How Baz Luhrmann's 'The Great Gatsby' gets it right

First of all, it's good. It's very good. Baz Luhrmann's adaptation of "The Great Gatsby" doesn't cast aside the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, nor does it try too hard to be slavishly faithful to the source material. The performances are nuanced and perfect for the moment. In the process, the film creates something new and contemporary while adhering to the spirit of its 90-year-old inspiration.

(By the way, if you haven't seen the movie and want to avoid spoilers, you might want to bail out here.)

I previously wrote about the problems of adapting "The Great Gatsby" for the screen here. Some of those problems stem from the largely internal observations that the narrator, Nick Carraway, makes. If you lose those, you lose the language of the novel and much of the magic Fitzgerald wrought in rendering his time and place. One aspect of that voice - Nick is telling us a story that happened presumably one year before the novel's publication, but he is telling the story with a voice of experience that seems gifted with a perspective many years after the fact.

To solve this problem, Nick (Tobey McGuire) is presented to us not in 1924, but in 1929 - the year of the Crash and the beginning of the Great Depression, when the Jazz Age seems as distant as a dinosaur. And instead of viewing the vanished bacchanalia of New York from the comfort of the Midwest, he is in an asylum there, drying out after a long drinking binge, the line between Nick and Fitzgerald at last blurred. (The Perkins Sanitarium - a tip of the hat to Fitzgerald's editor Max Perkins?) And Nick is now, after the fact, not a bond trader, but a writer - and was a frustrated writer before in New York while he worked on Wall Street. The movie goes so far as to show Nick discarding Joyce's "Ulysses" in favor of his new books on finance. This change in vocations isn't a total invention; after all, doesn't Nick himself say that he was "rather literary" at Yale? And doesn't Nick tell us that even then, he became, against his will, the guardian of other people's secrets?

Being the narrator, we understand now that Nick is a voyeur, which explains in part his obsession with Gatsby. (It also makes Nick a sort of cousin with Ewan McGregor's character from "Moulin Rouge!" in that he recounts his memories as a narrative.) But by making him a writer working out a sense of the past for therapeutic reasons, Luhrmann allows us as an audience to experience Nick's observations - and the language - in voiceover, preserving some of the original words. But the screenplay also makes an interesting decision to occasionally paraphrase Nick. Nick's father's advice - "Whenever you feel like criticizing anybody, remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages you've had" instead becomes ""Always try to see the best in people." To some ears, this may sound like dumbing down, but it serves the purpose of moving the narrative forward. And Luhrmann isn't afraid of occasionally mixing his own words with Nick's/Fitzgerald's - there are moments when the observations don't come from the book, and they don't necessarily draw undue attention to themselves as being wildly out of place. When Nick remarks on the "heiresses comparing inheritances" at Gatsby's parties, one has to remember that this melodic snippet isn't from the novel.

These changes in pace and presentation are necessary, as the movie doesn't really hit its stride until Gatsby appears on screen for the first time - faithfully to the book, having Nick suddenly and unknowingly encounter him at one of his parties. We see Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio) for the first time in the face, flashing one of his incomparable smiles, as "Rhapsody In Blue" reaches its climax in the background and fireworks burst overhead. Leo's Gatsby is at times subtle, at times dashing, at times affected as he should be (one could play a drinking game based on how many times he utters Gatsby's distinctive "Old Sport" expression), and his performance marks another step forward in his maturation as an actor. He doesn't seem to feel the need to fill the screen, as he did in "Gangs of New York" or "The Aviator." He understands the power of the material and how it is being represented on the screen.

Another change is actually inspired by Fitzgerald - Gatsby's original story of his background to Nick as they drive into town. In the novel, Gatsby tells an incredulous Nick about his war career, his time in the European capitals and his "sad" background, as Nick's skepticism mounts. In the middle of it, a policeman attempts to pull Gatsby over for speeding, but Gatsby flashes a card at the man who promises to remember him next time. The movie translates this fact, which occupies only a few sentences in the larger scene, into Gatsby being a manic driver. The change is inspired. What could be a static scene suddenly is supercharged, and in 3D on the screen, as Nick negotiates both his skepticism and his fear of Gatsby's driving. It also serves another purpose - it makes it easier for the portion of the audience which hasn't read the book to believe it is Gatsby who strikes Myrtle Wilson (Isla Fisher) dead later in the story.

The most obvious changes are in music, as the film score is a mix of hip-hop and pop with a few concessions toward twenties era jazz. This gives the movie a vitality as we navigate our way through a fantasia New York in CGI madness, with 3D tricks and sudden zooms across the bay that separates East and West Egg. The mansions are larger, the parties are wilder and brasher, and even the improvised bash that Tom and Myrtle throw grows into a wilder and cheaper gathering - providing a contrast with Gatsby's much larger "menagerie." These changes may seem cheap, but they accomplish in a visual sense what Fitzgerald's prose does in investing Gatsby's parties, his surroundings, his dreams with both the ecstatic quality that he must view them through, and the "foul dust" that floats around him.

