strange and random happenstance: 2001

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Published by: Penguin
Publication Date: 1925
Format: Hardcover, 198 Pages
Rating: ★★★
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Nick Carraway has moved east to sell bonds in New York City. Because that's what young men do to make money right? Move east and sell bonds. But living out on Long Island he has an advantage across the bay. His wealthy former classmate from Yale, Tom Buchanan, lives in a luxurious house with his wife Daisy, who just happens to be Nick's cousin. At Nick's first dinner at their home he meets Jordan Baker, a rather infamous golfer, and gets ringside seats to the drama of the Buchanan household. There's trouble in paradise as Tom's mistress has the gall to call during the dinner hour! Of course, being old classmates, Nick is drawn into Tom's extramarital activities, and it isn't long before Nick is partying in the couple's love nest in the city where Myrtle's sister is insisting to Nick that Tom and Myrtle are miserable in their marriages and if it wasn't for Daisy being a Catholic there'd be two divorces and one marriage faster than you can blink. Nick can't be sure of this assertion and soon his life is about to be complicated by even more intrigue. He's going to be brought into Jay Gatsby's orbit. Jay Gatsby is Nick's infamous neighbor. Infamous for his parties and his secretive past. Everyone comes to his parties and yet no one ever sees him. Nick is about to see a lot of him as he brings Nick into his world and into his greatest regret, losing Daisy, the love of his life. He asks Nick to be a go-between. Of course fearing rejection he uses his own go-between, Jordan Baker. The request is simple enough, can Nick invite Daisy to his humble abode, only to have Gatsby swing in and take them to his manse next door? Nick is glad to help, especially as it's Jordan asking, and soon, like Daisy, he is under Gatsby's spell. But as Gatsby and Daisy's courtship from before the war proves, love and wooing never go smooth. Soon Tom realizes what is happening and there is a great reckoning that not everyone survives. That is the price of wealth and woo.

The Great Gatsby is light on plot with little depth and an unreliable narrator and for those very reasons it has become a classic. Other than a distinct "Americanness" and much rumination on the American Dream, everything is open to interpretation. Can we believe a word Nick says? Probably not. Can we blame Gatsby for how he made his fortune in order to woo the woman he loves? Depends on how he really got his money... which the characters themselves like to discuss ad nauseam. Can the valley of ashes be real or is it just a metaphor? You can literally read anything you want into this book. I was strongly reminded in the laborious and best skipped introduction of certain friends of mine who can talk for hours on end about the color symbolism in 2001: A Space Odyssey. What red means in one shot, followed by the blue of another. If they had a desire to, which I'm sure they don't, they could go into the symbolism of color that larders the pages of this book. The green light at the end of Daisy's dock, the golden sheen coming off Gatsby, all of it can be taken as something or nothing. The green could be tied to Daisy and how her voice is full of money. The green could be her openness to Gatsby's return. His golden sheen could be an outward aura of his wealth or a reference to the golden calf from the Bible and all the symbolism that weights him down because of that. In fact, though I never took a high school class that actually read The Great Gatsby, I can see why it's a popular one to teach. There is so much that can be drawn out of this book literally anything any student says is a possible interpretation. There is no wrong answer where it comes to The Great Gatsby! In fact, here's my weird little interpretation. I think The Great Gatsby is the inspiration for the TV series Remington Steele. Now prove me wrong! You literally can't. Steele is a man of infinite style whose past is dubious and who embodies the American Dream. He may or may not have tragedy in his past and as for that past, it shifts and changes with each retelling. Who knows, he might also have medals for heroic service as well as the known warrants for his arrest. This is how much this one book has become a part of the American consciousness that a popular TV show from the 80s could draw meaning form it for a modern audience and make it continually relevant. The Great Gatsby is a book for the ages.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments

Labels: 1920s, 2001, American Dream, Daisy Buchanan, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gatsby, High School, Nick Carraway, Remington Steele, Roaring Back to Reading, Symbolism, The Great Gatsby, Tom Buchanan, Unreliable Narrator

The Terminal Man by Michael Crichton
Based on the book by Michael Crichton
Starring: George Segal, Joan Hackett, Richard Dysart, Donald Moffat, Michael C. Gwynne, William Hansen, Matt Clark, Jim Antonio, and Jill Clayburgh
Release Date: June 19th, 1974
Rating: ★
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Harry Benson is having an experimental surgery to stop his epileptic seizures that cause violent blackouts after he was in a car accident. Harry's entire life changed, from a loving family man he has become a violent criminal. The hope is that he can gain some semblance of his old life back. His psychiatrist, Doctor Janet Ross, thinks that implanting electrodes in his brain isn't the wisest idea, which is proven correct when his brain starts to trigger more and more mini seizures to get the euphoric jolt from the electrodes. The problem is, once the jolts become continuous, he will have a major blackout and will be the most dangerous he's ever been. This wouldn't be that big a problem except that Harry has escaped his police guard and left the hospital. He could be anyway and anything could happen. The first tipping point will be some minutes after three in the morning, and that's when Harry first kills. As his electric jolts become more and more constant he will have more major blackouts and more people could die, even the doctors who are trying to help him, because he knows where they all live.

