Sentimentalizing Daisy for the Screen

Abstract

Daisy Buchanan is one of the most enigmatic characters in American literature. Many first-time readers of The Great Gatsby are frustrated by Nick's account of Daisy and wonder why Gatsby would risk so much for such a woman. However, they miss the point. Daisy represents something indefinable—an idealized love. As Roger Lewis says in “Money, Love, and Aspiration in The Great Gatsby,” “the love becomes more important than the object of it” (49). Daisy herself is not his goal. Gatsby's goal is to keep hold of the love that she once inspired, the memory of her, which is colored by his idealization of her. This nostalgic longing for a feeling rooted in the past is sentimentality at a profound level. In fact, at the end of chapter 6, Nick listens to Gatsby recount his first kiss with Daisy and describes Gatsby's words as “appalling sentimentality” (Gatsby 111). Daisy's effect on Gatsby is perhaps the biggest paradox of the novel. Based on her actions, it is difficult to gauge how she exerts a hold on Gatsby. Nick comes closest when describing her voice, which, Gatsby later notes, is “full of money” (120): “When the melody rose, her voice broke up sweetly, following it, in a way contralto voices have, and each change tipped out a little of her warm human magic upon the air” (108). Daisy's “magic” is hard to define, and Nick seems to catch glimmers of it; but he is always at the periphery, unable to tell exactly what Gatsby sees in her. Especially after the car accident, Nick is amazed that Gatsby endangers himself by staying when he is, in Nick's words, “worth the whole damn bunch put together” (154).Film producers are uncomfortable with ambiguity, however. In general, all the film versions of Fitzgerald's novel have followed a predictable route. Their marketing campaigns claim that they have tried to evoke the spirit of the novel, yet they boost the sentimentality of the story with great deliberation, pushing the use of pathos far beyond what Fitzgerald would have sanctioned. Most egregiously, producers and filmmakers try to make Daisy a more sympathetic character by changing her storyline. For Fitzgerald readers, this change in Daisy's character is a continual disappointment. There have been five big-budget, filmed adaptations of The Great Gatsby: 1926, 1949, 1974, a 2000 television production, and 2013. All five films made significant changes to the story of the novel. Many of these changes elevated the sentimental, making Daisy a more domestic character and eliminating some of the ambiguity from Fitzgerald's story.The label “sentimental writing” is commonly used today to disparage a writer's work, but this was not always the case. Nor was domesticity always associated with this type of writing. It is true that sentimental writing has commonly been associated with mass or commercial appeal. This alone is enough to condemn it in the eyes of some reviewers. However, such a blanket condemnation of “sentimental writing” is not helpful when trying to understand the development of American fiction and its traditions. A more careful study of the history of sentimental writing helps to reveal why Daisy's character was, and continues to be, targeted by filmmakers for a sentimental makeover.Sentimental writing made its appearance in eighteenth century France. Manon Lescaut (1731) by Abbé Prévost was one of the earliest and most popular of these early novels, and followed the sad story of a young noble who gives up a promising future to run away with a young lady with an “inclination to pleasure” (Prévost 29). Sentimental writing seeks to build a sympathetic emotional connection between the writer's characters and the reading audience. To use Aristotle's terms, sentimentalism emphasizes Pathos over Ethos or Logos, in order to impart a moral lesson or to build sympathy for characters whose apparent actions might not necessarily elicit sympathy from readers. The young noble and his lady love in Manon Lescaut would have been scorned and abused had their real life counterparts been encountered in 1731, but Prévost's use of the sentimental brought an emotional currency to the plot that engaged readers and made them care for these characters despite their actions.The nineteenth century saw this sentimental style appropriated by American women writers who created advice manuals, evangelical writings, magazines, and other publications. Because of the popularity of these writings, novels written in the sentimental style fell under heavy criticism by male critics as they increasingly came to be associated with women and the domestic sphere. Despite this, women's sentimental writing was the most commercially successful fiction of this time and such novels as Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World (1850), Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), and Maria Cummins's The Lamplighter (1854) amassed record profits. However, the negative connotation associated with