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'The Great Gatsby' Predicted the Future

We're living in the world Fitzgerald wrote of 88 years ago.

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Baz Luhrmann’s all-singing, all-prancing Gatsby has high-kicked its way into town this week, whipping up a storm of 20s retromania and “Top five speakeasy” lists. Jazz Age-themed guides abound: How to look like a celebrity flapper? Boom. Wearing shirts closed with a tie pin so you look like Leo-Gatsby? Old sport, for some businessmen the tie pin “never went away”. Dying alone in your deserted mansion? Replace “deserted mansion” with “small room in east London” and brother, you’ve got me down to a tee! Nah, I’m kidding, but with all this burlesque and cocktail talk flying about, Time Out must feel like pigs in shit right now.

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What all this coverage seems to have ignored is that The Great Gatsby was not a piece of social history and we don’t read it today with a bewildered look of awe on our face, shaking our head as we marvel at “those funny folks from the 1920s and their strange, yet highly marketable ways”. We still respond to Gatsby because it’s a great novel and because it showed us a world that, in many ways, became ours. Our world is the new world Fitzgerald saw coming. It’s a world of cars and cities and broken dreams. We might not be huffing into our champagne flutes and the clarinet may no longer be at the forefront of popular music, but today Gatsby is all around us.

Gatsby’s story is a story of obsession. Like a group of young girls heading off to X Factor auditions or a bunch of lads at a pre-party, riling themselves up for the night ahead with Kanye videos on YouTube, Gatsby has spent much of his life aspiring to be a different, wealthier person. Like a lovelorn romantic scrolling through pictures of his ex on Facebook, Gatsby sits in his garden staring at the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. Sure, it’s weirder and more poetic than opening up that “Beach Holiday 2010” album, but the intention is the same. He’s obsessed with a lifestyle and he’s obsessed with a person. Neither makes him happy.

The internet actively encourages us to do 25-to-life in an emotional prison where the guards are ex-lovers and our rehabilitation arrives through a series of bitter realisations. Every conversation we ever have on our preferred IM platform (I’m all about the in-built chat function on chess.com, FYI) is stored for all time. “Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can!” Gatsby exclaims. And like Gatsby, we can constantly re-imagine the happiness we once felt, constantly castigate ourselves for thinking it would be a good idea to drop a winking emoji into every other sentence while imagining a future in which the past will be blissfully re-created. In the novel, Daisy is shown to be unworthy of Gatsby’s obsession, but of course the level of obsession that leads someone to spend every evening staring at a light for hours on end isn’t real. It isn’t real like a picture on a screen isn’t real. This obsession and loneliness is at the heart of what still makes The Great Gatsby current. Like a Drake video, the party swirls around Gatsby but never really grabs him. He’s just so lonely and deep. Boredom, nihilism and pleasure are king. His parties still represent what so many people aspire to. His loneliness and obsession still represent what so many people feel, just without the questionable blanket of money. In a culture that is more and more about the individual, in which more and more songs are about snatched nights of hedonism amid bleak days of pain, Gatsby is a sort of patron saint.

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The voyeurism that this life encourages – voyeurism that is played out every day in newspapers and across the internet – is embodied in Nick, the detached narrator, who stands aside, fascinated and appalled in equal measure. His detachment doesn’t save him from being poisoned by his world, though, or from loneliness. When he realises he’s 30, he reflects on the “portentous menacing road of a new decade” and the promise of this decade being one of “loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm…” Today’s cult of celebrity is foreshadowed in the cult of Gatsby. In one scene, a reporter comes to Gatsby’s house to ask him to give a statement about anything at all. The reporter has heard he’s famous and is scrabbling around for some titillation. This culture of hedonism, of money and of success – no matter what the cost to morality or sanity – is what Fitzgerald was skewering when he skewered the American Dream. Today, the American Dream is still alive and well, but it has morphed into being the dream of much of the world. Fast cars, large houses, great shirts: these are the things we are still sold, these are things we are still told to want. John Steinbeck said that, "Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”

This is the driving force behind the insidious fiction of global capital – that we can all have Gatsby’s money without the associated pain and loneliness. Magazines that tell us how to look like Daisy or look like Gatsby are telling us how to look like we have money, telling us that you can trick people into thinking you’re the Lord of Long Island just by wearing a pink suit from Jigsaw. In reality, only Leo DC gets to do sexy yet manly shoots for Esquire and he already has a tonne of cash. Just as in the 1920s, class holds the majority back.

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(Image via) Fitzgerald showed the emptiness at the heart of the dream, showed us it was unreal even for those who “achieved” it. But rather than think about that, we think about how we can recreate the prohibition vibe of a speakeasy in a country in which, later tonight, numerous 14-year-olds will stride out of Costcutters somewhere with a bag of Tennent’s under their arms.

Finally, what we see in The Great Gatsby is another story about the loss of innocence, though Fitzgerald knows we never had any innocence in the first place. Jay Gatsby believes in the dream, believes in his obsession, although both the dream and the obsession are a lie. Gatsby, despite his criminal past and his money, is a truly innocent being. The truth is that, while we lost our innocence a long time ago – never even had it, really – we are in a perpetual state of mourning for it. In The Great Gatsby, Meyer Wolfshiem is the “man who fixed the 1919 World Series”, the man who shattered America’s innocence. Today, life – and sport – continues to throw up these moments. Just look at the shock surrounding Lance Armstrong.

Gatsby is innocent because he cares about the world, which is why he’s such an engaging and sympathetic character. It’s why we still care about him. However long ago our innocence was lost, we still like to imagine we can get it back one day, that maybe it’s not too late, that our Daisy will return to us or that our poverty will be relieved or that the corruption of the world will wash away, leaving us free to be borne not back into the past, but into a future of our own choosing.

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