The thing about being lazy busy and not having time
to blog is that you collect a lot of great ideas just to see them fulfilled by
more determined not-busy people.
As such, I should’ve written this post BEFORE the new Great
Gatsby movie hit the theaters (I like to remind readers that it’s the new film
because Robert Redford version release date eked by a slim 39 years before the
new Baz Lurhmann version). Regardless, I think I’m Gatsbied out. I think I felt
this way before the movie even came out. Hell, I think I felt this way when I
had to reread the novel in sophomore year of my undergraduate studies—and I
have a degree in English. I’m tired of the fawning hipster masses and their
urges to go to upscale vintage boutiques and buy flapper dresses and pipes and
Google what’s in an Old Fashioned and throw a 1920s themed parties where maybe
1 in 20 partiers have heard of This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and the
Damned, Tender is the Night, or The Love of the Last Tycoon.
 |
| How most people remembered The Great Gatsby before that guy from that movie about that famous shipwreck made it relevant. |
(I’m feeling now that this blog is going to shotgun a
handful of gripes I have had lately, so I recommend you stop reading now.)
I don’t know if it’s the familiarity with the obscure (if
literature can be obscure in this day) that brings people together to think
that they’re all part of a cool group of people who liked or read or saw or
heard something before the rest of their friends or society.
I don’t know if it’s the consumer culture of Mad Men and
Gilt.com that inspired us to part with our sparse green during a recession that
is coming round again like a plague of insatiable locusts now that prospects
are looking up.
It’s escapist because even if there is a moral to the book—I
mean movie—or a greater meaning, it’s lost in the grandeur of lavish party
scenes, indulgent revelers, and a hit playlist. Maybe it’s more than escapist
in that it inspires some of us to attempt to live a life we are unable to
sustain.
Like that line in the book that I’m sure I’m not remembering
correctly because I, like the other 99 percent, haven’t read the book in years,
I feel like I’m watching moths drawn to a flame. I guess that makes it sound
like I’m judging a lot of people right now… which is good. Because I am. And I
will stodgily pelt these passing bandwagons of “culture” with my critical slingshot
from the comfort of my own hypocritical and self assuring hidey-hole.
Anyways, I’ll be seeing the movie this weekend with my wife.
I’ll let you know how it is.
