From Novel to Film: Adaptation, Excess, and Modernity in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby (2013)

From Novel to Film: Adaptation, Excess, and Modernity in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby (2013)

This blog is written as a task assigned by the head of the Department of English (MKBU), Prof. and Dr. Dilip Barad Sir. Here is the link to the Syllabus for background reading: Click here.

The Great Gatsby (2013) - A Dazzling Screen Adaptation

The Great Gatsby (2013) is a visually spectacular and emotionally charged film directed by Baz Luhrmann, bringing F. Scott Fitzgerald’s iconic 1925 novel to life on the big screen. This version stands out for its bold style and modern energy, making it one of the most talked-about literary adaptations of the 21st century.

• Title: The Great Gatsby
• Year: 2013
• Director: Baz Luhrmann
• Screenplay: Baz Luhrmann & Craig Pearce
• Based on: The Great Gatsby (1925 novel) by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Genre: Historical Romantic Drama
• Runtime: Approx. 142 minutes
• Language: English
• Countries: USA & Australia
• Budget: Around US$105–190 million
• Box Office: Over US$353 million worldwide- Luhrmann’s highest-grossing film to date.

Main Cast

• Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby
• Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway
• Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan
• Joel Edgerton as Tom Buchanan
• Isla Fisher as Myrtle Wilson
• Elizabeth Debicki as Jordan Baker
• Jason Clarke as George Wilson

This ensemble performance brings to life many of Fitzgerald’s central characters for the modern screen.

 Brief Summary (Plot)

Set in the Roaring Twenties (1922)  the Jazz Age  the film follows Nick Carraway, who moves from the American Midwest to Long Island, New York. Next door is the mysterious and ultra-wealthy Jay Gatsby, famous for throwing grand parties. The story explores Gatsby’s obsessive love for Daisy Buchanan (Nick’s cousin), who is married to the arrogant Tom Buchanan. Nick narrates intimate details of wealth, illusion, desire, and tragedy as events unfold that reveal the darker consequences of the American Dream.

Luhrmann’s adaptation opens with Nick in a psychiatric hospital recounting his experiences  a framing device not in the novel but used to deepen the narrative structure and emphasize memory and storytelling.

Adaptation Style & Key Features

• Luhrmann’s version is known for its extraordinarily vibrant, visually lush style:
• Extravagant set design and costumes that capture the lavishness of the Jazz Age.
• Use of modern-sounding music (including contemporary songs and hip-hop beats) to bridge 1920s themes with 21st-century energy.
• A dynamic, almost theatrical film language  bold camera moves, bright colors, and kinetic editing.

While faithful to the novel’s broad narrative, the film emphasizes spectacle and emotional intensity over subtlety in some scenes, which has been both praised and critiqued in reviews.

 Reception & Criticism

Critics were divided on the film:

Praise: Stunning visuals, strong performances (especially DiCaprio’s Gatsby), and bold adaptation choices.

Critique: Some felt the film’s vibrant style overshadowed the novel’s subtlety and emotional depth.

Metacritic scores indicate mixed reviews, and on Rotten Tomatoes it has around a 49% critic approval rating based on reviews.

Audience response was generally more positive, and Fitzgerald’s granddaughter reportedly said that “Scott would have been proud” of the adaptation.

Awards & Accolades

At the 86th Academy Awards (Oscars), the film won in both of its nominated categories:

• Best Production Design
• Best Costume Design

The awards highlight the film’s strong aesthetic and period-specific visual achievement.

GREAT GATSBY Trailer (2012) Movie HD

Here is the Infographic of this blog:

Part I: The Frame Narrative and the "Writerly" Text.

Unlike The Great Gatsby, where Nick Carraway’s narration quietly unfolds as reflective memory, Baz Luhrmann radically reframes the story. The film opens with Nick Carraway confined to a sanitarium, diagnosed with “morbid alcoholism,” where he is encouraged to write his experiences as therapy. This framing device foregrounds writing itself and transforms narration into a visible, psychological act.

1. The Sanitarium Device: Writing as Trauma and Testimony

Scholars observe that the sanitarium scene “connotes gloomy depression due to past experiences” and literalizes the act of writing. In cinematic terms, this is a deliberate strategy to externalize Nick’s internal monologue. What the novel achieves through introspective prose, the film renders through space, setting, and diagnosis.

