There was a commercial for the Great Gatsby movie and the Spousal Unit wondered why such a scrupulously period visual spectacle would be paired with such a non-retro score. My immediate response was “Because the guy responsible for the music is married to the contemporary Daisy Buchanan — but I don’t know whether that makes him Tom Buchanan or Jay Gatsby.”
Your thoughts?
The prophet Nostradumbass
Is there a product sleazy enough that Montel Williams won’t do an ad for it? Just saw one pushing payday loans.
Steeplejack
Comparison fail. Beyoncé is a talented, hard-working, successful artist. Daisy Buchanan is the idle rich.
Maybe try (a young) Ann Romney, although I can’t imagine anyone gazing longingly at the green light at the end of her pier, if you know what I mean (and I think that you do).
eemom
My thoughts? Marveling that a fifth rate copyright-infringer like you still has a gig at a high traffic blog like this one, and wondering how long even Cole is gonna put up with your shit.
This comment will be deleted in 5…4….3….
JasonF
Period pieces with modern scores is Baz Lurman’s signature.
Suzanne
@eemom: Pot. Kettle. Black.
comptr0ller
Jay “Z” Gatsby
Anne Laurie
@Steeplejack:
In the 1920s, “rich man’s idle wife” was a profession, the most aspirational one available to most women. And having an extremely ornamental wife who didn’t need to do anything more strenuous than shop (or maybe play a little lawn tennis at the club) was a status marker for men. Getting the right guy to marry & keep one in the style to which one (hoped to be) accustomed took some natural gifts, plenty of hard work, and a certain amount of luck.
Things have changed, to the degree that now the professional rich men’s wives feel the need to “have a career of their own” — even the gilded spawn of the One Percenters, or the wanna-bees of the proliferating Real Housewife tv series, all have daddy buy them cupcake shops or designer fashion lines or documentary film-making equipment or yoga studios.
There can’t be an exact comparison between a fictional character (Daisy) and a real person (Beyonce) but I stand by the idea that Beyonce is “our” current popcult ideal for “the woman every man wants to marry and every woman wants to be”.
kc
@eemom:
I wish Cole would ban your ass again.
Suzanne
@Anne Laurie: Except that Beyonce works her ass off and had a huge career before she married Jay-Z. She has her own power. I think your comparison fails. There’s still plenty of women who want to be taken care of, and Beyonce isn’t one of them.
Valdivia
I think it is a terrible comparison. Beyonce as Daisy?
The director himself said he wanted something that would be the equivalent of what jazz was in the 20s, not what it is today, which he thought was very mainstream. So he went for this score. I think it is right.
Steeplejack
@Anne Laurie:
Even if that’s true, which I doubt, it doesn’t hold for Daisy Buchanan. She is not the woman every man wants to marry; she is a particular obsession of Jay Gatsby’s, part of his quest to make himself into the man he wants to be.
The narrator, Nick Carraway, while he recognizes Daisy’s beauty and allure, stands outside Gatsby’s obsession. He doesn’t share it. He says of Gatsby:
Alison
@Anne Laurie: Okay, the final line may have some truth as regards Beyonce, but to put her in any way in the category of “the professional rich men’s wives” is just really wrong and, IMO, pretty messed up. You’re totally downplaying her incredible independent success, and treating her career as though it was equal to dressage or something. She;s not just “Jay-Z’s wife”, FFS.
James E. Powell
@Anne Laurie:
but I stand by the idea that Beyonce is “our” current popcult ideal for “the woman every man wants to marry and every woman wants to be”.
I can’t be completely sure because I don’t know who you are including in “our,” but, speaking as an ordinary average hetero male with a pretty good handle on the idealizations of others like me, I don’t think Beyonce is the woman every man wants to marry. Date, hang out with, have sex with, sure. But marry? No.
As for the woman who every woman wants to be, what do I know?
Ms.B
@JasonF:
Yep. I mean, Moulin Rouge, anyone?
Karen in GA (who really needs a better name)
@Ms.B: Or Romeo and Juliet.
