Red, White and Black Beauty

I

FIGURE THAT HOLLYWOOD promised to most of America what the Gatsbys did once upon a time: the possibility of godhoods and kingdoms of wealth not as afterlife's reward but as descended upon the chosen among men. It is not, after all, by accident that socialite and actor alike go by the name of "star"--star who could be god to more men than any man might be devil, star whose mortal success might so seem to fulfill the richest reddest blooded fantasies of the most American that it could appear as immortality achieved on earth. Gatsby would be as much monarch of his fortunes as any star could later feel of his screen, both immortals to unspeakably glorify the heart of America.

But figure further, figure even preposterously, that God gives all things equally to all men. Then if mortal life is rotten for most, the soul's reward will be golden. Then too, mortal stardom as every man's dream may be the star's nightmare. As it was Gatsby's, it would later be Hollywood's. Yes, Gatsby's falling star might have seen it writ in the stars that he and his kind would pass on the dreams of America to Hollywood. The talent though not the creed would change, and the next generation of immortals might be his progeny.

Hollywood was indeed, by the 1940s, consumed by a spirit not unlike the one which had so driven Gatsby: the golden dream of love and money. Though Gatsby's funeral was unattended, the devil of his opportunism rose as a phoenix in Hollywood, there to mainline his ambitions into the blood-stream of America, and to deposit his dreams in a substratum of the American mind.

II

Consider first West Egg, swimming in sybaritic air by the sea. It is a place of grace to try description and of grossness to try belief, proclaiming its economic sources even as it tells how prettily money can be used. It is a paradise existing as a testimony to the monstrous inequities of life--the logical extension of consumption ethic America--its wealth the moral point and the reward if not the end of economic success.

The spirit of the place is insistent with the presence of money. Set in feudal splendour cool and moist as the Snow Queen's summer palace in its perch upon the sea, it is redolent with sensual pleasure. It is also a monumental mistake built as if toward some transcendental point, and peaking in denial of possibilities even as it marks the exhaustion of America as a land still to be settled.

It is the place of the rich, yes, who are so different from you and me; of those who can afford to believe that life is to be comfortable and that the point if not the promise of life is happiness. But the place is somehow too brazen in its confidence that happiness can be bought and that the past can be brought back, too lacking in age and refinement, in the proportion and discretion that Henry James might approve. Its whiteness is somehow too harsh in a way that makes the mind spring ineluctably to the raw beginnings of the money. The enchantment of the place is too contrived, its greens too smooth, its hedges cut too sharply.

Its spiritual forefathers, hardy pioneers, might have shuddered had they foreseen where their dreams would head their children. For Gatsby's story is of those energies that settled Western America. He is son to that frontier past, the demise of which was sealed with the frontier. And Gatsby's tragedy comes of his attempt to graft the promise of a faded pastoral America onto an alien present.

His West Egg was as spiritually bankrupt as it was materially rich. Jumping off place and last stop for the ambitions and wealthy, it was for them a moral wasteland. Even as Gatsby wrought West Egg in the image of his dreams; his heaven on earth it could not be. More could it be his Hell, his dreams as phantoms, his mansion their graveyard. Embalmed in midsummer mists, the place even looked something of a mirage: shimmering on Saturday evenings with wealth and youth and beauty, and so heavy, up close, with the heat and sweat of life; dream and disillusionment ineffably caught in that blinking crystal of green at the end of Daisy's pier.

It was not, however, the heat and sweat that was remembered in his legend, but the wealth and youth and beauty. If West Egg for Gatsby had been a sort of haunted place, it had to look much more like paradise to most who had not lived there. And even more in the Depression that followed so close upon his death could it offer the fascination of the forbidden. If men could not have it and men could much less forget it, then it could still be had in dream and fantasy. In a grandeur of escapism might Gatsby's dream be borne back from the past. Yes, Hollywood could do as much.

III

Consider the Hollywood spectacular of the forties: where fireworks and fountains are settings for songs of love, whole armies in satin and silk top hats the choruses; where ending after ending applauding eternal love comes true; story after dreamy-eyed story where spectacle was half the thing and blissful love as life's reward the other half. As Gatsby dreamed of love and money, Hollywood made life out as all romance and pageantry. The picture of West Egg as a factory of pleasure could have been their fantasy factory's Model T.

Gatsby might have given Hollywood its bonanza formula. And Hollywood would not for pennies or cigars fail to capitalize on it--love and money, love and money. All the masterminds of Hollywood, all its technical knowhow and commercial wizardry, its public relations genius and its statistician's calculations had divined the hungry nerve of the public and hooked it on the Gatsby formula. One could get giddy on the charm in the promise even as the very existence of Hollywood testified to its exhaustion.

For as inevitably as the dream factories made Hollywood an economic empire, they made it a moral desert. The drug they advertized, then, the Hollywood magic formula, could be dangerous--as dangerous as any dream believed too much, even as dangerous as the course of Gatsby's dream. Then in Hollywood Gatsby's tragedy could be re-enacted.

As it surely was by the Harlows and Garlands and later, the Marilyns: the movie queens and bitch goddesses, stars who could be all things to all men, who could, via screen, be injected into the hearts of America, and via fantasy, enter every bed in America. Stars, yes, a race apart from you and me. If they could accept glory as a given of the starlet role, then they could build it into the identity: They could believe their parts; they could believe themselves exceptions to the truth that their movies were but all promises; they could grow so used to glory that they could come to need it in order to know who they were. Yes, they could wrestle with the self as much in a day as most people do in a lifetime. Then they could also find their stardoms mortal hells.