From a filmic perspective, the device creates a clear cause-and-effect logic:

Gatsby’s tragedy → Nick’s psychological collapse → the written memoir.

For a visual medium, this is effective. Cinema struggles with sustained interior reflection, and the sanitarium offers a concrete motivation for narration. Writing becomes an act of survival rather than mere recollection.

However, this choice also pathologizes the narrator. By medicalizing Nick’s voice, the film subtly undermines his role as a moral compass. In the novel, Nick’s authority lies in restraint and ethical distance. In the film, his narration emerges from trauma and illness, which raises an unsettling question:

Is Nick a reliable witness, or a damaged patient reconstructing memory?

This shift arguably reduces the novel’s complexity. Fitzgerald leaves the origins of Nick’s disillusionment ambiguous; Luhrmann explains it. The framing sacrifices moral subtlety for psychological clarity, replacing reflective ambiguity with therapeutic confession.

2. The “Cinematic Poem”: Floating Text and the Problem of Literalism

Luhrmann further experiments with narration through his so-called “cinematic poem.” In key scenes most notably the Valley of Ashes Fitzgerald’s prose appears visibly on screen, floating across images like handwriting in motion. Luhrmann calls this technique “poetic glue,” an attempt to bind literature and cinema together.

At first glance, this method bridges the gap between novel and film. It preserves the lyric intensity of Fitzgerald’s language and openly acknowledges the film’s literary origin. The Valley of Ashes, already symbolic, becomes doubly marked visually desolate and verbally inscribed.

Yet critics describe this approach as “noble literalism”: a reverent but limiting fidelity to the text. By quoting the prose directly, the film risks reifying language instead of translating it. Rather than allowing images, sound, and performance to convey meaning independently, the film sometimes shows and tells at once.

This produces a “quotational quality” that can distance the viewer from the diegetic reality. Instead of inhabiting the world, the audience is reminded that they are reading it. In the Valley of Ashes sequence, the words guide interpretation so forcefully that discovery gives way to instruction.

The image no longer breathes on its own; it is annotated.

Thus, while the floating text aspires to poetic cinema, it occasionally traps the film between two modes neither fully literary nor fully cinematic.

Adaptation as Explanation vs. Translation

Taken together, the sanitarium frame and the floating text reveal Luhrmann’s central anxiety as an adapter: how to honor a canonical novel without losing its authority. His solution is exposure of trauma, of writing, of language itself.

Yet Fitzgerald’s power lies in what is withheld, not what is displayed. Luhrmann’s film transforms quiet reflection into visible explanation, trading ambiguity for intensity. The result is a bold, self-conscious adaptation one that turns The Great Gatsby into not just a story remembered, but a story diagnosed, written, and quoted.

Part II: Adaptation Theory and "Fidelity"

The long-standing debate in adaptation studies asks a fundamental question: should a film remain faithful to its source text, or is creative transformation its true responsibility? The Great Gatsby provides a compelling answer when read through the theories of Linda Hutcheon and Alain Badiou.

3. Hutcheon’s “Knowing” vs. “Unknowing” Audience and the Rewritten Ending

Linda Hutcheon famously defines adaptation as “repetition without replication.” According to her, an adaptation must function on two levels simultaneously:

• The knowing audience – viewers familiar with The Great Gatsby
• The unknowing audience – viewers encountering the story for the first time through cinema

 The Omission that Changes Meaning

Luhrmann’s film omits Henry Gatz, Gatsby’s father, and removes the empty funeral procession that forms one of the novel’s most devastating social critiques. Instead, the film ends by focusing almost entirely on Nick’s emotional devotion to Gatsby.

For the knowing audience, this omission is deeply transformative:

• In the novel, Gatsby’s isolation is social and systemic
• The absence of mourners exposes the moral bankruptcy of the American elite
• Henry Gatz humanizes Gatsby and confirms the cruelty of social abandonment

Without these elements, Gatsby’s loneliness in the film becomes personal rather than political.

From social indictment → to emotional elegy

 A Shift in Genre

This change reshapes the genre itself:

• Novel: A social critique of class, capitalism, and the American Dream
• Film: A tragic romance centered on loyalty, memory, and loss

For the unknowing audience, the streamlined ending provides:

• Emotional clarity
• Narrative closure
• A romanticized image of Gatsby as a pure, misunderstood dreamer

Thus, Luhrmann’s choice aligns with Hutcheon’s argument: adaptations must work emotionally, even if that means sacrificing sociological complexity.

