For years, one of the rites of spring in my high school was walking down the hallways where freshman English classes met and hearing the sappily romantic strains of Nina Rota's soundtrack to Franco Zeffirelli's 1968 version of Romeo and Juliet. The music emanating from classrooms changed in 1996 with Baz Luhrmann's adaptation of Romeo + Juliet: suddenly reading Romeo and Juliet became hip. A young and tortured Leo DiCaprio set fire to doe-eyed Claire Danes's heart, as well as the hearts of most of the ninth grade girls in my class. Guns blazed, gas stations exploded, and songs such as Garbage's “Crush” pulsated with sexual desire down the hallways, overpowering the melodramatic violins of Rota's “What is a Youth?” Shakespeare traditionalists had good reason to be appalled by Luhrmann's lack of subtlety, but I loved the film for its energy and its allegiance to the core passion that drives the play—forbidden love between teenagers discovering love for the first time.

Seventeen years later, Luhrmann is back to transform the landscape of high school classrooms with his 2013 adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. The literary purist in me agrees with Philip French's review: “This is a film that tramples on Fitzgerald's exquisite prose, turning the oblique into the crude, the suggestively symbolic into the declaratively monumental, the abstract into the flatly real.” He argues that it is the “overstatement and noise” that “sinks Luhrmann's picture.”Footnote ¹ In turn, however, my students of all levels, from regular-level juniors in American Studies to Advanced Placement seniors, trample all over French's critique with their love for the film. They appreciate the “overstatement and noise,” the crude and rambunctious visual strokes that Luhrmann paints of The Roaring Twenties and The Jazz Age. My students are not literary purists; they talk about how the movie helped them to see the parties and clothing and raw energy of the 1920s. I agree with them.

Of course, not all of Luhrmann's choices succeed. Because Luhrmann chooses to highlight the excess of overflowing champagne bottles and grandiose automobiles, he struggles to tell the story through Nick Carraway's reserved narration. Nick Carraway is the internal voice of the novel, the semi-reliable, semi-autobiographical first person narrator who is “within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”Footnote ² Nick is Fitzgerald's greatest literary creation, not Gatsby. Luhrmann, contra Fitzgerald, unnecessarily places Nick in a sanitarium trying to recover from his “riotous excursions” in the East. The idea that Nick's doctor encourages him to write down his stories as a form of therapy is clumsy. When Luhrmann has Fitzgerald's words flow out of the typewriter and magically fill the screen, it is heavy handed, as if Luhrmann does not trust his audience to hear the magic of Fitzgerald's prose, or does not trust himself to simply present the language.

Luhrmann's greatest failure is his omission of the last chapter of the novel, including the arrival of Gatsby's father Henry C. Gatz and Gatsby's funeral where no one attends but Nick, Mr. Gatz, and Owl-eyes. The scene ends in a “thick drizzle” with Owl-eyes's final proclamation: “Why, my God! they used to go there by the hundreds… [T]he poor son-of-a-bitch.”Footnote ³ Luhrmann wants to focus on the romance between Gatsby and Daisy, and so the accident and Gatsby's death provide closure to Luhrmann's chosen storyline. Without that lonesome funeral in the Long Island drizzle, however, we lose an opportunity to struggle alongside Nick with the profound ambivalence of Gatsby and his legacy.

Yet Luhrmann deserves credit for what he gets right. Luhrmann's focus on Gatsby and Daisy's romance, his richly costumed and extravagant party scenes, and the hip-hop backdrop of the modern soundtrack all crackle with energy. Like Romeo + Juliet, he captures the core passion that drives the novel—the roughneck vitality of a young James Gatz who, like a young United States of America, “sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God … [S]o he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.”Footnote ⁴ Thanks to an older but still dashingly handsome Leo DiCaprio, and a soundtrack featuring Jay-Z and the sultry Lana Del Rey, among others, reading The Great Gatsby is hip.