being a “sentimental writer” has persisted for generations—so long now that the term has been studiously avoided even when sentimental strains appear within some of the most respected fiction.In recent years, scholars such as Jane Tompkins have championed sentimental fiction and urged a reconsideration of these texts that many formalist critics had rejected. In Sensational Designs, she argues that if given the proper context to understand these texts, we can then understand their true importance: The power of a sentimental novel to move its audience depends upon the audience's being in possession of the conceptual categories that constitute character and event. That storehouse of assumptions includes attitudes toward the family and toward social institutions; a definition of power and its relation to individual human feeling; notions of political and social equality; and above all, a set of religious beliefs that organizes and sustains the rest. (126–27)The film adaptations of The Great Gatsby are often judged by their faithfulness to the original story, but by focusing on how they differ from the written text, especially through their use of the sentimental, we can better understand the “storehouse of assumptions” that influence audience interpretation. Looking at the film versions of Gatsby, we observe many different sentimental devices. If we dismiss them as simply bad form, we miss an opportunity to discuss this “storehouse of assumptions” and to delve deeper into how each new generation interacts with Fitzgerald's novel.The first of these adaptations, the 1926 silent film adaptation of The Great Gatsby, directed by Herbert Brenon, is a lost film. There are no surviving film reels, and it was never fully transferred onto a more modern media format. All that remains of the film is a trailer that was first released in 2004 as part of a DVD collection, More Treasures from American Film Archives 1894–1931, produced by the National Film Preservation Foundation. Baz Luhrmann's DVD for his adaptation of The Great Gatsby also features the 1926 trailer in its special features. This trailer runs a full minute and includes several shots from the missing film. While this brief minute of footage is not enough to develop a thorough analysis, the University of California Los Angeles Theater Arts Special Collections does hold the original copy of the treatment outline for the film. Elizabeth Meehan wrote an extremely thorough forty-nine page treatment (double the length of most treatments written in Hollywood today) dated 26 May 1926. Although the screenwriting credit for the film is attributed to Becky Gardiner, Meehan is listed with an “adapted by” credit. Since the screenplay is no longer in existence, it is difficult to gauge what changes were made from treatment outline to script. However, there is a noticeable effort in Meehan's treatment to emphasize the sentimental and domestic elements surrounding Daisy.In the first act of her treatment, Meehan portrays Daisy as living in fear that Gatsby will return to break up her family. After a series of flashbacks designed to show Daisy's romance with Gatsby and her later decision to marry Tom, Meehan brings us back to the present and writes a scene where Daisy clings to her four-year-old daughter, staring out the window while begging her daughter to protect her from Gatsby's return. This ominous portrayal of Gatsby's effect on Daisy is combined with a tender mother/daughter moment that never existed in Fitzgerald's original. The softening of Daisy's character offers a striking contrast to Fitzgerald's portrayal. In the novel, Daisy enjoys cocktails while her daughter is off with a nurse, only spending time with her little girl to show her off to guests, then letting the nurse take her away before “Tom came back, preceding four gin rickeys that clinked full of ice” (Gatsby 118).Meehan goes further, softening the presentation of Tom to make him seem a gentler, family man. This enables a more easily accepted domestic resolution to the Buchanan family at the end of her treatment. The most striking example of softening Tom's character takes place in the middle of Meehan's treatment, when she presents an episode based on a scene from chapter 2 of the novel that takes place at Myrtle's apartment. Tom slaps Myrtle and breaks her nose after arguing over whether or not she has any right to say Daisy's name (37). Nick also describes in the novel that he is unable to hear the beginning of the conversation. Meehan is not bound by Nick's narration, however, and presents her version of the first half of this conversation by showing Myrtle antagonizing Tom. Myrtle hands him a lawyer's card and tells him to get a divorce. Tom tells her not to say Daisy's name again, and when she does, he covers her mouth with his hand, but she springs away and loudly proclaims that he struck her. This planned scene not only paints Tom in a better light, it portrays Myrtle as a hysteric.The last seven pages of Meehan's