SPOILER ALERT: You Should Have Read The Great Gatsby by Now
If you’re one of many people out there who are still clinging to their last hopes of being surprised by the new film adaptation of The Great Gatsby because you were too lazy to Sparknote it in high school, turn back now.
Let’s just get one thing straight, “spoiler alerts” should be rendered void after a book has been published for, oh, I don’t know, ALMOST A CENTURY. Be honest with yourself for a minute and realize that if you haven’t cared to peruse the roughly 150 page novel by now, you probably aren’t going to. This principle carries over into all subsequent film versions of said text, so before you write an angry letter saying I ruined the magic of the Jazz Age for you, know that this is completely your fault.
For those of you that have read the book, congratulations on being the smuggest of assholes since the movie was announced. Your literary prowess has earned you the right to be better than all of your ignorant peasant friends who couldn’t be bothered to read one of the greatest works in all of American literature. That is, until they make a new version of Moby Dick, which I mean, really, who actually read the whole thing? You, you erudite scholar, are immune to all spoilers, and are therefore probably the only ones still reading this. So let’s get down to the details, what should you expect from Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby?
First of all, Jay Gatsby is going to die at the end. I know you know it, so please, don’t look so surprised. And although Leonardo Dicaprio is probably going to be flawless, unless the Academy creates a new category for being heartbreakingly handsome, he probably isn’t going to win an Oscar. Don’t worry, his latest supermodel girlfriend will help him dry his sweet, precious tears.
Is your favorite part of the book going to be in the movie? Probably not! I know that haunting sentence from Chapter 4 completely changed the way that you view American decadence, but Dicaprio looked kind of sweaty and puffy in that scene, so they had to cut it.
Lastly, try to remember that this is an adaptation of a book, not a seven hour film version of the novel. They’re going to get stuff wrong. They’re going to change, cut, augment, and bastardize what you think is the pivot point that the whole story hangs on, and you needed to get over that, like, yesterday. So please stop bitching and moaning about all the great stuff they left out, and start bitching and moaning about how expensive your ticket was like the rest of us.