This appeared in today's The Sunday Guardian
Given
Baz Luhrmann’s love of the flamboyant, it’s entirely possible that he’s going
to miss the trees for the wood with his forthcoming remake of F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The recent
trailer does nothing to assuage this concern. As Ta-Nehesi Coates, senior
editor at The Atlantic, tweeted: “The
problem is The Great Gatsby probably
should be an indie flick. The beauty of the book is its small quiet take on a
big loud time.” That big, loud time was, of course, America’s so-called roaring
Twenties, a riotous age of Art Deco, flappers, jazz and Prohibition.
(For
those interested in Meyer Wolfsheim, the character played by Amitabh Bachchan
in the movie, he’s described by Fitzgerald as “a small, flat-nosed Jew” with
“two fine growths of hair which luxuriated in either nostril”. Some casting.)
Many
have commented on how Fitzgerald’s best-known work is still relevant to today’s
America, but what’s interesting is that there’s much about it that’s relevant
to urban India, too. Consider what Fitzgerald casts his eye on: a worship of
money, amorality, social climbing, an aggrandizement of surfaces -- and car
accidents. In short, “the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men”.
Nick
Carraway, the novel’s narrator, comes to New York to learn the “bond business”
and profit from the financial boom. Books on finance stand on his shelf “in red
and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets
that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew”. Such shining secrets are what
newly-minted Indian MBAs in finance as well as feverish Dalal Street speculators
hunger after, downturn or no downturn. How riches affect the way one sees the
world is beautifully caught in Gatsby’s remark about Daisy, his long-lost love:
“Her voice is full of money”.
Gatsby
himself is a model of reinvention, rising from a penurious but confident James
Gatz of North Dakota to the suave, affected Jay Gatsby of East Egg, a person
who hosts resplendent parties where “men and girls came and went like moths
among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars”. Gatsby’s shady past –
from bootlegging to possible financial malfeasance – doesn’t bother his guests
too much: they are “agonizingly aware of the easy money in the vicinity and
convinced that it was theirs for a few words in the right key”. Businessmen
with dubious antecedents being feted by those around them, social climbers with
connections: these are what one sees in the pages of the Indian papers every
day. As for the media itself, newspaper reports are described in the novel as
“grotesque, circumstantial, eager and untrue”.
Such
social climbing applies in the novel to geography, too. Gatsby’s mansion is in
West Egg, a former fishing village, while the old-rich section of Long Island
lives in East Egg, looking at the arrivistes
across the bay with a mixture of dismay and fascination. One can’t help but be
reminded of the plush gated communities and business zones emerging on the
outskirts of our cities, to rival and sometimes destabilise traditional city
centres. (“Welcome to New Cuffe Parade”, say the advertisements, referring to a
development off Mumbai’s Eastern Express Highway.)
Another
theme that reverberates throughout the novel is that of heedlessness -- specifically,
how the negligence of the privileged can be ruinous for the rest. As Fitzgerald
writes of Daisy and her husband, the brutish Tom: “They were careless
people…they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their
money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together,
and let other people clean up the mess they had made”. The vast carelessness of
the rich and of the elected and the mess they make: surely, one doesn’t need to
elaborate on how this applies to the subcontinent.
Baz
Luhrmann’s hyperkinetic Romeo + Juliet
transplanted Shakespeare’s play onto modern-day Florida. He should have
transplanted Gatsby onto modern-day
India: now that would have been worth waiting for.
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