Qianyu Ann Nie, Emma Willard School

“[H]e wanted to recover something... His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was...”

In “The Great Gatsby,” F. Scott Fitzgerald tells a tale about the love that Jay Gatsby, a wealthy self-made man, has for Daisy Buchanan, who is married to Tom Buchanan.

The story, set in Long Island in 1922, was narrated from the perspective of Nick Carraway. In the above quote, he comments on Gatsby’s goal of recreating the past as a means of self-discovery. From Nick’s point of view, Gatsby loses himself and his initial goals during his self-invention.

As a result, Gatsby deems that reliving the past is the only solution, a precious second chance, for him to “correct” his impoverished life so that he could have been Daisy’s perfect match from the beginning.

Both Baz Luhrmann’s movie and the book employ Gatsby’s reminiscing and conversations with Nick to demonstrate that Gatsby’s seemingly successful experience of self-invention deludes him into thinking that the past with Daisy is repeatable.

Gatsby’s manipulation of his past makes him believe that he can apply the same methods to his expectations of a future with Daisy, so he aspires to recreate the past with her. In Chapter VI, Nick describes the smooth transformation from “James” to “Gatsby” by commenting that “[i]t was James Gatz who had been loafing along the beach ... but it was already Jay Gatsby who borrowed a rowboat” and saved Dan Cody.

Gatsby was born in a poor working class, but he has always painted a bright future for himself in his mind. But his aspirations became so radical that he completely cut himself off from his origin and created a better story for himself.

Dan Cody is the man who gives him the opportunity to step into the higher social circle, but he was mentally well-prepared while the young James was waiting for this opportunity and was ready to grab it. Thus, by erasing his true past, Gatsby wins wealth and status and convinces himself that he can do the same thing to win Daisy’s love.

While talking to Nick, he gazes around “as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.” This personification of the past being a child playing hide-and-seek with Gatsby further illustrates his unstoppable pursuit of eradicating the unsatisfactory past.

To him, once the past is grabbed tightly, he can recreate the idealized story in which he impresses Daisy with wealth and marries her.

In his flashback, “Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalk really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees — he could climb to it.” The metaphor here compares Gatsby’s self-creation process to a ladder that leads to the top, which represents his ambition, whether it be marrying Daisy or climbing the “social ladder.” To Gatsby, transforming himself from Jimmy Gatz to Jay Gatsby is an improvement essential to reaching Daisy, and it convinces him that he can apply the same method to his relationship with her.

In the film, Luhrmann employs both changes of lighting and dissolve in switching between Gatsby’s reminiscence and reality.

During one scene with dissolve, Daisy’s house in Louisville first appears in a misty cloud, as if frozen in time.

Then the shot zooms in, and the interior of the house is covered with warm-toned, retro lighting. Young Gatsby looks amazed by the extravagance, and he climbs up the stairs following Daisy. This scene of climbing up the stairs resonates with the metaphor of climbing up the “ladders” previously discussed, portraying Gatsby’s grand aspiration of reaching Daisy.

To further demonstrate his faith in self-invention, Luhrmann employs symbolism in the scene. When Gatsby is holding Daisy in his arms, he hesitates and looks up to the sky — a bright star is gliding through the night sky – then he kisses her with symphonic music bursting forth from the background. The shooting star appears again later in the scene as Gatsby states that his life must “keep going up” like the nebula he pointed out to Nick.

This simile draws a parallel between the shooting star and his life, meaning that Gatsby is striving to improve his career and living standards progressively like a shooting star. The star symbolizes Gatsby’s great aspiration. However, a shooting star is a fast-moving meteor that burns out upon entering the earth’s atmosphere. Therefore, although the meteor symbolizes Gatsby’s dream, its quality of evanescence foreshadows the demise of Gatsby.