What moves my students about The Great Gatsby, often with dreamy eyes, is the doomed romance between Gatsby and Daisy. The fairy tale world that Fitzgerald creates speaks universally, regardless of how we feel about these two characters or the accuracy of Fitzgerald's representation of the 1920s. When Fitzgerald writes that Gatsby “knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God,”Footnote ⁵ and then “she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete,”Footnote ⁶ we cannot help but be swept into his newly created world by the magical precision of his imagery, an originally American version of star-crossed lovers.

I have taught American Studies for twenty years as part of a program team-taught with a social science teacher. Our goal is to interweave literature and history, illuminating history through literature and literature through history. It is hard to think of a better example of how the two produce one another. Fitzgerald practically created later generations' understanding of this period. Fitzgerald penned the term “The Jazz Age” in his 1931 essay “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” and he saw himself at the heart of an important historical moment. Fitzgerald's essay used language that resonates today in traditional history textbooks describing the 1920s. He describes “the wildest of all generations, the generation which had been adolescent during the confusion of the War” that “danced into the limelight.”Footnote ⁷ Fitzgerald argues that the old social order broke down and was built anew as a youthful generation encounters a world transformed by the Industrial Revolution. “As far back as 1915 the unchaperoned young people of the smaller cities had discovered the mobile privacy of that automobile given to young Bill at sixteen to make him ‘self-reliant.’ At first petting was a desperate adventure even under such favorable conditions, but presently confidences were exchanged and the old commandment broke down.”Footnote ⁸ It is this mobile privacy of the car that brought about America's first sexual revolution, and it is in the privacy of an automobile where Fitzgerald first introduces the reader to Gatsby and Daisy together. As Jordan Baker tells Nick, “When I came opposite her house that morning her white roadster was beside the curb, and she was sitting in it with a lieutenant I had never seen before. They were so engrossed in each other that she didn't see me until I was five feet away … The officer looked at Daisy while she was speaking in a way that every young girl wants to be looked at some time, and because it seemed romantic to me I have remembered the incident ever since.”Footnote ⁹ Daisy Fay was Louisville's number one debutante, and Gatsby knows that he is a “penniless young man without a past, and at any moment the invisible cloak of his uniform might slip from his shoulders.”Footnote ¹⁰ The “mobile privacy of the automobile” removes Daisy from the watchful eyes of her parents, and we come to understand the actual danger that this removal poses for the real “commandment” at stake: the rigid divisions of class in America.

Fitzgerald's novel provides a literary entry point into a historical discussion about the 1920s. Luhrmann's film offers a chance to augment this discussion. The first decision that I make as a teacher might seem obvious, but it will inform every other curricular decision: what is the specific purpose of showing this film to this particular class or collection of students? As a well-crafted film and piece of art in its own right, Luhrmann's Gatsby offers narrative structures and visual images worthy of examination. My purpose in showing the film is to foster a truly engaged dialogue between Fitzgerald's novel, Luhrmann's adaptation, and the historical truths of the 1920s or 2010s.

When discussing Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby with my AP kids, they were adamant that we should only watch the movie after reading the book. Studying the film together with the novel lends itself to a lesson structured around comparison and contrast, which meets a Common Core standard. The Common Core asks eleventh and twelfth grade students to “analyze how an author's choices concerning how to structure specific parts of a text contribute to its overall structure and meaning as well as its aesthetic impact” as well as “analyze multiple interpretations of a story, evaluating how each version interprets the source text.”Footnote ¹¹ Using the novel and film adaptation together provide the perfect opportunity for students to think about similarities and differences in complex ways.

I asked my AP students to work in groups to develop a lesson plan that compared a scene from the novel to a scene in the movie. The lesson plan needed to provide learning targets, directions for the teacher, any worksheets that students would use, and a “cheat sheet” that explained why they chose this scene and provided expected responses. The lesson required three components: specific text from the novel; a clip from the movie that the class would watch; and some activity that compared the two, focusing on authorial or directorial intent. The assignment forces students to do close analysis of a passage from the novel, which they often select because they either love or hate Luhrmann's adaptation of the scene. It is fun because they often choose what I consider to be a surprising passage. After teaching The Great Gatsby for years, I know exactly which passages I want to examine closely. When the students present an unexpected treasure, the novel blooms again for me.