treatment are a succession of radical changes in Fitzgerald's plot. Meehan writes, in an aside, about how it is important that Daisy not realize what happened to Myrtle at the time of the accident, although Gatsby does and keeps it to himself. In the book, however, Gatsby tells Daisy he thinks Myrtle is dead almost immediately following the accident, or so he reports to Nick (143). Then, Meehan writes that Tom pleads with Daisy after the accident that they need to begin again, but at the end of Fitzgerald's chapter 7, the conversation between Tom and Daisy goes observed—though unheard—by Nick. After Gatsby's murder, when Nick tries to call Daisy, Meehan writes that she and her daughter are getting into a car while Tom instructs a servant to say they have left. In the novel, Nick only hears from a servant that Daisy and her family are gone. Nick assumes they are on the road already (Gatsby 164). The visual of the family's flight ties in well to Meehan's ending, which veers away from Fitzgerald's book yet again. Instead of Nick's attendance at Gatsby's funeral or Fitzgerald's rumination about the green light, we end with a note of domestic triumph and the happy Buchanan family in their new home. Meehan writes about Daisy showing pangs of remorse for letting Gatsby take the blame for Myrtle's death, implying that she and her husband have no idea that Gatsby has been murdered. By all accounts, the 1926 adaptation did not do well at the box office and soon disappeared after a few weeks. It would be more than twenty years before there was a second attempt to film Fitzgerald's novel.The 1949 version took quite some time to develop, due in large part to the Motion Picture Production Code (or the Hays Code as it was commonly called, after Will H. Hays). This code was put in place in 1930 and lasted until 1968. As a result of the Code, producers and writers were forced to re-envision the tale of Gatsby as a morality tale where adultery, bootlegging, and manslaughter were eventually punished, and the remaining characters were reconciled to the idea that crime does not pay. Many people were brought in to work on the project, including hardboiled writer James M. Cain, best known at the time for The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) and Double Indemnity (1943). Hardboiled film noir crime dramas were doing well at the time, and the producers of the film probably saw a way to create some market synchronicity by using Cain's style and casting Alan Ladd as Gatsby. Ladd was well known from such noir films as This Gun for Hire (1942) and The Blue Dahlia (1946). In fact, the plot of The Blue Dahlia (only three years before the 1949 Gatsby adaptation) has similar plot elements—featuring an innocent protagonist (a returning war veteran like Gatsby) who is pursued for a woman's murder he did not commit. However, it was one thing for the moralistic censors to approve an innocent man being redeemed and quite another for them to consider letting a bootlegger like Gatsby escape death like Cain suggested. Although the producers of the 1949 Gatsby adaptation wanted a happy domestic ending, neither they nor the censors could bring themselves to let Cain write his version. The 1926 adaptation by Meehan and its ending with the Buchanans obviously did not play well with audiences, so the 1949 Gatsby adapters shied away from repeating past mistakes. In the end, they finally decided to give the happy ending to Nick and Jordan.Both Nick and Jordan greet us at the beginning of the 1949 adaptation. Their presence is part of a bookended narrative that brings this (now married) couple to Gatsby's graveside twenty years later to reflect on his death and the profound influence he had on their lives. Nick says, “I like him for what he might have been,” which seems an honest enough sentiment, but then he continues with rather heavy-handed moralizing by quoting from Gatsby's tombstone which bears an inscription from Proverbs 14:12: “There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.” The idea that anyone would inscribe this on a stone seems preposterous; however this quote is a convenient transition that leads us into a flashback montage of dancing, speakeasies, drinking, and bootlegging from Gatsby's life.Gatsby's gangster ways are all explained in a lengthy flashback that expands upon the backstory between Gatsby and Dan Cody given in Fitzgerald's novel (98–101). Poisoned by Cody's assertions that personal wealth is the key to all happiness, Gatsby first amasses and then uses his wealth indiscriminately to get everything he wants. Instead of building a friendly relationship with Nick and trying to persuade him to set up a meeting with Daisy, as in the novel, Gatsby attempts to bribe him with money outright and when this fails, he succeeds with Jordan by giving her a Dusenberg car that matches his own. Jordan flatly admits her own corruption, which is only hinted at in the book with rumors of a golf scandal, and seems unrepentant