Tag Archives: audience

Why Gatsby Can’t Be Great on Film

Can’t Repeat the Past? Why of Course You Can!

When I first heard that Baz Luhrmann was adapting The Great Gatsby (in 3-D, no less), it struck me as a bad idea. Luhrmann excels at operatic emotion and visual opulence, and while Gatsby is a story about opulent people, the story itself is about quiet, subtle, excruciatingly small things that explode internally. All the great moments in the novel are either emotional exchanges between two people or dramatic reveals of shrouded pasts and obscured intentions. For all its gaudy excess, Gatsby isn’t a Moulin Rouge type of spectacle, which made me worry that Luhrmann might be the wrong voice for Gatsby.

But then I saw the trailer, and all my fears seemed unfounded.

Look at the energy!

Look at the style!

Look at the action!

Never mind that I was having trouble remembering there being much action in the book itself. The sheer grandeur of the trailer had convinced me that Luhrmann just might have everything right.

And the frustrating part is, he almost did.

Where I think Luhrmann went wrong was in making the exact same mistake Zack Snyder did with Watchmen: by remaining too faithful to the source material, he created a moving book, rather than a film that lived as its own creature.

In Stories, Form Follows Function

It’s a hard trick, adapting a story everyone knows in such a way that it becomes “of the moment” while still being true to its essence. If you stray too far from the source and the movie fails, you’ll be pilloried for ruining a classic. But if you’re a slave to the original, then your own work can only live in the source’s shadow.

Sound tough? It gets worse.

The real reason most books fail as films is because what makes a book work is the exact opposite of what makes a movie work.

There’s a lot about Robert McKee‘s screenwriting advice in his now-classic Story that I disagree with, but one of his basic tenets is almost bulletproof. To paraphrase McKee:

If a conflict is primarily internal, it’s a novel.
If a conflict is interpersonal and dialogue-driven, it’s a stage play.
If a conflict is external and action-driven, it’s a screenplay.

As with any rule, there are exceptions, and no one says you can’t make a great dialogue-driven film or write a bestselling adventure novel. But, generally speaking, the nature of your story’s conflict determines its ideal form.

The Great Gatsby is a story about an idea, told primarily as an internal monologue by a character who bore witness to the unfolding events of a conflict he had no direct hand in. In other words, it’s nearly the textbook example of what a novel is supposed to be.

Unfortunately, Gatsby‘s status as a (and perhaps the) great American novel is the very thing that prevents it from becoming a great American film. Or, to put it another way, it’s not that Luhrmann was the wrong voice for Gatsby-as-movie; it’s that Luhrmann decided that silencing his own voice would best serve the material, when what the material actually deserves is to be retold in a voice as singular as Fitzgerald’s own.

God Sees Everything

As I was watching Luhrmann’s film, I could pinpoint the exact moment when I stopped caring about what was happening. It occurs when Nick excuses himself from tea so Gatsby and Daisy can talk, alone. It’s a necessary scene, and the entire story unfolds as a result of it.

But it’s also a scene where Nick — meaning us — isn’t actually present for the action.

Nick also isn’t present for most of Gatsby and Daisy’s gallivanting during the subsequent weeks, or Tom’s various affairs, or Gatbsy’s firing of his staff and his rapid unspooling into a barely functional, paranoid obsessive.

No, Nick is just the witness to the moments between these events. In the book this works because Nick has the benefit of hindsight, and he can posthumously contextualize what happened, and why, how it impacted everyone else, and muse about what everyone thought and felt, and tell us why any of it mattered.

Thus, in the book, Nick is “God” in the same way that any narrator becomes the eyes through which we see (or don’t see) the story. We have to trust him (or not) because his is the only perspective we have. But onscreen, we have our own eyes to rely on, and that shift in context requires that the story be told in a functionally different manner than retrospect and hearsay.

