Partying in The Great Gatsby: Baz Luhrmann’s Audiovisual Sublime

Abstract

The first party sequence in Baz Luhrmann’ s The Great Gatsby (2013) counts as one of the most opulent, densely articulated, and extravagant in film history. On its release critics noted its ‘frenetic beauty’, ‘orgasmic pitch’, and ‘Vincente Minnelli-style suavity with controlled vertigo’. Décor, costuming, sound, movement, and colour come to the fore because the sequence’s spatial layout can’t be determined until its end. The mélanged soundtrack itself refuses to grant the viewer a sense of ground. What distances might this musical sample brook? Who’s performing and who isn’t? To which period and community does this music speak? Why this snippet against that? Sounds’ sources and imagined spatial locations seem to cross and overlap with elaborate vectors. This analysis plumbs the ways nineteen aural and visual techniques pull the viewer affectively and proprioceptively in different directions, helping, with the aid of digital technologies, to construct an extravagant rhetoric appropriate for our unfortunate gilded age. Considering Gatsby provides a way to further understand audiovisual aesthetics, the newly emergent role of soundtracks, contemporary cinema, and our time.