There are also occasional moments where Luhrmann goes a little further than the text in underlining moments for the audience's benefit. When Daisy weeps over the fineness of Gatsby's shirts, we who read the novel know why she is weeping, but on its face, this scene normally appears overwrought on the screen. So for our benefit, Nick's voice tells us that it is suddenly clear what Daisy (Carey Mulligan) has missed in the five years since Gatsby left her life. When Nick and Jordan (Elizabeth Debicki) encounter "Owl Eyes" in the library, the partygoer goes farther in telling us how "genuine" the books are, and makes it clearer that Gatsby's image is only a mirage, and that the man may not even exist. (And for the purposes of speed, we are spared Nick's relationship with Jordan, as well as the timely appearance of Mr. Gatz following his son's death. Jordan remains unattainable because of her wealth and fame, and Mr. Gatz's absence underlines the tragedy of Gatsby's funeral, with only Nick there to mourn.)

And during the climatic scene when Gatsby tries to force Daisy's hand and make her tell Tom she never loved him, Tom succeeds in rattling Gatsby so much that Gatsby's cool cracks. Instead of his demeanor subtly dissolving under Tom's brutality, Gatsby lashes out and threatens Tom physically - and Nick sees that Gatsby probably has "killed a man." Cheap? Perhaps, but one hardly minds. It's a movie. Luhrmann uses the big screen and the possibilities of 3D to tell the story more completely than anyone has attempted. One of the reasons for "The Great Gatsby"'s continuing life on the page is the vibrancy of Fitzgerald's vision, not just in the words chosen but the images and their ability to entertain and teach. This movie renders those images tangible - if it isn't quite the book we see in our minds when we read, it is as close as filmed entertainment can get to it.

Just before Gatsby's inevitable murder at the hands of Mr. Wilson, Nick says something telling. For most of the movie, we have understood that Nick is both "within and without" - that he is of the Midwest and not New York, that he is of some privilege and not self-made like Gatsby, that he is a part of the events around him but not engaged in them, that he is like the Buchanans but not infected by their malicious carelessness. But as Nick leaves Gatsby's for the last time, he says, "I have to go. I have to work."

Of course he does - it is the one moment that we see the undercurrent of the novel projected on the screen. "The Great Gatsby" teaches us what the Declaration of Independence does not - that happiness may be pursued, but not necessarily attained. No matter how ambitious the parties, or those who throw them, the business of America is business - and it never stops.

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Going to the movies with 'The Great Gatsby'

The coming of Baz Luhrmann’s “The Great Gatsby” has inspired a great deal of angst amongst careful readers of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, including me. I find myself expecting both spectacle and disappointment, and not just because that’s usually the feeling one gets in leaving a big-budget Hollywood summer film. It’s the feeling that there is something within “Gatsby” that cannot be translated beyond the page – though it may be attempted a thousand times, there is something about the book itself that not only has eluded the camera, but has never even been glimpsed. 

And why is that? One would think “The Great Gatsby” would be a natural for the movies.After all, many of the guests at Gatsby's parties, we're told, were in the movie business. At least three other big screen versions have been made, yet none of them have been particularly successful. I think one of the reasons “The Great Gatsby” has bedeviled filmmakers is that the book illustrates the fundamental differences between the two media – print and the movies. 

An example: Gatsby is mentioned early, but we don’t actually meet him until more than a third of the way into the book. Then his appearance is meant to pleasantly shock us – Nick Carraway is engaged in conversation during one of the parties when he suddenly realizes he’s talking to the mysterious host. Later it becomes apparent that Gatsby has arranged for Nick to meet him because he wants to arrange a meeting with Daisy Buchanan. To do this, Gatsby invites Nick with him on a trip into the city, and on the way, Gatsby initiates a conversation with the awkward question, “What’s your opinion of me?” The question puts Nick ill at ease, as Gatsby begins spinning out his “origin” story as being the child of rich people, now dead, and relating his career as a haunted scion in the great capitals of Europe. Internally, Nick believes none of it, and we perceive his earlier observation that Gatsby embodies “everything for which I have an unaffected scorn.”  It is only when Gatsby produces a medal from his service in the war that Nick begins to believe some part of his story.

Now, let’s look at how these sets of events were portrayed in the last incarnation of “The Great Gatsby,” the film from 1974 starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow. When Nick finally meets Gatsby, it is at a party – but one of Gatsby’s tuxedo-clad henchmen comes to fetch Nick for reasons he won’t reveal. Then Nick is ushered alone into Gatsby’s office – and Robert Redford is allowed to be a star and flash, not the confident but sinister smile of the self-made man, but the Robert Redford star smile, impressive and impressively bland. Then, when he takes Nick, played by Sam Waterson, into the city and explains his past, Nick listens impassively as the tale spins out. We only perceive him as listening without judgment.  

Anyone who has read the book can tell the difference – the fact that we do not sense Gatsby’s simultaneously myth-making and Nick’s skepticism is an immediate, grave handicap. Even though Gatsby in the novel is a thin, barely perceptible character, he is as solid as Mount Rushmore compared to the character Redford embodies on the screen. And herein is the distance between the word and the picture. Great literature does not deal in the exterior, but the interior. Most of the great scenes, and great books, give us characters sometimes acting in direct contradiction to their deepest desires, motivated by social concern for their image, and it is only when we get inside their minds that we get a glimpse of the confusion, and desperation, gripping them. These contradictions, carried simultaneously, are what make them real to us, and both unique and commonplace. There is still no effective way to do this in the movies – voiceover is only so effective, and can only be used sparingly. The screen is invariably superficial as a result, and deals in emotions that can only be expressed visually – and quickly, because we have only a limited amount of time before the audience grows weary.  

