Examples Of Materialism In The Great Gatsby

Materialism is prominent in almost every scene of The Great Gatsby. From close-ups of Jewels to the magnitude of party scenes to the contrasting bright colors, many objects become more than just themselves. The first site of terms I will examine begins at 23:35 of the film . This scene is the first encounter with the famed Gatsby parties. An overview of the road between the city and the Gatsby mansion is presented at night with the lights indicating a line of cars making the trek. The cars swerve past the gates with the Jay Gatsby insignia built into their frames, towards the beckoning lights of an enormous castle-like estate. The guests arrive in a variety of fashions, but close-ups focus on the diamond accents around the flappers’ necks.

Everything within the mansion is larger than expected. Champagne bottles the size of full-grown men shoot confetti out into the crowd, a chandelier with elegant gems hangs high above the ballroom encapsulating a majority of the ceiling, and multiple entertainment acts are present within the ranks of attendees. Booze floods in every direction allowing for loose behavior by all. This single portion of the film brings together a cluster of terms repeatedly seen throughout that categorically fit into materialism.
Jewelry and contrasting colors are the first two cluster terms that establish materialism and begin alluding to its place in the separation of class status.

When looking at jewelry two specific moments capture its significance best. Luhrmann chooses to look closely at gems of a clearly wealthy woman at 23:59 who is entering the Gatsby estate for a party. Luhrmann also focuses on the accessories of Myrtle as she descends the stairs that connects her home with her husband’s mechanic shop in the dingy outskirts of New York to greet her adulterous lover Tom Buchanan. The first woman is wearing a deep V black sequin dress. Around her neck is a necklace that is also V-shaped with several individual arrangements of diamonds. Each ear holds large round diamonds encased in silver metal rounds. Three bracelets, each about an inch in width, dangle’s gingerly from her wrist as she stands at the entrance of the Gatsby mansion looking down upon the cars driving in. The crystal clear appearance of the diamonds is a stark contrast to the cherry-red plastic of Myrtle’s gems. Myrtle is adorned with a set of earrings that have a downward facing metal cone with bright red plastic round balls closing them off. Both arms have five thick bands on them; mostly red in color but also a single navy on each arm and white on her right. These material objects directly relate to the status of the women who wear them. Myrtle is from the Valley of Ashes which is

