Nick Ain't Straight (The Great Gatsby)

[Music] hey guys since my last couple videos have been about uh disability abuse redemption genocide ultron i figured out how to lay off the heavy stuff for a while a friend suggested i make a video about something i liked something fun i wasn't sure what i wanted to cover until i remembered my great gatsby obsession you see as a teenager i had to read the great gatsby for english class and you guys gotta remember that the queer rep landscape has changed drastically over the last decade like really really [ __ ] drastically in 2013 i was a freshly realized queer person and really [ __ ] discouraged by how few stories had room for people like me thus i was always on the hunt for a whiff of queer subtext which led to the notorious book discussion day where i raised my hand proposed that nick wasn't straight and my classmate shot me down like well like gatsby i guess [Music] and i cradled that resentment like a bundle of hot coals within my breast and i waited year after terrible year for my chance to unleash that fiery burden upon the world for some day i would have my vengeance they'd see they'd all see that this book is really [ __ ] [Music] gay now here's how this is gonna go i'm gonna describe the plot of the book then talk about what i think makes the book queer and then i'm gonna talk about how the movies handled that queerness or you know didn't suddenly i began to like new york a couple notes before we begin one i'd like to explore the queer angle of the great gatsby but i do not condone fitzgerald's or nyx bigotry this book contains some real racist and anti-semitic [ __ ] just know that i don't hold this story up as the great american novel or a cinnamon roll too pure for this world oow gay romp through the tulips it's racist it's anti-semitic today we make fitzgerald's grave spin like a hamster wheel two if you don't like the word queer you'll want to close this video i'm a queer person and i use that word as an umbrella term three queer theory tends to make people really defensive so i want to clear this up now i believe that two objectively correct analyses can exist at one time if you read nick as straight then congratulations you are right there is a very valid version of this book where nick is straight as a poll i also think there's a valid version of this book where he's not straight and that's the version i want to talk about today but that doesn't have to be your cup of tea you you don't have to watch this video welp now that that's done time to force my gay agenda onto a book about car crashes summary it's june 1922 nick carraway fresh from the warfront and weary of well life moves to west egg long island he rents a cottage next to a mansion owned by a mysterious rich guy jay gatsby who throws lavish parties nick goes to visit his cousin daisy buchanan and her very muscular husband tom buchanan who lived directly across the bay from nick and gatsby at daisy's house nick beats jordan a famous golfer later nick takes the train with tom to new york nom take nom who's nom tom takes nick to meet his mistress myrtle wilson whose oblivious husband owns a gas station also this guy named dr t.j eckelberg made a billboard of eyes that freaks everybody the [ __ ] out tom and myrtle then take nick to an apartment where a drunken party ensues here nick meets mr mckee who we'll get to later nick goes to one of gatsby's parties with jordan as kinda sort of his date the two wander around the mansion for a while in the library they mean a drunken man that nick calls owl eyes nick also meets gatsby who more or less dazzles him gatsby takes jordan aside to tell her something in late july gatsby details his supposed history to nick he claims he's a war hero from a wealthy family with an oxford education he and nick have lunch with a gambler named wolfsheim it's strongly suggested that gatsby gets his money from beat like booze gatsby asked nick to meet with jordan for t nick follows gatsby's command and at the tea garden jordan reveals what gatsby told her at his party turns out gatsby met daisy five years ago as a penniless soldier the two fell for each other but the army called gaspi away and he didn't return to the states for several years in that time daisy married tom buchanan gatsby determined to win daisy back did the logical thing and amassed a fortune bought a house directly across the bay from her and threw giant parties to try and tempt her over to west end this has not worked thus far so now he's asked jordan to ask nick to ask daisy to t nick agrees he kisses jordan and then arranges to meet daisy for tea at his cottage daisy arrives gatsby surprises her and the two reunite gatsby gives nick and daisy a tour of his mansion daisy cries into some shirts we get a flashback where nick reveals gatsby's true past james gatz was a north dakotan fisher boy who decided to shake his poor legacy with a new name jay gatsby he took off with dan cody a rich yacht sailor and wandered around the seas for a couple years before cody died and jay left for the midwest met daisy and got shipped off to fight the germans back to the main timeline tom kind of realizes daisy and gatsby have a thing for each other they all decide to go to town tom demands to drive gatsby's car so he and jordan and nick take gatsby's yellow car while gatsby and daisy take tom's blue car tom stops to get gas at wilson's garage wilson has found out myrtle's having an affair though he doesn't know with whom he's decided to force her to move out west myrtle sees tom in the yellow car and your people