Another example: The 1974 movie gamely tries to render one aspect of the book on screen. In the novel, after Nick has established the pattern of Gatsby’s parties, he then gives a long list of the guests who used to come. The list comprises about six paragraphs, and would be boring by itself except that Fitzgerald embroiders the names with little details about some the fates of the individuals once they left Gatsby’s hospitality. One man strangled his wife, while another drowned, while another stepped in front of a subway train. There are mentions of what happened at the parties-one man so drunk a car ran over his hand. And there are the sound of some of the names, which are occasionally Dickensian in their ability to conjure up feelings just by their distinctive sound – Leech, Bunson, Hornbeam, Blackbuck, Whitebait, Flink, Belcher, Hipp, Smirk, and James B. “Rot-Gut” Ferret. It is one aspect of Fitzgerald’s genius that he manages to flesh out the parties, contribute to the myth of Gatsby, and conjure up the Jazz Age in just a few sentences with what, on the surface, might be just a sequence of names. 

In the movie, this is inserted later in the script, when Daisy finally shows up at what inevitably is Gatsby’s last party. As she and Tom enter the festivities, Tom begins to point out the people there, mentioning the same names as in the book. But the effect isn’t quite the same. We aren’t paying attention to the names or the people. Tom’s recitation draws attention to him, not them. And when he states them, he is merely restating something we already knew – important people of high and low society come to Gatsby’s.  

This illustrates again that the movies are a different experience than the printed word, and filmmakers are usually conscious of the difference. When passionate readers of a particular book are disappointed that this or that detail doesn’t wind up on a screen, it is usually because it can’t be rendered visually. Not only that, it does not move the narrative forward, since every frame of a movie reveals producers and directors panicking that the story is not progressing fast enough to its conclusion. One of the best bits of the book is when Nick and Jordan wander through Gatsby’s party and encounter strange characters, much like the list, such as “Owl Eyes,” who seems flabbergasted that the books in Gatsby’s study are real. In the book, this underlines the fact that there is something fundamentally dishonest about Gatsby’s character which even casual guests perceive. 

Because the movies deal in image, they compromise Gatsby’s character almost fatally when he is portrayed on screen. The character Fitzgerald creates is a criminal – a bootlegger living on the proceeds of criminal acts, who probably has killed more than a few men, planning an elaborate adultery and ultimately shielding his mistress from possible charges of manslaughter. Yet, as Nick writes, “there was something gorgeous about him,” and we are carried away, as he is, by the “foul dust that floated in the wake of his dreams.” It is Gatsby’s quest and his own self-creation that endear him to us, his personal sense of gallantry, and his obliviousness to the fact that reality inevitably will snuff out his long-held dreams. When the movies render this, they give us the dash of Gatsby’s manners, the cut of his clothes, the polish on his automobiles, but they only hint that all of this is a mirage.

For example, take in Nick’s description of Gatsby after his meeting with Dan Cody, and the first intimations that he might leave the home that has frustrated his self-conceptions:

“He was a son of God — a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that — and he must be about His Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.”

The 1974 film desperately wants to render some of that language on the screen, but once again, it must deal in images. To highlight his character’s dilemma, Fitzgerald invokes the image of Christ, and intimates that there is something almost God-like about Gatsby. He is a singular creation, his passions and exploits are divine in nature and worthy of awe, and like Christ, he will ultimately suffer in pursuit of his mission. But Fitzgerald in the same short passage makes it clear that there is something phony, childish, and even morally wrong about Gatsby’s incarnation, and those qualities in and of themselves somehow only add to his greatness.  Here we see the contradictions of life, how our lives and ambitions can conspire to cancel each other out a dozen times, yet we continue on, as Nick concludes, “boats against the current.” 

How would we render such a thing on screen? One might look at another period film, “The Godfather,” the apex of filmed art for the era. (And remember, Francis Ford Coppola wrote the screenplays for both “Godfather” and “Gatsby,” and both are adapted from novels, though Coppola says his script didn't get made into the final film.) We know that Don Corleone is a bad man, but we see him at his daughter’s wedding, doting on his children and those who depend on him, and we are touched. It is still necessary to see the blood of the horse’s head on the sleeping movie producer to know that if necessary, the Don will kill mercilessly rather than be disrespected. It is necessary for us to “see” the evil in the Corleone crime family to understand the depth of the man, and the scene exists in the book. With Gatsby, it might be necessary for a film to invent such a scene and make Gatsby's morality real to us, but no one wants to add to Fitzgerald’s novel, for any host of reasons. (It also helps that while “The Godfather” is a novel, it is nowhere near an equal to “Gatsby” on the printed page. Coppola’s genius was in knowing what to cut out of a lurid, pulpy thriller, no matter how exalted some portions of it are.) 

In some ways, it is fitting that there is something frustrating and elusive about “The Great Gatsby,” just as the book itself illustrates the way our dreams evade our understanding and our ability to grasp them. Perhaps Luhrmann’s film will somehow give us a Gatsby alive on the screen and allow us to glimpse him as Fitzgerald did. Or maybe such a thing is like the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock – taunting us across the bay - something we stretch out our arms toward, knowing against our better selves that, sooner or later, we will grasp hold of it. Like everyone else, I'll be watching.