4. Alain Badiou and the “Truth Event”: Hip-Hop as Modern Rupture

Alain Badiou’s philosophy introduces the concept of the “Truth Event” a radical rupture that disrupts an existing order and produces new ways of seeing. In adaptation terms, fidelity may lie not in surface accuracy, but in faithfulness to the evental energy of the original work.

 Jazz vs. Hip-Hop: Translating Rupture

Luhrmann has argued that he used hip-hop music to make contemporary viewers feel the same cultural shock that Jazz produced in the 1920s. Historically, Jazz symbolized:

• Cultural rebellion
• Youthful excess
• The unsettling speed of Modernity

Hip-hop performs a parallel function today.

This choice represents intersemiotic translation:

the transfer of meaning across different sign systems

(from literary rhythm → musical sound → cinematic energy)

 Fidelity or Betrayal?

• Historically, the soundtrack is undeniably anachronistic
• Philosophically, it is faithful to the Truth Event of Modernity

Badiou would argue that truth does not reside in period accuracy, but in transformative intensity. From this perspective, hip-hop does not betray Fitzgerald’s novel it reactivates its disruptive force for a new cultural moment.

The film is faithful not to the sound of the 1920s, but to its shock.

 Soundtrack as Event, Not Decoration

• Jazz in the novel → linguistic rhythm and social excess
• Hip-hop in the film → cinematic rhythm and cultural rupture

The soundtrack becomes an evental equivalent, not a historical reconstruction.

Rethinking Fidelity

Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby challenges the idea that fidelity means replicating plot, characters, or historical detail. Instead, it proposes a different loyalty:

• To emotional affect (Hutcheon)
• To cultural rupture and excess (Badiou)

By reshaping the ending and modernizing the soundtrack, the film transforms Gatsby from a social casualty into a romantic icon. Whether this is enrichment or reduction depends on the audience—but as an adaptation, the film remains faithful to a different truth.

Part III: Characterization and Performance

In Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation, characterization becomes one of the most significant sites of transformation. Through performance, spectacle, and selective omission, the film reshapes both Gatsby and Daisy to align with contemporary expectations of romance and emotional identification. This section examines how performance and visual style soften moral ambiguity and reframe desire.

5. Gatsby: Romantic Hero or Corrupted Dreamer?

In The Great Gatsby, Gatsby’s criminality is revealed gradually and unsettlingly. His involvement in bootlegging and bond fraud emerges as part of a larger critique of the American Dream corrupted by capitalism. Fitzgerald ensures that Gatsby is neither innocent nor fully admirable; he is complicit in the very system that destroys him.

 DiCaprio’s Gatsby and the Softening of Crime

In the film, Leonardo DiCaprio’s portrayal significantly alters this trajectory. Luhrmann:

• Delays or reframes explicit references to Gatsby’s criminal activities
• Removes the revealing phone call from Detroit/Philadelphia that exposes bond fraud
• Frames illegality as background noise, not moral substance

As a result, Gatsby’s corruption is aestheticized rather than interrogated.

 The “Red Curtain” Effect

Luhrmann’s signature “Red Curtain” style marked by excess, theatricality, and visual intoxication plays a crucial role here. The overwhelming spectacle of:

• Glittering parties
• Golden lighting
• Grand musical crescendos

creates what might be called moral distraction.

The dream dazzles so brightly that its corruption fades into the background.

Instead of exposing Gatsby’s delusion, the film recasts him as a victim of circumstance betrayed by society, fate, and love rather than as someone undone by his own obsessive belief in recreating the past.

 Critical Shift

• Novel: Gatsby’s tragedy stems from his self-created illusion
• Film: Gatsby’s tragedy feels externally imposed

Thus, the critique of the “corrupted dream” is softened, and Gatsby emerges as a romantic martyr rather than a morally compromised dreamer.

“Gatsby believed in the green light…” 

transformed from irony into elegy

6. Daisy Buchanan: From Carelessness to Romantic Ideal

Daisy Buchanan’s characterization undergoes an equally significant transformation. In the novel, Daisy is famously described as careless emotionally shallow, morally evasive, and complicit in harm. Fitzgerald exposes her emptiness through moments of domestic indifference, particularly her relationship with her child.