Nancy Irving
@eemom: Huh? Anne Laurie is one of the best front-page posters on this blog. What is your problem with her?
NotMax
Such a narrow, blinkered imagination.
Does “spousal unit” get livid should anyone mention 2001 and Strauss?
However, would take Josephine Baker over Beyoncé any day. Just a personal thing; don’t like the latter’s voice and delivery style, but can recognize the filmmakers’ utilization of her commercial appeal to the majority.
But sexy? Beyoncé is about as sexy as bag of wet laundry.
Dean Hacker
Daisy Buchanan is a sociopath, but I am not willing to go that far with Beyonce.
Jay-Z is like a Bizarro Jay Gatsby. Instead of hiding the criminality associated with his wealth, Jay-Z flaunts and exploits it. On the plus side, he got the girl.
Kris Collins
OK, I’m a very long time lurker, infrequent, though more so recently, commenter, so maybe this is a dumb question, but who is this eemon person? A joke or just an asshole? Anyway, to the topic at hand: I was excited about this movie mainly because I thought DeCaprio was perfectly cast, but the more I hear about it the less I want to see it. I had not yet heard that Jay Z had anything to do with the music and that is another strike against it, nothing against Jay Z, just wrong for this story. And Beyonce as Daisy? Are you fucking kidding me? I don’t even know where to start , maybe tomorrow after I’ve had some sleep if the thread is.still going.
Schlemizel
@Nancy Irving:
What is your problem
with her?FTFY
Bob h
Actually Ann Laurie is a Digby-class blogger.
I suspect that if Hilary makes it we’ll be hearing about Tom and Daisy endlessly.
Karla
I agree with others upthread noting that the comparison of Daisy and Beyonce is the opposite of apt, particularly Alison’s comment. Downplaying/erasing women’s identities once they’ve added the one called “wife” (not to mention “mother”) is a real, general problem, and while I have no reason to believe you do it often, you’ve done it here. (I wouldn’t say I’m a fan of Beyonce, but recognize she’s done a lot of work and has a lot of talent that were in evidence before she was even associated with Jay-Z.)
Karla
Oops, grammar fail on that last sentence.
Lurking Canadian
@Ms.B: Is what I’m saying. “a scrupulously period visual spectacle would be paired with such a non-retro score” won Luhrman an Oscar for fin de siècle Paris. Why wouldn’t he stick with what works?
And I don’t believe either JayZ or Beyonce had anything to do with Moulin Rouge.
jimbo57
Despise this guy’s entire oeuvre. My personal theory is that it has been decided, no doubt through intensive research with focus groups, that the precious youth demographic will not sit through a feature length film with a score dating from before 1965. Critics have levelled serious charges at the Redford film, notably on account of its languid pacing (helloo, it’s a story about the idle rich, remember? Folks who don’t have to do a damn thing) but in retrospect, that version stands up well compared to this dreck.
AdamK
This movie is crap, is why.
stratplayer
@Valdivia:
Rubbish. This was Jay-Z’s vanity project and he doesn’t give two shits about whether it works artistically. My very hip 19 y.o. film student son saw Gastby and found the modern soundtrack to be very jarring and distracting.
Marc
@Steeplejack:
I would hope not, since he’s her cousin.
Ultraviolet Thunder
If not Beyonce, then who would be our modern day Daisy? Paris Hilton?
PIGL
@eemom: just what exactly the fuck is your problem? Hitting the gin a little too hard last night, were we?
daveNYC
Like everyone else I’ll mention that Beyonce had fame and fortune pre-Jay-Z.
I’m not sure why you’d go with Beyonce as the soundtrack on something like Gatsby. Tarantino is able to do stuff like that on his movies, but that’s because they are Tarantino movies, and he’s also pretty damn good at doing soundtracks. But something like The Great Gatsby when it’s being played straight? Not really seeing it.
A Humble Lurker
@Ultraviolet Thunder:
I would think more Palin, Romney, or any one of our media twats who say whatever untrue crap they want and fear little to no consequences.