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After the Banquet by Yukio Mishima

Death figures heavily in the writing of Yukio Mishima, as even a casual reader knows. However, his 1960 novel, "After the Banquet," does not fit so neatly into the complete body of work. I've previously written about Mishima here and here.


Mishima himself grouped his novels into two categories - pièces noires and pièces roses, of which "After the Banquet" falls in the former category. It has a female protagonist and dashes of humor, and it displays an advanced and detached understanding of contemporary Japanese domestic politics. And its stance on death, more than anything, gives it a place of its own among Mishima's bloody and brilliant works.

"After the Banquet" opens with Kazu, the female owner of the Setsuogoan, a Tokyo restaurant frequented by the powerful and rich. Kazu's ownership is the culmination of a long climb to respectability, and her reputation as a hostess is well-known and well-earned. Her life changes when she meets Noguchi, a semi-retired former minister possessing a quiet style and a proud, stubborn, antique modesty.

The two form an attachment that later leads to marriage, though laying dormant in their relationship is their incompatibility. Kazu has a fierce, protective love for Noguchi, but we understand that she also sees their marriage as the final seal on her acceptance into polite society. But she is, at long last, an independent woman, and her love for the diplomat is complicated by the demands of her owning the Setsuogoan. Noguchi then begins a political campaign that Kazu takes part in, to the frustration of her husband. She discovers another part of herself in the process.

"After the Banquet" does not often get into the heads of its characters, dwelling instead on details of dress and scenery, going so far as to produce the menu for certain meals at social occasions. There may have been other reasons for this beyond simple considerations of style. Mishima based the story on events in the life of a real politician, Hachiro Arita, who later sued for invasion of privacy in a famous Japanese legal case.

One is constantly reminded that Noguchi and Kazu are older characters, though Noguchi is the more elderly. He has come to see his marriage as his final home, Mishima writes, and Kazu sees it as her tomb. "But people cannot go on living inside a tomb," the narrator's voice intones. 

When Noguchi takes Kazu to his family cemetery plot, and she encounters the grave of his first wife, we suddenly get a peek inside her head:

"Kazu had had no opportunity even at the wedding to meet the living members of Noguchi's family, but she could imagine how the dead ones with their high principles and absolute incorruptibility had transmitted the family's heritage to succeeding generations. Grinding poverty, obsequiousness, lies, contemptible natures - these were no concern of this family. Confused memories returned of obscene parties in country restaurants, of drunken customers thrusting their hands inside an innocent girl's kimono, of a runaway girl shrinking in terror as she boarded a night train, of back alleys in the city, of bought caresses, of petty ruses of every sort employed to protect herself, of the domineering kisses of cold-hearted men, of contempt mixed with affection, of a persistent craving for revenge against an unknown adversary: such experiences were surely undreamed of by this family."

Suddenly, we see Kazu has had a desperate fear of death, as though her life and its struggle would disappear into nothingness at the moment she leaves the earth. At one point in the book, Kazu realizes her possessions, symbolized by a vast collection of kimonos, is meaningless, and she feels "a desolation as if her flesh were suddenly melting away." By marrying a man of means and prestige, she has insured that one day she will buried among his family, her name finally having status and meaning. She perceives that death is the ultimate negation of her vital, emotional life. But by marrying, she has cheated her inevitable destiny.

She returns to the cemetery on election day, after lighting a candle before a Buddhist altar. She has a strange expectation that she can somehow woo the spirit of the former Mrs. Noguchi into bringing about an election victory supernaturally. Even the fact that mosquitoes are biting her is taken as a hardship, the endurance of which will bring about a reward.

"What do you say? Let's join hands, one woman to another, and help him win somehow." Kazu felt as if a beautiful friendship for this woman she had never met was rapidly materializing, and she wept a little. "What a fine lady, a fine lady. I am sure that if you were still alive we'd become good friends!"

Noguchi's defeat, which seems inevitable after a pamphlet reveals Kazu's notorious career for the voters, dooms the marriage. The couple cannot stay together because Noguchi had wanted a quiet retirement, while Kazu still longs for the Setsuogoan. In a decision much like Huck Finn's resolution to "go to hell" in helping a slave escape to freedom, Kazu chooses, in a sense, oblivion.

"There flashed before Kazu's eyes an unvisited grave in some desolate cemetery, belonging to someone who had died without a family...If Kazu were no longer a member of the Noguchi family, she would assuredly travel a straight road leading to that desolate grave...But something was calling Kazu for the distance. An animated life, every day wildly busy, many people coming and going - something like a perpetually blazing fire called her. That world held no resignation or abandoned hopes, no complicated principles; it was insincere and all its inhabitants fickle, but in return, drink and laughter bubbled up lightheartedly. That world seen from here looked like the torchlight of dancers scorching the night sky on a hilltop beyond dark meadows."

In this sense, Kazu is not very different from other "heroes" in the Mishima universe, for whom death is simply another, more final statement of life that adds a meaning, even if the meaning is meaningless. Like much of his audience, it is now that matters - knowing it will not last makes even the pain somehow sweet, in the sort of sad, philosophical sense that only a writer can believe. After the banquet, it is the hired help who cleans up after the celebrants. And the party becomes just another memory, if only for the sober.

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The Ghost of John Updike and the Boston Bombing

This weekend's capture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the brothers believed responsible for the Boston Marathon bombing, brings up many questions. Time and investigation will tell whether the brothers were acting alone, had identified future targets, or were supported by means beyond their own.