are everybody congregates at a hotel gatsby confronts tom and declares that daisy belongs to him this does not go well nick and jordan are still here for some reason you can tell daisy has decided she's not gonna run away with gatsby it's also nick's birthday hooray welp time to go home daisy and gatsby take the yellow car out of town tom nick and jordan take the blue car daisy's driving the yellow car when they pass wilson's garage myrtle sees the yellow car from afar and thinks it's tom come to rescue her she runs out into the road to receive the car [Music] and tom arrives however long later and he and nick and jordan find myrtle's body this makes tom he and jordan and nick all arrive back at tom and daisy's place jordan tries to drag nick along to have some food and nick puts his foot down and says no this pretty much marks the end of their fling gatsby has taken the fall for the car crash nick wakes up at dawn and finds gatsby the two wander around the mansion and smoke together gatsby tells nick more about his real past daisy and the war in his brief time at oxford nick misses several trains to stay with gatsby he finally decides to go to work but promises to call gatsby at noon meanwhile wilson has gone to toms to avenge his wife he thinks tom owns the yellow car but tom assures him that it's gaspies so wilson walks over to gatsby's mansion shoots gatsby and then shoots himself oh no nick mourns gatsby he arranges the funeral which only he gatsby's dad and our lives attend tom and daisy flee new york retreating into their carelessness insert metaphor here about the allure of the american dream and how we'll never move up the ranks the end okay so where is the gay where is it where is it you little cup well to understand that we need to understand nick because his dishonesty reflects on his sexuality and i know that sounds weird but please please stick with me in consequence i'm inclined to reserve all judgments a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran boars see to be a reliable narrator nick needs to be a neutral party to not contaminate the story with personal bias hallie edwards warns as a reader you should be skeptical of nick because of how he opens the story namely that he spends a few pages basically trying to prove himself a reliable source and later how he characterizes himself as one of the few honest people i have ever known after all does an honest person really have to defend their own honesty i promise i'm honest guys super duper oddest nothing like those other people i'm so moral and reliable and i would never lie to you have i mentioned how honest i am now excuse me while i go help cover up an affair there's the fact that nick hides daisy's affair from tom but i feel like nick's biases are exemplified by his stance on tom and gatsby iwasi elect put this perfectly gatsby is after all a bootlegger a criminal perhaps even a murderer or someone who threatens murder if tom's report of walter chase's fear is accurate tom makes love to another man's wife but so does gatsby tom buys myrtle for a few trinkets and daisy for a 350 000 necklace gatsby tries to buy her with his magnificent mansion tom orchestrates a rather messy party in which people get sloppy drunk and violent but so does gatsby only this scale is greater tom may be insensitive to people but gatsby hardly seems to be aware that anyone other than daisy exists nick claims he's always disapproved of gatsby but when you compare the way he describes these two men you can tell that under all the cynicism nick finds gatsby gorgeous and pleasant and finds tom arrogant and cruel he wants gatsby to succeed and tom to fail if nick were truly to view these two men through a reserved neutral lens surely he wouldn't prop gatsby up so much surely he would not say to gatsby they're a rotten crowd they're worth the whole damn bunch put together what the hell what has gatsby done to deserve that status other than lie and break the law and try to buy daisy's love what's so special about him that separates him from the rotten masses nick's clearly biased here but why i posit that deep down nick suspects he's not an honest person maybe that the war has done more damage to him than limit his tolerance to other people's riotous excursions but nick still wants us to see him as that neutral camera lens he needs outside reassurance because he's started to doubt his own hype and gatsby embraces and validates nick's facade he smiled understandingly much more than understandingly it was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it that you may come across four or five times in life it faced or seemed to face the whole external world for an instant and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor it understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that at your best you hope to convey so that sense of reassurance might give gatsby a leg over tom it's possible that nick also likes gatsby more than tom because he and nick are kindred spirits there's a lot to compare and contrast between these two both nick and gatsby grew up in the midwest they both fought in the great war stationed close enough together that gatsby even recognized nick from his battalion they both returned from the war to find their hopes dashed they both left the midwest for long island they both hide behind their respective facades gatsby his wealth and nick his honesty i'm thirty i said i'm five years too old to lie to myself sure jan but i feel like gatsby's hope captures nick the most here's the excuse nick gives for why he decided to