The Great Gatsby...and...uh...Escapism? A Pensive Rant.

WARNING: This is going to be one of those rants with no real purpose, that might not really be going anywhere. The subject also has the potential to get melancholy and full of pensive self-analysis, so a preemptive apology if I get a bit melodramatic and lack the snarky humour that many of you love. Feel free to skip.

            Every once in a while, you come across a movie that changes your life. For me, there are quite a few of them. I have no idea what kind of person I would have become had I not seen The Nightmare Before Christmas, Hook, and Legend as a child. Interview with the Vampire and Edward Scissorhands created bends in the road during adolescence, and you can clearly see what happened when I came across The Dark Knight. The list goes on and on, obscure titles and mainstream blockbusters, so many films have influenced me in so many ways. In May, when I was in BG for the weekend, I finally saw The Great Gatsby, and I felt something tweak in the fabric of my life’s path, the same way I had when I saw any of the other films I mentioned. Watching it made me feel a very specific kind of alive. I felt like my heart had dissolved into warm light and spread through my veins.

            I did not go into Gatsby expecting this kind of reaction. I’d been excited to see the movie for months, without really being sure why. I read the book once, in junior high, and to be perfectly honest, all pretentions aside, I don’t remember a damn thing about it, except that 13-year-old Dee found it soul-suckingly boring.  I also have a meh/hate relationship with Baz Luhrmann, having only kind of liked Romeo and Juliet and truly despised Moulin Rouge. I loathe how choppy and quick his split-second camera shots are, especially since he takes so much time to weave lush visuals. The camera work just destroys any chance of enjoyment. But once I saw the trailer for Gatsby, I was aching to see it. I’m a very big DiCaprio fan, having never been disappointed in a performance of his since he launched his more serious career. There’s something about his face and the way he approaches his roles that I just genuinely like. The trailer also showcased Luhrmann’s ability to create a rich and sensual world, which is my catnip.

            Knowing The Boyfriend would not be remotely interested in seeing this movie, I went to BG’s super cheap theatre with a friend. For the first twenty minutes of the movie, I was in simmering rage, because once again, Baz fucking Luhrmann seemed to have given editing duties to an epileptic on acid. If I blinked, I missed the introduction of a character or an establishing shot. The CG looked like a dvd menu from early in the millennium, it was that bad. But, thank sweet zombie Jesus, once Gatsby was introduced, the camera slowed down, shots got longer, and I actually got to see the costumes, the meticulous makeup, the details, and oh, my God, it was so beautiful. This movie was so beautiful. With the exception of Tobey Maguire, who has always been a flat actor to me, the performances were phenomenal.

            Gatsby is not a critical darling. Critics felt that they sacrificed the story of the book for stunning visuals. I get where they’re coming from, but from someone who pretty much hasn’t read the book, I disagree. I was hooked into the storyline. I did not see the hit and run coming, and I felt embittered and heartbroken at the end of the movie, just like Nick Carraway. I despised what Daisy and Tom, but, and here’s my favourite part, I understood the motivations of every character. Absolutely nothing seemed forced to me. I saw Tom as a formidable man who felt that he was past his prime, slipping in and out of affairs as a way of reaffirming his manhood and virility. And I believed that he loved Daisy through it all, that she wasn’t just a possession, though he treated her that way. I despised but understood when he lied to the mechanic about Gatsby having had the affair with Myrtle. I felt Daisy’s personal magnetism and understood her desire to run away with Gatsby rather than confront and end things with her husband, I felt her realization that she did love Tom and Gatsby both, and understood the choice that she ultimately made, however horrible I found it that she would fall back and let Tom and his money clean up the mess. I did and didn’t hate her for it, because I could relate to it. Same with Gatsby. I understood his need to “go back” into the past as if the five years leading up to the story had never happened, rather than accepting the past and moving forward as best he could. Hell, I even understood why Myrtle ran into the street. Do you have any idea how rare it is for every single character in a story to have motivations that feel utterly natural and not forced into motion for the sake of the plot? I’ve rarely seen it. And I don’t believe they sacrificed the story. Without Googling the theme of the book, I’m going to make a guess. I walked away from the film thinking about how wild and irresponsible New Yorkers of the roaring 20s seemed, so reckless and selfish and at the same time so innocent, like spoiled children who have always been given whatever they wanted. I felt embittered by how Gatsby had been betrayed and condemned as a ‘bootlegging criminal’ by the hoard of hypocrites who openly drank his booze and celebrated his mysterious reputation only months before. I felt rage and sorrow toward Tom and Daisy, the very quintessence of those spoiled rich 20s children, who destroyed a life, knew they had, and fell back behind the warm and secretive veil of their wealth, counting on their affluence to keep their reputation safe, though I really couldn’t hate them for it. I pretty much fell in love with Gatsby, a man who brought himself from rags to riches due to an unfailing sense of hope and idealism, which also brought about his downfall in the most poetically heartbreaking and perfect way.

            And now, Googling the book theme, I see it’s about the hypocrisy of the era, condemnation of crooked politics, and the downside and tragedy of the American Dream. Pretty much exactly what I took away from the film. In your face, critics.

