![\"gatsby_final_chapters\"](\"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/gatsby_final_chapters.jpg\")
<\/a>\n
\nThe Great Gatsby<\/i>
\n\u201cChapter 8\u201d<\/p>\n
Well, we finally got the flashback we wanted\u2014or thought<\/i> we wanted\u2014as well as a rather pedestrian double homicide that we weren\u2019t even allowed to witness. (Those of you who predicted in last week\u2019s comments that we\u2019d get the rumored Gatsby death tonight can congratulate yourselves; I thought Fitzgerald would be canny enough to save that for the climax, but obviously I was wrong).<\/p>\n
As The Great Gatsby<\/i> winds up\u2014or winds down\u2014who among us isn\u2019t feeling a massive sense of anticlimax? What started out as so much fun has become a chore. I remember my review of Chapter 3, in which I wrote, \u201cThe party scenes alone make this one of the best stories ever<\/i>: the \u2018Owl Eyed Man;\u2019 the car with the missing wheel\u2014what a virtuostic performance!\u201d Revisiting that review now, I\u2019m saddened by the optimism I felt back then. That mysterious library interloper (Who was he? Where did he come from?) never returned, and the entire dazzling sequence (barring any unlikely surprises next week) turned out to be the only one of its kind. (EDIT: Commenters remind me of the dreary affair in Chapter 6\u2014technically, a Gatsby party\u2014but we can agree that was merely a background for the Buchanan\u2019s tiresome bickering; all the magic was gone.)<\/p>\n
Last week, I complained about the leaden pacing (somebody needs to inform Fitzgerald that one<\/i> laborious description of the drive from Long Island to Manhattan, however prettily rendered, is quite enough) which, despite the long-overdue Tom\/Gatsby hotel confrontation, ended up dwelling endlessly on a dull police investigation (after a fatal crash we don\u2019t even get to watch<\/i>) and a total lack of dramatic release for Nick, Gatsby and the Buchanans, who go their separate ways without resolving anything. In Chapter 8, the disappointments continue. (Are we really<\/i> never going to see Jordan Baker again?) Instead of dramatic resolution, a dull-as-dirt flashback story and, later in the chapter, a long discussion between, of all people, Tom Buchanan and Wilson the mechanic. With only one more chapter to go, can we possibly have time for this? Somebody needs to tell F. Scott that nobody cares about these ancilary characters\u2014with so little time left, we want more Gatsby and Daisy!<\/p>\n
What was originally a glorious paen to a vanished age of hedonism\u2014with so much juicy foreshadowing of dark horrors to come\u2014has become, in the end, just another \u201cbro\u201d story. As Nick patiently listened through Gatsby\u2019s forlorn, lengthy narrative, I kept wanting him to speed the man along, to get us to the good stuff<\/i> (and is anyone else as sick of \u201cold sport\u201d as I am, at this point?)\u2014but no; we linger over every wartime clich\u00e9, every reference to someone named Dan Cody (Who? I’m told in comments I’m overlooking stray lines from Chapter 7\u2014I must have missed those). It’s all too little, too late\u2026and then, literally on the chapter\u2019s last page, the two murders, presented as anticlimactically as possible (it\u2019s not even clear what happened). All I can say is, what a disappointment! We\u2019ll see what happens next week, but with just one chapter to wrap this thing up and try to make a satisfying ending (with a dead title character!) or even, dare we hope, a fiendishly clever twist, I\u2019m afraid my hopes aren\u2019t up: the chances of Fitzgerald overcoming his losing streak\u2014everyone remembers the profoundly disappointing finales of This Side of Paradise<\/i> and The Beautiful and Damned<\/i>\u2014are dim at best. It\u2019s a shame; The Great Gatsby<\/i> started strong but it\u2019s turned into a serious bummer.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n As television changes, TV criticism struggles to keep up. Yes, writers like Alan Sepinwall are raising the level of discourse, adopting techniques from established academic disciplines of cinema and literature criticism and theory. But there are formal problems, as there were a century ago when movies were new\u2014nobody knew how to write about them, either, until the \u201cauteur theory\u201d days of James Agee and Francois Truffaut.<\/p>\n For decades, television was artistically limited by broadcast technology: until the Betamax, there was no way to ensure that your audience would even see all of your episodes. (Even the journeyman freelance writers, hired to do a Columbo<\/i> or a Star Trek<\/i>, would have no way of familiarizing themselves with the shows they\u2019d missed.) So the stories were episodic, not serial; the parts could be viewed in any order, since each hour of drama returned the scenario to a fixed\u00a0tabula rasa<\/i>. This changed in the early 1980s with Dallas<\/i> and the other \u201cprime-time soaps\u201d like Stephen Bochco\u2019s revolutionary Hill Street Blues<\/i>, which combined existing daytime-drama serialization techniques with high-toned dramatic content.