The problem is, Luhrmann didn’t trust himself — or us — enough to fill in the blanks with action instead of anecdotes. And he must certainly have felt he’d be doing Fitzgerald a disservice if he allowed us to come to our own conclusions about the characters and their motives without the aid of Nick’s lumbering voiceover that tells us exactly what to think and feel — sometimes unnaturally, as when Nick tells us Gatsby was a man with “an extraordinary gift for hope,” while his actions in the film make him look more like a dangerously unhinged and chemically imbalanced stalker.

And if we can’t believe our own eyes, whose should we trust? Luhrmann’s… or Fitzgerald’s?

That’s a Great Expression of Yours, Isn’t It?

Lurhmann’s adherence to period language and his stubborn reverence to Fitzgerald’s prose doesn’t help draw a modern audience into the story. From a taste and tone standpoint, Luhrman having Tobey Maguire narrate Fitzgerald-as-Carraway’s written words aloud as though they possess mystical importance is cringe-inducing, but having DiCaprio end every sentence with “old sport” is even worse because it’s unintentionally hilarious. After the thirtieth or fortieth mention, the phrase makes Gatsby seem entirely unworthy of being taken seriously.

And there’s also one nagging stylistic choice I found distracting for all the wrong reasons: while the book (which was written in 1925) barely mentions non-white characters, Luhrmann’s insistence on including African-American extras as background characters in as many scenes as possible feels obligatory at best and, at worst, strategically calculated. (Notice the first scene in the trailer? A Jay-Z-fueled soundtrack throbbing over footage of zoot suit-wearing Harlem high-rollers speeding over the Queensboro bridge in a 1920s convertible may make for attention-getting trailer fodder, but it also feels like the studio thought the only way they could get “urban” audiences to come see a story about sad white people from 1922 would be to oversell the story’s “diversity.”)

And yet, while the big knock on Luhrmann’s Gatsby is that it’s boring, I think the subsequent accusations that the original story is now outdated and irrelevant is mistaken. The success of Mad Men proves that modern audiences can still be captivated by the melodramatic antics of white alcoholic narcissists from bygone days. Those antics just need to be retold in a form that serves their function, and in a manner that rewards the audience rather than the author.

And that means the greatest compliment the next director who adapts The Great Gatsby can pay to the genius of F. Scott Fitzgerald would be to use his book as an inspiration, a reference, or simply as a guide along the way to creating a film that shows us what the book made us feel.

Just don’t use his novel as a screenplay. Trust me; he’d have told you the same thing.

Maybe It’s Time for America to Give Up on Movie Theaters

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I was willing to ignore the first five texts that the three guys in front of me sent during To the Wonder. For all I knew, maybe they were waiting for important news from the hospital, and they were killing time in a Terrence Malick film. (Hey, stranger things have happened.)

But after they’d sent 15 texts in an hour, including several that were apparently so amusing that they had to pass their phones back and forth to share the jokes — while drinking beers — I got up and left.

I know you’re disappointed, because you hoped I would say something to them. You’d like to hear a story where I chastised them for being inconsiderate, and they would suddenly realize the error of their ways and they would, now humbled, settle down to watch the movie they’d been distracting the rest of us from enjoying.

But the truth is, we’re all adults here, and we all make choices.

Photo: William DeShazer / Chicago Tribune

The Charles Theater chose to show a film that has no narrative structure, and then allow people to drink while they watched it. Why? Because they respect the rights of adults to responsibly enjoy an art film and a beer at the same time.

These three guys chose to amuse themselves at the expense of the rest of the theater patrons. Why? Partly because the theater was almost empty — there were only nine of us in the 150-seat theater — and partly because they frankly didn’t give a fuck. To be fair, the one time the guy on the end needed to make a phone call, he did get up and do so just outside the theater door. Then he came back and sat down and laughed about it, but at least he was vaguely aware of what appropriate behavior should be around his fellow humans.

And I chose to not say anything to the offenders or the theater because, let’s be honest: who cares what I think?

At best, they would respectfully apologize, watch the rest of the movie in silence, and then explain on their way out that they really didn’t realize they were being disruptive, and thank me for making them aware of the impact of their actions. But unless they were each born in a test lab, I’m fairly certain they’ve been to a movie theater before, and they understand what “don’t talk or text during a movie” means.

