Episode 87: The Great Gatsby and the Not so Great ‘20s

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In my younger and more vulnerable years… (sigh) Well, it was college. I’m not going to take that gimmick to a place where it’s just inaccurate. Yes, I was still figuring things out in college, but I had a pretty good safety net around me. But I was young, and I had this really good friend who lived in a residence hall that decided to have a The-Great-Gatsby-themed dance. And that actually made more sense than you might be thinking. One on hand, the movie with Leonardo DiCaprio had just come out, so the theme was kind of trendy. On the other hand, they had this tower along the side of their dorm that overlooked the grassy area where all social events were held. The sort of tower that you could put a great light in for some added effect.

My friend and I strictly went to this dance to get some food. We didn’t even dress up, not that we were the only ones. A lot of people did not dress up in costume-esque 1920s style clothing attire as they did not have it. And it was just before midterms, so no one had the time to go shopping for the occasion. Or the urge to procrastinate, which basically looks like the same thing.

After we ate, we went back to her dormroom to watch movies and anime. I don’t remember exactly what it was that we amused ourselves with, which is not surprising because that wasn’t the part that stuck with us. Rather, it was a joke around the idea seemingly at the core of The Great Gatsby.

“You can’t repeat the past, Old Sport,” one of us would say. And the other would reply. “Of course you can, Old Sport.”

Now, if you cringed when I said that. Yes. Nick Carraway didn’t use the infamous “old sport” as a term of endearment, so telling an “old sport” that they cannot repeat the past doesn’t make any sense. I was the one to mess it up when both of us were tired. And being tired, we both thought it was absolutely hilarious. Because inside-jokes between friends don’t need to be that objectively good or logically sound, it never went away. And jokes like that can be repeated. But what about the past?

Old sport.

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Hi. It’s M. Welcome to Episode 87. And Part 2 of 2 in this… surprise discussion on the comforts of nostalgia.

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Because in some ways, Jay Gatsby does what I’ve been doing recently, as in living in the past. As I talked about last week, I have completely lost track of time with childhood television shows. I mean, yes, the immediate rebuttal would be a matter of intensity. I’m just watching cartoons during a plague. Gatsby committed an unknown number of crimes to accrue a vast fortune, threw some wild parties, all to get a girl, oh and also a couple people died along the way. Including him. So there’s that. Also I don’t call people “Old Sport” in anything that could vaguely resemble an unironic way. But honestly, I think that detail actually has a bit more to it than that. 

We can and should say that, yes, but in doing so, we also overlook some of the details that The Great Gatsby calls attention to. 

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Before we get there, however, if you aren’t familiar with The Great Gatsby, the 1925 novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, let me fill you in. Basically, there’s this young man named Nick Carraway, and he’s our narrator. He’s also a young man seeking employment and some sense of fulfillment, I guess. He goes to the New York City area, specifically the fictional towns of West Egg and East Egg. He’s got a lead on a job as a bond salesman out there and also a cousin: Daisy Buchanan, who he’s not incredibly close to, but then again, she’s not really close to anyone. She’s in a somewhat unhappy marriage with someone who is unhappy seemingly as a rule. While he has a wife and child, the best days of Tom’s life are behind him partially because he’s somewhat incapable of loving either of them, so he’s never going to find fulfillment on that front.

But that’s a story for another day. Maybe.

Nick is living in a small cottage that turns out to be fairly close to the estate of the mysterious host but prolific partier Jay Gatsby. Close enough that without much effort, he catches Gatsby’s eye and gets pulled into his world. Which isn’t just about partying. It’s also trying to win over his first love, Daisy. And yeah, same Daisy. 

And as far as friendships go, that could be an awkward start, you know? Trying to be friends with someone whose pretty much obsessed with your cousin, but maybe it helped that Nick and Daisy aren’t particularly close or that Nick saw pretty quickly how unhappy Daisy was in her marriage. So I guess Gatsby had some sort of advantage in winning over Nick’s affection. 

Who knows why? But Nick does like him. Even after… Well spoiler alert, but Gatsby dies in the end. Gatsby’s obsession with his past love leads to the series of events that gets him killed. If he wasn’t so determined to win her over on his terms--on terms that are not fully possible given the present--the series of events that led to his death would not have happened. But still, Nick somewhat overlooks this and still retains a sense of fondness for Gatsby. In fact, he says in a quote that I almost had to explain in an in class essay but yay for choices, “Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.”

