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The Great Gatsby American Dream

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The film is based on the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It follows Jay Gatsby, a man who molds his life around one desire: to be reunited with Daisy Buchanan, the love he lost five years earlier. Gatsby 's quest leads him from poverty to wealth, into the arms of his beloved, and eventually to death. Nick Caraway is the narrator, or storyteller, of The Great Gatsby, as well as Daisy 's cousin who happens to live next door to Great Gatsby. Daisy represents the paragon of perfection. She has the aura of charm, wealth, sophistication, grace, and aristocracy that Gatsby longed for as a child in North Dakota and that first attracted him to her. In reality, however, Daisy falls far short of Gatsby’s ideals. She is beautiful and charming, but also …show more content…

However, Fitzgerald explores much more than the failure of the American dream, he is more deeply concerned with its total corruption. Gatsby has not achieved his wealth through honest hard work, but through bootlegging and crime. His money is not simply ‘new’ money it is dirty money, earned through dishonesty and crime. His wealthy lifestyle is little more than an illusion, as is the whole person Jay Gatsby. Gatsby has been created from the dreams of the boy James Gatz. It is not only Gatsby who is corrupt. Nick repeatedly says that he is the only honest person he knows. The film is full of lying and cheating. Even Nick is involved in this deception, helping Gatsby and Daisy in their relationship and later concealing the truth about Myrtle’s death. The society in which the novel takes place is one of moral decadence. Whether their money is inherited or earned, its inhabitant is morally decadent, living life in quest of cheap thrills and with no seeming moral purpose to their lives.
The Great Gatsby is a highly specific portrait of American society during the Roaring Twenties, the Mise-en-scene is sumptuous with lights and colors that fill the viewers’ eyes, costumes that amaze and dazzle and music that projects the audience into an epic dimension. The director and producer use a lot of high key lighting throughout the film which makes images glamorous and visually appealing while producing a dreamy,

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