More likely, they would just burst out laughing and / or passively-aggressively text each other for the rest of the film, because really, what else is anyone — including me — going to do to stop three guys who want to text during a movie? It’s not like the theater, which is staffed mainly by minimum wage art students who equally don’t give a fuck, is going to send someone in to reprimand them. The Charles is not The Alamo Drafthouse.

And maybe that’s the problem.

The Alamo is widely known for the quality of its film selection and its customer experience. (And, also, for serving food during the movie, in a manner that’s still, amazingly, not as disruptive as the guy in front of you texting someone is.) Hence, the Alamo is a destination, and people respect it as such. (Or, they get kicked out.)

Nationwide, theater owners complain that attendance is going down every year. (Yes, box office records keep getting set, but that’s all due to inflation, 3-D and IMAX prices.) So theaters try to improve their offering with better seats, better audio, better visual effects, and more showtimes for the most popular films, so you’ll (theoretically) never have to be inconvenienced…

… and then they make you watch around 15 to 20 minutes’ worth of ads and trailers before they start the main feature, during which you’ll spend two hours trying to ignore people texting and talking during the film.

Why put up with that? And why expect theaters to bloat their operating costs further by employing bouncers when people are clearly choosing to not act like responsible adults?

To the Wonder is a film that only works if you’re willing to immerse yourself in it. Watched at a side glance, it’s hokey and overwrought, and it means nothing. It’s a film that would benefit from theaters offering an “adult showtime,” during which you would be ejected immediately if your cell phone left its cupholder.

There’s a reason TV is kicking film’s ass right now, and it’s not just because it’s a medium that allows for better character development and more complicated plotlines than your standard two hour blockbuster. It’s because at home, even though you’re theoretically surrounded by distractions, you can control them. And if you missed what Don Draper said after that fifteen second slow burn — which, on the big screen, would have sent people scrambling to update Facebook — you can rewind it and watch it again.

It’s not that movie theaters are bad, or that people are bad.

It’s just that in this age of constant partial attention and perpetual connectivity, people just aren’t good in movie theaters.

Why The Harlem Shake Is Our Digital Generation Gap

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Hey, do you hear that?

Listen close; it’s the sound of a generation gap widening on the Internet.

And here’s its theme song:

I’ll admit, I was late to the Harlem Shake, just like I’m usually late to every meme. It’s not that I’m purposely out of touch; I just do my best to withstand the onslaught of new information until it’s developed a context. (You should see how long it took me to finally watch Gangnam Style; like, at least a week. omgIKNOWrite? wtf srsly

So when I finally sat down to watch the Harlem Shake videos on YouTube, I gave it a little time. (True story: I watched about 26 minutes’ worth of Harlem Shake variations, all in a row.) Why? Because I wasn’t sure I “got it” at first, so I needed to see a variety of them in order to wrap my head around what it was.

But it wasn’t until I stepped back from it and looked at how other people felt about the Harlem Shake that I finally “got it.” Because that’s when I started seeing tweets like this:

Whenever people have that kind of overly self-satisfied defensive reaction to something, in which disliking it is somehow seen as a badge of good taste, that’s my signal that something big is about to happen within the culture. And that’s when I realized what’s really happening with the Harlem Shake:

The people who think they know what the Internet is for are frustrated that it’s passing them by.

You’re Doing It Wrong

The point of the Harlem Shake is that there is no point; it’s a meme that celebrates outrageous group fun, and a sense of belonging to a spontaneous burst of (bizarre) joy. It’s about being “okay,” regardless of who or where you are. And, ultimately, it’s just about dancing like no one is watching, even though you really hope that everyone is.

Really, it’s about the purest form of personal expression that YouTube has yet produced.

And when the very people who make a living explaining the Internet to other people can’t grok why the Harlem Shake rose to (and then immediately fell from) prominence, I find that jarring. Not because I always expect a new meme to be universally appreciated, but I at least expect it to be understandable by the people whose job it is to understand the way this medium works.

So pour one out for our first generation of Internet adopters, because — like all media — it’s now evolving past the rules its creators thought we’d all agreed upon.