<\/p>\n But criticism still worked the old way: at that decade\u2019s end, when Hill Street<\/i> co-creator Mark Frost worked with David Lynch to invent Twin Peaks<\/i>\u2014arguably the Citizen Kane<\/i> of modern television\u2014there was only a single review (of the two-hour pilot) in each newspaper and magazine. As in the old days of TV Guide<\/i>, they told us what to expect based on the premiere, and quit\u2014as we watched each week, and the Lynch\/Frost masterpiece got stranger and more brilliant, we viewers were on our own (except, ironically, for Soap Opera Digest<\/i>, the only periodical to keep up).<\/p>\n Along with affordable DVD sets (which replaced \u201cthe episode\u201d with \u201cthe season\u201d as television\u2019s default storytelling unit), the internet eventually transformed television through streaming and piracy\u2014and it changed criticism, too: even in the early 1990s, when Bochco was making NYPD Blue<\/i>, a young Alan Sepinwall was posting weekly summary\/reviews on a BBS board that got circulated by email. Today, just as the entire history of television is there for the asking Netflix and YouTube, so every episode of every series, old and new, is treated with dozens or hundreds of web pages\u2019 worth of commentary.<\/p>\n But in the meantime television has evolved again. Shows like True Detective<\/i> and Mad Men<\/i> are the first wave of a subtler, more refined, vastly more sophisticated narrative art form that inherits the formal traditions, aesthetic sweep and philosophical depth of the novel far more easily than cinema ever did or ever could. Entire series are now planned from the outset (\u201cthis is a story that began with its ending in mind,\u201d estabilshed novelist Nik Pizzolatto said of his brilliant True Detective,<\/i> for which he wrote every episode), truncated not by \u201cthe networks\u201d\u2019 arbitrary, bottom line-based \u201ccancellations\u201d (as in the old days) but by carefully worked-out deals that let producer\/writers like Mad Men<\/i>\u2019s Matthew Weiner meticulously plan out their storytelling in advance.<\/p>\n Granada Television\u2019s celebrated early-1980s renditions of Brideshead Revisited <\/i>and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy<\/i> notwithstanding, novelistic material has rarely gotten this kind of long-form cinematic treatment, and the depth and artistry of the results\u2014as, for example, Weiner\u2019s baroque, exhausively-researched 1960s unfold through a photographic and theatrical recreation far more ambitious than even Rainer Werner Fassbinder\u2019s 14-hour Berlin Alexanderplatz<\/i>\u2014reveal the inadequacy of contemporary criticism (it\u2019s like reading a great F. Scott Fitzgerald novel chapter by chapter in a class who\u2019s teacher hasn\u2019t read it either). It\u2019s unclear if anything can be done about this\u2014Netflix, at least, has taken to releasing its new shows (Daredevil<\/i> and Grace and Frankie<\/i>) all at once, obviously in order to forestall the problems of piecemeal viewing.<\/p>\n It’s not that the critics aren’t smart, or well-intentioned. The problem is more fundamental: as the newest shows in today’s “television Renaissance” (like Mad Men<\/i> and True Detective<\/i>) reach higher and higher levels of literary sophistication (inheriting novelistic formal traditions to a degree that far surpasses what’s possible in theatrical cinema), week-by-week reviewing becomes increasingly inadequate\u2014the first-time viewer, no matter how smart, is functionally incapable of the necessary aesthetic and philosophical insight. You can’t understand Gatsby<\/i> until you’ve read it all, and its meaning and purpose has been systematically assessed; the same is true of Mad Men<\/i>. It’s not that critics need to hold off until the show (or the season) is over\u2014it’s that they need to approach their work in light of these new shows’ literary sophistication, and adjust their expectations and analysis accordingly. If \u201cthe streaming\/cable show\u201d truly is the first great new narrative art form of the century, it won\u2019t be long before the critical establishment adapts and matures.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Great Gatsby \u201cChapter 8\u201d Well, we finally got the flashback we wanted\u2014or thought we wanted\u2014as well as a rather pedestrian double homicide that we weren\u2019t even allowed to witness. (Those of you who predicted in last week\u2019s comments that we\u2019d get the rumored Gatsby death tonight can congratulate yourselves; I thought Fitzgerald would be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":43579,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43578","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43578"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43578"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43578\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44429,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43578\/revisions\/44429"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43579"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43578"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43578"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43578"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}