Also, Beyonce = Daisy? No.
different-church-lady
You’re looking for logic in a Baz Luhrmann film. How cute.
"Fair and Balanced" Dave
@Anne Laurie:
If that is your criteria then I agree with Alison that Beyoncé is the wrong modern equivalent. If you want to use a modern day pop diva as an example, I’d cite Mariah Carey rather than Beyoncé. Recall that Mariah Carey’s first husband was record exec Tommy Motolla who was almost twice Carey’s age when they married.
gene108
@Ultraviolet Thunder:
As vapid as people say Paris Hilton is a good chunk of her inheritance has been earmarked by Granddad to go to charity.
She used whatever talent and appeal she has to make a a good chunk of change on her own.
I wouldn’t put Paris Hilton into the trophy wife category.
dr. bloor
Anne, love you lots, but this really deserves the Woody-brings-Marshall-McLuhan-into-the-frame treatment.
Valdivia
@stratplayer:
well Lurhman wanted Rap for the reason I mentioned and asked Jay-Z, What he did with it I have no idea since I have not seen it and I am not endorsing it. I am just repeating what the idea was behind it. I really doubt the movie was Jay Z’s vanity project since it was Lurhman’s baby from start to finish.
Why all this intensity of negativity for Jay-Z and Beyonce?
Ultraviolet Thunder
@gene108:
I don’t care one way or the other about Paris Hilton but I would expect that her starting out as a wealthy celebrity had a lot to do with her being able to make more money on her own. Of this talent that you speak of I have seen none in evidence.
dr. bloor
@Valdivia:
“They were careless people, Beyonce and Jay-Z–they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money of their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
Or something. Who the hell knows?
ThresherK
Myself and SpousalUnitThresherK are Bazheads (if there are such things).
The modern soundtrack worked for us in Moulin Rouge! and now that jazz has become ossified and the realm of geeks (like me) I can imagine the purpose of putting a modern soundtrack on a movie set in the ’20s.
How did it work? I may chime in when we see it. That we’re going to a first-run theater, something we do 3x a year, indicates how much I’m looking forward to it.
buskertype
@stratplayer:
stop the presses!!!
“19 year old film student finds summer blockbuster lacking artistic merit”
ThresherK
Ugh–editing and timed out.
There’s no right or wrong answer to “why a modern sountrack” to me.
I enjoyed the strictness in “Kansas City” and “Cotton Club”, especially when the former was recorded live on set, and the latter had Gere doing his own cornet solos.
But to get at the vulgar excess and rules-breaking, almost a century hence, in Fitzgerald’s characters is one thing. Having a movie give an audience a crash course in Kid Ory, Louis Armstrong (before “Hello Dolly” and “What a Wonderful World”), and why Paul Whiteman was the King of Jazz but really played jazz-inflected pop, is the job of a documentary, rather than a film adaptation of a novel.
Suffern ACE is a Basset Hound
@Steeplejack: @Ultraviolet Thunder: we wouldn’t know our modern day Daisy. The closest may be some third generation Walton or the daughter of some hedge fund manager who marries the son of one of the wealthiest families in Chicago. She’s not national rich. She’s local rich moved to Long Island. Every city has them – locally known wealthy people who’s family name is on the wing of the hospital. She’s the wealthy daughter of the Louisville elite. No one we’d know unless we lived in Louisville and read the papers.
gene108
@Ultraviolet Thunder:
I never said she had a lot of talent. She did maximize whatever little talent she does have to the fullest to obtain a certain level of celebrity.
Yes, being born rich did help her out immensely, but I think there’s a difference between the public persona of Paris Hilton and the businesswoman Paris Hilton, i.e. she’s not actually as dumb as she acts.
lojasmo
As if the director’s previous films were not enough reasons for me to not see this film.
Jay-Z? Ugh.