Why The Avengers Movie Is Actually the Ultimate Explanation of Geek Culture

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I’ve been thinking a lot about The Avengers since I read this astoundingly dense (and hyper-useful, if you’re a writer or artist) scene-by-scene dissection of the film by Todd Alcott. He meticulously explains why each element in the movie does (or doesn’t) work, what it all means thematically, and how it all supports the multiple arcs and narrative threads that combine to form the overarching story.

Many of Alcott’s filmmaking observations have been stuck in my head over the past few days, but one in particular got me thinking. Alcott says:

Now that our narrative has a protagonist (Nick Fury), the question, as always, is “What does the protagonist want?” Superficially, Nick Fury wants “to save the world,” that most generic of motives. To save the world, Fury must get a group of superheroes from vastly different backgrounds to work together.

Surprise! What the protagonist wants is exactly the same thing as what the writer-director wants! If Joss Whedon cannot succeed in getting his dog’s-breakfast of a cast to mesh, meld and work as a unit, his narrative will fail and no one will go see his movie.

Makes sense, although you could really say the same thing about any movie: the director needs the hero to succeed so people will want to pay to see him succeed.

What it actually got me thinking about was the other way a writer-director imparts himself upon any story he creates. See, no one writes a story about people they don’t care about. And in order for a writer to care about a character, s/he has to see that character as a human being worth relating to. Thus, every character in a story represents that author’s worldview about what that type of person means to the author personally.

Which, really, means The Avengers is the logical culmination in Whedon’s career-long lionizing of the pop culture [white male] geek obsessive as hero. In other words, The Avengers is about how Joss Whedon would be a hero.

Not sure about this? Here are the notes I spewed across my laptop as they came to me in a flood of self-recognition; stop me when you see yourself.

Hulk (Bruce Banner) = the geek who always wants to punch the jocks / racists / idiots at the bar, but there would be repercussions if he did; yet, as the Hulk, you’re invincible AND there are no repercussions (especially because what he finally unleashes himself upon are faceless and anonymous representations of pure militant evil). Thus, Whedon’s Banner is “always angry,” and Whedon’s Hulk is finally allowed to take all the punches that Banner — and Whedon, and we — must pull, every day.

Hawkeye (Clint Barton) = the emotionally distanced technician who’s exceedingly good at something a human actually could become good at if he tried (and he’s funny, and the only girl in the group likes him), which makes him the surrogate for all the geeks in the audience, as they imagine themselves to be (in their idealized versions of themselves).

Black Widow (Natasha Romanoff) = the alpha female fantasy of all guy geeks; she’s smart, impossibly attractive, uses her body as a weapon, allows herself to be fetishized and abused, yet always turns the tables on the bad guys she’s manipulated and beats them down (although she’d never manipulate you because you’re on her side — see? finally, a hot chick you can trust AND understand!), AND she’s secretly in love with the guy who most obviously resembles the proxy character for the male audience. Yay! You have a girlfriend!

Iron Man (Tony Stark) = the smart, funny geek playboy athlete billionaire, AKA what you presume you’ll grow up to be someday — especially because he makes it all look so easy, as though you really don’t have to work all that hard to achieve it because IT WILL JUST COME NATURALLY TO YOU IF YOU HAVE THE INHERENT SKILLS (wish fulfillment!) and then your biggest problem will be which of your amazing achievements you’ll be remembered for.

And who’s Iron Man’s opposite in this film?

Loki! The truth is, if Hawkeye is how the geek audience already sees itself, and if Iron Man (actually just Tony Stark) is what it aspires to become, then Loki is what it’s afraid it would become if it DID have access to extreme power — petty, angry, vengeful, totalitarian, and loved by no one. This is why Loki (who’s a completely irredeemable asshole in most of the comics) works so well as a villain the way Tom Hiddleston plays him in the Marvel film universe: his craven motives are implicitly understood by the audience, because he is us (as we fear ourselves to be). Which brings us to Thor.

