Baz Luhrmann’s Globalized Reinterpretation of F. Scott. Fitzgerald’s 1925 classic The Great G

Abstract

In this study I compare Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, to the homonymous film of 2013, by Australian director and producer Baz Luhrmann. The analysis rejects obsolete concepts such as fidelity, perceiving the cinematographic work in a dialogic relation with the literary text. I provide an analysis of Luhrmann’s movie as a rereading which globalizes Fitzgerald’s narrative, once focused on the critique of the myths that sustain the American Nation- State. As a result, I describe historic, economic and cultural determinants which surround the film, aiming at problematizing the director’s reinterpretive choices, which throw the movie in the contemporary wave of the global cultural flows. I also refer to how the filmic interpretation turns Fitzgerald’s fiction into a multimedia narrative which relocates the obsession with financial success in a world context, suppressing some of the novel’s particularities in order to address audiences in various parts of the globe, including Brazil.