considered
“…a grotesque place. New York’s dumping ground half way between West egg and the city where the burnt out coal that powered the booming golden city was discarded by men who moved dimly and already crumbing through the powdery air.”
She does not have money, and is placed amongst the lowest class of the city. The unnamed women on the other hand stand above the hooligans entering the party. This asserts their status while their diamonds solidify their place in the one percent. In addition to the comparison between diamonds and plastic, color begins to assert differences in these scenes.
Color is more closely aligned with attitude, or perceived status, in The Great Gatsby. While Myrtle lives amongst the low class she fancies herself better than her neighbors. Her affair with a rich married man gives her access to commodities of elite status, such as having an apartment to herself in New York. Her perception of her relationship with Mr. Buchanan is that he will continue their affair allowing her to reap the benefits of possibly marrying into a wealthy family. In the case of a union her social status would be elevated, an assumptive stance Myrtle lives within.
Another strong example of color is the custom bright yellow car of Mr. Gatsby. From 35:38 to 37:06 Gatsby and Nick are entering the city via a country road. Other vehicles, as well as the scenery, are dull in comparison to canary beast swerving rapidly along the road. The car is an extension of Gatsby’s elaborate tale of riches and family status. He has constructed an almost impermeable illusion of coming from a well-to-do family that died off, leaving him a very large inheritance. In reality, he came from a very lowly farming family that barely made it from year-to-year. His illusion, although more concretely constructed than Myrtle’s, is still a self-created status higher than reality. Social status is further represented within the Gatsby estate itself. In his construction of belonging in the upper class, Gatsby had to play on social expectations of representation of status. Luhrmann creates a blanket of deception using materialistic symbols accepted in public memory.
The use of size as being part of status is seen within the Gatsby mansion. Beginning 1:00:00 Gatsby leads Daisy on a tour of his home. They begin at the gates which are opened by two gate keepers as two other attendants stand by. They walk up the drive, looking upon a home that barely fits within the frame. Towers rise high into the sky and a large pond with several statues sits at the end of the stairway that leads from the front door. A fountain explodes in the front yard, reaching to be about three times as large as Daisy. The kitchen has an elaborate machine to make juice with. The back yard pool extends to a beach with two changing tents, a long dock, a floating patio with a diving board and the bay. The ballroom extends the length of a chapel with three grand chandeliers down the center of the ceiling. An organ sits on one side and a marble staircase at the other. Gatsby’s room has an open format closet that surrounds the outer edge of the room on a second story. Emphasized in each scene of this sequence is the volume objects take on when being used to equate money and status. The front of the home alone takes up almost an entire frame, allowing Luhrmann to make it seem larger than life. The individual windows, doors, and décor are unable to be determined from the distance it was shot at to make it fit into the single frame. Luhrmann’s use of undefinable magnitude serves the purpose of making Gatsby’s wealth bigger than imaginable. His social status is determined by the fact that society cannot place limitations on his reaches financially.
Materialistic objects cluster easily in a film like The Great Gatsby that focuses on glamour. Below the immediate imagery of excess are the subtleties of maintaining social order. Prominent are the social engagements between those on both sides of the law. At 40:25 Nick, Gatsby, and one of Gatsby’s questionable associates enter a speakeasy through a hidden door in the back of a barbershop. Down a set of stairs, a crowded bar scene emerges. Gatsby guides Nick through the throngs of people towards a table directly in front of a stage with several women dancing for the crowd. They encounter both the senator and police commissioner of New York among the gangsters, gambling, loose women, jazz, and drinking. The veil between the right and wrong sides of the law is evaporated into a blend of illegal activities and heads of enforcement agencies. Social order of Luhrmann’s version of the twenties is ruled by bribes, corruption, and the direction of cash flow. Lawmen are not pure due to personal vices. Similarly to today, Luhrmann is implying that “money talks,” and as long as one continues to live by the drive of personal vices, the law is subsequent to life.
Physical lawmen are countered by ever-watching “eyes of God” that sit on the edge of the slums, referred to as the Valley of Ashes. The viewer is introduced to the billboard by Nick as he states sarcastically that, “This fantastic farm was ever watched by Doctor T.J. Eckleburg, a forgotten oculist whose eyes brooded over it all, like the eyes of God.” Our guide pushes the viewers to immediately give the eyes a more significant level of importance by equating them to a higher power. The billboard overlooks the players numerous times throughout the duration of the film, including when Gatsby is weaving his false tales, Gatsby swears to Nick to be true, and as Myrtle is ran over by the bright yellow car . The eyes represent the concept of being watched by a divine power that lives outside of the law, but sees and judges all from an elevated moral state. This power balances the corruption of mere men, and with its position in the slums, also keeps the lower class from rising up against the upper class out of fear of moral retributions. Even as the lawmen live outside the law and don’t enforce it, social order is maintained by fear of encountering Karma for misdeeds, and the promise of later retributions for all those who sin.
The final layer within Luhrmann’s film is encapsulated in the quote “I was both within and without”. This is said by Nick Carraway twice, the first at 22:07 and again at 58:21. The first is framed by a party with Tom, his mistress, and their friends, in the apartment Tom keeps for Myrtle secretly. Nick has alcohol, drugs, and overall participation forced upon him. As his high wears off, he begins to reflect on his place in the world and his current place in time. He concludes that he is a single light admit the masses of apartments that overlook the city. Luhrmann choses this point to physically displace Nick. He both sits in the window of the apartment looking down on the city, and is an average bystander looking up into the lights of windows that contain unknown activities. As a representative guide for the audience, Nick is encapsulating the individualized nature of participating in a culture that is not inherently part of your class, and the displacement caused by realizing the delineation between your place in time and grander role in society.
Nick is trapped in this by the secrets he is forced to keep; forced out of obligations to loved ones and the expectations in society for those in lower classed to cave under the pressures of the upper class. This displacement and secret keeping correlation arises directly in the second occurrence of the statement. Nick stands outside his home while his cousin, Daisy, and neighbor, Gatsby, are left alone inside to heal their past wounds in hopes of rekindling their love. Nick stands in the rain under a tree as he narrates to the audience, “I am reminded that for the second time that summer I was guarding other people’s secrets. Once again I was within and without.” The secrets of others weigh heavily on Nick in each occurrence. His individuality is stripped by the expectation that he will conform to the will of others by going along with their stories. Luhrmann is paralleling Nick’s individual will with the overall will of society as they are expected to bend to the public memory decided on by the hegemonic, dominant class. Public memory is created based on the need of the present, allowing for a fluidity of events. The hegemonic concept behind this is to continue a single identity of a society, but in the agreement to go along with a single version of public memory individuality is forgone.
Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby is more than just a flashy film. The deep correlations throughout makes it a text that points to the struggles of the society in which it was created, and how those issues closely resemble another time in history. Materialism is easy to find in a twenties based movie. Glamour and excess are key parts of the public memory of the decade, thus being a staple of representation. Luhrmann takes it further by allowing the objects of material obsession to take on another role of differentiating class. This status correlation speaks to a current reflection of the inequalities of the twenties and today. Luhrmann’s depth continues when he uses the gangster undertones and divinity reference of Fitzgerald’s novel to incorporate the maintenance of hegemonic order that twenty first century American society relies on for the continuation of socially developed habits of order. This order is threatened by individuality, but the film squashes the idea through its illustration of duel representation. Luhrmann allow the narrator to be both inside a situation and outside of it, allowing him to see his role. Nick’s acceptance of the subordinate role proliferates the idea of submission to the public memory created by a dominant minority. Economically, the twenties have similar trends as seen in the twenty first century. This is not only brought on by money dispersion, but people are beginning to associate themselves more closely with groups that they are actually monetarily close to. Even without regard to finances, this association has the ability to delude the middle class. Luhrmann works this into his film through subtle terms to allow for the audience to choose their role of participation. Although it is clear that there are similarities between the decades, Luhrmann is careful not to make the correlation explicit. This plays on societies coping mechanisms that employ ignorance to avoid the possibility of mimicking a time that preluded an economic depression that greatly injured the United States. Luhrmann’s choice of embedding the terms under the apparent story line allows the audience to choose their depth of participation. Those who are watching The Great Gatsby for solely entertainment purposes are able to ignore the separation of class, the maintenance of societal order, and individuality as they relate to today.