Parasite is the Great Gatsby of our Era

I said to my wife in the car after seeing  Parasite that it was Gatsby. I hadn't thought about it since but the more that film resonates and now after getting Best Picture I really do believe it is a modern parable much in the same vein of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby. Both stories involve class stratification and ultimately class warfare. Parasite and Gatsby may be culturally worlds apart but they both tell the story of the American Dream or the World Dream gone bad.
 
Gatsby's telling of Tom Buchannan's world of privilege that Gatsby has bought his way into by being a bootlegger is much the same as the Kim's world of buying their way into the one percent  by posing as servants to the upper class. Deception is key in both stories. Gatsby fakes his lineage and the source of his money while the Kim's fake their pedigrees of education and serving the rich. The protagonists of both parables are doomed by their efforts to move up and ultimately destroyed by the forces that hold them down.

While Gatsby is but a 1920s singular comment on the American Dream as it existed in early twentieth century America, Parasite spreads out and gives the world view that the dream of having a family and living a life of satisfying work, leisure, with a comfortable home and a better world for our children transcends the boundaries of America and reaches into the corners of the world as a modern comment on the ongoing struggle between the haves and have nots. In both cases, Gatsby being shot by Myrtle Wilsons deranged husband and the Kim's destruction at the hand of the deranged husband of the housekeeper are eerily similar in that the rich use the very people they oppress to murder those who dare to break out of their class. Ninety five years separate these two stories, but the world that is painted is much the same.

william hazelgrove

Reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's Obits

I was reading the obituaries of F Scott Fitzgerald the other day. I had some time between classes and the college had a very old collection of miscellaneous articles. In there were the New York Times and other papers convering Fitzgeralds death. They were not kind. The NY Times and others lamented how Fitzgerald had squandered his talent. How he had written about topics that were light and frivolous and the spoiled generation of the twenties. They surmised that maybe The Great Gatsby might survive him but that was probably a long shot.

And the other papers were worse. Many of the editors hacked poor Fitz apart. Saying he had some talent but ultimately he was a drunk and he got what he deserved dying at the ripe old age of forty four. They didn't even bother summing up The Great Gatsby accurately calling it a bootlegger story and dismissing his work as a flash in the pan. The real world had real problems and Fitzgerald had essentially written about nothing

And so it went on. They were unanimous in their prediction that he was a minor player in the literary field and that Gatsby had merit but that the author and the book probably would not stand the test of time. Of course Fitzgerald was out of print and out of mind at the time. Their collective jaws would certainly hit the floor at his legacy now and The Great Gatsby's place as a corner stone of our collective literary heritage.

Of course all those editors are dead and forgotten now. The last laugh was Scotts.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher

Why Gatsby Will Always Elude Film

We all saw Coppola's effort to capture The Great Gatsby with Redford and Mia Farrow mooning after each other in seventies grandeur. Great clothing. Great cars. Great music. Terrible movie. And yet here was Fitzgerald's masterpiece, but of course Coppola's problem was he was too in love with the novel. He tried to interject Fitzgerald's prose wherever he could and it was like laying silk on charcoal. "Cant repeat the past, of course you can old sport!' Redford choked on that one.

And if the characters didn't choke on the prose then the narrator did. "I have been turning over some advice my father gave me once...." The stertorous Nick Caraway years before he was a TD Waterhouse mouthpiece just couldn't handle those lines without dropping them like lead into the Long Island Sound. And why shouldn't he? Voice overs are tricky anyway and literary voice overs feel like syrup dribbled all over perfectly good scenes. Scream when the metaphors become too much.

But metaphor was Fitzgerald's gift and that elegiac elegant prose does not translate to the eye or the ear. It was meant to be read. Sadly for DiCaprio and everyone else involved in the new attempt to bring Gatsby to the twenty first century they will only succeed in sending people to find the book. And even if they update the story will not translate. The intelligence of Fitzgerald and any first rate novelist is they understand the keening of a read line of prose and its impress on human consciousness. No amount of CG will ever bail out a visual medium in this area.

And so we will be left with the plot without the fine linen. And so, we will beat on, boats against the current, born back ceaseless to the novel. And not the film.