            As you can plainly see, I fell in love with this movie. It was simply beautiful, visually, in writing, in performance, and in delivery. Even the music, blending modern hip hop and soul with 20s jazz, giving the whole thing a simultaneously modern and vintage gangster feel, was just perfect. The music itself pointed out the cycle of the American dream to me, gangsters back then being bootleggers and pseud-celebrity mobsters, today being drug dealers and hip hop artists with spotty pasts (and presents)despite their wealth. My only critique, and I have to dig deep for it, is that they overemphasized the symbolism that was probably very subtle in the book; the green light and the eyes of Dr. T.J Eckelburg. I would have kept it a little subtler, but I understand the urge to make it less so when transferring mediums from book to film. And let’s be real here, subtlety is not in Luhrmann’s vocabulary.

            I think this movie spoke so strongly to me largely because its strengths lend themselves to escapism, and if there is one solitary running theme through my entire being, it is escapism. I was born a daydreamer, played make believe games long after my peers had gravitated toward sports and other recess activities grounded in reality. I wrote stories during every single one of my high school classes, utterly neglecting academics that bored me, and continued to play make believe through theatre and home movies I would write and film with friends. I create mental music videos to favourite songs and even entire story arcs with playlists in the car. I write on scrap paper during idle periods at the register. Dance, writing, reading, music, meditation, movies, all of them are vehicles for escape for me. I even respond to traumatic moments by honest to deity dissociation.

In American Psycho, Patrick Bateman has a haunting monologue, “There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman; some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me: only an entity, something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable... I simply am not there.”

            With Batemen, his sense of disconnect with this world is due to a malignant sociopathy, the feeling of being detached from the whole of mankind. It is a natural escapism, ingrained within him. I may be the opposite of a sociopath. I’ve mentioned in this blog that I was a nightmare as a child, a raging mini demon who lashed out and terrorized peers and caretakers. I think this was because even then, I felt emotions very strongly. And I still do, though the spectrum is less extreme than when I was a kid. And I think this, paired with the fact that I cannot mentally handle idleness or the dullness of the real world, contributed to the daydreaming escapist you see before you. I disconnect from this world out of necessity, whether to protect myself or keep myself entertained and mentally active. This is also, I think, why I fell so hard for The Great Gatsby and for other movies that are visually dramatic, like The Cell, The Crow, Pan’s Labyrinth, the highly stylized worlds of Burton and Kubrick and Del Toro and Singh. I see the world in a highly stylized way. When my depression attacks, colours are duller, faces around me are less animated, I interpret people’s behaviour as more negative toward me (She’s avoiding me. He’s never really liked me.) And when I’m happy, well, it’s Luhrmann’s world. You need only look at my excessive romanticizing of Ination for the strongest example of that. I swear to God, Ination looks to me like one of the party scenes in Gatsby. It’s like my ubermensch tendencies with romance, only for the entire world. I’m drawn to stylized, bigger-and-brighter-and-more-beautiful or darker-and-more-sinister-and-colder than life movies because that’s how I view the world during points of high emotion, and that’s the world I escape to in so many ways during so many points of my day-to-day life.

            I didn’t realize the extent of my escapism, and how unhealthy it can be, until I moved down here to CBus, and started a full time job, paying bills, with very little change or variety. It’s the first time I’ve lived in what college kids call “the real world”, and I crept further and further into my fantasies, until I was barely present. I started having the same focus issues I had in grade school, zoning out without realizing it, in mid-conversation with somebody. A Psyclon Nine song popping onto Pandora would emotionally hijack me. I wouldn’t even hear The Boyfriend talking to me while I read on my Nook.

            Escapism to this level isn’t healthy, because soon the cracks between the worlds you’re living in begin to appear, the gaps begin widening. I saw this most with dance. While driving to and from work, I tend to listen to songs for which I’m coming up with choreography, running ideas over and over in my head. But until recently, I had no real time to physically work out these choreographies, and definitely no time to perform them. The gap between my fantasy world, where I had these great ideas and increasingly idealized my persona and performances, and the real world, where I did technique drills once a week and had yet to perform at all, was widening. Once I finally tried to physically pound out the choreographies in my had, I found that I wasn’t fit enough for them, and it was brutally made clear that I was not the performer that I had accidentally built myself up to be in my own head.

            The real world, especially once you get into the daily grind of it, can be very dull, and escapism is natural. Why do you think film is a multi-billion dollar industry? But if you’re like me, you can lose yourself entirely in your own world. That idea has a romantic ring to it, and that’s part of the draw, trust me. But I’m slowly learning that what I should be doing is making the real world more livable for myself. I need to be throwing myself into my writing/dancing/various creative endeavors, rather than walking down that stone staircase and hiding in the confines of my mind. I already see the real world in a stylized fashion. I should try to draw that out, express it in my art, do things instead of thinking about them so much. Maybe then the real world wouldn’t be so unbearable.

            …

            ………

            What the fuck did I just spend so much time ranting about?

            Dude, I’m fucking crazy.

            So, in conclusion…The Great Gatsby was awesome.

           

            End transmission.