The Great Gatsby

 The Great Gatsby

Thinking Activity

This blog is a thinking activity assigned by Dr.Dilip Barad sir. In this blog I am going to answer some questions mentioned in the task which are based on The Great Gatsby movie(2013) movie.

Great Gatsby(2013)

 movie

Baz Luhrmann

The Great Gatsby is a 2013 historical and romantic drama film. This movie is based on F. Scott Fitzgerald' novel of the same name which was published in 1925.

This film was co-written and directed by Baz Luhrmann and stars  cast  of this movie are Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, Carey Mulligan, Joel Edgerton, Isla Fisher, Jason Clarke, and Elizabeth Debicki. This film follows the life and times of millionaire Jay Gatsby  and his neighbor Nick Carraway, who recounts his encounter with Gatsby at the height of the Roaring Twenties on Long Island in New York.

The film is the tragic story of Jay Gatsby. First of all when this movie starts we can see a gray shade which indicates the tonality of the movie and then green light captures our attention which shows a symbol of hope, hope of Jay Gatsby, and also it indicates tears following from the eye. Then narration starts with Nick's voice. Here are some dialogues which are appear with beginning in movie-

"Always try to see the best in people"

"never be judgemental, always be observer"

This movie starts with Nick Carraway's narration, and we noticed that Nick has a disease of morbidly alcoholic, insomniac, fits of anger, and stress. He believes that Gatsby is 'The single most hopeful person I've ever met.' In this movie Gatsby introduced a mystical way, and he was considered a 'mysterious Gatsby'.  His real name was James Getz. He introduced himself at his party, we noticed that he had become rich in a very wrong way, he was living with full fakeness, though he attended many calls in a day that indicate that something is going wrong and at the end it indicates his hope that Daisy will call him but Daisy and Tom have another plan. Gatsby madly loves Daisy and wants to get her, but he knows that she loves his money not him, however he said " she has to go Tom, and told Tom that she never loved him" and when Gatsby died there was no one for his funeral except Nick and his father. Many rich people came when he gave a luxurious party, but when he died with the fake crime of murder a lady everyone wanted to get rid of him. Nick said that Tom and Daisy are so careless people that they continuously smash peoples' lives and behave like nothing happened, and

"Not even a single flower from Daisy".

That's how new money people always suffer because of old money people and also we don't feel much sympathy for Gatsby because he got rich in a very wrong way.

[1] How did the film capture the Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties, The Flappers & The Prohibition act of America in the 1920s?

“It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire,” 

Today, the moniker “Jazz Age” has come to signify, as a kind of evocative shorthand, the 1920s in both academic and pop culture.

Fitzgerald famously wrote of the 1920s in a 1931 essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age.”  In his mind, the decade defied any rigid definition, but what perhaps characterized it best was the jazz music he so frequently alluded to in his own writing. In Fitzgerald’s most popular novel, The Great Gatsby, jazz appears as constant background music. When this movie starts and the scene of the city in the background we can hear music of Jazz and In the contemporary phenomenon of “Gatsby parties” festivities intended to capture the air of the titular Jay Gatsby’s famously lavish, bacchanalian parties. Fitzgerald’s incorporation of jazz both into The Great Gatsby and into his definition of the 1920s was similarly fraught.

Prohibition creates a ‘new money’ class. We know that Jay Gatsby was from the new money class, he got rich in the wrong way. Elite class people and newly rich people were different from their clothes like the example of Gatsby's pink suit, Tom laughed at him “An Oxford man! Like hell he is! He wears a pink suit!"Gatsby borrowed how to speak like an elite class from Den cody.  As their wealth grew, many Americans of the 1920s broke down the traditional barriers of society. This, in turn, provoked anxiety among upper-class plutocrats (represented in the novel by Tom Buchanan). In The Great Gatsby, Prohibition finances Gatsby’s rise to a new social status, where he can court his lost love, Daisy Buchanan, whose voice is “full of money"; she doesn't love Gatsby but loves his money.

By 1925, when Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby, flappers were out in full force, complete with bobbed hair, shorter skirts and cigarettes dangling from their mouths as they danced the Charleston. But while later Hollywood versions of Gatsby channeled flapper style, the novel itself actually captures a comparatively conservative moment, as 1922 could be considered closer to 1918 than to the heyday of the Roaring Twenties later in the decade. We noticed in this movie the character of Daisy she represents as a flapper. 

[2] Watch ppt on the difference between the film and the novel and write briefly about it.

