The Great Debate

Starting Friday, masses of Americans will sit with 3-D glasses perched on the ends of their noses, carried away by Baz Luhrmann’s magic carpet ride into the ur-myth of the modern age. The 3-D technology works splendidly to sweep us into the material wonder of the 1920s: Sparkling objects whiz by, seemingly close enough to snatch from the air. The dizzying pace of the era’s change comes alive in the kaleidoscopic rush of party sequences; a hypnotic hip-hop beat propelling us through opulent rooms that display Jay Gatsby’s capitalist triumph in all its eye-popping splendor.

That we’re asked to view the Land of Baz through a pair of mass-produced cardboard spectacles ‑ our heads aching slightly as our eyes struggle to reconcile two separate projections of the same image ‑ makes an uncanny kind of sense.

The Great Gatsby, after all, is a novel of double vision. Gatsby is a man who wishes to be seen, and not seen; an exhibitionist eager to show off every aspect of his magnificent wealth but bent on hiding the hustling it took to acquire. Fitzgerald reveals the power dynamics in who gets to look at whom, and the tension between what’s in front of us and what’s moving just beyond our field of vision. The observant author filled his slim book with references to eyes: floating eyes, tragic eyes, aggressive eyes, impersonal eyes. One character is known simply as “Owl Eyes.” There are eyes that approve and eyes that scorn. The motif is so prominent that artist Francis Cugat chose to feature a pair of hypnotic eyes that hover over the carnival lights of a city for the novel’s iconic cover.

Fitzgerald wants us to be dazzled by Gatsby, but not be so blinded that we can’t see the limitations of his viewpoint. With all his strength of vision, Gatsby is not looking for a better world. He’s just looking for acceptance into a corrupt world that already exists — a world rife with racism, exclusion, women reduced to objects and, above all, fantastically expensive stuff. All the sumptuous parties and social graces cover up habitual lying, criminality and degradation. It’s ugly at the top. That’s Gatsby’s blind spot.

The last major film experience of Gatsby was 1974, in the wake of the Watergate revelations that drew back the curtain on political corruption. Still reeling from the mayhem of a Wall Street-driven financial crash, we turn to Gatsby once again for a sense of perspective on our American experiment.

The new icon of Hollywood is not a celebrity or a movie franchise — it’s the CIA. In 2012, the year’s most award-winning and popular “quality” films  – Argo, Zero Dark Thirty  – as well as 2012′s best television show (Homeland) were all about The Agency, usually bathed in quite a positive light. Why have the upper reaches of the entertainment business started to love the CIA, after years of offering more troubling images on screen?

One answer is that it has been a decade since the invasion of Iraq, and it would seem that the Iraq War itself (Abu Ghraib, civilian deaths, trillions of dollars) has sullied the image of the U.S. military. It has apparently become so tainted that Hollywood believes it can no longer assume officers are gentlemen. Military pilots no longer serve audience desire for moral clarity, as in the age of Top Gun — today, the star performers of the Air Force are pilotless drones, for one thing. And generally there are fewer soldiers and veterans on screen than after other recent wars; no equivalent of Jon Voight in a wheelchair in the Vietnam film Coming Home or World War Two’s The Best Years of Our Lives, which starred an actual double-amputee veteran.

Instead, today’s films have all-knowing agents, who tap, bug and lie with impunity yet somehow always wind up heroes. In Argo, it’s CIA operative Tony Mendez, smuggling American embassy workers out of Iran after the revolution. In Zero Dark Thirty, it’s a CIA employee who successfully hunts down Osama. If we throw MI6 into the mix in Skyfall, it’s a more realistic James Bond saving the agency itself from a plausible threat.

Everyone in America knows that we live in times of gridlock. We despair of anything really getting done, as we bump from one budgetary crisis to another. Nothing seems to work, and our expectations have plummeted. But there is a place where, against the odds, people seem to accomplish exactly what they desire – a place where no obstacle is insuperable. That place is Hollywood.

Not Hollywood as a physical location but the Hollywood of the imagination. If you look at this year’s Oscar contenders for Best Picture, you will find that – as disparate as their subjects are – many of them share a thematic bond. These films are about efficacy. They are about the ability of people, and even institutions, to get things done – whether it is smuggling diplomats out of revolutionary Iran, or killing Osama bin Laden, or wreaking vengeance on a powerful plantation owner and slaveholder in the antebellum South, or toppling the French monarchy, or at least setting the process in motion.

Americans have become accustomed to inertia. Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, pro-gun folks and anti-gun folks, pro-choice and anti-choice, pro-immigration and anti-immigration – everyone seems to be engaged in a standoff.