Thor = the hardest character to assimilate into this geek self-actualization fantasy, which is (I suspect) partly why Whedon waits the longest to introduce him. The other characters are all shades of Whedon’s own personality (and, by extension, of ours), but Thor is essentially the jock in a room full of geeks. He’s unearthly handsome, strong, athletic, and charismatic — just like the high school jocks that the comic geeks naturally feel like (resentful) insects in the presence of. So how does Whedon make him accessible to the audience? By

making him awkward and uncomfortable (just like he’d be at YOUR party, if he actually showed up), and
by focusing his character arc on achieving some kind of reconciliation with his brother Loki, AKA the bad version of us.

In other words, Thor becomes a character the geek audience can reluctantly embrace because HE LITERALLY WANTS TO EMBRACE US (LOKI) AND MAKE UP AND LEARN HOW TO WORK TOGETHER (wouldn’t it be GREAT if the jocks sat down at the geek lunch table of exile and were all like, “Hey, we respect you, and we’re not happy unless we’re all getting along?”). It’s telling that the thrill of Banner’s Hulk indulgence is punctuated by self-satisfyingly punching Thor out of the frame. Thor is a character the geeks need on their side, and will tolerate, but only when he recognizes that their brains are equal (or superior) to his brawn (and good looks).

Captain America (Steve Rogers) = represents the audience’s own naive, childish, and stubborn belief in two things: the individual potential of the audience members themselves to grow up and become the kinds of “real men” that their own dads and grandfathers would be proud of, and the possibility that America actually *could* be the greatest nation on Earth, *if* we all learned how to work together in honor of our mythical common dreams of justice, equality and the pursuit of happiness. Making Cap a dork makes him human (it’s akin to the tactic Whedon uses with Thor), rather than a holier-than-thou espouser of arbitrary ideals. And if this dork can grow up to embody America, so can you, dear viewer.

Nick Fury = just like the Black Widow represents the ultimate male geek fantasy as it pertains to women, Nick Fury represents the ultimate white male geek fantasy as it pertains to black men, on two levels. By making Fury black when he was always white in the comics (until The Ultimate Avengers, anyway), Marvel wins all the politically progressive brownie points AND audience demographic spillover it could hope for while only angering the sub-audience of comics purists and white supremacists whom it would rather not have to take into consideration anyway. This allows the audience (and Marvel) to feel progressive, in the same way that going to Starbucks makes you feel like a citizen of the world: no, listening to Count Basie while you sip your vanilla latte doesn’t really make you actively cosmopolitan, but it’s a visual shorthand for WANTING TO BE SEEN AS SUCH.

Likewise, in the context of the film, Samuel L. Jackson as Fury is the ultimate scary angry black guy who is, in this case, ON YOUR SIDE, IN CHARGE, NEEDS YOUR HELP, AND IS WILLING TO BREAK ALL THE RULES (AND LAWS) SO YOU HAVE EVERY CHANCE TO SUCCEED. He’s really a mix of Thor and the Black Widow — the kind of guy you can’t be and secretly resent because you think women like him better than they like you, PLUS the kick-ass cathartic fantasy of a type of humanity (black, as opposed to female) that you can’t understand and therefore secretly fear, BUT WHICH NOW RESPECTS AND LIKES YOU, so we’re really all cool, right?

This isn’t all meant in any way as a knock on or oversimplification of Whedon. He’s spent his entire career (Buffy, Firefly, Dollhouse) chasing these themes, the same way Woody Allen and Kathryn Bigelow and Spike Lee and Quentin Tarantino revisit their same themes over and over, each time re-peeling the same grape from a different side. And in The Avengers, he finally achieved his thematic apex.

Personally, I’m curious to see how much more time he’ll spend on this particular adventure before he turns his attention to another shade of his themes — feminism, intellectualism, traditionalism, etc. — and explores them in another fictional universe. But for now, the Marvel universe is his self-analyst’s couch, and we get to see every session in 3-D.

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Overcoming the Cult of Easy

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This weekend, I tweeted a link to an article about the new ABC series Last Resort, which argues that Andre Braugher’s character, Capt. Marcus Chaplin, is a bold commentary on what it means to be a black male in modern America.