make gatsby his exception i wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart only gatsby the man who gives his name to this book was exempt from my reaction it was an extraordinary gift for hope a romantic readiness such as i have never found in any other person and which it is not likely i shall ever find again no gatsby turned out all right at the end by the end of the book nick's curiosity about gatsby's hope has turned to a kind of blind devotion the compliment your worth the whole damn bunch put together shows that as much as nick may shake his finger or roll his eyes at gatsby he upholds him as a symbol of hope and purity amidst a rotten careless world which what this dude you want to pin that on this dude the vaguely creepy childish obsessive egocentric bootlegger this shoot so that's the end of the straight version nick's biased towards gatsby because he relates to him or he's blinded by hope or both then there's the queer version which can be read on top of the straight one that nick thinks tom's hot yeah but he has a huge stinking crush on gatsby a lot of us queer folks have had to lie to ourselves and others at some point we've established that he's not a reliable narrator and romantic attraction would certainly help explain his gatsby-sized blind spot it also makes sense for nick to bury his queerness as a way to preserve his morality and that's that because i'm equating immorality to queerness it's because it's 1920 and there are lots of course views out there and we'll talk about this more later are you okay i actually [Music] it's fun to read nick's devotion to gatsby as romantic because then you get to compare and contrast nick's love for gatsby with gatsby's love for daisy it seems to me that while gatsby might have fallen for the real daisy when they first met over the years daisy became a symbol to him almost five years there must have been moments even that afternoon when daisy tumbled short of his dreams not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion it had gone beyond her beyond everything he had thrown himself into it with a creative passion adding to it all the time decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way no amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart then there's the besotted nick who while he claims he's always doubted gatsby's facade believes gatsby came out of this mess all right the gatsby was a victim and the real problem lay with the people who preyed upon his hope there's truth to tom's statement here little dust in your eyes nick just like you did with daisy gatsby's aim was to dazzle daisy but as much as nick denies the fact he also fell under gatsby's spell then there's the fact that gatsby doesn't care about the real daisy he loves her as a symbol and she never gets to know the real gatsby he never tells daisy his past or even his real name nick speculates that gatsby might have lost his hope at the very end but as far as we know gatsby never left his dream world where he and daisy lived happily ever after in his mansion full of polo shirts he just couldn't face reality but even as he swept away by gatsby's hope nick cares about the man underneath that smile hundreds of new yorkers were taken by gatsby's lavish parties but when he died no one but nick gatsby's dad and owl eyes attend his funeral i cannot find anyone who knows anything real about mr gatsby well i don't care he gets large parties and i like large parties they're so intimate all these people cared about was the facade not the real person nick meanwhile sits up with gatsby for hours to hear him tell the story of james gatz the poor farm boy from north dakota when gatsby dies nick's the one who makes the arrangements who calls number after number to beg anyone to come to gatsby's funeral who's there for gatsby's father when he arrives from the midwest you could even say nick sacrificed part of his own facade for gatsby when the book began nick clung to that role as the neutral observer but that required him to be detached from the events around him he could have left someone else to care for gatsby and preserve that you know false sense of distance instead he shucks the veil of neutrality and anoints himself the point person of gatsby's funeral arrangements you could honestly say he takes up the role of the grieving widow here that's a far cry from neutral i wanted to get somebody for him i wanted to go into the room where he lay and reassure him i'll get somebody for you gatsby don't worry just trust me and i'll get somebody for you there's still deception between both of these cases but when you compare the two nick's love for gatsby platonic or not was more honest and real than gatsby's love for daisy so that's a little bit gay i feel like no gatesby analysis is complete without at least a nod to jordan because she radiates queer energy like smoke from a house fire but yeah i don't know about how that relates to nick he did have a fling with the most androgynous woman he could find but you know that doesn't make him queer you could be straight and have a type but hey worth a worth of nod oh my god at last we've arrived at the holy grail of gatsby queer theory oh my god okay it's happening everybody stay calm everyone what's the procedure okay so here's where a lot of queer people stop and go wait a [ __ ] second let's backtrack to that party with tom and his mistress myrtle enter mr mckee a pale feminine photographer and his shrill languid handsome and horrible wife in consequence i'm inclined to reserve all judgments both myrtle and her sister