F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby is an unusual combination of realism and romance. Its realism is rooted both in its devotion to a historical moment and to the way in which the story is told, while its romance is located in the character of Jay Gatsby. Baz Luhrmann's adaptation of the novel, while presenting a superficially realistic picture of the “Jazz Age,” diminishes the narrative's historical validity through its treatment of narrator Nick Carraway. Ironically, Luhrmann might have been able to make a much better picture had he not tried so hard to be faithful to the novel.

Fitzgerald named the 1920s “the Jazz Age.” He was, of course, in part referring to the new popularity of the African American music, but “jazz” for him had a wider meaning. His 1931 essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” begins, “The word jazz in its progress toward respectability has meant first sex, then dancing, then music. It is associated with a state of nervous stimulation, not unlike that of big cities behind the lines of a war.”Footnote ¹ Fitzgerald dates the period from the repression of May Day demonstrations in 1919 to the October 1929 stock market crash, when “the most expensive orgy in history” came to an end. For Fitzgerald, the Jazz Age is characterized by changes in manners and morals, by the emergence of youth as a distinct category, and by excess. Fitzgerald himself was so powerfully identified with each of these and the Jazz Age, in general, that when it ended, critics and readers actively rejected him. He was never a simple celebrant of the period, but rather something like a participant observer who made and spent enormous sums of money and drank himself sick but who was able to write about the era with detachment.

The Great Gatsby may be the best illustration of this dual role, since in it Fitzgerald seems to have divided himself into observer and participant. The observer is Nick Carraway, the novel's narrator who is characterized by moderation in his behavior as well as in his judgment of what he witnesses.Footnote ² Fitzgerald the participant in excess is represented by Jay Gatsby, though it is important to observe that Gatsby's excesses are romantic rather than self-destructive. The genius of the novel is this division, which allows two very different visions to be represented and two different genres to be combined in the same novel. Nick's observations give us a realistic vision and a novel of manners; Gatsby's vision is romantic and his story is a romance both in the sense that it is about romantic love and in the sense that it is about a character who is larger than life and events that are far from ordinary. This combination was recognized by Richard Chase in his enormously influential The American Novel and Its Tradition, where he located The Great Gatsby as part of the distinctively American tradition of the romance despite the fact that it is a novel of manners.Footnote ³

Nick's narration places Gatsby's story very precisely in time and place. The people he describes, mainly midwesterners displaced to the East, are very much of their moment. More important, they are defined not only by geography and age, but also by social class. Fitzgerald famously observed, in his story “The Rich Boy,” “the very rich … are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful … They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are.”Footnote ⁴ Fitzgerald is registering a new awareness of the power and privilege of wealth in America. While this awareness in part depends on changes in manners, it doubtless also reflects a recognition of the widening economic gulf between the very rich and everyone else. The 1920s saw the greatest concentration of wealth at the top, together with the lowest marginal tax rates until the first decade of the twenty-first century. During 1920s, union membership declined, middle-class incomes stagnated, and agriculture was already in economic crisis. Prosperity during the 1920s was experienced mainly at top, while the middle class experienced increasing pressure from advertising and the success of the rich to try to keep up.

Of course, the Gilded Age had also been a period of vast income disparities, but it produced little literature that depicted class relations. Class differences were seldom addressed by American novelists of the nineteenth century, and even novelists of manners Henry James and Edith Wharton wrote about the rich largely in isolation from other classes. It may be that the war and changes in courtship practices and other social forms made the mixing of classes more common. Fitzgerald grew up as an upper-middle class boy who knew the children of the very rich at boarding school and at Princeton. He met his wife, Zelda Sayre, as an army officer in training in Alabama, but was only able to win her hand after his first novel was accepted for publication.

Gatsby's major characters are defined by the distinctions of their social classes. Tom Buchanan is at the top of the heap. His family is described as “enormously wealthy,” and “he'd left Chicago and come East in a fashion that rather took your breath away; for instance, he'd brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest.”Footnote ⁵ This leads Nick to remark, “It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that.” Daisy (whose voice is “full of money”), of course, shares Tom's wealth, but her own family is presented as socially prominent (TGG, 120). She is described as “the first nice girl” Gatsby ever met, and he is said to have deceived her back in Louisville by letting “her believe that he was a person from the same stratum as herself” (TGG, 148–149). Nick, unlike Tom and Daisy, who are depicted as “idle rich,” has to work for a living, but he clearly comes from an upper-middle class family. He attended boarding school in the East and then Yale, where he knew Tom. While he was not at all in the same “stratum” as the Buchanans, he also is not worried about money. If he is not their economic equal, he is not beyond the social pale. Gatsby, on the contrary, is the son of “shiftless and unsuccessful farm people” (TGG, 98). He quit school in order to make his own way in the world, and a bit like a Horatio Alger hero, attained a kind of education working for Dan Cody, a millionaire from mining and metals, on whose yacht Gatsby, previously James Gatz, found himself. Gatsby learned social graces working for Cody, but breaking from a typical Alger story, he was denied the inheritance Cody sought to leave him by legal maneuvering. Thus, even though Gatsby has by the time in the book enough money to live in a “colossal” mansion, “a factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy,” and can throw lavish parties weekend after weekend, he will always be to Tom and his ilk, “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere” (5, 130). Tom, who is fond of quoting from white supremacist polemics, even likens Gatsby's pursuit of Daisy to “intermarriage between black and white” (130).

