Bishop Barron on "The Great Gatsby"

well the appearance of another film of f scott fitzgerald's of the great gatsby gives us an opportunity to reflect on what many consider to be the great American novel if you're looking for a real detail to review of the film qua film you might be disappointed I like to reflect really more on the story that lies behind it I will say this about the film I think the Baz Luhrmann version is better than the sleepy 1974 version and that Leonardo DiCaprio makes it better Gatsby than Robert Redford did but again I think this story is what is most important here as you know scott Fitzgerald began to belong to that famously lost generation of writers and artists people that came of age during the first world war which is really the worst calamity you could say in human history it was the most shocking calamity as Western civilization stumbled into this horrible a crisis these people witnessed it firsthand they also witnessed the fact that no institution political cultural religious really was able to deal with this crisis and it sent many of these young men adrift so it was Gertrude Stein who famously called them the Lost Generation most famously Hemingway but also John Dos Passos and Ford Madox Ford and F scott Fitzgerald belongs a course to that generation think of Hemingway whom I loved as a writer but what you find in Hemingway is this fascination with edgy experiences whether it's you know bullfighting or deep-sea fishing or or battling a you know political opponents and Hemingway had to put himself in these kind of limit situations to to stir up a sense of life it was his way of dealing with the collapse of meaning the collapse of sort of moral and spiritual structure around that time well scott Fitzgerald I think becomes a chronicler maybe the best chronicler of another way that people handle the collapse of meaning and that was to surrender to a life of conspicuous consumption and the Great Gatsby is a very telling commentary on just that tendency so you know the story well it deals with Tom and Daisy Buchanan who are denizens of East Egg which is a little town on Long Island where a lot of the old money resides and these are people who have everything you could possibly want in terms of wealth they've got the riches they have servants they have a beautiful home there's a great scene in the new version of Gatsby where we meet them for the first time and you see all the luxury that surrounds them but there they are really in utter boredom there's another scene not long after that one so Daisy sort of just falls into a languid you know life of regret and then her husband Tom is running off with all these sexual affairs with both people of the lower class and the upper class it's a scene toward the beginning the movie which is basically a drunken orgy that takes place in a Manhattan apartment the Tom owns the invites a group of his friends and they just spend the afternoon you know drinking and carrying on and carousing at the end of it everybody who was involved in that drunken orgy are just listless and lifeless and unhappy so we see that this picture of this life well then we meet the main character of the novel and of the film Gatsby himself Gatsby lives in in West Egg just across the bay from East a where some of the newer money resides Gatsby is a grand figure he wears a flashy suits he drives this yellow roadster he lives in an even more impressive mansion than the Buchanan's and every Saturday night he throws this magnificent party to which all the glitterati of New York are invited we discover that the purpose that party is to lure Daisy back Daisy and he had had a relationship some years before he's still pining after it hoping to revive it and hoping that he can lure this now married woman back into a relationship the parties are maybe the highlight of the book and the movie is is there this explosion of 1920s you know music and jazz and the 1920s outfits and the flappers and all this business and you see this sort of wild expression of conspicuous consumption those are Gatsby's parties well I won't go into any more details of the story only to say that these people whose lives are utterly given over to the satisfaction of their sensual desires the story ends up disastrously with the death of Gatsby at the hands of a gunman there's a thing though about the story and why it matters for us today f scott Fitzgerald himself knew that world well I mean he was a denizen of that world he was famous for his his drinking and his carousing nevertheless I should say really because of that he becomes a great moral surveyor of that situation he sees in a very clear-eyed way that what happens when morality spirituality a sense of transcendent purpose are lost what happens is this corroding of the soul which is a parent in every major character of The Great Gatsby even though he was himself a bit of a carouser he's like a transcendently clear moralist when it comes to seeing what goes on as a town that lies in between West Egg and Manhattan and the characters go back and forth through it all during the story it's a kind of a burnt-out underdeveloped economically depressed area a lot of the poor people live there and scott Fitzgerald clearly is commenting on the sort of de treatise of the roaring 20s what made that high life possible was an awful lot of economic exploitation so we're meant to see the kind of dark underbelly of American life at that time but there's something more going on because right at the middle of that event sort of burnt out town there's the remains of a billboard it was advertising an ophthalmologist it's oh you see are a pair of eyes surrounded by these owlish glasses but as the people go back and forth through the little town the eyes are watching well don't take too much symbolic imagination to see that those eyes are symbolic of God God who watches everything who sees everything many people the roaring 20s as many people today bracket God marginalized God there's no transcendent purpose there's no moral absolute all we should do is live our lives as kind of wildly and freely as we can we should live our lives in in conspicuous consumption no like it or not believe it or not God is watching there is a transcendent purpose there is a moral absolute when you forget it what happens are the lives of the characters in the great gatsby so if you're tempted to say oh who needs God I would say to you watch this movie based upon a book that was written by a very clear-eyed moralist who preaches a very good sermon that is still worth hearing

Channel: Bishop Robert Barron

Views: 41,402

Rating: 4.9506173 out of 5

Keywords: Fr. Barron, Word On Fire, The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Id: OLSVx84uPrY

Length: 8min 11sec (491 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 15 2013