catherine get up close and personal with nick but nick doesn't make a move on them in fact his descriptions of them make it seem like he's turned off by their advances he only reaches out to mr mckee mr mckee was asleep on a chair with his fists clenched in his lap like a photograph of a man of action taking out my handkerchief i wiped from his cheek the remains of the spot of dried lather that had worried me all the afternoon like have you ever talked to someone with a piece of tape or a leaf on their shirt and spent the whole conversation wishing you could find an excuse to reach over and brush it off that could be the vibe here which i love but also that's kind of tender because americans are a lot of things but we're also super rigid about physical contact it's socially acceptable for a friend to pluck a hair off your sweater or tell you you have a bit of lather on your face but by the time you're an adult you'll rarely see anyone but a loved one reach over with a napkin and wipe that lather off your face for you so that starts the evening off with a bit of a questionable undercurrent then this happens mr mckee turned and continued on out the door taking my hat from the chandelier i followed come to lunch someday he suggested as we groaned down the elevator where anywhere keep your hands off the lever snapped the elevator boy i beg your pardon said mr mckee with dignity i didn't know i was touching it alright i agreed i'll be glad to okay so nick leaves the party with mr mckee while everyone else stays behind but the night's not over yet lads i beg your pardon said mr mckee with dignity i didn't know i was touching it all right i agreed i'll be glad to i was standing beside the bed and he was sitting up between the sheets clad in his underwear with a great portfolio in his hands beauty and the beast loneliness old grocery horse brooking bridge then i was lying half asleep in the cold lower level of the pennsylvania station staring at the morning tribune and waiting for the four o'clock train we cut directly from the elevator to mr mckee's bedroom with nick beside the bed and mr mckee very nearly naked under the sheets as he reads aloud from his portfolio nick left the party and took that elevator a little before midnight we have no clue how long nick waited for the four o'clock train and therefore no way to put a time stamp on how many the hours between midnight and four nick spent with mr mckee versus how many he spent wandering around new york city or waiting at penn station how long did mrs mckee stay at the party for all we know nick could have been with mr mckee a full hour before the scene with the portfolio we don't know is nick fully clothed is this all post-coital what the [ __ ] is going on because i mean yeah fitzgerald could have gone feral for no reason why not but there are so many ways to show that two characters are drunk why a bedroom even a living room would have felt less explicit why did fitzgerald strip mckee down to his underwear and all these ellipses suggest something happened whether before or after the bedroom scene how much of the night does nick not remember and how much has he chosen to cut out it's honestly like nick's senses a scene has become too gay and yanks the car around to the next one like so i left the party with some guy and we went down to his room and he took his shirt and pants off then anyway there i was at penn station about gatsby's parties now usually i have to work to explain the queer version of a text this time i have to work to explain the straight version to get to why i really think nick ended up next to an underwear clad mckee i finally have to give some background on fitzgerald and how he feels about queerness in 2020 the queer rights movement has advanced enough that a good chunk of the american population understands that queerness doesn't somehow reflect a person's morality it's not a choice it's who you are a fact like how you look and where you were born in 1920 new york's relationship with queerness was complicated queer nightlife bloomed and while many straight people were fascinated by queer culture or at least drag shows bigotry was still the social norm fitzgerald was very concerned with homosexuality he wrote about queer people by all accounts his masculinity was very fragile to the point that he felt the need to assert his straightness to his friends across all the articles i could find there was also a consensus that while fitzgerald would sometimes accept fairies he still viewed queerness as a moral deficit to fitzgerald queerness was something that could happen to any man without enough resolve and he seemed fascinated by that supposed struggle in tender as the night fitzgerald's last completed book the character dick driver talks to a gay man about his sexuality it's a hole in corner business at best dick told him you'll spend your whole life on it and its consequences and you won't have time or energy for any other decent or social act if you want to face the world you'll have to begin by controlling your sensuality fitzgerald notoriously borrowed elements from his own life people and places as well as his own past and problems and mash them together to make his stories you'll have to explore all the parallels between his work and his real life on your own time because this video is already so [ __ ] long but yeah fitzgerald's struggle with masculinity and morality could have bled through to the scene with mr mckee maybe fitz only wanted nick the false observer to come across some gay guy for the laws or it could be commentary about