The novel doesn't do much to picture life below the level of the upper-middle class. The best it does is the portrait of Wilson and his wife Myrtle, the former the proprietor of a failing gas station and the latter Tom's mistress: neither character comes off well. Servants are mentioned, but they are not developed as characters, and the industrial proletariat is missing entirely. Fitzgerald gives us a world in which class matters a great deal, and where the very rich are self-absorbed and “careless,” but he does not offer analysis of what class means politically or even economically. We don't know where the Buchanan's money came from, and source of Gatsby's wealth, while it is presumed to involve bootlegging, remains mysterious. While Fitzgerald described himself in his notebook as “essentially Marxian,” probably meaning that he considered himself an economic determinist, his fiction is about changes in courtship, marriage, and other aspects of social and cultural life. Indeed, the whole premise of Gatsby rests on the shift from calling to dating that occurred in the first decades of the 1900s.Footnote ⁶ Under the old order, Gatsby and Daisy would been very unlikely to have fallen in love, because they would not have been able to be alone together. It is because of the automobile and the increasing respectability of public amusements that the boundaries of social class suddenly seemed both more troubling and more fragile. Despite its focus on the upper-income levels, the novel offers a powerful critique of the social consequences of vast inequalities of wealth.

The critical social realism of Nick's narration is largely lost in Luhrmann's film despite his efforts to remain faithful to the novel's narrative presentation and structure, not to mention its very language. In an interview offered on the DVD package for his film, Luhrmann asserts, “The problem that everyone has had with [The Great Gatsby] as a film is that it's almost entirely internal. It's the internal narrative of Nick Carraway … But I want to solve that problem.”Footnote ⁷ Luhrmann's solution is to make Nick more involved in the world he describes, presumably to make him a more interesting character. Thus, while Fitzgerald's Nick reports that “I have been drunk just twice in my life,” Luhrmann's film opens with Nick in a sanitarium where he is apparently being treated for some kind of nervous breakdown (TGG, 29). We are shown his chart, which lists the following: “morbidly alcoholic; insomniac; fits of anger; anxiety; depression.” As a therapy, he is asked to write about anything he chooses, and the result is the narrative the film will present.

The effect of making Nick a mental patient is to render the moral center of the novel untrustworthy.Footnote ⁸ Such a report, a confession, must be considered unreliable. More important, the person in the novel who had been a sober witness to all of the events save his visit to Tom's love nest is now presented as someone who lived through them drunk. Luhrmann is, of course, drawing on Fitzgerald's biography here, and he calls attention to this by making the pre-institutionalized Nick a failed writer.

All of these changes render the story more subjective. While the novel is entirely in Nick's words, it is not, in fact, “internal.” It is not told in stream of consciousness style, and Nick describes himself as “one of the few honest people that I have ever known”(59). Fitzgerald created a narrator that readers could trust so that Gatsby's fantastic story would be believable, and so that the meaning of that story would not be left to their imaginations. Luhrmann's demeaning of Nick's character diminishes both effects, rendering, for example, Nick's judgment that “Gatsby turned out alright in the end” the ravings of a mental case.

Filmmakers have no obligation to remain faithful to their literary sources. The best films are often those that use their sources as jumping off places for what are essentially new works, as Howard Hawks did with Ernest Hemingway's novel To Have and Have Not. That Luhrmann chose to try to be faithful to Fitzgerald's novel, however, may not be entirely an aesthetic decision. With a well-known and beloved text like Gatsby, it would be a risk not to seem to be faithful. Yet Luhrmann's aesthetic may be the opposite of Fitzgerald's. While Fitzgerald was certainly a romantic in sensibility, the form of his fiction is realist. All of his novels are firmly grounded in time and place, and they detail contemporary social life, behavior, and psychology. Luhrmann's films have never been concerned with any of these things. While Strictly Ballroom, his first film, is set in a contemporary Australia, it is utterly detached from that context. His more recent films, Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge, and Australia, all make use of non-contemporary material or settings. Each of these films is a romance in both senses, and each in its own way is anti-realist.