Flatlander
It’s because it’s Baz Luhrmann, and he’s one of the greatest directors of modern times. He’s good enough to know that if he made it with a jazz soundtrack, it would be a period piece, and could take its place alongside Merchant Ivory wig flicks. If you don’t get it, don’t go; it’s not for you, but for the millions of more common people who do get it.
Jay-Z is only doing the job because Lurhmann hired him. It’s Luhrmann’s vision he’s executing in the soundtrack. It’s got nothing to do with Jay-Z’s wife, and you bring her up just because you know more about her than you know about the director.
Luhrmann thinks the Gatsby story resonates with contemporary society, and wants the film to resonate with contemporary society, even for people under fifty. That vision is why his Romeo and Juliet was one of the best productions of Shakespeare in the twentieth century. If you make Shakespeare without making it popular, you are just fetishizing High Culture and alienating the Bard from his true audience. Go to your art cinema to watch sluggish productions of Shakespeare with a minute audience of wizened dowagers and theatre queens. Go to Luhrmann’s films to watch a perennial story being told to millions.
Gatsby is a story that makes perfect sense in 2013, and sinking it into a hole of obsessive period detail and septuagenarian musical emotions would be the best way to alienate it from the popular audience. It is a rejuvenation of the story, stealing it out of the vault of High Art and returning it to currency. Filthy fucking lucre. It’s what the story is about.
Valdivia
@dr. bloor:
that’s what I don’t get–the likening of this couple to the oblivious characters of Gatsby. Of all the celebrities to do this to, this couple seems to be out in the world actually doing things, caring if you will. aware of what they touch. how could they not. So why them? It really baffles me.
daveNYC
@Flatlander: I’m just going to assume I’m missing the sarcasm tags.
Omnes Omnibus
@Anne Laurie:
Daisy was so much less than that. She was the object of one man’s personal obsession and she wasn’t remotely worthy of his attention. The only way in which the comparison may work is that Gatsby builty a Daisy in his mind who did not remotely match the actual Daisy and people may build an image of a celebrity like Beyonce that does not remotely fit the actual person. But, even here, it doesn’t work. With Daisy – stealing from another 20s icon, there is no there there; with Beyonce, while she may not match one’s preconceived notions, there is something there.
AliceBlue
I saw the Redford version of Gatsby in 1974 when I was in college. I thought the period music was lovely and haunting; I didn’t need a soundtrack of Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones to make it relevant to me. The film was very popular with “the kids” back then, so I wasn’t alone.
Amir Khalid
I must join the consensus that Beyoncé is not the 2013 edition of Daisy Buchanan (sorry, Anne Laurie). For one thing, Jay-Z is definitely not the 2013 Tom Buchanan. Are any of the truly idle rich famous in their own right, anyway? They’re all somebody’s son or daughter; they’ve never made their own mark on the world.
As for the movie, I think it suffers not just from the anachronistic music; or Luhrmann’s love of jarring, outlandish touches (like casting Amitabh Bachchan as a Jewish gangster); or his obsession with Gatsby’s parties; but most of all because he doesn’t really get to grips with the novel’s central mystery: Who is Jay Gatsby?
Omnes Omnibus
@AliceBlue: I haven’t seen the new movie and I am not a Luhrmann fan at all (I spent the last hour of Moulin Rouge praying for Nicole Kidman’s character to just die already so the movie could finally end), but, if one isn’t going to try to do something different with a story there is no real reason to make a movie out of a novel that already has a film version. If Luhrmann were to simply remake the Redford film, why bother?
Unsympathetic
Beyonce is Daisy? Who’s secretly crushing her and wants Jay-Z out of the way? More to the point, who was Beyonce’s high school date?
daveNYC
@Omnes Omnibus: Eh, that’s fine, but from the sounds of it, the only thing Luhrmann has done is dial the production quality up to 11 and modernize the soundtrack. It’s basically a straight up Gatsby remake period piece, just with a modern soundtrack.
vickijean
@Flatlander: So why the period dress and house. What is jarring is for it to be a period piece in every way except the music
Omnes Omnibus
@daveNYC: I am not saying it is going to be an artistic success. In fact, given my opinion of Luhrmann, I rather doubt it will be.
