Various “Great Gatsbys” Review
I have recently subjected myself to a Great Gatsby marathon. First I watched the Leonardo DiCaprio movie, then the Robert Redford movie and last but not least I read the book by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
It’s a good story but I wouldn’t give it five stars for one reason: Daisy.
The problem with the whole book and story in all three version for me is that in my opinion Daisy is not a likeable character. Why the heck does Jay Gatsby love this woman so much? She is shallow, selfish, materialistic and pretentious. She does not deserve to be loved in such a fierce and condition less manner as Gatsby loves her. The intensity of Gatsby’s feelings is awkward.
Maybe that’s the point, maybe what the author really wants to tell us is that all love is an illusion or rather, self-made. She doesn’t even need to be perfect, Gatsby makes her perfect in his mind. But when she rejects him in the hotel scene, a part of him has to realizes that his dream is far from reality. It would have been better for Gatsby had he never met her again, then he could have continue with his dream about her in which he constructs her to be his ideal woman.
But, if this is the main issue, if Daisy doesn’t need to be real, then I don’t get this message clearly enough. To bring this message across she either needs to be more ideal in “real” terms or she needs to be even nastier than as she is described now. The way the novel reads itself, Daisy Buchanan is neither fish nor meat and that is disappointing.
Let’s define fish as bad girl and meat as good girl for the moment.
If she were meat it would be wonderfully tragic that Gatsby was whipped to war or thought he needed to make more money to make her happy and by parental pressure or whatever she could not wait and married Tom. Now that would be a bit boring, since we have seen unhappy love stories like that manifold.
If she were fish she needed to be nastier and the gap between Gatsby’s ideal and her real self would be more obvious. She’d need fewer friends, fewer positive comments about her and the narrator, Nick, should like her less. She could do some bad stuff and yet Gatsby loves her and it would have been an act of masterly writing to bring that across in a convincing manner.
As you can probably already guess, the latter construction would, in my opinion, have made a much better novel.
For my taste, the novel is walking a too fine line between fish and meat that makes the actions and reactions of the people in it fuzzy and hard to identify with. Some may say that is the art of this novel and may find that to be appealing, for me though it’s not convincing or rather not consequent enough.
Anyway, it was a good object of study and I have the feeling I learned something about character building. I, by the way, still like the underplayed Redford version less than the more showing rather than telling DiCaprio version as far as the movie is concerned.