But the episode also poses an obscure cultural question - will the events of last week and the coming weeks' vindicate one of John Updike's last, and least regarded, novels?

"Terrorist" was published in 2006, five years after the 9/11 attacks. It follows the life of a teenage Muslim American, Ahmad Mulloy, and his high school counselor, Jack Levy, along with a number of other characters in the forgotten American urban landscape of New Prospect, N.J.

The novel came at an interesting juncture in Updike's career. Long regarded as a possible Nobel Prize candidate, Updike's work landed in bookstores with the regularity of the seasons. Novels arrived every two years, in between short story collections, essay collections or poetry. His reputation was unassailable. But there was a feeling, hovering in the background, that Updike's suburbanite guilt-ridden adulterous Christian protagonists, swathed in his characteristically elegant prose, has grown way too precious. There was a feeling that the Master had become too detached from reality.

The first hints of this came after the triumph of "In the Beauty of the Lilies," still my favorite Updike. He followed this up with experimental works, such as "Toward the End of Time," a pseudo-science fiction work, "Gertude and Claudius," giving the backstory of "Hamlet," and "Seek My Face" and "Villages," workmanlike and occasionally perplexing examinations of the art world and the early days of computers. 

Next came assaults from outside. Updike's contemporary, Philip Roth, executed his late career renaissance with his celebrated American trilogy of "American Pastoral," "I Married a Communist" and "The Human Stain." And from the right came Tom Wolfe, fresh off "The Bonfire of the Vanities" and "A Man In Full." Wolfe, responding to criticism from Updike that his work was not literature, called Updike a "stooge" who had lost touch with his audience - a critique he didn't reserve solely for Updike but for most of the literati.

"Terrorist" is, in some ways, Updike's attempt to answer back. He fills the novel with as much modernity as he can muster - when he wrote the novel, there was still a lingering criticism that American writers had not fully engaged the ramifications of the 9/11 attacks and the War on Terror. (Something that still remains largely unattempted.)  And "Terrorist" is many things, but most of its main characters are not suburban middle-class people struggling to contain their hormones. It's possible to see the book as a combination of Roth and Wolfe - engaging American society while registering as many status details as possible.

The criticisms of the novel at the time, as I recall, were that Updike's Muslim, Ahmad, was not credibly rendered. Ahmad's mother, as well as Levy, come off as a stereotypes, as well as the novel's black characters. These criticisms are interesting when one considers that the characters of Roth's "The Human Stain" are almost all stereotypes, but it works. The sense we had at the time was that "Terrorist" didn't work. Taking it off the shelf, it took a few minutes to remember precisely what happened in the book.

The first line of the novel:

"Devils, Ahmad thinks. These devils seek to take away my God." 

Ahmad thinks of his teachers as weak Christians and nonobservant Jews who "make a show of teaching virtue and righteous self-restraint" but whose "shifty eyes and hollow voices betray their lack of belief." From the opening is established a critique - we see the world through Ahmad's eyes and we see America as a false, hypocritical place full of soul-destroying danger. 

It's also important to remember that 2006 was when the War on Terror began to take on a different shading. President George W. Bush, fresh off re-election, was no longer a unifying leader but was by now mortally wounded politically due to the aftermath of the Iraq War and Hurricane Katrina. To many, we as a nation weren't in a generational global cultural conflict so much as replaying, in a Middle Eastern setting, our nation's continuing angst over Vietnam and presidential power.

That's why Updike's characters often fill "Terrorist" with liberal political critiques that sound more like a writer airing his frustrations than characters stating their views. It is this lapsing voice that is the novel's most frustrating problem. You find yourself admiring Updike's ambition in tackling the story at the same time you wish his execution was more exacting. When Ahmad's planned attack doesn't come off in the end, the reason, meant to be life-affirming and uplifting, instead feels false and unearned.

Ahmad in some ways fits what we know of the actual terrorists who have shown up in the past 20 years in America. Like their godfather, Sayyid Qutb, the 9/11 hijackers were not Islamic hermits who disengaged themselves from American culture. They were part of it - indeed the 9/11 hijackers conducted a meeting in Las Vegas weeks before the attack. It is the freedom of the culture that outraged them, even as they insinuated themselves into it. Ahmad doesn't square with what we know of the Tsarnaev brothers - Dzhokhar had a Twitter account much like any other, commenting on the movies and sports, and he was known to smoke pot. Ahmad's conduct seems naive, sheltered, abnormally sensitive. In this regard, he does not fit the profile - our real-life terrorists, at some crucial point, leave one with the lingering impression that their faith or the ideology is simply an excuse to inflict pain - ruthless, pitiless pain, on a grand scale.

There is an interesting scene involved Ahmad and Joryleen Grant, a black classmate who later becomes a prostitute. She undresses for him, talks to him, teases him, then sings "What a Friend We Have In Jesus." Is Ahmad being tempted by sex, or Christianity, or both and neither? It is this temptation, whatever it may be, which eventually inspires Ahmad to undertake his act of terrorism - in the end, violence is the only response when one succumbs, even in the mind, to temptation. That is the only way the true believer can earn redemption. At least this part seems true to life.