nick's morality told through the lens of queerness that could have been fitzgerald's version of a nick can't be trusted billboard i bring up fitzgerald only because his background gives us one way to understand this scene not because he's the one with final say over what's queer and what's not i'm one of those death of the author types and i feel like as long as you can back up your claims with textual evidence you get to decide what the story means not the author also the context of a story can change with the culture maybe a hundred years ago the scene somehow would have seemed pretty straight today the bedroom scene with mr mckee not only feels very queer to me but makes nick seem more moral not less maggie frolic writes as a homosexual man then nick understands the necessity of deceit in a society that defines one's desire and agency as illicit and where there are eyes and cameras everywhere in this he identifies with women particularly jordan baker it would have been difficult for nick to admit he was dishonest but to come out as queer was actively dangerous if nick shares fitzgerald's view of queerness then his quest to defend his decency could also be his quest to defend his straightness his determination to believe he's a good honest person becomes his determination to believe he's straight why should i care i've read a couple articles where people argue that nick's queerness matters because it outs him as an unreliable narrator there are other ways to tell that nick's a liar though you can look at how jordan baker calls nick out you can look at the way nick judges other people you can look at the way nick periodically stops the story to remind you he's a good person you can look at the way he helps conceive and cover up his cousin's affair you can compare the way he talks about gatsby and tom and claim that bias comes from gatsby's hope or any of the other reasons i gave that weren't nick's romantic love nick doesn't magically become an honest person because he's straight to me nick's sexuality changes the shape of that dishonesty it creates two versions of this book both are about deceit and i think both are valid but they contain very different nics the queer version of a great gatsby paints a scenario where nick's dishonesty comes not from a place of pride but of self-preservation that starkly changes nick's relationship with people like gatsby and jordan it changes why nick feels the need to put the brakes on his desires when everyone around him can let loose and chase their pleasure it adds a more tragic tinge to his struggle to be seen as moral and good his desire to be separate becomes a desire to be without desire he can't face he's fallen for gatsby so he clings to his status as a neutral observer that version of the story will resonate with a lot of queer readers and that's where i think nick's sexuality will matter to some readers more than others it won't break the novel to see nick as straight however it does strike me as strange when people claim a queer version of this story doesn't exist at all when mr [ __ ] mckee is right [ __ ] there on the topic of people who claim a queer version of this story doesn't exist i present to you the great gatsby the straightest films ever made that's not fair but they're they're they're pretty straight there are five great gatsby films altogether but the first one a silent film was famously lost the 1949 film was boring as [ __ ] 130 men with 16 louis guns that's when they made him a major we got back to new york in november 1919 i picked up a railroad ticket for him to louisville i only managed to keep myself awake with a constant stream of raisinets i wish i could tell you guys that this scene is gay but somehow there are no undertones the only thing that's wonderful is the face he makes when he gets shot yeah that's great the 1974 gatsby film has a nick he does the gay eye roll at tom and myrtle two girls dance and that's kind of queer that that's kind of all not for lack of trying though you see bob evans asked truman capote to write up a screenplay for the 1974 film bazlerman that guy who's responsible for this can tell you what happened next there's a screenplay for 1974's the great gatsby written by truman capote which i got my hands on bob evans whom i now know very well and who was running the studio at the time rejected it because basically jordan is gay and nick is gay and the script is too hardcore truman was really upset about it and went on television and called paramount a bunch of wankers it's in his hand but it's totally legible it's also unfinished basically it's mad and bad and crazy seth was lovely enough to find and scan said mad bad and crazy screenplay from the new york public library so now we can all read capote's gatsby and while there's no mr mckeeson capote still makes his gay agenda known i'm talking speculation about whether or not gatsby's queer i'm talking nick and gatsby skinny dipping together this screenplay wasn't uh what's the word great well if you were in my shoes what would you have done i don't know tom i don't know the camera trawls through the window and through the snow flurried air towards a close-up of the huge blue-eyed spectacles that cover the whole screen i can't even say this line with a stream only died it's so bad it's terrible okay i couldn't do it only dr eckleburg could ever answer that needless to say bob evans called francis coppola who worked with jack clayton to rebuild the screenplay from scratch so no queer gatsby for us any and all hints of queerness were scrubbed away the story was