The watches and the shirts that are at the center of the universe of capitalism

It's the Rolex.

Few can possess it, but almost everybody ought to desire one in her lifetime.

The Rolex featured recently in an episode (I watched a rerun) of the television serial The Big Bang Theory.

Bernadette, having got a job finding the magic pill for yeast infection, in the R & D department of a big pharmaceutical company, gifts a Rolex to her fiance, Howie. Howie is wonderstruck with the object yet a feeling of envy sneaks in. 

The Rolex corrupts his relation with "Bernie" momentarily with a power complex: Will Bernie now become the "man" of the family?

Switching to reality, two of the bank robbers (a pair of Dominicans from Yonkers, New York) who were involved in the biggest bank heist in human history (it was a cyber-heist), photographed themselves with piles of Rolexes after they stole their share and went on a luxury goods buying-spree in New York City.

These two under-enlightened loafers were merely using the commodity as a thing possessed, something akin in their minds to the classy female "pussy," is my guess.

When the commodity is fetishized by those who have no previous context to attach the commodity to, then it's all vulgarly phallic. But fetishized, it is.

Rolex, as I understand, is more than a watch; according to Karl Marx, it's a commodity, that transcends its use-value and acquires magical, near-theological value.

When inanimate things acquire godly powers, then they become commodities, and just as primitive societies worshipped or fetishized objects, so we, dwellers of modern, scientific, times, fetishize commodities. Yet, the act of fetishizing doesn't regress us into the status of "primitives." The more we worship objects, provided these objects are not mere barks of enchanted trees, or the aroma of monkey-brains, preserved in a jar, the more modern and properly civilized we are regarded as.

That is the precise point of Australian director Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby, as film critic A.O. Scott, so finely tells us in his discussion of the rising tide of commodity fetishizm in contemporary American movies.

In the novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald was ambivalent about the erotic life of objects, which is a foundation of materialism, excess and greed. That's why Fitzgerald's Gatsby, though he had a life of material excess, is punished with an unattended funeral. Arthur Miller's Willy Loman, the salesman who pined for making it better and bigger every single day of his life, was similarly punished with a thinly attended funeral.

When nobody shows up when you're dead, then it's a sign that nobody cared for you when you were alive.

However, the ambivalence toward the material life is removed from the latest film version of Gatsby.

The Rolex-centered universe is in full panoply through the 3D machinery in Luhrmann's movie. Additionally, and more fascinatingly, the aura of the rolex spreads to shirts. Gatsby enchants both Nick Carraway and Daisy with his collection of the world's "most beautiful" shirts, so beautiful that Daisy cries upon beholding and touching and feeling them.

Sometimes, it's said that Daisy is sexually aroused by the beauty of Gatsby's shirts, and the emotions transfer over onto the collector of those shirts.

I decided to take a look at the famous "shirt scene" from an earlier Great Gatsby (starring Robert Redford as Jay), since the new Gatsby has this scene in 3D and the idea is to enable the audience "feel" the shirts as well, in full, three-dimensional splendor.

Here is the scene:

Daisy is caressing the shirts; in the new Gatsby, she bursts into tears, sobbing into the thick folds of the clothing and saying, "It makes me sad, because I haven't seen such, such beautiful shirts."

A.O. Scott writes that in the novel perhaps the reader could attribute Daisy's tears to other causes as well. And they would be right in their attribution. But in Baz Luhrmann's film, one has no reason not to take Daisy at her word:

One of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s points is that "beautiful things in abundance can produce a powerful aesthetic response, akin to the sublime. And the sublimity of stuff, of shirts and cars and Champagne flutes and everything else that money can buy, is surely what drives Baz Luhrmann's wildly extravagant adaptation of Gatsby."

Commodity fetishizm, in other words, is at the center of the film.

Who is Daisy?

Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby has not only revived an interest in Fitzgerald's novel, but it has also revived an interest in the characters of the novel.

Daisy, for instance, remains an enigma; who is she? Don't look to the novel for much help, because in the prose, Daisy is less of a person, and more of an ideal, of all that, not only Jay Gatsby, but most of the romantically aspiring, male youth, of the novel yearn for.