Updike's career will endure largely because of the length and depth of his talent and the character and quality of earlier novels. "Terrorist" is an interesting book, but it suffers in its critique for one reason at least - the reality it depicts wasn't born out later by events. Updike's depiction of the War on Terror has a disquieting moral equivalency between Islamic fundamentalist terrorism and America's reaction about it, and that reads less charitably after an event like the Boston Marathon attack and the city's response. Writing, perhaps with ideas of rendition, waterboarding, warrantless wiretaps and other causes in mind, Updike has one of his characters remark, "An open society is so defenseless. Everything the modern free world has achieved is so fragile."

If anything, the last week's events - senseless tragedy, national sympathy, patient police work, calm civic resolve - affirm that open societies are well-equipped to fight terror with the same freedom that inspires the attacks in the first place. Perhaps one of the flaws of our time is that we collectively expect something darker in our fiction to ring truer, darker even than evil that can strike in the most public places, when all we want to do is run.

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Mad Men: "The Doorway"

The sixth season of “Mad Men” opens in paradise, but Don Draper’s mind is in hell – he sits on a Hawaiian beach, Diamondhead in the background, reading the opening of Dante’s “Inferno:"

“Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray from the straight road, and awoke to find myself in a dark wood, alone…”

When last we saw Don, he was still recovering from the suicide of his business partner Lane Pryce, and finding his way after the departure of Peggy Olson for a rival agency. He spent the first year of his marriage seemingly committed to his second wife Megan, but we were left with the impression as the season ended that 1967 would see the end of his fidelity. And after a period of near failure, his advertising agency is finally beginning to assert itself as a player on Madison Avenue, following the firm’s securing an account with Jaguar. 

But what can we make of Don’s dipping into Dante? The answer comes at the end of the season opener, “The Doorway,” when we discover that Don has been having an affair with Sylvia, the wife of his neighbor, the heart surgeon Dr. Arnold Rosen.  “Did you read my Dante?” she asks, during their New Year’s Eve rendezvous. We understand from their dialogue that Don wants their affair to end, but he, of course, sought her out.

“The Doorway” is chiefly concerned with mortality, which you might expect from an episode that begins with the first lines of “The Divine Comedy.” Dante, in exile, writes of a supernatural encounter with the ghost of the classical poet Virgil, who then takes him on the beginning of a journey through Hell, Purgatory and, and eventually, Heaven. It is there that he will be reunited with his love Beatrice, and come face to face with God.  

As Don puts down his book on the beach, he notices his watch has stopped. Time has seemingly come to a standstill in paradise. But time is chiefly what Don and his coworkers are obsessed with. It is New Year, after all, the one time of life when we have no choice but to note its passage. There is Jonesy, the doorman for Don’s apartment building, who had a heart attack shortly before their trip and was saved by Dr. Rosen. There is Roger, who has to deal with the death of his mother after a long life. But time and mortality haunt Don, to the point where he can’t sleep and drinks so much that he vomits at the Sterling funeral, during a speech about what Mrs. Sterling’s life meant. 

These intimations of death have clearly gotten to Don (or is he still thinking about Lane’s death?) when he pitches an ad campaign using his Hawaii trip – and inadvertently leaves the impression of someone killing themselves. This references the very first episode of “Mad Men,” when Don struggled to come up with an ad campaign for Lucky Strike, knowing the product causes cancer. Roger comments on this:

“We sold actual death for 28 years with Lucky Strike. You know how we did it? We ignored it.”

In that first episode six years ago, Don said that advertising is a sign saying whatever you’re doing is okay. That’s perhaps what is being said throughout the episode – why do we take vacations to paradise? Why do we drink? Why do we worship? Because we know we will die, but as Dr. Rosen observes at episode’s end – “People do anything to alleviate their anxiety.” They want the sign by the side of the road assuring them that all is well. 

Don’s choice of reading material also reminds us of an earlier moment in the series. Don sent a copy of “Notes In the Middle of an Emergency” to Anna Draper, the wife of his dead namesake in season two. This was at a moment when Don began to grasp the loneliness of his double life, and the ethereal quality of his success. This time, however, it is a woman who has given him poetry.  

Dante’s work – our jumping off point – begins with a journey through Hell. John Ciardi, who translated “The Divine Comedy” says that the souls who find themselves in Dante’s Hell insisted upon it. “One must deliberately exclude himself from grace by hardening his heart against it. Hell is what the damned have actively and insistently wished for.” It is a hallmark of “Mad Men” that Don never stays happy for very long, that he seems insistent on melancholy. As Peggy told him last year, at the moment of the Jaguar triumph, he never seems to appreciate the good moments in life. 

There is also a spiritual subtext to “The Doorway,” much more vivid than is usually the case for “Mad Men.” (I continue to be amazed at how many times the characters refer to Jesus, and not just as a profanity.) For example, after his mother’s funeral, Roger feels moved to give his daughter a jar filled with water from the Jordan River. His father procured it on a business trip, and it baptized not only Roger but his daughter.

Peggy Olson deals with a work crisis while unable to get hold of her boss. We learn, through her end of a phone conversation with a pastor, that he seems to be on some sort of “religious retreat.” When he returns, he informs Peggy that his wife thinks he works too much. We also notice that Teddy is not the same character we were introduced to in the fourth season – a scheming, frustrated second-fiddle to Don Draper. He looks somehow content in a way that Don never seems, and that Peggy can’t seem to find either. 

 When Don meets Sylvia later, the camera pans across the bedroom to reveal a plastic mockup of a human heart – and a cross. And what day is it? Of course, it’s Sunday.  