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You know, it’s kind of hard to say that someone turned out okay when they died. But in many ways, Nick sees Gatsby as the victim of sorts. He was a poetic soul that was swallowed up by the coldness of the world, you could potentially say.

Now, this is the point where you might be tempted to point out that Daisy should never have been a prize to be claimed, and I feel that. I respect that. I largely agree. But that’s a grievance with F. Scott. Also Daisy has somewhat resigned herself to the fact that the best thing a woman could be or that her daughter could be is a beautiful fool. That ignorance to what plagues you was really all a woman could hope for. So that’s what we’re dealing with in this. But on that note, maybe Daisy would have been better off not knowing of Gatsby and his lingering love for her. But in the context of this book and her life, that’s the best she could have hoped for. To not know someone was in love with her, actively pursuing her, dreaming of her, hoping to break her from her miseries. 

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But okay back to the point. Again. So many tangents on this podcast. Miscellany Media Tangents, am I right? Okay. For real. I didn’t really understand that quote back when I read it in high school. Because I was kind of held up by the “if Gatsby had been a bit more reasonable, i.e. trying to make a new future and not recreate the past, he would have been better off,” which is not the perspective Nick seems to have. Fun fact, the second thought I got caught in was “wow, people really tend to make their own miseries, don’t they?” 

Both of those things need to be unpacked and addressed some other time. 

Nick’s perspective, though, seems to be that Gatsby was this wonderful man who got swallowed up by something outside of him. Something external destroyed Gatsby not necessarily that he willed his own destruction by any means. Careless or otherwise. And that’s the thing that Nick seems to hate. And look to points one and two for potential explanations. But as I sit in my home, for many more hours than normal, while my cats cause absolute chaos because me and my neighbors are home, and the cats are still super confused about it, I can’t help but see there’s some other sort of culprit involved. 

Gatsby started a retreat into the past, and that past turned out to be a trap. But instead of focusing on the trap, we could always focus on what sent him running to the past in the first place. The past being--in this metaphor--what he assumes to be not just safe but some sort of ideal as well. 

Just like a childhood cartoon is for me. But yeah, less extreme of course.

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Now, The Great Gatsby takes place against the backdrop of the roaring twenties in America. Life was good if you were rich. There were a lot of pleasures to be had. And everything should have been fine. But it wasn’t fine. Pleasures was only a distraction, and if someone like Tom Buchanan, Daisy’s unfaithful husband and just all around useless person, sees through the haze and is confronted with something more existential, well, what do they really have going for them? The crushing realization that they have been essentially worthless since their early twenties. Not a great look. Or feeling.

It just goes against human instinct. We all want to feel useful, right? We want to feel like we’re accomplishing something or we are engrossed in something worthwhile. As evidenced by the fact that I’m still seeing tweets about the promises of being better when we leave this or lamenting that those grand plans for productivity for producing [insert item of individual interest here] are just not coming together right now. They just aren’t. And it sucks that we can’t see tangible results doing the things we need to do: i.e. get through this. But that’s unfortunately how it is right now.

Doing the best you can just isn’t all that flashy of an achievement, I’m afraid. 

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But regardless, when we feel that distraught, we have this… fight or flight response. Take it down or get away from whatever threatens our perception of security. Now in this case, the line between the two reactions blurs a bit because an escape from this is a more direct rebellion than you might expect. 

But in many ways, Tom with his more aggressive, take them all down attitude is the fight. He fights directly and indirectly, moving the rest of the proverbial chess board around in a way that leads to Gatsby’s destruction and lets Tom get away with it all scot-free. His defense against this dread, you could say, is being a self-centered jerk, exulting himself and trying to subtly persuade others to do the same. To give him validation through some sort of social contract. 

Now you clearly are not supposed to like Tom. You put up with him because he seemingly fell out of his mother and into this place where you cannot ignore him, but you would not choose this.

Gatsby, on the other hand, is remarkably charming and friendly. Despite being mysterious, he’s a great host. And what is he doing? In many ways, he’s running into this… dream of his. Into the past. A place that he knew not just to be safe but to be wonderful. Because he had love. The love of this beautiful woman who cared him for who he is and not for his social status or wealth because he didn’t have those things. He was just a young military officer in Kentucky during something as scary as World War I.