In return, someone who follows me responded:

I’d read that column, but I don’t have an hour to kill. It lost me in the first paragraph.

I, too, got thrown by a run-on sentence in the first paragraph. The site it’s linked from, The New Inquiry, is a purposely self-indulgent meta-critique of pop culture, and I’m used to their style. But I can certainly see how someone who’s never read their work before might find it challenging, and maybe the article does a bad job of giving a newbie a reason to stick with it.

But here’s what really worries me about that response: because the reader had trouble following the article’s logic, he gave up. Note that he doesn’t say he found the article uninteresting; he says he’d read it “if he had an hour.” (The article runs about 1900 words; it should take an average reader approximately 7-10 minutes.)

Not only that, but his response makes it subtly sound like it’s either my fault for sharing something that was beyond his ability to comprehend, or it’s the author’s fault for not making the argument easier to understand.

In short: it wasn’t low-hanging fruit, so it was ignored.

Welcome to modern society, 2012.

But Would You Want to Have a Beer with Him?

Since 2000, when education, intellectualism and expertise became synonymous with “elitism” — and elitism became synonymous with “Un-American” — society has been skeptical of intelligence and the efforts to acquire it.

Politically, we reward the people who seem most like us, rather than the people we’d most like to become. Artistically, we reward TV that serves up predictability and music that provides us with [danceable] emotional escapism. Scientifically, we question everything, believe nothing, and prefer to rely on conventional wisdom rather than statistical probability.

When critical thinking is frowned upon, even achieving mediocrity can start to seem rebellious.

This explains why films that seem smart end up being touted as modern masterworks, when they’re really just modernized rehashes of classic tropes. Inception, Looper and Prometheus aren’t particularly complicated films, but when compared to anything by Adam Sandler, I can see why critics are desperate to call something “smart.”

Lowering Our Common Denominator

On Salon, film critic Andrew O’Hehir mourns the death of film culture, noting that TV has replaced film as the source for our most intelligent and boundary-pushing stories. Whereas previous generations could debate the morals, ethics and cultural commentary found in films like Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate and Chinatown on a near-weekly basis, modern audiences must turn to The Wire, Mad Men and Game of Thrones for that same level of authorial analysis.

Not that this is a problem, per se. The rise of TV as the standard-bearer for intellectual pop culture may be surprising compared to TV’s own past, but the serialized format does lend itself to greater depth than a 90-minute stand-alone film. No, the problem isn’t that TV is now “smarter” than film; it’s that audiences who crave “smart” no longer exist in meaningful, market-impacting numbers.

If you adjusted for inflation, The Graduate (1967) would be the #21 film of all-time in terms of box office, at a staggering $686M.

That’s higher than The Avengers.

Meanwhile, The Wire — regularly cited as the most intelligent TV show of all-time — averaged 4 million viewers per episode. Granted, it aired on HBO, which isn’t a standard free TV channel. But considering TV viewership was hitting all-time highs in 2006, which was the same year The Wire aired what’s often considered their finest season (Season Four, AKA the “school” season), you’d think it could have attracted at least a quarter of the 13.89 million people who were watching Two and a Half Men.

Don’t Write for People Who Can’t Read

I realize I’m connecting dots here that may not be actually be adjacent.

I realize I’m basing my estimation of America’s sociological decline on my own opinions about popular culture, mixed with the kind of sepia-toned “things used to be better” nostalgia that’s easily debunked by pointing out that some pop culture is always smart, and most of it is always stupid.

But I’m also connecting these dots due to my long-simmering frustration with the increasingly vocal ghettoization of knowledge.

I get that we’re a busy culture, so stopping to read when we don’t have to is an imposition.

I get that we’re a depressed culture, so having to think about problems isn’t as fun as avoiding them.

I get that we’re a remix culture, so learning what came before is never as compelling as seeing what’s coming next.

But maybe if we stopped to dissect our modern culture a little more, we might understand it better. And if we understood it better, maybe we could improve it, or we could at least stop rewarding the producers of information who demand nothing from us beyond a glance, a “like” or a click.

Maybe we could stop seeing intelligence as the problem.