Screen shot taken from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sN183rJltNM

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” is lush like Keats’ poetry. Reading the novel in high school, I missed this lushness, the passages dripping with beauty and the prose rhythm he develops so wonderfully through Nick’s narration — a rhythm that becomes physiological as the words start to beat along with your heart. I hadn’t re-read “Gatsby” in about 9 years: Obviously, my 16 year-old opinions on literature were the correct ones. But perfect Carey Mulligan drove me to a second reading last week, and this time I was floored by the weightiness of the story Fitzgerald tells.

And it is exactly this weightiness that I think I missed as a high school reader, and exactly the weightiness that Baz Luhrmann’s film misses. On the whole, I liked Luhrmann’s interpretation of the text. One of my reservations about the film version, though, is that it doesn’t capture the abject dread that permeates the text even from the very beginning. In the book, even before that iconic line about driving towards death is uttered by Nick, the reader knows subconsciously that this whole novel, this whole time, has been a race towards death.

Indeed, as far as I can make any definite claims about a novel so enigmatic and so inscrutable, this story is finally a story of death. Yes, it is about the Twenties and about money and about class, but these things are shallow things; they do not weigh, they are not heavy like death is. And death hangs over this book; it drips off of the characters’ tongues and clothes and ideas and lives. Their money makes them careless, but death will have them, too, in the end.

It’s not only about death in the literal sense. Sure, some of the characters die, but death in this novel captures not only bodies, but also the intangibles — it captures dreams and it captures eyes and it captures our hearts as readers. And when we feel the weightiness of this in the tone and text of the novel, we know intrinsically that “Gatsby” is about more than unbridled spending and a sense of entitlement by the upper class.

It’s hard to put one’s finger on anything in the novel, and harder to represent something as intangible as death, but I think this is what Luhrmann’s film lacks. And it’s a shame, because in a world where nothing is so certain as death, and nothing so prevalent as excess and pride and self-centeredness, perhaps being reminded of the end to which we are inevitably, always, unceasingly moving is good in fact for our souls.