Gatsby? What Gatsby?
is what Daisy says
when she hears Jordan Baker
mention the name to Nick,
and it’s what teenagers
used to say before they
knew Leonardo DiCaprio
was starring in the new
Baz Luhrmann film.
Suddenly, now, they
want to read this novel
because they recognize
the name and because Leonardo
is starring in the new
Baz Luhrmann film.
And as I read the opening pages
to my students today,
we wondered together
how those words might
be rendered in 3-D:
Here’s some advice my father
gave me–in 3-D.
Here’s me, the victim of
a few veteran bores–in 3-D.
Reserving judgements is a matter
of infinite hope–in 3-D.
The fundamental decencies
are parceled out unequally at birth
–in 3-D. And that’s just
the very first page.
We all agreed how exciting
it will be to see the foul dust
floating in the wake of Gatsby’s dreams
come alive on the screen in 3-D.
And somehow, I’m thinking
that a much better movie of
The Great Gatsby would
be to capture on film what
that one guy did on the stage
in 7 hours: he read or recited
the whole damn novel out loud.
There we might have a film
of an American classic.
michael jarmer 