Rewriting the Dream: A Critical Analysis ofThe Great Gatsby
Introduction: From Modernist Novel to Postmodern Spectacle
When The Great Gatsby, it immediately polarized critics and scholars. Some dismissed it as excessive, vulgar, and emotionally manipulative; others defended it as a daring attempt to retranslate a canonical modernist text into a twenty-first-century cinematic idiom. This polarized reception itself reveals why The Great Gatsby is a crucial case study for adaptation theory.
The source text, The Great Gatsby is marked by ambiguity, irony, narrative restraint, and moral hesitation qualities that resist easy visualization. by contrast, thrives on spectacle, excess, emotional maximalism, and theatrical artifice. The adaptation thus stages not merely a translation from page to screen, but a confrontation between modernist subtlety and postmodern excess.
This blog argues that film should not be judged primarily through the narrow lens of “fidelity” to the novel. Instead, it should be understood as a cultural and intersemiotic translation that reimagines Fitzgerald’s critique of the American Dream for a post-2008, hyper-capitalist world. At the same time, the film’s stylistic bravura frequently threatens to collapse critique into celebration, turning moral ambiguity into emotional certainty. What follows is a sustained, research-driven analysis of this tension.
Part I: Frame Narrative and the Problem of the ‘Writerly’ Text
1. The Sanitarium Device: Externalizing or Pathologizing Nick?
Luhrmann’s most radical narrative intervention is the invention of the sanitarium frame. Unlike the novel where Nick Carraway’s retrospective narration emerges organically from memory the film presents Nick as a patient diagnosed with “morbid alcoholism,” urged by a doctor to write as therapy.
On one level, this device clearly serves the demands of cinema. Film struggles to convey interiority without recourse to voiceover or visual metaphor. By literalizing the act of writing, the film creates a visible cause-and-effect chain: trauma → breakdown → narration. From a purely cinematic standpoint, this is efficient and intelligible.
However, this efficiency comes at a conceptual cost. In the novel, Nick’s authority rests on his apparent sobriety, restraint, and moral attentiveness. His famous claim to be “one of the few honest people” he has ever known is already ironic and unstable but it is not clinically compromised. By diagnosing Nick, the film pathologizes narration itself, subtly undermining his status as a moral compass.
Rather than an ethical observer wrestling with ambiguity, Nick becomes a damaged witness seeking emotional closure. The narrative thus shifts from moral inquiry to therapeutic confession. This simplifies the novel’s epistemological uncertainty: instead of asking how stories distort truth, the film tells us why Nick tells this story at all. In doing so, it reduces the complexity of Fitzgerald’s unreliable narration in favor of psychological causality.
2. The “Cinematic Poem” and Floating Text: Translation or Reification?
Luhrmann’s use of superimposed text most notably in the “Valley of Ashes” sequence has been described by the director as a “cinematic poem.” Lines from Fitzgerald’s prose float across the screen, visually anchoring the film to its literary origin.
This strategy is deeply controversial. On the one hand, it acknowledges what adaptation theory often ignores: some meanings reside in language itself and cannot be fully translated into images. The floating text becomes a bridge between semiotic systems, reminding viewers that this is a film in dialogue with literature, not a replacement for it.
On the other hand, the technique risks what critics call “noble literalism.” By visually reproducing Fitzgerald’s words, the film freezes prose into ornament. Rather than allowing cinematic form to reinterpret metaphor, the text becomes a fetish object revered but inert. The viewer reads instead of perceives; the diegetic world pauses to admire its own literary pedigree.
Instead of deepening immersion, the floating words often distance the spectator, foregrounding quotation over experience. The result is not a fusion of media, but a reminder of their incompatibility.
Part II: Adaptation Theory Beyond Fidelity
3. Hutcheon’s Knowing vs. Unknowing Audience
According to Linda Hutcheon, adaptations must address both “knowing” audiences (familiar with the source) and “unknowing” audiences (encountering the story for the first time). Adaptation, she argues, is “repetition without replication.”
Luhrmann’s ending exemplifies this tension. By omitting Gatsby’s father (Henry Gatz) and the sparsely attended funeral, the film intensifies Gatsby’s isolation while simultaneously narrowing its social critique. In the novel, the father’s appearance exposes Gatsby’s self-invention as both delusional and deeply American a product of ambition rather than pure romance.
For knowing audiences, this omission is significant. Gatsby’s dream becomes less social and more personal; less about American ideology and more about lost love. For unknowing audiences, the narrative coheres as a tragic romance centered on devotion and betrayal.
This shift undeniably re-genres the story. The novel’s critique of class, capitalism, and historical amnesia gives way to a melodrama of emotional excess. Luhrmann sacrifices sociological breadth to ensure affective clarity an understandable but ideologically consequential choice.
