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Class and 'The Great Gatsby'
http://www.thenation.com/blog/174402/class-and-great-gatsby
There is one thing that Baz Luhrmann gets right about The Great Gatsby, and I think it’s unintentional. It has to do with the way that, turned at a certain angle, lit in a certain way, Leonardo DiCaprio again looks like the boy everyone I knew (I’m that age) grew up loving. The rest of the time, well, he’s still handsome, but he’s aged in such a way that it makes the features of his youthful beauty look a little ridiculous, in retrospect. The worry lines and stubble seem to be telling us that the beauty of that face was only a temporary, fleeting thing. I guess you could say he looks like a ruin of a movie star—a gorgeous ruin, but a ruin nonetheless. And ruin, I always thought, was what Gatsby was all about. Everything in the book is ruined: the old mansion he lives in, the love he has for his perfect woman, the business he runs, Tom Buchanan’s mistress and, more broadly, in the way your tenth grade English teacher taught it to you, the American Dream.
Luhrmann clearly disagrees that rot has any place in the story; he sparkles and spangles his Gatsby to the hilt. But then his interpretation seems to be the dominant one. Kathryn Schulz, in a well-argued piece in New York, pointed out that Scott Fitzgerald was always a bit of a hypocrite about class. In spite of himself, he sort of liked the rich, and she argued that Gatsby suffers from that. “As readers, we revel in the glamorous dissipation of the rich, and then we revel in the cheap satisfaction of seeing them fall,” she wrote. “At no point are we made to feel uncomfortable about either pleasure, let alone their conjunction.”
For this heresy, Schulz received some entertaining blowback: A.O. Scott, in The New York Times, called her a “showboating critical contrarian,” and Joyce Carol Oates tweeted, in apparent reaction, that “Hating ‘The Great Gatsby’ [the novel] is like spitting into the Grand Canyon. It will not be going away anytime soon, but you will be.” But in fact Schulz’s position has been around as long as Gatsby has. Here in The Nation, in a review of a 1926 stage adaptation of the novel, a critic began with a rant about Fitzgerald’s worldview,
Though granted just enough detachment to make him undertake the task of description, he is by temperament too much a part of the things described to view them with any penetratingly critical eye and he sees flappers, male and female, much as they see themselves. Sharing to a very considerable extent in their psychological processes, he romanticizes their puerilities in much the same fashion as they do…
Read more: http://www.thenation.com/blog/174402/class-and-great-gatsby#ixzz2TjwpXOaG
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http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/05/-i-the-great-gatsby-i-movie-needed-to-be-more-gay/275768/
Come to lunch someday," [Mr. McKee] suggested, as we groaned down in the elevator.
"Where?"
"Anywhere."
"Keep your hands off the lever," snapped the elevator boy.
"I beg your pardon," said Mr. McKee with dignity, "I didn't know I was touching it."
"All right," I agreed, "I'll be glad to."
. . . I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the sheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands.
F, Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is usually thought of as the story of... well, the great Jay Gatsby, poor boy made nouveau riche, and his efforts to win the aristocratic Daisy Buchanan away from her boorish aristocratic husband Tom. But the quote above is about Daisy's cousin, the narrator Nick Carraway. In the passage, as you can see, Fitzgerald makes a flamboyant phallic pun ("Keep your hands off the lever" indeed), and then shows us McKee and Nick virtually in bed together. Many people skim over that scene—as I did more than once. But once it's been pointed out, it's difficult to see it as anything but post-coital.
Baz Luhrman's recently film version of Gatsby makes a nod to this incident: Mr. McKee, a photographer, is very interested to learn that writer Nick is also an artist. But while McKee may still be gay, film-Nick (Toby Maguire) is adamantly not. In the book, Nick meets Mr. McKee at a party and goes home with him. In the film, he still goes to the party, but ends up canoodling and maybe probably having sex not with a man, but with a woman. Film Nick is first attracted to Gatsby's parties by a glimpse of a lovely flapper flitting through the bushes. He seems visibly affected by the sensuality of Myrtle Wilson, Tom's mistress. In the book, he recognizes her appeal, but seems unmoved or even disgusted by it. In one telling passage while at the party, he notes that he "was simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life." In the next sentence, he says Myrtle pulls her chair over and "her warm breath poured over me." A couple paragraphs later he's sneering at her "artificial laughter."
Come to lunch someday," [Mr. McKee] suggested, as we groaned down in the elevator.
"Where?"
"Anywhere."
"Keep your hands off the lever," snapped the elevator boy.
"I beg your pardon," said Mr. McKee with dignity, "I didn't know I was touching it."
"All right," I agreed, "I'll be glad to."
. . . I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the sheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands.
F, Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is usually thought of as the story of... well, the great Jay Gatsby, poor boy made nouveau riche, and his efforts to win the aristocratic Daisy Buchanan away from her boorish aristocratic husband Tom. But the quote above is about Daisy's cousin, the narrator Nick Carraway. In the passage, as you can see, Fitzgerald makes a flamboyant phallic pun ("Keep your hands off the lever" indeed), and then shows us McKee and Nick virtually in bed together. Many people skim over that scene—as I did more than once. But once it's been pointed out, it's difficult to see it as anything but post-coital.
Baz Luhrman's recently film version of Gatsby makes a nod to this incident: Mr. McKee, a photographer, is very interested to learn that writer Nick is also an artist. But while McKee may still be gay, film-Nick (Toby Maguire) is adamantly not. In the book, Nick meets Mr. McKee at a party and goes home with him. In the film, he still goes to the party, but ends up canoodling and maybe probably having sex not with a man, but with a woman. Film Nick is first attracted to Gatsby's parties by a glimpse of a lovely flapper flitting through the bushes. He seems visibly affected by the sensuality of Myrtle Wilson, Tom's mistress. In the book, he recognizes her appeal, but seems unmoved or even disgusted by it. In one telling passage while at the party, he notes that he "was simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life." In the next sentence, he says Myrtle pulls her chair over and "her warm breath poured over me." A couple paragraphs later he's sneering at her "artificial laughter."
It is all a daydream, in the Freudian sense of fiction being a projection of the writer's unconsciousness wishes and fears, and Fitzgerald himself did rent a modest West Egg dwelling nestled amongst nouveau-riche mansions to write it as I recall, so you get an A. 
p.s. I saw it in 3D last weekend and I completely agree with you: it is visually spectacular and the 3D photography is worth the price of admission. Highly recommended. I also thought the casting and acting were better than in the Redford version whose characters didn't come close to the novel. Redford would have made a good Tom Buchanan but he wasn't much of a Gatsby and Sam Waterson makes a much better cop-lawyer than Nick Carraway.
Anyway if anyone has any interest in blowing a few bucks at the Cineplex I'd catch it in 3D before it goes away.
Elizabeth Debiecki as Jordan Baker, pro golfer and Nick Carraway love interest