even padded out with more gatsby and daisy moments so that's a situation where someone tried to add queerness and was very much shut down the 2000s film more the same people often rank this gatsby film as more queer than the others and i i kind of get that in the book after gatsby gets turned down by daisy he still tells his butler to mind the phone he wants to believe she'll still call him and tell him she's changed her mind daisy never calls and gatsby dies but the 2000s film does this oh [ __ ] remember how i was like oh when you compare nick's love for gatsby versus daisy's love for gatsby nick's love was the most real gatsby expects a call from his lover and nick's the one nix cares enough to check up on him that's a direct comparison between nick and daisy my dudes with nick as the person who comes out on top that's kind of all then there's the 2013 film i had hopes for this one y'all mostly because of the year i figured yeah 2013 was a very different landscape from 1949 1974 and 2000. 2013's also very different from 2020 but i hoped we had come far enough along by that point that i could expect to see at least some level of and suddenly i began to straight for like [ __ ] seconds in the book catherine leans close and whispers in nick's ear that's the only clue we get to her in nick's position they only ever chat with each other though you get the sense catherine might want nick to make a move on her the great gatsby 2013 places catherine on nick's lap and has them make out but they also pull the telephone switcheroo which makes me happy bazlerman well he's aware of the queer version of the great gatsby he concedes that capote might have been onto something with his queer portrayal of nick he's writing the book about gatsby because he's trying to work out his feelings towards him which in any interpretation are deeply romantic are they physically romantic i don't think they ever were in the story but is it possible that nick carraway could ever be physically romantic with a man all that is going to be answered after the book is completed when nick carraway is ready to be nick carraway when he's able to find himself okay so the phrase able to find himself sticks out to me here it says to me that baz's nick doesn't know whether he's queer or not and would need to take some time out to himself to come to that conclusion my version of dick knows deep down that he's queer but wants to believe otherwise so he puts on a mask and seeks others reassurance it's like baz's nick needs to find himself and my nick needs to face himself yeah baz doesn't seem opposed to a queer nick and we get a couple moments that could be queer like the phone scene or maybe even this garden scene and then there's the real gold mine [Music] his smile was one of those rare smiles that you may come across four or five times in life it seemed to understand you and believe in you just as you would like to be understood and believed in but there's also i said i'm straight while the film blatantly shows nick's attraction to women any attraction to men has to be mined from subtext there's a divided consensus within the queer gatsby circle as to whether this film went so far as to erase all hints of gayness i no i wouldn't go that far but i get the sense that the queer moments were designed to be covert enough to slip under the radar for anyone but queer fans what rab you want nick and gatsby to french kiss under the full moon no i want somebody to finally have the balls to adapt the scene with mr [ __ ] mckee you can have straight versions that's fine but why do we not have any mr mckee to me mr mckee is the face of nick's queerness you can get queer vibes from nick and talk about his bias towards gatsby and maybe compare his love for gatsby to daisies but the scene with mckee provides the ground for that analysis to stand on it's foundational to this version of the great gatsby and none of the films include the bedroom scene with mr mckee nick never leaves the party with him they never take the elevator together they never end up in his room because like fine the straight version yeah more people are going to be aware of that one make that but why shy away from mr mckee altogether why erase him from these films they all made that choice well there's the extraneous scene argument but at 47 000 words half the length of the hobbit the great gatsby doesn't have a lot of room for extraneous scenes the mckee scene doesn't appear to add a lot to the book at first glance but neither does the scene where myrtle and tom by a dog and that got adapted the fact that none of these films adapted the mcki scene says to me that time wasn't the most prominent factor here see there's a reason my classmates disregarded any suggestion that nick was queer but were perfectly happy to argue the symbolism of the color of gatsby's car for half the period queer analysis doesn't carry the same validity as other essay topics we're taught to only explore the straight and cis versions of any given story it takes time to unlearn that lesson and not everyone will do so the mcki scene along with any other queer vibes has gone over a lot of americans heads for decades there are people teachers even who will reread this book for years and years and still blip over the keys bedroom in the middle of a class discussion of f scott fitzgerald's the great gatsby some years ago a student raised his hand and asked in essence what are we supposed to make of the scene where nick carraway goes off with a gay guy and i said in essence wait what gay guy he pointed me to the scene