But where the Inferno begins on Holy Thursday in the year 1300, “The Doorway” takes place in the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, 1967. “World Bids Adieu to a Violent Year,” is the headline in The New York Times when Don returns to his apartment. What neither he nor anybody else can know is that they are about to enter the bloodiest year of the 1960s, the most turbulent, and the most dispiriting. The Tet Offensive, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, the riots, the Chicago Democratic Convention, the hints of absolute disorder are right around the corner. But the future always looks bright on the first day of the year. 

Jules Whitcover, in his book, “The Year The Dream Died,” tells us that 1968 was a nightmare. “It was the year when the sensitivities and nerve ends of millions of Americans were assaulted almost beyond bearing,” he writes, “and the hopes of other millions were buried beneath a wave of violence, deception and collective trauma unmatched in any previous January through December in the nation’s memory.”

Essentially 1968 was a paradox. After less than a decade of expanding civil rights, loosening social attitudes, and unprecedented prosperity and technical innovation, American society descended into chaos, leaving one with the impression that things were not moving toward a social utopia.  Where Don Draper’s generation may have felt a self-satisfaction at the pace of liberal American democracy, the younger, more radical left felt democratic pretensions were  a sham, and American consumerism a dead end. !968 offered a clash of these sentiments, and many others. Instead of paradise,  many were moved to remark, “This country is going to hell.” 

Perhaps “Mad Men” – and the journey of Don Draper – is “The Divine Comedy” in reverse. Don begins in the 1960s in Paradise. “Who couldn’t be happy with all this?” he asks Roger over a drink in his office in the show’s second episode. But he loses his marriage at the same moment he must build a firm from nothing. The season he spent building it, and rebuilding his life, could function as a kind of purgatory. But as Don sits on the beach reading Dante, we wonder if he’s learned anything from his journey. 

Dante’s Hell was not a metaphor to him, just as any man’s suffering is not an entertainment. But as the sign above the gates of Hell reminded the poet, what makes Hell hellish is its never-ending absence of hope. It remains to be seen what awaits Don Draper in the new year.

Buy my book, "Brilliant Disguises" for .99 cents here.  Available in all e-formats.
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Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

To say “Gone Girl” is a love story would be truthful, but it would be truthful in the same way as saying Hannibal Lecter knows a lot about cooking.

“Gone Girl” is catastrophically romantic, as the character Nick Dunne says of his relationship with his wife Amy. It is a story of obsession, of love curdling into something very close to hatred, then metastasizing into obsession, domination and possession. But one is never really sure who is being possessed, who is obsessed, and where the line between love and hatred exists between Nick and his wife. And the book’s success over the last year can be traced to this hard center which lies at the heart of what might otherwise be only a well-crafted thriller.

Gillian Flynn’s novel uses the device of Nick telling the story of his wife disappearing, seemingly into thin air, one day after they have abandoned New York City for Nick’s hometown in Missouri. His chapters are immediately followed by one written by Amy, giving her side of their marriage. The couple’s move was brought on by the faltering economy, and a sudden change in fortune for the couple, who are both very skilled writers rendered unemployed by the recession and the changing publishing industry. Like many couples, moving unhinges the dynamics that have marked their still-developing marriage. Nick co-owns a bar with his sister Margo, and Amy is struggling to find herself in her new surroundings. But Amy has distinguished herself her whole life – the daughter of a husband-wife team of children’s book authors, their creation being an above average little girl named “Amazing Amy.”

Amy’s disappearance is the catalyst for some truths and some lies between the couple, and each has confessing to do within their pages. But we are conscious early on that Nick is not completely reliable with the truth, and neither is Amy, as we come to discover. Anyone who digests television news on a regular basis can spot the outlines of the story – a woman disappears and her husband quickly becomes the prime suspect. But by putting us in Nick’s (and Amy’s) head, the story doesn’t give us a Rashomon rehash of a marriage coming off the rails, but something else entirely. When the book abruptly changes gears mid-way through, the reader is by this time undeniably hooked.

Tricks? Of course. The couple’s words complement and contradict each other, with chapters ending at just the proper point to drive the reader forward. We know we are getting deeper and deeper into some very dark places, but we hardly care. The Dunnes aren’t a typical couple, by any definition, and they have some surprising things to say about the nature of love.

One theme of the book is genuineness. By taking us back through the beginnings of the Dunnes’ relationship, we see once again how two people assume roles in order to impress and attract the other. The act of courting allows a man and a woman to become, in someone else’s eyes, the person they have always wanted to be seen as. The past can be abandoned and ignored, or even discarded. We find ourselves longing for the artificial instead of the genuine, but the truth will out, as it always does.

But what about in our present world, where the line between the genuine and the artificial, or the genuine and the derivative, is always hard to spot? We live in a time where self-invention takes many virtual forms, but few concrete, tangible ones. Nick remarks on this about a third of the way into the book:

“It’s a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters.”

There is another aspect to the story – that of understanding, of appreciation, in the original sense of the word. When love begins in an emotionally immature or still developing person, it usually begins when one person believes the other person “gets them” – understands them on a level previously unknown by anyone else. Usually, this is a positive, and in places of “Gone Girl,” this holds true even for the Dunnes. But gradually, Amy and Nick want each other to fully “appreciate” who and what they are apart, and together. This is not necessarily a good thing at all. One can appreciate a caged lion in a very different way than appreciating one bearing down on you. Some knowledge is better appreciated from a safe distance through a veil of speculation, rather than feeling the full brunt and savagery of the information. 

