viz.

I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to view a trailer for Baz Luhrmann’s Great Gatsby adaptation yet, but I think I’ll see the film. This comment says nothing about my expectations for the film’s critical success, but rather reflects what a visual feast this production is sure to be. From what I can tell, the movie attempts to marry a 1920s aesthetic with the sorts of gratuitous celebrations I remember last seeing 1990s rap music videos. The parties in the Great Gatsby film, as you can glimpse above, seem to be indulgent and overly choreographed affairs. At times the frame rate even appears to slow down a bit (like the polo shot in the trailer above), and I think this is meant to give viewers an opportunity to take it all in. I remember first seeing this technique in rap music videos, when the director would give us a slow-motion pan shot of an eclectic street party. It’ll be interesting to see how successful Luhrmann’s marriage of this 1990s aesthetic is when added to the necessary narrative components of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece. One of my reservations is that there’s a way in which the novel is anxious about gratuitous wealth, especially about the ways wealth can potentially corrode moral fiber, and idealizing such parties seems out of step. My other reservation is that, judging from the trailers alone, the movie looks like a 2010s fashion catalogue.

(Image credit: Brooks Brothers)

My first impulse was that the film looks like something like a J. Crew catalogue, or maybe a GAP one. But what do I know? I don’t get these things in the mail. Then, over the weekend, I saw fellow viz blogger Jim Wiedner in a dapper seersucker suit, and my immediate thought in the hot Texas sun was “I have to get one of those things.” Not knowing where one gets those things, I pulled up Brooks Brothers website and voilà – they have an entire new catalogue inspired by the new Great Gatsby film. I knew there had to be one clothing chain involved in this picture. And, true to myself, I’m not quite sure how to feel about this. I’ve always felt a bit odd about product placement in film. I’ve gagged when spying a Burger King take-out sack in Iron Man, but absolutely love that moment in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet when Dennis Hopper’s character says “Heineken? Fuck that shit! Pabst Blue Ribbon!” The cynic would say that this reasoning is largely the product of my own taste, but I do prefer Heineken to PBR (though I never eat Burger King). And every time I see a BMW Z3 I fondly think of Pierce Brosnan’s James Bond films. Maybe what I’m sensing is that there’s something potentially lame or artistically untrue in associating two seemingly unrelated human productions? The moral quandary gets even more complicated here, as Luhrmann’s film crew designed costumes after old Brooks Brothers catalogues. So it is indeed product placement, but it’s also distended product placement. Not only do we learn that these are Brooks Brothers-style suits, but we also are told something about how we’re to think of Brooks Brothers' past. Maybe this is all fine if folks who neglected the novel in high school are inspired to pick it up so that something matches their expensive clothes? Heck, maybe they’ll even pick up Tender Is the Night.

(Image credit: Brooks Brothers)

Of course, I haven’t seen the film yet. It opens nation-wide on May 10^th. Perhaps it’s all a completely successful artistic endeavor. As F. Scott said it himself in the novel that bears its name, “And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”