in the face of Nick's dour stare. When the meeting between Gatsby and Daisy does take place, she is easily bought as well. After the parade through Gatsby's mansion and the scene with his display of shirts, Gatsby tells Daisy he wants to be with her and she agrees, saying that she will let Tom know of her decision soon. Perhaps the expansion of the Dan Cody storyline in the first act necessitated some cuts to stay within a feature-length running time and, perhaps, these easy submissions to Gatsby's wealth work well with the gangster story genre, but all the dramatic pacing of Gatsby's story is lost in this adaptation. There is no tension as the audience wonders when Gatsby and Daisy will meet and if they will rekindle their romance. It is bought and paid for almost immediately.This fast tracking of the seduction of Daisy plays awkwardly against the required moralizing demanded by the Motion Picture Production Code. Almost as though the filmmakers realized that the quick seduction needed a moral counterweight, the next series of scenes is all about repentance. Daisy delivers a long and awkward speech to Nick at one of Gatsby's parties, asserting that everyone she knows (including herself) is corrupt and she does not blame him for not wanting to kiss her. “I'm lost, Nick!” she says and he replies, “We all are.” As a parallel to this scene, Gatsby and Daisy have a similar conversation in his library where she shows some misgivings over breaking up her family. Daisy may have made a rash decision, but her domestic ties (and reason for supporting them) are painted more strongly in this film adaptation. Her husband's philandering with Myrtle is underplayed and Daisy's young daughter, affectionately called Pammy by her mother and father, is shown being hugged by both of them—a much different view from the remote cocktail-drinking parents of the novel who let their nanny handle the child-rearing.In keeping with the more on-the-nose dialogue of the rest of the 1949 adaptation, the consequences of Tom and Daisy's breakup and the fracturing of their domestic household is directly addressed. When, after Tom and Gatsby's hotel-room showdown, Daisy prepares to leave, Tom tells her, “Wait a minute. I'm protecting my home here. If you go with him, there's not a court in the country that would award the child to you.” This gives Daisy pause, but it is not until after the death of Myrtle that Daisy changes her mind. She prefers, naturally, that Gatsby take the blame instead of her risking prison and having her daughter taken from her. Though Daisy does not appear as sympathetic in this version as in the 1926 film, the domestic reasoning behind her actions is much more clear.Another important change that the 1949 adaptation made is the way that events subsequent to Myrtle's fatal accident unfold. Instead of Daisy's responsibility being secretly revealed by Gatsby to Nick, Daisy confesses her role to Tom, Nick, and Jordan immediately after Gatsby drops her off at her home. Daisy bluntly tells everyone that Gatsby has volunteered to be the scapegoat. Furthermore, she rather stupidly goes on to plot with Tom exactly how they can use him during the manslaughter trial, telling everyone that she intends to stay with her family; all the while she is not remotely aware that Gatsby is still outside the door listening to her entire conversation. This again undercuts the dramatic tension of Fitzgerald's novel, in which Gatsby waits patiently at his mansion and gives up his chance to escape because he believes that Daisy plans to leave her family behind and fly away with him. However, the sentimentality of the scene is greatly increased. Gatsby's insistence on waiting for Daisy, after her inability in the hotel to declare she loved only him, shows his strong sentimental attachment to their first love from years ago. Furthermore, the film heightens this sentimentality so that Gatsby is willing to martyr himself, to turn himself in to the authorities on Daisy's behalf, although his plans are cut short when George Wilson murders him. This moralistic version seemed to do much better at the box office than its predecessor, but it was still disparaged by critics for its flaws and was eventually laid to rest in the studio vault after it ran its course. However, three years after the expiration of the Motion Picture Production Code, a new adaptation was put in motion.Truman Capote was the first writer hired by producers at Paramount to write the new film adaptation. Capote's 1965 novel In Cold Blood was highly regarded and it was thought that he could bring a grittier, more modern feel to the production. Development is seldom an easy process, however, and even the most respected writers find themselves rewritten. This project was no exception. Although Capote finished the script, Paramount decided to go in another direction. To this day, rumors abound that the reason for the script's rejection was that Capote, a homosexual, had interpreted Nick's character