And then, there’s love itself. In the final chapter of the book, Amy makes an observation:

“I was told love should be unconditional. That’s the rule, everyone says so. But if love has no boundaries, no limits, no conditions, why should anyone try to do the right thing ever? If I know I am loved no matter what, where is the challenge?...It makes me think that everyone is very wrong, that love should have many conditions. Love should require both partners to be their very best at all times. Unconditional love is an undisciplined love, and as we all have seen, undisciplined love is disastrous.”

Since Christian love is supposed to be unconditional, there is a ready answer for this – what Amy is talking about isn’t total unconditional love, not between two people. Because total love is what makes the other “try to do the right thing.”  It is love that inspires action, even constant action, that keeps the lover tuned into what the beloved wants, and vice versa. What Amy is speaking of sounds suspiciously like an act, a pantomime, but it is a serious observation, because for human beings, undisciplined love is disastrous. It easily changes and warps out of love and into the acts that drive the Dunnes apart, together, and back again, over and over. 

“Gone Girl” puts the hook into the reader, and then slowly reminds him that even the clichés that riddle the evening news are embodied by real people, and sometimes the light shines on them to reveal how much larger – and smaller – we all are than the images we cling to, about ourselves and each other.

Buy my book, "Brilliant Disguises," for .99 cents here. Available in all e-formats.
Buy my book, "The Uncanny Valley," for $5.99 here. Available in all e-formats.

'We didn't need dialogue...we had faces!'

"The Uncanny Valley" sprang to life by way of a magazine cover:

In a 2010 article, Forbes speculated that it wouldn't be too long before Hollywood began making new movies with old movie stars - dead movie stars, that is. Not too long after that, a tabloid story had George Lucas buying the rights to certain dead movie star's images in order to use them, via computer animation. Though this story came to nothing, there is still some buzz, every now and then, about seeing a "new" Humphrey Bogart movie, or a "new" Marilyn Monroe movie. Think about it - take an existing actor, superimpose the older actor's face onto the new, tinker with the voice, and suddenly, you can see what happened to Marilyn after "Some Like It Hot."

Of course, there are questions of taste to consider. But I was immediately struck by the image, and by the idea. Anybody who got my last novel, "Brilliant Disguises," knows how important the image of the face was in that book. This time, I was carried away by several ideas - for example, Hollywood replacing someone's natural face with the one it thinks you would rather see. It's the sort of thing Nora Desmond would understand:

Another, more obvious idea, is resurrection. This is the best Hollywood can do - a computer generated image, brought back to life, just on the slim hope you can relive a thrill, just for an instant. 

So my novel would be about an imaginary actor from the past, brought back to life, my only little version of "Frankenstein." But what to base him on? The Humphrey Bogart image obviously stuck with me, as did the role he was playing when he wore that famous white evening coat - Rick Blaine in "Casablanca." Umberto Eco observed that Casablanca does an almost mystical job of mixing a host of screen cliches into something fresh and totally captivating. But my story couldn't be about a Bogart character. Instead, I mixed in a little of that 50s icon who in many ways has been overshadowed by the intervening years - James Dean.

Like him, my character Buck Trapp would only make a handful of films - just enough to gain a cult following, and only enough so that a whole mythology might attach itself to him without any regard for who and what he actually was. Buck Trapp would encounter many of the 50s Hollywood benchmarks - westerns, religious epics, noir mysteries, even foreign films - and he would die violently, and all too soon.

But what to call his film? "The Uncanny Valley" is the name for a psychological phenomenon, the switch in your brain that tells you something that is supposed to look lifelike is not real. For any work of fiction to succeed, it must trigger the brain's "willing suspension of disbelief" - even though you know you're looking a series of still images projected on a screen, and you know those images are actors playing parts, you are willing to be lied to, on several levels, to be entertained. In the case of computer generated images though, especially those involving the human face, the closer an image gets to a real face, the harder it is to trick the brain into accepting it as "real." The Uncanny Valley is the distance between reality and fantasy, an expanse which seems small but can be vast. It also sounds like a mystery...

But "The Uncanny Valley" may also be the distance between the reality we perceive in our lives, and what others experience. We are often the poorest judges of who we are, where we're going, and what we're doing. Like many - too many - entertainers before him, Buck Trapp loses control of his life, forgetting the lessons he learned in a life before he was transformed into an idol unworthy of worship.

It is only when a present day actor, Newman Self, is asked to star in a sequel to Buck Trapp's greatest role that he tries to unlock the mystery of the earlier star's life, and learns what he lost. Resurrection, as the world practices it, is never permanent. But the journey to the land of the dead and back is always with us in life and literature, which is why there's a little bit of Orpheus thrown in our journey, mixed with bits from Mozart, and that other Resurrection which continues to dog our steps. And our movie is a little mixture of "Casablanca," "Gone With the Wind," and "Citizen Kane" thrown in for good measure.

And besides, who doesn't like the movies? The show's about to start...

To read an excerpt, click here. To order a copy, click here.

Buy my book, "Brilliant Disguises," for .99 cents here. Available in all e-formats.
Buy my book, "The Uncanny Valley," for $5.99 here. Available in all e-formats.