 Strategic Omissions and Reconstruction

Luhrmann’s film removes or minimizes:

• Scenes highlighting Daisy’s lack of maternal instinct
• Domestic banality that contradicts romantic fantasy

Instead, Carey Mulligan’s Daisy is framed through:

• Soft lighting
• Emotional vulnerability
• Nostalgic longing

This reconstruction makes Gatsby’s obsession credible to a 21st-century audience, which expects romantic reciprocity rather than ironic detachment.

 Agency or Idealization?

However, this transformation comes at a cost. By reducing Daisy’s moral ambiguity, the film risks stripping her of agency. She becomes:

• Less a chooser of her own comfort
• More an object of male desire and narrative necessity

To preserve Gatsby as the romantic hero, Daisy must remain:

• Gentle rather than calculating
• Conflicted rather than careless

Her passivity sustains his purity.

 Gendered Consequences

• Novel: Daisy is responsible, evasive, and morally accountable
• Film: Daisy is fragile, trapped, and emotionally overwhelmed

This shift reinforces a romantic structure in which Gatsby dreams and Daisy merely symbolizes the dream.

“Her voice is full of money”  reduced from critique to allure

Performance as Adaptation

Through DiCaprio’s emotive performance and Luhrmann’s visual excess, The Great Gatsby (2013) transforms character into myth. Gatsby becomes a tragic romantic hero, Daisy a softened ideal, and the novel’s sharp social critique is reframed as an emotionally immersive love story.

This is not accidental but strategic. The film adapts Fitzgerald not just across media, but across cultural expectation, ensuring emotional investment even if it means muting moral complexity.

In Luhrmann’s Gatsby, spectacle does not merely illustrate the dream; it protects it.

Part IV: Visual Style and Socio-Political Context

Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation reaches its most controversial point in its spectacle-driven aesthetics and its historical repositioning of the American Dream. Through the Party Scenes, 3D technology, and symbolic spaces like the Green Light and Valley of Ashes, the film negotiates between critique and celebration, asking whether excess exposes emptiness or disguises it.

7. The “Red Curtain” Style, 3D, and the Party Scene

Point 1: The Party Scene as Sensory Overload

Luhrmann’s “Red Curtain” style is defined by theatrical excess, artificiality, and audience immersion. In the famous party scenes, the viewer is thrust into Gatsby’s world through:

• Vortex-like camera movements
• Rapid montage editing
• Explosive 3D depth, where champagne, confetti, and dancers burst toward the audience

The effect is deliberately overwhelming a cinematic assault on the senses.

Excess becomes the message.

Point 2: Critique or Celebration of Orgiastic Wealth?

On a theoretical level, these techniques can be read as critical. The dizzying motion and visual chaos mirror the moral disorientation of the Jazz Age elite. The viewer experiences not pleasure alone, but fatigue and vertigo, suggesting the emptiness beneath the spectacle.

The party never stops because stopping would mean thinking.

However, the same techniques also risk aesthetic seduction. The glamour is intoxicating, and the 3D spectacle can easily be consumed as celebration rather than critique.

Thus, Luhrmann creates a paradox:

• Form critiques content
• But form also glorifies content

This tension mirrors Fitzgerald’s own ambivalence but pushes it to an extreme where consumerism becomes visually irresistible.

Mini-Conclusion (Party Scene)

• As satire, the party scenes expose excess as hollow
• As spectacle, they risk reproducing the very pleasure they condemn

The camera dances when morality should hesitate.

8. Recontextualizing the American Dream: 1925 vs. Post-2008

Point 1: The Film’s Historical Moment

Released after the 2008 global financial crisis, Luhrmann’s Gatsby speaks to a world shaped by:

• Wall Street collapse
• Corporate greed
• What Luhrmann calls “the moral rubberiness of finance”

The American Dream in 2013 is no longer merely corrupted it is exposed as structurally unstable.

Point 2: The Green Light—Dream or Delusion?

In Fitzgerald’s novel, the Green Light symbolizes hope deferred the future always just out of reach. In the film, the Green Light is:

• Enlarged visually
• Bathed in digital glow
• Repeated obsessively through close-ups and slow motion

This emphasis transforms the symbol into a spectacle of desire.