as homosexual also. A reading of the actual script shows that this is not the case. Capote's version has a film noir sensibility (much less moralistic than the 1949 version) and is more sexualized, but not as daring as some would have us believe. During an early party scene, when guests speculate about Gatsby's identity, someone voices (along with a number of other hypotheticals) that he might be “queer.” Also, after one of Gatsby's later parties, he and Nick go skinny-dipping in the pool. However, Nick and Jordan are also shown kissing passionately in an early scene (Capote, typewritten ms. 43); and, in the final act, there is a nude sex scene between Daisy and Gatsby where Daisy tells him, “I love you” (Capote, handwritten ms. 84). So, although he made some alterations, it appears that Capote did not have a so-called homosexual agenda.One of Capote's most interesting additions, when taking into consideration sentimentality, is a trip to the jewelry store with Gatsby and Daisy in act two. There, Gatsby has Daisy try on several expensive pieces of jewelry and is prepared to purchase everything for her, amounting to about $800,000, but Daisy tells him just the square cut emerald ring will be enough—$27,000—which Gatsby pays in cash (Capote, typewritten ms. 89–92). In some ways, this scene supplants the memorable scene from chapter 5 of Fitzgerald's novel where Gatsby showers Daisy in shirts. Additionally, the ring is a visible token of Gatsby's sentiment that Daisy carries away with her when she returns home.A further addition that supports a sentimental domestic interpretation happens immediately after the jewelry store scene. Daisy takes off her new ring and drops it into her purse as she arrives home. There, she is greeted by the sight of her family—Pammy is horseback riding with her father, “tucked into the saddle in front of him.” After Pammy enthusiastically gushes about her day and seeing “wild gooses,” Tom confronts Daisy for having been spotted by one of his friends in Gatsby's company (Capote, typewritten ms. 92–94). These two scenes—the jewelry store and the family scene—play off one another quite well to illustrate Daisy's internal struggle. Additionally, Tom's role as a family man is strengthened. He is shown to be a capable father, if only momentarily, and a jealous husband who still cares for Daisy. Although they would only have amounted to four or five minutes of screen time, these scenes stand out as Capote's most obvious attempt to manipulate the sentimentality of the story. Also of interest is that the typewritten manuscript continues up until the end of these two scenes, with the remainder of the third act remaining handwritten (89–94). This underscores the importance of these last two scenes as the “second act turning point” (or “plot point two”), a pivotal section that heralds the end of act two and sets up the remaining action for the final act. It is likely that when the film's producers read the typewritten portion of the first two acts, and passed on Capote's interpretation, he did not bother to type up the remainder.The same year that Paramount came out with its own, different, version of The Great Gatsby, Capote attended the San Francisco International Film Festival and took questions from the audience afterward. One person asked about his experience working on the Gatsby script. Capote replied, “I did complete a script that was faithful to Fitzgerald and fast-paced. There were three producers on the picture and finally one of them told me, ‘The difficulty is your script is The Great Gatsby. It's just too literal.’ I said that in that case they should get someone else to do it. They did so and you know what happened” (Otsuki). This might seem sour grapes, but at the end of his life, rather than disappointment, Capote expressed relief that his version was not accepted. In Lawrence Grobel's Conversations with Capote, which took place between 1982 and 1984, he comments: my script was not the one finally used, thank God…. There were only two scenes in the whole book that were filmable….One is when they go to the Plaza Hotel and get sort of drunk; the other is when the mechanic goes to the house to shoot him, it actually has a narrative movement. But everything else is a flashback or flashforward. That's fine in prose, but it's not in the movies. (159)Jack Clayton finished the Paramount-approved film in 1974, with a new script by Francis Ford Coppola, and starring Robert Redford. As was the case with previous versions, Clayton's film attempts to change Daisy's character and Gatsby's motivation as well. Clayton makes Daisy less shallow seeming and provides evidence that Gatsby was, indeed, more domestically minded than in Fitzgerald's original depiction of him. Although the director attempts to make Daisy more sympathetic and Gatsby more pragmatic, he also conjures a great deal of sentimentality that is not found in the original text. These sentimental aspects of the film are apparent from the