Rocket Man...The American dream turned upside down
 

Gatsby's American Dream

With the new movie almost out it is fitting to reflect on the American Dream once again as put forth by Jay Gatsby. I assume you read the book and know Gatsby's story of bootlegger turned landed gentry and ready to secure the girl of his dreams Daisy Buchanan. Ah the green light at the end of the dock that means so much. Gatsby's dream. The American dream. That beacon in the Long Island night that represents all we want but cannot obtain.

And of course Gatsby is done in by the darkness of the American Dream. It is the price right? We know now the high price of the dream because we have been living it for the last five years. Only a few can hit such heights and those that do usually lose some part of themselves as Gatsby did. Fitzgerald put forth the idea that this dream comes with too high a price and in fact it can kill you which of course it did with Gatsby.

And we are  now at a point where the American dream has turned upside down. Our houses worth less than we owe, jobs still scarce, money not abundant. And we are looking now for something we might have missed and left behind us. And of course there is nothing new as Fitzgerald says at the end of Gatsby in the most eloquent line in American literature. "So we beat on, boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past."

Still so true.

Rocket Man...the American Dream upside down

The green Light at the end of our dock

Well you have heard by now Daisy Buchanan's mansion has been torn down due to the price of upkeep. Forty five hundred a day. High price for a literary touchstone. But still, it does seem to fall in with the times and who can forget that green light at the end of Daisy's dock. It is really the heart of Gatsby. The young man who yearns for so much and yet he cannot touch it and there is that green light out in the harbor, a symbol for all that he aspires too and yet can not have.

You cannot read Fitzgerald's early masterpiece of the last century and not think about its relation to where we are now. Gatsby of course wants it all and cannot have it. He is rich but he does not have the girl and so he has nothing. And we have nothing now. We have the fabulously wealthy but the very heart of the American Dream Fitzgerald saw as being corrupted has been fully diseased. Greedy unseen forces did Gatsby iin a much earlier part of our history. The Tom Buchanan's of the world who stood in for the larger world that really held the power and money.

And we have found now that the dream does have a high price. An entire country has suffered of course for the extravagance Gatsby paid for with his life. Certainly this mansion Gatsby saw as having all that life could offer is touching in its demolition because life has lost even the chimera glamour of that old dream. During Fitzgerald's time the American Dream was still being formed, but he saw it's Horatio Algier underside and left the cautionary tale of Gatsby's fate.

So the old mansion is no longer. And I assume the green light at the end of Daisy's dock burned out years before. All we are left with is the novel and the glow of our own fading dreams.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will blast off this summer

Is our Literary American Dream Dead?

Maybe the President should stop the town hall meetings. It looked pretty bad when the African American woman said she was about to start eating hot dogs and beans. The President smiled, looked really prosperous, then spun into his answer. Or the guy who asked him point blank...tell me, is the American Dream Dead? He was sincere. And the President had no answer. I guess you have to decide what the American Dream really is.

Horatio Alger is our first stop on the trail of the American Dream; these books published in the late nineteenth early twentieth century were the poor boy who raises up to take over the company and become rich. Very much part of our culture. Anyone can become rich. Anyone can become President. We see this played out in our movies and books constantly. We constantly hold up the lowly outsider who rises to fame and fortune and achieves greatness.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's the Great Gatsby is the classic questioning of this economic nirvana. The price is just too high for Gatsby's dream and Nick Caraway returns to the Midwest looking for salvation in old traditional values in a world vanishing from twentieth century America. Then our dream was updated through television and questioned in novels such as Revolutionary Road. Our modern American dream is not so much the self made man, but the man or woman who plugs into a corporation and gets security and a job and a house that appreciates along with a 401K. That is the American dream that was destroyed in the crash.

So we still spin this question around. The classic economic model of the American Dream seems to be dead. Our happiness came from our gratification in the land of plenty. Maybe the American Dream needs to be revised. Maybe the American Dream will have to fall back to this is enough, because there might not be anymore for a long time to come.

William Hazelgrove's latest novel is Rocket Man. A story of the American dream in reverse
http://www.billhazelgrove.com/