May 10, 2013
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It’s good to see a fine book in style this year. But are we focusing
on the book, or the style? Baz Lurhmann’s new movie version of
The Great Gatsby
opens today, and unfortunately, its obsessive attention to glittering
gowns, sumptuous suits and deco trappings makes style the star and
substance the understudy.
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a book about the very nasty things that
happen when we set money as the marker of our value. But you wouldn’t
know it from Lurhmann’s film, which celebrates the love of wealth and
comes with more shopping tie-ins than the beads in Daisy’s dress.
Glamour! Excess! Hedonism! These are the words that repeat themselves
in endless ads associated with the film’s release. High-end brands are
practically characters in the movie, with appearances by Prada, Miu Miu,
Tiffany and Brooks Brothers. French lace-maker Solstiss produced 1,400
meters of lace in deco patterns for the costumes. Daisy Buchanan is a
walking display of runway-ready styles and glittering jewels. Her
diamond-studded Tiffany headpiece retails for $200,000, if you need ideas for Mother’s Day.
All is designed to make you hit the stores the minute you leave the
theater. Brooks Brothers has its own “Gatsby web experience,” complete
with “behind the scenes video” featuring clips from the movie and
discussion of the “partnership” between the clothing giant and the film.
The tie-ins don’t stop with the bling. Hotel advertisements tempt you to “
live the life of Gatsby”
(which presumably does not include his horrible end) at any number of
swank retreats. For the bibliophile traveler, the Chatwal New York
provides copies of the novel in each sumptuously appointed room (hey, it
beats cable!). Not to be outdone, the
Seelbach Hilton
in Louisville, Kentucky, touts the fact that Fitzgerald used it as a
backdrop for Tom and Daisy Buchanan's wedding as a selling point.
But Donald Trump wins the prize for all-out shamelessness, offering a
$14,999 three-night stay at Trump New York, which comes with dinner at Jean-Georges, a bracelet designed by Ivanka Trump and a bottle of bubbly.
When you look at current consumer trends, all this swooning over
luxury makes a perverse kind of sense. Despite the fact that most of us
are mighty worried about our economic well-being, wealthy America is
experiencing what Brad Tuttle at
Time calls the “
Splurge Surge.”
“They’re going on shopping sprees,” Tuttle writes, “.....with
increasing sales seen for luxury hotel stays, high-end automobiles, and
more.” Polls show that the rich really don’t think the economy is
recovering, but they’re spending anyway. The reason is simple: From
2009 to 2011, the mean net worth of households in the top 7 percent rose
by 28 percent. Everbody else’s dropped by 4 percent over this same time
period. There’s still a recession happening, just not for them.
Whoopie!
A movie like
The Great Gatsby conspires to make the 99
percent forget our credit card debt and join the rich in a shopping
spree. Maybe we'll get the down-market version of Daisy's dress, but
we'll think, for a moment, that we're getting a piece of the action (
Seventeen magazine
highlights a variety of 1920s-style prom dresses in the $300-$600 range). All is well and good until the bill arrives.
The last time America saw such a disconnect between the experiences
of the rich and the rest was, of course, the Roaring Twenties. Which
ended very badly, just like Gatsby’s race to the top of the capitalist
heap.
Lynn Parramore is an
AlterNet senior editor. She is cofounder of Recessionwire, founding
editor of New Deal 2.0, and author of 'Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt
in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture.' She received her Ph.d in
English and Cultural Theory from NYU, where she has taught essay writing
and semiotics. She is the Director of AlterNet's New Economic Dialogue
Project. Follow her on Twitter @LynnParramore.
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