When I started out in journalism, I spent five long years as a reporter in Montgomery County, Md., a cosseted suburb of Washington.
Driving to work every day, I passed a small cemetery connected to St. Mary's Catholic Church in Rockville. I would always look up and give a silent salute to F. Scott Fitzgerald, who is buried there in the Fitzgerald family plot.
His modest headstone features the indelible final line of "The Great Gatsby": "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
When Fitzgerald died of a heart attack at 44 after a failed stint as a screenwriter, a losing struggle with alcoholism and a relationship with the Hollywood gossip columnist Sheila Graham, his Hollywood funeral attracted only 30 people, including his editor, Maxwell Perkins, and required hired pallbearers.
Surveying his own crushed dreams once, Fitzgerald famously said that there are no second acts in American life. For someone who wrote an iconic American novel it was a bad miscalculation. Americans love sin and redemption and reinvention almost as much as they love stuff.
Fitzgerald is not only having a glittering second act, it's in the third dimension.
All over Manhattan, in anticipation of the opening of Baz Luhrmann's $104.5 million 3-D theme-park ride of a "Great Gatsby," with its hip-hop-studded soundtrack and gorgeous Prada dresses, Fitzgerald is being celebrated with starry parties; Tiffany's jazz-baby windows; Brooks Brothers boaters, bow ties and canes; and a Vogue cover of the latest Daisy Buchanan, Carey Mulligan, gleaming in diamonds and pearls, looking as if she would sound like money.
''She's in her own TV show," Mulligan said of her character. "She's like a Kardashian."
In this gaudy, blingy, frenzied version that puts the roaring in Roaring Twenties, gin bottles, bits of the novel's text and Gatsby's passel of pastel shirts come flying off the screen right at you.
The 3-D glasses, though, just get in the way of seeing the more subtle elements of Fitzgerald's masterpiece: the decay of souls, the crumbling mythology and the dark side of social mobility.
Some at screenings last week muttered at how appalled they were that "Gatsby" was being treated like a Disney pirate movie. One woman said the dizzying kaleidoscope made her long to see a small black-and-white version of the film. But the Australian director argues that Fitzgerald was a modernist who was fascinated with new cinematic techniques and jazz when it was dangerous, so he would have been intrigued by 3-D and rap.
Luhrmann told The Wall Street Journal that when he met with Jay-Z about scoring the soundtrack and showed him a rough cut, that Jay, who started as Shawn Carter, immediately connected with the other Jay, who started as James Gatz: "Jay turns to me and goes, 'It's an aspirational film. You know, the thing about this story is that it's not a question of how Gatsby made his money, it's is he a good person or not? Is there meaning in his life? And all these characters, do they have a moral compass?'"
Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, understands that we're drawn back to "Gatsby" because we keep seeing modern buccaneers of banking and hedge funds, swathed in carelessness and opulence. "But what most people don't understand is that the adjective 'Great' in the title was meant laconically," he said. "There's nothing genuinely great about Gatsby. He's a poignant phony. Owing to the money-addled society we live in, people have lost the irony of Fitzgerald's title. So the movies become complicit in the excessively materialistic culture that the novel set out to criticize."
He noted that Gatsby movies are usually just moving versions of Town and Country or The Times' T magazine, and that filmmakers "get seduced by the seductions that the book itself is warning about."
A really great movie of the novel, he argues, would "show a dissenting streak of austerity." He thinks it's time for a black Gatsby, noting that Jay-Z might be an inspirational starting point — "a young man of talents with an unsavory past consumed by status anxiety and ascending unstoppably through tireless self-promotion and increasingly conspicuous wealth."
The problem with the "Gatsby" movies, he said, "is that they look like they were made by Gatsby. The trick is to make a Gatsby movie that couldn't have been made by Gatsby — an unglossy portrait of gloss."