Maybe that’s overly romantic. But Gatsby clearly loves the past that had Daisy in it. He wants to go back to when he and Daisy first parted ways five years before and live as if they had never been separated, living in a sort of disconnected and impossible to fulfill daydream. And that’s not just impossible because child, but nobody tell Gatsby about that. He doesn’t care. 

“I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before,” he famously says.

In that, it’s clear he loves the past. That part you really can’t deny. It fills so much of his conversations and motivations. But it’s more than just a retreat to him. This isn’t the way he takes a break from most of his problems. All his problems are that he doesn’t have the past. Anything else, he’s been able to accomplish. Whereas Tom just fell into things and now has to spend his life coasting, Gatsby is more than capable of  manufacturing anything he wants for himself. Or almost anything, 

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Towards the end of the book, Nick is confronted with the extent of Gatsby’s reimagination. He changed his last name from Gatz to Gatsby, and he did not have a gathering of people who felt compelled to attend his funeral. People would fill his home during his parties, but those same people did not feel compelled to even pretend to mourn him at his funeral, a simple act of respect to be sure. In the course of his pursuit, Gatsby literally sacrificed all that he was and could have been for this illusion. Not just that Daisy could be his but that she had only ever been his. That she never loved Tom or anyone else. 

Let them return to the state of young lovers who think the world consists of only them. Never mind that they have aged a lot in the past five years, and Daisy now has a daughter of her own. No, Gatsby can’t see any of that. He sees the dream he had, the nostalgia fueled dream of what was five years before. 

This isn’t a break for him, right? This was an obsession. This became his identity and every pursuit he had not a way to cope.

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But what was he trying to cope with, you might be asking? What was he escaping from? Besides the law as a bootlegger. Well, it can’t be so clear. Gatsby’s fantasies are of a beautiful domestic life with Daisy, and those fantasies seep into every word, particularly those he says to Nick. He doesn’t disclose anything about himself. Everything is about Daisy. Although it would have been the type of life where he wouldn’t have been sent to war maybe because, you know, if you had enough money, it would be easier to get out of certain things. At the very least, he would not be rejected as a suitor for a lack of financial prospects. Or that was F. Scott Fitzgerald.

But that’s part of it, I guess. Gatsby escapes circumstances where he had no control of his life or his world. The rich had a bit more control, but still, he didn’t have everything. Still, everything was moving past him rapidly. He was a leaf in a current of water as things were taken away from him. Daisy was taken away from him. And he’s scrambling to get it back through this obsession. But he can’t get it back. He can’t take it back in order to build the beautiful future that was unfairly denied him. 

And that’s unfortunate. Even though Gatsby’s a fictional character, I’m not going to deny that he might have been hurt by the loss and genuinely grieved her. But at the end, one has to let go of the past and reimagine the future. Potentially a better future than what one could have had. Certainly a future better than what Gatsby actually got.

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You know, I always knew I was going to talk about The Great Gatsby about this podcast, and I had a couple stories of my own green light across the bay. And then this whole general circumstances of the world thing happened. And now for the sake of balance, I felt the need to pair it, albeit loosely, with a discussion of Rugrats. With a discussion of how I myself kept falling into my past because it’s just easier to do right now. 

But honestly, sometimes it’s easy to think of our breaks into nostalgia, or bread or whichever outlet we choose as a sort of self-destruction along the lines of Gatsby’s. A complete and total waste of ourselves and our potential. It clearly isn’t. We’re not in our own swimming pools right now, metaphorically speaking. Really, we just have to get through to the other side, to the best version of the future we have claims to, not the ones we think we can forcefully manufacture. There’s no harm in dreaming, even if that dreaming is idle. The harm is in pursuing that which is not worth pursuit, in pursuing that which could lead us off a cliff. Because no matter how hard we run or try, it could never be either way. No matter the effort exerted, the clock will never turn back. 

In a sense, those lofty goals of productivity are Gatsby’s dreams of the past: an unachievable dream that just doesn’t line up with reality. So why should we pursue it so ardently? I really don’t know. So don’t let it destroy you.

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This has been a production of Miscellany Media Studios with music licensed from the Sounds like an Earful music supply. Thanks for listening! Find more information about our shows at miscellanymedia.online or follow us on Twitter @miscellanymedia for updates on current and future projects.

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