that closes chapter 3. this is the chapter in which nick accompanies tom buchanan and his mistress myrtle to an apartment tom keeps in manhattan i had i'm embarrassed to say never seen that passage before except that's not true i'd read the book half a dozen times since college and taught it once but i had somehow missed the fact that the narrator wanders off in a drunken stupor with a stranger and ends up in his bedroom when a person reads the mckee scene fitzgerald provides the words but the reader's the one doing all the visual leg work they can make the choice to hand wave the underwear and the bedroom as drunken nonsense but a film would eliminate that control over the scene a person would be forced to see nick leave the party with another man see him take the elevator down to his room and see him next to that other man's bed with the other man stripped down to his underwear it doesn't come up too often but people do care about gatsby as a story many people will have read this book at a very formative point in their lives and most of them will have read nick as straight i dare pause it a mckee bedroom scene would make a lot of those people upset or confused or both and with big reboots like these of course you want to avoid that reaction where you can 2013 might have been a more tolerant year but warner bros wanted to cast as wide a net as possible so as to make as much money as possible yeah they're not going to risk a bedroom scene with queer overtones however short better to give nick a good old case of the not gays and maybe throw the queer fans a bone with some fireworks i'm not gay no more i am deliberate i don't like men no more i thought i like women women you'd expect smaller adaptations to be more brazen maybe but the great gatsby is still under copyright in the united states you can make an essay sure or parody something that's transformative enough to fall under fair use law but to adapt the great gatsby as a us citizen you would need permission from the fitzgerald estate which would take a [ __ ] ton of time and likely a [ __ ] ton of cash these people are very protective of gatsby as a property one graphic novel has been given the green light from the estate and there's no mckee bedroom scene one stage play has been given exclusive rights and there's no mickey bedroom scene no you aren't allowed to add one either it's hard to get permission from the estate and risky to move forward without that permission it's no wonder we see so few glimpses of a queer nick when the great gatsby and by extension nick's sexuality are padlocked behind a copyright wall of the handful of people who have the gall or the cash to find a way over that wall how many will care about or even notice the queer version of gatsby and how many will prioritize that queerness over their audience's comfort but great news guys i have come here to promise you that gay exciting things are hovering in the next a couple months because the great gatsby is supposed to go into the public domain in 2021 so while there haven't been any overtly queer gatsby adaptations yet i'm pretty sure we'll get something now that monopolies won't be the only ones with the resources to access the story you guys should let me know what you would do with the great gatsby i would have nick be in love with gatsby and jordan could be non-binary and in love with daisy and nick and gatsby were in the war together except nick got gas gangrene and had to leave and you know his leg wasn't upset then nick wanders into one of gatsby's parties and he sees gatsby and he's like james except gatsby turns around and he's like sorry old sport you must have me confused for someone else my name is the green light is an eldritch abomination that feeds on greed and we have to stop it before it takes over all stealing down in her blood covered hands and jordan won't stop shouting where's the baby daisy did he kill those people how much does he not remember and how much does he not want to rise nick like would you would you really doom the new york stock exchange and plunge this country into an economic depression just so you can get your boyfriend's memories back would you nick would you whatever the case i do hope we get a queer adaptation soon because while the great gatsby doesn't need to be queer to be good a queer gatsby would be very fun now i'm gonna go face myself hey you squad thanks so much for watching this mr mckee fan video and thank you so much to my patreon supporters for all your help shout out to my top patrons lunasarum so hastalitha and sally graves you guys are the real deal it means so much to me that you would pledge if you'd like to get your name on this list see previews of my projects and get videos early you can mosey on over to my patreon i also want to get a little sentimental here for a second and throw a thank you out there to miss connor my high school english teacher i didn't know what literary analysis was before miss connor's class and she used books like gatsby to teach me and so many other kids like me how fun analysis can be so much of my process still comes from her lessons so thank you english teacher who will never see this video you truly are as you would say a goddess stay safe everybody see you sinners

Channel: The Sin Squad

Views: 395,921

Keywords: the great gatsby, the great gatsby review, the great gatsby nick ain't straight, the great gatsby analysis, nick carraway, jay gatsby, great gatsby gay, nick carraway gay

Id: ZAxlChE7gnA

Length: 45min 14sec (2714 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 16 2020