Jim Johnson's List: Arts

• Gatsby is upset because more than simply wanting Daisy for his own, he is pursuing a vision of who he wants to be. He loves Daisy insofar as Daisy wants to live his life, in a castle with gates imported from an old Dutch monastery, a castle that staffs a distant relative of Beethoven as its resident musician, that has a bedroom with a literal wrap-around catwalk.

   

    Without clearly understanding this core of Fitzgerald's tale, the movie can only flounder, not sure if Gatsby's a narcissist, a hopeless romantic, or an eternal optimist. Luhrmann tries hard to convince us, but the "all for Daisy" rhetoric stretches credulity a little too much.

   

    It was for himself. What Gatsby loves is a dream of a world, one where he is king, the chosen one, the best—and one that, incidentally and perhaps accidentally, includes Daisy.

   

    So when Nick declares that Gatsby was "the most hopeful man I'd ever encountered," he's not wrong. But what Gatsby dreamed, with a purity of vision unmatched by anyone else, was a dream of himself, a vision for himself, a life where everything orbited around the center construct of Gatsby.

   

    This is a question of human nature. Can someone like Gatsby—because first and foremost, he's a type, a representation of the self-constructed man writ large—really love someone wholeheartedly? Can he really give himself away to someone else?
• Choose who you are, what you want to be, and what you want. And then take it. To do anything else is incoherent, nonsensical, and cowardly. It'd be giving up.
• As the epitome of a self-made man, Don Draper embodies the kind of success that might be possible for someone who took Sartre's conception of the universe seriously. He's respected, wealthy, sexy, and successful, and he can get any girl he wants.

• The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation." In Wallace's eyes, the American experiment had conflated absolute freedom with absolute solipsism.

   

    Wallace pointed out what lies beneath the problem for Gatsby and Draper: "Worship power," he said, "and you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out." Real freedom, in Wallace's estimation, "involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able to truly care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day."

   

    Freedom, contra Sartre, is about obligating yourself to others—not freeing yourself from their expectations. It is about finding yourself in the steady, unrelenting, knowing, freeing gaze of someone who knows you—you, the you that you despise—and who is glad to be near you, who loves you anyways. Freedom, at its core, is about love, is inextricable from love, is love.

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