Last year, one group set as a learning target having students identify how Fitzgerald uses language to create tone. They chose two passages from the novel: one about Tom the night that he came with Daisy to Gatsby's party, and one when Fitzgerald describes Gatsby and Daisy's first kiss. Their lesson asked students to compare words in the first passage (perturbed, oppressiveness, unpleasantness, harshness, saddening) with words in the second passage (blossomed, white face, star, flower, incarnation). The plan then put students in the director's chair of the next Gatsby film and called for students to select music for these scenes, and to explain why they selected those songs. Then students would watch those two scenes from the movie, and compare and contrast the choices that they made with Luhrmann's choices. What a great lesson—I am definitely going to use it next year! Though I used this compare and contrast lesson with AP students, I think it could work for all students. The learning targets forces the groups to focus on language and meaning (tone, literary devices, symbols, characterization, and setting). The comparison between a short passage and short clip is manageable for all students, and enables detailed analysis. And the creation of an actual lesson plan with expected responses shows the students engaged in critical thinking on a section of the text that they want to explore.Footnote ¹²

I used the movie differently last year in my regular eleventh grade class. These students struggle more with reading comprehension and can be reluctant readers, especially with a demanding, vocabulary-rich text such as The Great Gatsby. I showed the movie before reading the book in the hopes that the raw energy of the film would bring more students to Fitzgerald's text. Students knew going in to the reading that they would be comparing Fitzgerald's novel to the film.

Because this was an American Studies class, we wanted students to make direct connections between the novel and key ideas about the 1920s, including industrialization and the labor movement; consumerism and the growth of advertising; xenophobia expressed in the anti-immigration laws and the eugenics movement; and the immense wealth disparity distinguished by race, gender, and class. We began the unit with the idea presented by Henry George in Progress and Poverty from 1879. He observed that “widespread destitution is found in the midst of the greatest abundance,” and that economic growth does not “act upon the social fabric from underneath, as was for a long time hoped and believed, but strike it at a point intermediate between top and bottom … as though an immense wedge were being forced, not underneath, but through society.”Footnote ¹³ It seems to me that Fitzgerald was keenly aware of this wedge, as he juxtaposes the “glittering white palaces of fashionable East Egg”Footnote ¹⁴ in Chapter 1 with the valley of ashes in Chapter 2 where the “ash-grey men move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.”Footnote ¹⁵ Myrtle Wilson's intense vitality transforms into impressive hauteur simply by donning an elaborate afternoon dress, and Gatsby understands more clearly than Nick that Daisy's voice compels men because it is “full of money.”Footnote ¹⁶

One fundamental goal in our American Studies class is to have our students continually consider the question “What is an American?” Has America lived up to the creeds set out in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights? The average eleventh grader does not have an active stake in reading literature or history, so one strategy that we employ is constantly asking our students why specific time periods or pieces of literature speak to us today. Numerous articles have come out since the Occupy Movement articulating the fact that “U.S. income inequality has been increasing steadily since the 1970s, and now has reached levels not seen since 1928.”Footnote ¹⁷ We want our students to think about wealth disparity. Is it fair that 1% of the population earns 20% of the wealth? Is wealth disparity the outcome of hard work and capitalism, or is it unjust? My students are less optimistic about America than they were twenty years ago, but they still want to succeed, and they define success by excess and access to cash. They want their piece of the pie, but they recognize that the system is unfair. Perhaps they see that dilemma all too clearly in The Great Gatsby.

I think that students love the Luhrmann adaptation of The Great Gatsby because he unabashedly brings the story into the present and provides a fluid and fluent way to compare the past to the present. As Jay-Z writes in “100$ Bill,” the anthem to the Luhrmann vision: “Benjamin Franklins filled, fold it just for the thrill/ Go numb until I can't feel, or might pop this pill/ Stock markets just crash, now I'm just a bill … Decade of decadence, ill reverence, irreverence.”Footnote ¹⁸ Luhrmann's vision of excess and extravagance does trample on Fitzgerald's prose and it does replace sophisticated nuance with crude overstatements, but in a decade of decadence and irreverence, his vision speaks to us all.