4. Badiou, Truth Events, and Hip-Hop Anachronism
Luhrmann has defended his anachronistic soundtrack featuring hip-hop and contemporary pop by arguing that jazz in the 1920s functioned as a cultural rupture similar to hip-hop today. This argument resonates strongly with Alain Badiou’s concept of the “truth event.”
If fidelity is understood not as historical accuracy but as loyalty to the evental energy of the text, then Luhrmann’s soundtrack is arguably faithful. Jazz in Fitzgerald’s time symbolized modernity, racial transgression, and cultural anxiety. Hip-hop carries similar disruptive force in contemporary culture.
However, this intersemiotic translation is double-edged. While it communicates rupture, it also risks collapsing critique into spectacle. The music amplifies glamour far more than unease. What is lost is the novel’s underlying moral exhaustion the sense that the party is already ending even as it rages on.
Thus, the soundtrack is faithful to affect, but not necessarily to ethos.
Part III: Characterization and Performance
5. Gatsby: Romantic Martyr or Self-Made Criminal?
Leonardo DiCaprio’s Gatsby is overwhelmingly romanticized. The gradual revelation of Gatsby’s criminality in the novel key to Fitzgerald’s critique of self-made mythology is softened, delayed, or visually overshadowed.
The “Red Curtain” style transforms corruption into pageantry. Crime becomes aestheticized rather than interrogated. Gatsby appears less responsible for his downfall than victimized by class rigidity and emotional sincerity.
This fundamentally alters the moral architecture of the story. Fitzgerald’s Gatsby is destroyed by his own delusions, not merely by society’s cruelty. Luhrmann’s Gatsby, by contrast, is martyred too pure for a cynical world. The critique of the corrupted American Dream is thus diluted into a lament for lost innocence.
6. Daisy Buchanan: Agency Erased
In the novel, Daisy is careless, shallow, and morally evasive but she is not powerless. The film removes key scenes that emphasize her maternal indifference and moral vacuity, reconstructing her as fragile, conflicted, and emotionally overwhelmed.
This revision serves a clear purpose: to justify Gatsby’s obsession for a modern audience. Yet in doing so, Daisy’s agency is stripped away. She becomes a symbol rather than a subject a narrative function designed to preserve Gatsby’s romantic purity.
Ironically, a film marketed as emotionally progressive ends up reinforcing a conservative gender logic: the ideal woman must remain ambiguous, passive, and unattainable.
Part IV: Visual Style and Socio-Political Context
7. The Party Scene: Critique or Celebration?
Luhrmann’s party sequences are technically astonishing vortex camera movements, rapid editing, 3D immersion.
The problem is not excess per se, but uncontrolled excess. The film invites the viewer to enjoy the spectacle before condemning it, often too late. Fitzgerald’s parties are seductive but hollow; Luhrmann’s are intoxicatingly pleasurable.
As a result, critique is overwhelmed by consumption. The viewer becomes complicit, not reflective.
8. Post-2008 American Dream
Released after the global financial crisis, the film inevitably reframes the American Dream. The Green Light no longer signifies hopeful striving but receding illusion a dream endlessly deferred by systemic inequality.
Yet Luhrmann cannot resist glamour. The dream remains visually irresistible even as it is narratively impossible. The film thus captures a distinctly post-2008 contradiction: we know the dream is broken, but we still desire it.
Part V: Creative Response – Rewriting the Plaza Scene
If I were adapting the Plaza Hotel confrontation, I would remove Gatsby’s near-violent outburst. In the novel, Gatsby’s tragedy lies in his emotional restraint his refusal to see Daisy as she is. Violence externalizes conflict too crudely.
Fidelity to the medium does not require abandoning character integrity. Cinematic tension can be achieved through silence, hesitation, and failed articulation. Gatsby should unravel inwardly, not explode outwardly. The moment should expose illusion, not aggression.
Conclusion: Adaptation as Cultural Translation
Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby is neither a betrayal nor a simple homage. It is a symptomatic adaptation revealing what contemporary culture desires from classics: emotional certainty, visual excess, and romantic identification.
It succeeds as a cultural translation of affect but falters as a sustained moral critique. The film understands the dream’s beauty better than its danger. And that imbalance tells us as much about 2013 as Fitzgerald’s novel tells us about 1925.
In the end, Luhrmann does not destroy Fitzgerald’s text he refracts it. What we see in that refraction is not just Gatsby, but ourselves.
References :
Luhrmann, Baz, director. The Great Gatsby. Performances by Leonardo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan, and Tobey Maguire, Warner Bros. Pictures, 2013.
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