If you want a pompous pretentious movie that is so full of itself that you will be laughing till you are crying, then I heartily recommend you watch The Terminal Man! This adaptation might be the most amusing of all the Crichton adaptations I have ever seen. Either the adaptation is true to the book and with Crichton's involvement we get to watch a solid movie, or the adaptation is all levels of tacky throwing in bad robotic apes with sign language gloves that disappoint while the viewer is able to still find some humor in their situation. But The Terminal Man leaves all others in the dust when it comes to overreaching. Cinema in the late sixties and early seventies was revitalized by more artistic movies that weren't meant to be mainstream. From Bonnie and Clyde to The Graduate, 2001 to A Clockwork Orange, movies were breaking with conventions and what would have previously been art house fare was now de rigueur. The Terminal Man obviously had dreams of being the next big thing with it's limited dialogue and score set in a very colorless world but instead the movie comes off as trying too hard. It wants to be chic so badly that it oversteps and we are left with a laughable mess.

The biggest hint that they are trying to make a medical thriller into an artsy film is in the sets and costumes. The sets have no color. No color at all. And literally everyone is only ever seen in white, black, or grey. There are no other colors in this world, except that hint of red. Both blood and flowers are allowed red, but nothing else. It's obviously aiming for the impact of the girl with the red coat in Schindler's List and instead it's just weird. The appearance of the red when Harry starts to kill isn't jarring, like a horrific murder should be, it was just laughable. I'm not sure if this colorless world was supposed to be a commentary on the antiseptic lifestyle that surrounds a hospital or some weird futuristic concept where colors are tacky in the future, because they did noticeably remove any reference to the year the movie was set in. The height of the fashion faux pas is the nurses uniforms, which are so impractical and their headdresses are half medieval peasant half nun that one wonders what the hell world this movie was really thinking it lived in. You can actually feel the filmmakers striving for greatness, you can hear the gears in their head moving and thinking, yes, this will be a classic for the ages like Kubrick. If Kubrick did Lifetime TV movies, then maybe the analogy would be right.

The Terminal Man just wanted to be profound, it wanted to be something more. The sparseness is also seen in the paring down of the story. There is almost no dialogue and what plot existed in the book has been almost completely gutted. Instead the film is populated with long silences and static images that in the hands of someone talented, aka Kubrick, it could have worked, but here it draws out the movie so that a film that is under two hours feels about six. The problem that arises from parring down everything is the story is lost in translation. You don't realize that Harry Benson is supposed to be a genius with a fear of machines that indicates his psychosis, instead we have a violent man who has a surgery that goes wrong and kills some people. Where is the motivation? Where is the reasoning? In the book there is a connection between Benson and Doctor Ross where they have a true friendship, where their conversations delve into deep concepts. Here their doctor patient relationship is almost nonexistent and Doctor Ross is relegated to sexist jokes and wailing while trying to futilely save her patient.

The major divergence from the book, wherein they make Harry a Roman Catholic, exemplifies how the filmmakers were striving for some inner meaning. Something lofty and enigmatic and shocking. Instead of just sticking to the solid story that existed, here Harry isn't contemplating machines taking over the world, but instead trying to come to terms with being a violent man. What? I mean, he doesn't remember these attacks and often puts himself purposefully in these situations, ie, going to bars and strip clubs, yet somehow he has remorse? Since when? His going to church to confess made me role my eyes. The film seriously thought that by adding this layer of spiritualism that they would somehow redeem it? Make it something worthy of discussion? Instead the killing of the priest with his rosary during Harry's confession comes off as laughable and oh so predictable. It isn't helped by the fact that George Segal, while a good actor in his own way, was unable to carry this production. His "seizures" are worthy of a Razzie.

But the saddest fact of this whole film is that it wants to have been a Stanley Kubrick film. With the minimal score, only Bach's Goldberg Variation No. 25 played by Glenn Gould is ever heard, the colorless sets, the framing of each scene, the doctors in evening wear, the weird eye through the door watching over us, all of it cries out as a poor Kubrick imitation. Personally, I have never been the biggest Kubrick fan, but watching someone trying to emulate him so hard it is painful to watch you realize how great Kubrick is. This, this was like the bad Lifetime tv movie that was made as a Kubrick film. Much like the true stories of Saved by the Bell and Full House, The Terminal Man comes off as cut rate, cliched, badly cast, lacking vision, and unable to grasp even the basics of what they are trying to do. By the end of the film when George Segal is having a seizure in a cemetery plot, well, you're just praying for that bullet to end it all. It was amusing to watch the film once because of how bad it is, but a second viewing would be masochistic. Go watch something by Kubrick instead, it's the real deal, not a pale over ambitious imitation.