opening scenes. Beginning with a haunting tour through Gatsby's empty mansion, the camera lingers on his scrapbook of Daisy with its newspaper society clippings. Gatsby is established as someone trapped in the past and obsessed. Meanwhile, the empty house rings with disembodied voices of party guests and a gothic dread prevails. This over-the-top foreshadowing of Gatsby's death is only a precursor of things to come, however. Having established the mood, Clayton next sets about establishing the emotional insecurities of the other characters, exaggerating their emotional states in a sentimental fashion, and clearly changing what Fitzgerald had written.Tears are a hallmark signature of the sentimental, especially the sentimental domestic novel. Clayton's actresses break into tears during two significant scenes, and in neither does Fitzgerald describe the women as weeping. The first of these scenes is with Daisy (Gatsby 17). Daisy describes her relief at finding that she had given birth to a girl. She tells Nick how she wept afterward. In the film, however, Daisy weeps while recounting the story. The second scene is during the party at Myrtle's apartment when she recounts her first meeting with Tom. In the novel, Myrtle laughingly describes the scene directly to Nick (Gatsby 35–36). In the film, however, Myrtle describes the scene to several people and Nick listens as she becomes choked up with emotion and the tears begin to flow.In addition to added tears, Clayton inserts domestic scenery not found in the novel to make the possibility of domestic life between Daisy and Gatsby more plausible. In one montage sequence, Daisy tours Gatsby's mansion and marvels at the gleaming copper pots and cake molds hanging in his kitchen. In this, the so-called “woman's sphere,” she undergoes a change and asks Gatsby to put on his army uniform from their younger days. This sentimentality for their past is held alongside an equally sentimentalized view of women's role in society. Clayton's kitchen scene at Gatsby's mansion is very interesting when compared to the kitchen scene in the Buchanan house between Daisy and Tom in chapter 7 of the novel. These two kitchen scenes are pivotal in showing Daisy's deliberation between the two men she claims to love. That they both take place in a kitchen helps to drive home the importance of domesticity and family considerations versus the unfettered romanticism of Gatsby's waterside dock. However, Daisy's final choice takes place in the Buchanans’ kitchen and although Nick is not privy to their conversation, from his description it is apparent that Daisy has reconciled with Tom. All of Gatsby's wealth might someday vanish if his bootlegging crimes and other schemes with Wolfsheim are discovered. So Daisy chooses the security Tom offers to her and her daughter: Daisy and Tom were sitting opposite each other at the kitchen table, with a plate of cold fried chicken between them, and two bottles of ale. He was talking intently across the table at her, and in his earnestness his hand had fallen upon and covered her own. Once in a while she looked up at him and nodded in agreement.They weren't happy, and neither of them had touched the chicken or the ale—and yet they weren't unhappy either. There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture, and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together. (144–45) Fitzgerald's image of Gatsby waiting outside as a sentinel, worried that Tom might hurt Daisy is sad and pathetic. However, Gatsby's concern is justified, judging by Tom's violence toward women; he broke Myrtle's nose at the end of chapter 2. And although there is no way for Daisy to know that Gatsby is out there, readers feel a strange disconnect between her profession of love to him and her sudden return to Tom. Even Fitzgerald was aware of this. In a letter to H. L. Mencken, he declared, “There is a tremendous fault in the book—the lack of an emotional presentment of Daisy's attitude toward Gatsby after their reunion (and the subsequent lack of logic or importance in her throwing him over)” (Fitzgerald, Letters 480). This “fault” has been a subject of debate, and perhaps the very ambiguity of Daisy's motivations has made the book all the more captivating to readers, lending an air of mystery and allowing them to supply their own interpretations.Clayton's 1974 film attempts to address the “fault” in Daisy through newly invented scenes. In the novel, the reunion scene between Gatsby and Daisy at Nick's cottage allows us to see Daisy as Gatsby does, through the use of Nick's voiceover. In the film version, however, this voiceover is omitted. Instead of staying true to a filtered perception of the couple through the eyes of Nick, Clayton begins at this point to stage a series of additions to the Daisy and Gatsby storyline in order to fill the gap between their reunion and the eventual confrontation between Tom and Gatsby. These additions are clearly not something that Nick could have wi