Kiril
@Flatlander: It’s because it’s Baz Luhrmann, and he’s one of the greatest directors of modern times.
So long, internet! See ya tomorrow!
Amir Khalid
@Flatlander:
You make a great case for setting an adaptation of The Great Gatsby in 2013, and that would certainly be an interesting movie. But it’s not the movie Luhrmann made.
Mnemosyne
There are other period-piece-with-a-modern-soundtrack films that I loved (like Marie Antoinette) but I think the difference between those films and this one is that Luhrmann commissioned a brand-new modern soundtrack rather than using modern songs that people were already familiar with. That may be one of the reasons people feel it doesn’t work as well as, say, Moulin Rouge.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mnemosyne: The other difference may be that Sofia Coppola has some subtlety as a director and Luhrmann does not. But, then, I am a hater.
ruemara
@Anne Laurie: Um, no. Not every woman and I dislike the Beyonce fandom, but she’s hardly a Daisy Buchanan.
Mnemosyne
@Amir Khalid:
I think that would be difficult to do, because (IMO) a lot of the subtext of the book is the social upheaval of World War I that led the lower-class Gatsby to think he could win Daisy Buchanan if he just amassed enough money. Gatsby’s mistake was thinking that money=social class.
You could probably do a really interesting “modern” Gatsby by setting it just after the 1960s and having Gatsby and Daisy’s failed romance happen at anti-war protests. I can’t think of a more recent social upheaval that would parallel that of WWI.
Mnemosyne
Also, too, can mistermix or someone web-savvy please help Anne Laurie figure out why her posts are borked on the mobile site? I had to read everyone else’s comments to figure out the gist of what she said, because all I have is a photo of Beyonce with Jay-Z followed by a giant black box.
Amir Khalid
@Mnemosyne:
In case you’re still wondering, Anne Laurie said:
Amir Khalid
@Mnemosyne:
I reckon modern America might still have enough shady OKBs* like Gatsby, enough class inequality, and still enough inherited-money types like the Buchanans, ever ready to pull up the drawbridge, to make the story relevant.
* short for orang kaya baru, newly rich person.
NickT
If Beyoncé is Daisy Buchanan, I must have read the unauthorized version of The Great Gatsby.
AdrianLesher
Recent reports have Beyoncé’s net worth at 400 million and Jay Z’s at 470 million, which would seem to dispel any idea that she is dependent upon her husband.
JWL
Haven’t seen Gatsby, but I thought contemporary music worked well in S.Coppola’s, ‘Marie Antoinette’. It was adroitly employed, and served to illustrate the siren song of eternal mammon.
West of the Rockies
Regarding Paris Hilton’s business sense, I suspect it comes largely from having been born with more contacts and open doors than the rest of us will collectively ever see. I could well be talking from a position of ignorance (wouldn’t be the first time), but did she have any sort of musical/voice training prior to putting out a CD, or did she just do it because it sound fun (or “hot”)? Would she have gotten her own reality show if she were just some random, cute sorority girl at Anytown University? Her own perfume line?
Tehanu
@Suzanne:
I’d agree with this except it postis eemom and Anne L as equivalents, whereas I’ve noticed eemom’s comments being pretty much always both nasty and contrarian. Here’s a clue ee: being in the minority about EVERYTHING is not a guarantee of moral rectitude. Or shorter me, STFU already.
rikyrah
Beyonce is not Daisy
Jay-Z is not Gatsby
Mnemosyne
@Amir Khalid:
Sort of — I still think a huge underlying factor in Gatsby that a lot of people discount is that Gatsby’s romance with Daisy happened during the huge social upheaval of the war. We haven’t had that kind of social upheaval here since the 1960s (contrary to how some conservatives talk about it, “the Reagan Revolution” doesn’t come close) so putting it in modern day wouldn’t have the same resonance.
Bonnie
I have no intention of paying ten bucks for that movie just because of the music.