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

Daisy Buchanan and The Longest Day of the Year

Daisy Buchanan complains she always misses the longest day of the year. It is momentous in the Great Gatsby. It shows her boredom, her spiritual vacuity as she longs for something she has missed. But of course we miss it too. It is here on this Solstice the year pivots back to the shorter days incredibly on the very day summer begins. A shadow on the moon once emerged.

And we know that another year is slipping along and that we have passed something even if we don't know what it was. The longest day of the year should be a milestone. It should be something that Daisy waits for like a child for Christmas. And yet it eludes her. We think that we can get it all in our digital age but we just cant stop time.

Our days go even quicker. One finding the other before we remembered what has even happened. And we look for some sort of  milestone. Something in between all those moments to give us our bearings like the longest day of the year. But of course by the time we know the day is here  it is too late.

We are already heading for the short days once again.

www.williamhazelgrove.com

Fitzgeralds Last Laugh on Hemingway

The two titans of literature in the early twentieth century never really vied for the spot of Best Writer at all. Hemingway knocked out Fitzgerald right after he gave him a leg up by writing to Max Perkins and telling him about a young writer in Paris who is the real thing. The real thing then turned his back on Fitzgerald and pilloried him in print, disparaged him to his editor, and then left him in the dust with publications, movies, media, becoming the HE MAN writer while Scott hacked it out in a hotel room in Baltimore and then later died in Hollywood a broken man. The Great Gatsby and the rest of his work cooled in Scribner warehouses with little demand.

Now lets fast forward to 2013. The mannered Hemingway prose has not translated well. Still widely read as high school fare and universally admired but not modern nor could anyone see one of his books being made into a contemporary movie with Leo and the Toby. But maybe I'm wrong that someone could take another crack at For Whom The Bell Tolls or Old Man and Sea or Farewell To Arms but there is lacking that modern story. And that is what Fitzgerald gave us with Gatsby a modern story for the ages that has crashed back onto the bestseller list and beckons to  us from airports and drugstores. Revenge is a dish best served cold.

Because Hemingway did treat him like a drunken has been from the beginning. He set his sites on crushing Fitzgerald and anyone else got close to him. There was to be only one man in the ring and that was Ernest Hemingway but now with both men gone and the Hemingway megaphone long silence, Fitzgerald seems to be the one in the ring with both hands held high. Jay Gatz has been transported through the years and we can relate and that effable Fitzgerald prose has no equal. Even Hemingway cant touch it.

And so Fitz did have the last laugh. The ninety eight pound weakling came back stronger than ever and kicked the bully straight back on his ass.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

The Brilliance of The Great Gatsby

The critics have not been kind but they are wrong. The Great Gatsby shimmers on the screen. The film does what Fitzgerald did; it takes us in the eye of the metaphor and jumps into it and then does what any art does...exaggerates. Take the green light. Perfect. Of course we build around that visionary beam of the American Dream. It is nothing less than Gatsby's soul and in the movie the green light beams and beams like a laser strobe across the bay from Daisy's dock. It is the coalescence of the Fitzgerald novel...the magnet that catches all the metal filings. And we open and close with that green vision of hope... but lets move on.

The flowing billowy curtains that takes Fitzgerald's prose and puts it into form. The eloquence of that metaphor is the women and the room are all floating around the ceiling and when Tom Buchanan shuts the door he shuts it all down and everyone floats back down...the effortless ether of the rich against the hard malice of Tom. And then of course the parties that seem to bother everyone. Have you never partied? Maureen Dowd of NY Times and others just couldn't get around the fact that these parties were over the top  and fantastical. Did we ever live through the first twentieth century boom before income tax? During prohibition? And of course the original prose was over the top. When Fitzgerald describes the party it is the top of the top doing what they do best.

And then of course the driving. The crazy driving and Gatsby's car which is described as a leather conservatory in the novel and an amazing yellow car nickel plated and swollen with hat boxes and fenders and curves and so we create Gatsby's car and the way he drives and the way everyone drives in the roaring twenties. And could the party in Toms apartment been any more than the drunken bacchanal of sex, jazz,  and booze that was the twenties?  And then we go on to the showdown at the Plaza and Gatsby cracking up against Toms hard malice. And what is amazing is the film stayed on Fitzgerald's metaphors and prose giving way to the book by putting the actual words on the screen and yes the use of Nick Caraway as the writer might have bothered some but it did anchor us in time and yes the relationship between Nick and Jordan Baker was lost but a small point for finally taking on the  love story of Jay Gatsby and Daisy and giving the story its markers as the last will and testament to the American Dream.

I was all set to hate this film. In fact I never believed the novel could be brought to life on the screen but the movie brought to life the story and tipped its hat to the prose all along the way. The brilliance of the movie is that it made brilliant Fitzgerald's prose....a film of metaphors and for someone to pull that off in the year 2013 and bring high brow entertainment to the masses...I'll drink a highball to that any day and say with Jay Gatsby in his pink suit...
Cant repeat the past!...of course you can old sport!

Rocket Man...the upside down American Dream

Five Things You Dont Know About The Great Gatsby

Here are five things you don't know about The Great Gatsby:

1. Fitzgerald was not crazy about the name and preferred High Hatted Golden Lover or Trimalchio. Even just before printing he thought about changing the name an his editor Max Perkins said it was too late.

2. The critical reception for The Great Gatsby was not good. The novel was criticized for being tawdry and superficial. And for being too short. Only a few reviewers realized The Great Gatsby was something great.

3. The book did not sell well. It barely sold out it's first printing and Fitzgerald made more money off the sale of the movie rights than the book. He had to go back to writing Saturday Evening Post stories to make money.

4. When Fitzgerald died The Great Gatsby was not out of print. It was worse than that. It was sitting in warehouses with virtually no demand. Effectively being out of print at his death.

5. There have been two movies made of The Great Gatsby. The first one was a silent film made in the twenties. The second one was made in the seventies by Francis Ford Coppola with Robert Redford. The reviews were not good and the movie was not a big hit with the public. The feeling was that the novel is too  literary, too dependent on Fitzgerald's prose to ever be made into a good movie. We will see.

Rocket Man...the American Dream Upside Down