Following are the biggest differences   in The Great Gatsby film. To give a frame to Nick Carraway's narration, Luhrmann introduces us to a broken Nick, who is working with a doctor to recover his health after troubles with alcohol. This seems a little distasteful, since Carraway comes across as a mostly careful and considerate individual. Asking us to see him out of sorts after Gatsby's death is more than a bit of a stretch, especially as Luhrmann also tasks the character with writing The Great Gatsby.

We learn Jordan Baker is an athlete and friend of Daisy. Though this in itself doesn't mean much, her entire storyline is sped up and her unlikely romance with Nick is cut out for the sake of time. In the book, the two only ever seem to have a casual affection for each other, especially as Jordan is shown to be dishonest, but in the film, she's a blank canvas we never get to know all that much about. This actually makes her character quite a bit more mysterious and likable, though. In the novel they become a couple and break up near the end of summer.

Tom has a mistress called Myrtel who is the wife of a Queens mechanic. In a Manhattan apartment they make love. In the film he was sitting quietly in the living room. Luhramanns  also shows Myrtle's sister who gave pills to Nick. Luhramanns nick wake up at hope half dressed and didn't know what happened with him. On the other side Fitzgerald's narrator  to the apartment downstairs from Tom and Myrtles place.

When Tom and Gatsby went to meet Wolfsheim at the barber shop, and then they went to a party there were many dancers and in the novel they were not mentioned.

In the end Gatsby was waiting for a phone call from Daisy and he was swimming in his pool and one phone call Gatsby thought that it was from Daizy and he got out of the pool . That time someone  shot him and he died. That call was from Nick.

[3] How did the film help in understanding the symbolic significance of 'The Valley of Ashes', The Eyes of Dr. T.J. Ecokeleberg' and 'The Green Light' ?

In the movie the green light represents Gatsby’s hopes and dreams for the future. Gatsby associates it with Daisy, and in the movie he reaches toward it in the darkness as a guiding light to lead him to his goal. Because Gatsby’s quest for Daisy is broadly associated with the American dream, the green light also symbolizes that more generalized ideal.

The valley of ashes between West Egg and New York City consists of a long stretch of desolate land created by the dumping of industrial ashes. It represents the moral and social decay that results from the uninhibited pursuit of wealth, as the rich indulge themselves with regard for nothing but their own pleasure. The valley of ashes also symbolizes the plight of the poor, like George Wilson, who live among the dirty ashes and lose their vitality as a result.

The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are a pair of fading, bespectacled eyes painted on an old advertising billboard over the valley of ashes. They may represent God staring down upon and judging American society as a moral wasteland, though the novel never makes this point explicitly.

[4] How did the film capture the theme of Racism and Sexism ?

The character of Tom Buchanan is especially interesting in the movie. We notice his unconcealed sexism, hypocrisy, selfishness, and racism. It was normal for Tom to possess all these characteristics since he was born with them rather than gained them over the years. Tom was one of those men who reached such acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors anticlimax. His family was enormously wealthy even in college, his freedom with money was a matter for reproach” . The narrator does not hide Tom’s negative features and lets the viewer know that this character deserves their disapproval. “Now he was a sturdy straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward”. Tom Buchanan’s racist ideas fully correspond to the situation in the United States in the 1920s which is reflected in his emphasizing the supremacy of white people, standing up against giving black people equal rights with the whites, and expressing his fear of the white population to be submerged by the black community.

Tom believes that white people are not colored but other people are colored people in this his mentality reflects racism.

[5] Watch the video on Nick Carraway and discuss him as a narrator.

One of the interesting twists in this movie, though, is that the narrator, Nick Carroway (Tobey Maguire), Gatsby’s neighbor and a former college classmate of Tom’s, is now institutionalized in the “Perkins Sanatorium.” While getting help for “morbid alcoholism” as well as other issues, Nick is telling his Gatsby-focused story not to us but to his shrink, who’s played by Jack Thompson.

[6] Watch the video on psychoanalytical study of Jay Gatsby and write about his character.

Psychoanalysis of Jay Gatsby In the movie The Great Gatsby, a character named Jay Gatsby, though his real name being James Gatz. He was born into a family of farmers and grew up poor in North Dakota. He saved a man out in the ocean by the name of Dan Cody in which he hired Gatsby to work for him. Gatsby, being very ambitious, changed his name from James Gatz to Jay Gatsby and learned proper manners and etiquette from Dan Cody. Dan Cody meant to leave his wealth to Gatsby but his wife took all his money, leaving Gatsby poor again. Gatsby, determined to become wealthy again, decided to enlist in the army during World War I.

Word -  1902

pictures - 7

Video -  0

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