these choices often simplify moral ambiguity and class criticism. Rather than strict fidelity to the text, Luhrmann offers fidelity to affect and cultural rupture, transforming the novel’s modernist disillusionment into a tragic love story shaped by contemporary sensibilities.