No, Hollywood was not unlike Gatsby's West Egg. It could grow as cocksure, as raunchy with all its wealth. It could make pictures with extravagance to rival Gatsby's parties. It could appear to outsiders as walled off and desirous a world, and to insiders it could offer a future as closed. Even further, just as Gatsby intrigued with gamblers and built a bootlegger's paradise, Hollywood's machinery worked more like a crap game than like clockwork. Few moguls were unlike, at least in the way they came by their fortunes, descendants of Gatsby.

Hollywood, creator of America's next breed of immortals could possess them as completely. Representing for America the great internationalization of the great American dream, it created another race of stars apart, another generation of lucky creatures locked in another as different a world.

And if Hollywood's attributes were so amply like West Egg's, Hollywood was bound to lure Fitzgerald into a mad hate-love affair. Its attraction could magnetize the man as certainly as it could rot his art. As the peeling Dr. Eckleberg--monument to America's first age of advertising and god of the ash heaps--mocked the death of Gatsby's dreams, so Hollywood--monster bulwark of materialism and smug summit of the equation--tortured Fitzgerald. Yes, the place could be as hostile to Fitzgerald as West Egg had been to Gatsby. Though both could dream unto death, neither could ever be of either place. But Fitzgerald had the distance to see this. The rich were different, yes, he could place the problem as Gatsby could not.

And as Hollywood could not. Hollywood had been blinded by the very inversion of values that Fitzgerald had been able to objectify so powerfully. If Hollywood's ambition derived at all from the purblind ambition of Gatsby, then it would prove as poisonous. And it would as inevitably lead Hollywood to reproduce Gatsby's mistakes.

Then when Hollywood aspires to make The Great Gatsby, how easily might it be bound by the very forms Fitzgerald criticized. How spectacularly would it make the Gatsby story. Make it--it would make it over. Imagine the spectacular to come of the match. It's the Hollywood movie dream. It's also Hollywood's hubris--Fitzgerald's devil returned to bedevil Hollywood.

IV

And the movie is no more than another Hollywood spectacular, all the show and the glitter, the gold and the tinsel, all sunbursts and exploding skies. It tells a good story with lots of yummy mush and death to boot; it's a nice little Hollywood bit. It runs just like an American beauty pageant, stargazing from start to finish. From the first laborious pan over Gatsby's shining bedspread the movie shows off its affects. Come, you are cordially invited, to this miracle of Gatsby masquerading.

Hollywood has long been notorious for just such vanity. But this movie ignores all appropriate acknowledgemeets. It lacks the grace to pay tribute to any vanished aspect of its past. It is too stuck up--failing to break out of the hollowness of its conception, echoing instead a hollowness not unlike that of West Egg. And its breed of pretentiousness is simply 30 years too late.

It's rather insulting, now, I suspect, to be shown pictures like the close-up of lovers' hands stretching toward each other and failing to touch as the forecast of Gatsby's and Daisy's ill-fated love; or scenes of Gatsby and Daisy gamboling through sun-dappled gardens spliced with shots of cooing geese as lovers' bliss; and what of the countless times the camera peers through Daisy's diaphonous hatbrim to watch her kissed--stolen kisses? And there is more of this comic strip stuff, too much more. The camera injects twinkling into everybody's eyes--or are the actors so starstruck by their roles? Karen Black yaws her mouth open like a catcher's mit and rolls out her O's more like monkeys than any Brooklyn twang. Mia Farrow's voice is less of money than of milk. And there is Lois Chiles as Jordan Baker who is the worst since Welch.

If the people who made this movie intended to capitalize on some so-called nostalgia craze, then somebody should have told them that there is more to the art of allusion than straight imitation. There is the self-consciousness that registers not the action but the joke in its reverberations; it puns off not the sense but the sensibility of the thing, a game of doublethink. But the self-consciousness of this movie is solipsistic. It is so linear in the literalness of its interpretation that it two-times rather than doublethinks Fitzgerald's story--it's all copycat. Fitzgerald might be the magic mountain and the movie-makers the mouse, for it's loyal to the letter of Fitzgerald's descriptions as if making up for having missed his meanings. And it plods over those like a half-blind elephant.

The novel, of course, is powerful by innuendo. Nick Carroway's sense distills the sense of Gatsby, and Carroway's values--the superior morality of the Midwestern small town Christian conscience, the nostalgia for the old American orders under eclipse--judge West Egg. But this movie doles out portions of the narrative like a mess sergeant in an army canteen, everybody gets some: Mr. Gats gets some of Carroway's, Carroway is made to speak what had been silent observation, Daisy and Gatsby even get to act out some of Jordan Baker's. Further, the movie hardhits you with scenery, the shining shots like shiner punches at Fitzgerald. And it fumbles facial close-ups--as if a picture of a face, especially a face as blank as Redford's, could tell of the mind.

And what is left of poor Fitzgerald is the presence of money, nay, more a proclamation than a presence. The movie, finally, is not unlike an early Newport mansion for a new-monied man. It plasters gold on its surface in true gargoyle style; the pictures too perfectly partake of the New Port pretensions they are supposed to reveal. The movie stands as a tabloid monument to social climbing America--too much of it too new, too raw-nozed, its jaw somehow too square and too set. So completely lacking is it in the distinctions of taste and tradition, so uneducated in the vocabulary of the rich that it could suppose the surface to be the sensibility. It is sweating with all the putting on of airs.