The dream shines brighter as it becomes more impossible.

For a post-2008 audience, the Green Light no longer promises success; it signifies perpetual postponement the illusion that effort will eventually be rewarded.

Point 3: The Valley of Ashes as Late-Capitalist Ruin

The Valley of Ashes in Luhrmann’s film resembles an industrial wasteland, echoing:

• Economic inequality
• Environmental decay
• The human cost of unchecked capitalism

Seen through a post-crisis lens, the Valley becomes the inevitable by-product of financial excess the shadow cast by the Green Light.

Every dream leaves ashes behind.

Unlike the novel’s moral warning, the film presents the Valley as systemic, not accidental.

 Dream, Spectacle, and Disillusionment

Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby ultimately oscillates between exposing and indulging excess:

• The party scenes critique wealth through overload, yet seduce through beauty
• The Green Light emphasizes the dream’s  impossibility, yet glamorizes its pursuit
• The Valley of Ashes reflects a post-2008 awareness that the American Dream produces ruin as reliably as hope

The film suggests not that the dream is dead but that it survives by dazzling us into forgetting its cost.

Part V: Creative Response

Scenario

As the scriptwriter adapting the iconic Plaza Hotel confrontation from The Great Gatsby into The Great Gatsby, I would keep the film’s addition of Gatsby losing his temper and nearly striking Tom Buchanan.

The Core Decision

Decision:  Retain Gatsby’s loss of temper

Priority: Dramatic tension (fidelity to the medium) over strict character consistency (fidelity to the book)

Justification

1. Novel vs. Film: Psychology vs. Physicality

In the novel, the Plaza confrontation functions as a psychological chess match. Gatsby’s control falters, but only inwardly. Fitzgerald famously writes that Gatsby

“looked as if he had killed a man,”

yet he never becomes physically violent. The tension is internal, sustained through dialogue, implication, and moral pressure.

Film, however, is a medium of externalized emotion. What literature can hold in silence and subtext, cinema must often make visible. A purely verbal breakdown risks anticlimax for a mass audience.

2. Cinema Demands a Visible Breaking Point

Luhrmann’s Gatsby is presented throughout the film as a carefully engineered façade polite, controlled, almost mythic. He is a pressure cooker of:

• Repressed desire
• Class anxiety
• Carefully concealed criminality

For the narrative’s emotional arc to peak, this façade must shatter on screen.

By having Gatsby lose his temper and nearly strike Tom, the film creates a visual climax a moment where inner collapse becomes outward rupture.

The dream does not fade quietly; it breaks.

3. Narrative Function: Why the Outburst Matters

This moment serves several crucial cinematic purposes:

• It confirms Tom’s accusation that Gatsby is a “common swindler”
• It terrifies Daisy, pushing her back toward the security of Tom
• It marks the instant when “the Great Gatsby” dissolves into James Gatz

The audience witnesses, in real time, the collapse of illusion. Gatsby’s loss of control signals that the fantasy cannot survive confrontation with reality.

This is the instant the myth dies and the man is exposed.

4. Fidelity Reconsidered: Medium Over Text

While this choice deviates from the novel’s subtle psychological dismantling, it remains faithful to cinema’s demands. Luhrmann prioritizes:

• Visceral impact
• Emotional clarity
• Narrative immediacy

In blockbuster cinema, tragedy must be felt, not merely understood. Gatsby’s near-violent outburst tells the audience without ambiguity that the dream is over.

The dream is not debated; it is destroyed.

Conclusion: 

Keeping Gatsby’s loss of temper transforms the Plaza Hotel scene into the film’s irreversible turning point. It may sacrifice some of Fitzgerald’s restraint, but it gains something cinema values deeply: impact.

By prioritizing dramatic tension, the film ensures that Gatsby’s downfall is not just intellectually grasped, but emotionally experienced.

In Luhrmann’s Gatsby, the dream does not die in silence it dies in public.

References:

Barad, Dilip. (2026). Worksheet: Critical Analysis of Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby (2013). 10.13140/RG.2.2.10969.38244. 

Fitzgerald, F. Scott (Francis Scott). “The Great Gatsby.” The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Great Gatsby, 25 Dec. 2025, www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/64317/pg64317-images.html.

The Great Gatsby. Directed by Baz Luhrmann, Warner Bros., 2013.

Thank you!