Every so often, on a Sunday night after evening chapel, I will try to sneak in a $2 black market movie (which is legal out here, though you get what you pay for). Last night, I was treated to The Great Gatsby, which, due to its quality, offered me each picture several seconds before it sound. So I would watch lips move followed by a scene change, and then here what was said. Annoying, but tolerable. :)
I enjoyed the movie for a number of reasons: One, I only read a brief portion of the book in high school before I got bored and read the Spark Notes (don't do this at home, kids). So it was new to me. Two, I love Baz Luhrmann's cinematography and powerful intermingling of music with his films (as in the masterful Moulin Rouge). Third, it makes some profound points, which will be my focus here.
(Spoiler alert) The historical backdrop of the story is the roaring '20s, a time of booming wealth, exceeded only by undue optimism and egotism. To the great credit of the movie (and perhaps the book?), it does not directly and exclusively tie this era, the wealthy, or Wall Street to the odious motive of "greed." (I wish our public school system showed such intellectual honesty when dealing with history, but unless you demolish the motives and character of this era, you cannot turn FDR into the economic and moral messiah that many believe him to be.)
The character of the '20s was very much like our era and every age generally--a complex intermeshing of virtue and vice. Was there great greed? Of course. There always is. Man is greedy. There was also great hope amongst many to create a better future for their children then the ravagement of the "war to end all wars" the previous decade.
Part of the story--simple economics--is somewhat morally neutral. The great boom was not merely a product of human nature and its desires, it was a product of great scientific advances, technological innovation, and the freedom to harness the creative impulses and invest and their potential. The investments in such a promising era became too risky, and the reality that growth takes time would come crashing down in the form of the Great Depression (in ways similar to this recent, and perhaps present, recession).
But a large part of the story, often missed in our education of this era, was an undue optimism in human nature. World War One did not have the same devastating effects of American optimism that it did in Europe. Modernism--the belief that autonomous man can master truth, society, and human nature--was still undeminished. Progressive utopianism, largely led by theologically hollow churches, which believed in the innate goodness and perfectibility of man, would proceed unabated.
Thus, the prevailing worldview of many Americans would fundamentally flawed, leading to a reckless lifestyle where failure and suffering was somewhat incomprehensible. The Great Depression did not simply burst the economic bubble, but the naive idealism that undergirded it.
At the end of Gatsby, after the frivolous parties, lavish decadence, and rampant self-indulgences, the central figure lies dead, without a single visitor to his funeral. Gatsby, like many of his era cloaked in perceived invincibility, feasted upon the world until he was famished. Man can never transform his nature or that of the world, and such a naive hope always ends in despair and often in disaster.
I found this theme dramatically illustrated in the use of cars in the movie. For much of the movie, the wealthy characters at the heart of the story drove at excessive speed and simply flashed their business cards at police to avoid getting ticketed. They lived reckless lives, unbound by law or boundaries. Toward the end of the movie, such reckless driving resulted in both a crash and a death--the puncturing of the perception of invicibility and the loss of humanity.
The reality is, as America began to finally learn in the Great Depression and in World War Two and finally in the drugged-up Vietnam era, that human nature can be neither transformed, nor can it transform the world. Sinners cannot remedy what ails them with the resources of their own nature or a broken world. Our passions and purposes can only be rightly directed and fulfilled when they are set upon their rightful object--the God of the universe, revealed to us in Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ poured out his life, not in pursuit of meaningless worldly objects or social ideals, but for the sake of sinners and the glory of the Father. Every life apart from Christ is wasted. Yet there was no part of the life of Christ that was wasted. He didn't idolize sinners; He died for them.
Gatsby, with its depressing and meaningful storyline about meaninglessness, does not reveal the vacuity of the '20s, wealth, or Wall Street, but of human nature and its pretensions. Yet the forsaken death of the great Gatsby is answered by the forsaken death of the humble Son of God. Life need not be marked by a meaningless decay and descent into death, but can grow ever upward in hope and meaning by the righteous life and atoning death of Jesus Christ.