Novelist Benjamin Lythal, whose debut novel, A Map of Tulsa, has a Gatsbyesque plot--in it a man goes home and stages a reunion with his former girlfriend, with disastrous consequences--says Daisy is to Jay Gatsby what Galatea is to Pygmalion (more or less).

To get to this analogy, Lythal quotes Joseph Brodsky's take on Pygmalion (from the essay, "On Grief and Reason"):

His fascination is not with what he sees but with what he imagines it conceals—what he has placed there. He invests her with mystery and then rushes to uncloak it: this rapacity is always Pygmalion’s double bind. It is as though the sculptor found himself puzzled by the facial expression of his model: she “sees” what he does not “see.”

The Jay Gatsby and Daisy relationship is akin to a Pygmalion relationship, in that Jay,

[The lover] is not even sure his beloved really exists but nonetheless craves her tutelage, her authority to see his life and judge it. She is the novel he has tried to write about himself.

The Gatsby is flat

...and Baz Luhrmann's film, The Great Gatsby is, in the spirit of Fitzgerald's novel, anti-fantasist.

In The Serious Superficiality of The Great Gatsby, Joshua Rothman does a fine plucking out of what precisely F. Scott Fitzgerald's great American classic ought to be truly remembered for, and how director Baz Luhrmann's celluloid rendition of the novel gets it.

The film is "flat," the characters are "flatter" claim many critics of the movie, and Rothman says:

[...] I can’t help but feel that the film’s flatness is a deliberate choice; that what seems like a failure of Luhrmann’s imagination is actually a faithfulness to Fitzgerald’s. The characters are like that in the novel, too; that’s why Lionel Trilling, in “The Liberal Imagination,” compared them to “ideographs.” Flatness, after all, is the state to which all of Fitzgerald’s characters aspire. Even Gatsby, whose life thrums with secret ambition and desire, manages to be the cool man in the pink suit. “You always look so cool,” Daisy tells him. In a moment of admiration, she says that he resembles “an advertisement” of a man.

But the "flatness" is insightful in that:

It might seem as though, if we were to live out our fantasy lives, we would become more creative and expansive; we would be unfettered, alive, and truly ourselves. But “The Great Gatsby” doesn’t think that fantasies work that way. In “Gatsby,” everyone wants to be simpler than they really are. Everyone wants to give himself up to something that will define, constrain, and explain him—to be swept up into a fantasy that’s narrower than the life he really lives. Everyone is a fantasist, and, therefore, an actor, a “beautiful little fool.”

Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald sold the film rights of his novel The Great Gatsby (in the 20s) for a mere $60,000.

Perhaps the price was so flea-marketishly low because it was said that the novel itself was unfilmable as its real power comes less from the plot and more from the prose.

Some feel that The Great Gatsby, as film, would be closest to the spirit of the novel were it to be silent and black and white.

Above is the trailer of one such filmic version of the American masterpiece, made in 1926.

Giving the classics a third dimension

Many might object to the conversion of an F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, an American masterpiece, into a 3D movie.

3 dimensionalizing F Scott Fitzgerald's timeless classic would certainly accentuate the marvels of the external world of material excess into which Jay Gatsby plunges, but it wouldn't, as Maureen Dowd observes, bring to the surface some of the novels' deeper concerns: the decay of souls, the crumbling mythology and the dark side of social mobility.

Indeed, most memorable works of literature internalize conflicts, whereas technology like 3D can only visually dramatize external one's.

Imagine a 3D version of Herman Melville's Moby Dick. I can see the gorgeousness of the sea and the waves reaching out to us via our 3D glasses, but we would remain blind and inert to the inner recesses of Captain Ahab's tortured mind.

How about a 3D peep into Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter? Honestly, having seen and been disappointed by the Demi Moore-dominated morose version of this movie, I can't see any uplift in the visual experience, except for suffering a nightmare or two about a marauding pair of breasts (Demi Moore's) with the letters "A" coming at you.

My point is that excellent literary works are inlaid with a third dimension already; The instrument that is most likely to bring this dimension out are our eyes, unadorned by 3D glasses.

The one novel I can think of that would be a super visual and visceral experience were we to watch a film version of it in 3D, is H.G. Wells' The Time Machine...and all of the Victorian boys adventure novels.

By the way, I was surprised to find that the music of Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby is composed by Jay-Z. Eerie echo of Jay Gatsby?