Because of Nick's narration, Luhrmann's Gatsby is not entirely lacking in realism, which continues to be present in language retained from Fitzgerald. And probably because the story is closely associated with a historical moment that popular culture has continued to represent, Luhrmann and production designer/costumer designer Catherine Martin tried to give us something that looks like the 1920s. The hairstyles and fashions are particularly convincing, more accurate than those in the 1974 adaptation. The film opens with Nick reading some lines from one of Fitzgerald's essays about the 1920s, and we get some colorized file footage of New York scenes meant to remind us of what we already believe we know about the “Roaring Twenties.”Footnote ⁹ The cars and some of the music seem like what Gatsby would have driven or listened to in 1922, but even here the details don't quite pass muster. Gatsby's Duesenberg was a 1929 model, and Tom's blue coupe is a 1933 Auburn. The music similarly only seems authentic. Just one song on the soundtrack, “St. Louis Blues,” by W. C. Handy, had been written by 1922. Curiously, the songs that Fitzgerald quotes in the novel, such as “Ain't We Got Fun,” are not used.

Because it does not try to create a seamless illusion of a past time, The Great Gatsby cannot be accused of being a “nostalgia film” in Fredric Jameson's sense of the term, a slick, glossy realistic reproduction of the surface of a previous era that hides the absence of any actual historical substance. Yes, Luhrmann's film trades on a past become “a vast collection of images, a multitudinous photographic simulacrum,” an instance that is the transformation of the restaurant at which Nick meets Wolfsheim into a speakeasy straight out of the movies.Footnote ¹⁰ But “historical” reference of this kind is not the film's main visual mode. The film is rather constructed of images that advertise their unreality in various ways. Take, for example, the film's setting: it is nominally the north shore of Long Island, as it is in the novel, but the spatial relations of West Egg, East Egg, the Valley of Ashes, and Manhattan are never made clear. Instead, the distances among these places are distorted by special effects that move the viewer quickly from one location to the next. The green light at end of Daisy's dock looks like it is a lighthouse beacon so brightly does it shine, or maybe a lightship, since its distance from Gatsby's house is variable. Since Luhrmann chose to shoot the film in Australia, he could not use the actual geography to situate the events, but he could have found other ways to make the settings seem real. Instead, his spatial presentation seems fantastic and dreamlike.

The treatment of space is far from the only derealizing technique used in the film. Some scenes, especially the two drives into Manhattan, seem designed to remind us that this is only a movie by giving us versions of that movie staple, the car chase. Many scenes are like those in Moulin Rouge where we are made aware that what we are watching is a show. Gatsby's parties are presented as if they were theater, replete with music and dance performance and a crowd of partygoers as spectators. Gatsby's mansion and the number of people it holds are larger than life. The behavior of the guests is outlandish in ways not represented in the novel.Footnote ¹¹ The same is true of the scene in Tom's love nest apartment in Manhattan, which in the film is turned into a kind of orgy, with Nick participating rather than merely getting drunk as he does in the novel. In his DVD interview, Luhrmann says that he needed to find ways to communicate the story effectively to today's audience. Thus, he uses Jay Z's hip-hop music as an equivalent for the then-new jazz music, that is, as something raucous and dangerous. Since hip hop is old enough now to be on the downward slope of its trajectory, I'm not sure this analogy works, but it does illustrate Luhrmann's strategy of making the film appeal to twenty-first-century viewers by taking their tastes, manners, and morals into account. There is a lot more exposed flesh, more racial and class mixing, and more explicit suggestion of political corruption than the novel describes.

One might say of Luhrmann's Gatsby what Edmund Wilson said of Fitzgerald's first novel, This Side of Paradise, that it “commits almost every sin that a novel can possible commit: but it does not commit the unpardonable sin: it does not fail to live.”Footnote ¹² As A. O. Scott in the New York Times put it, The Great Gatsby is “an eminently enjoyable movie … less a conventional movie adaptation than a splashy, trashy opera.”Footnote ¹³ Luhrmann's obvious anti-realism is not in itself a bad strategy, and given his preference for this aesthetic, one wonders why Luhrmann didn't have the courage to simply tell us Gatsby's story without Nick's contextualizations and qualifications. Gatsby's romance is exactly the sort of tale that Hollywood has specialized in, and Luhrmann's visual extravagance is perfectly suited to it. This would have required a screenplay that, instead of trying to make Nick more interesting, gave Gatsby some interiority of his own. The movie would have needed to show us how it felt to be someone so hopeful, so in love, and capable of believing that the past can be repeated. It might also have given us something of Daisy's mind, an element almost completely missing in the novel. Gatsby's romance is the part of the novel that transcends the work in which it appears because it relies on the tragic sense of the discourse of romance that goes back to Tristan and other literature of the late Middle Ages.Footnote ¹⁴ Like the stories that Shakespeare borrowed to make his plays, this narrative can be endlessly retold. Fitzgerald's novel is nearly perfect in itself, but it is perfect as a novel. A great film might yet be made of it if a filmmaker could free himself from the novel's perfection.