I have beef with a YouTuber over a 100-year old book. At first, I hoped to focus solely on Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 adaptation of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and how it got made. As a Creative Media Production major, I was excited to learn about the process of adapting a beloved classic into a script and the reasons behind camera direction. However, while I was doing research, I stumbled upon a video from 2024 titled Why every Great Gatsby Adaptation Fails: The ‘Unfilmable’ Classic Explained by YouTube commentator Steve Shives. As much as I tried to keep focus, this video has taken up far too much space in my brain to focus on the beauty of cinematography.
With over 300,000 subscribers and 4,000 videos, Steve Shives describes his channel as “videos about politics, social issues, Star Trek, pop culture, and general smartassery and tomfoolery” (n.d.). Shives’ video, sitting at over 44,000 views, goes through every main adaptation starting with the lost-to-time 1926 silent film and ending with Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 technicolor sensation. This paper will be focusing specifically on the latter portion.
This paper aims to analyze Shives’ principal critiques through the theoretical framework of adaptation theory. Adaptation theory is described as “a translation technique which takes place under a set of specific conditions and which ultimately aims at relevance rather than accuracy.” It is about capturing, for lack of a better term, the “vibe” of a film – the message of a film – without blatantly copying it word for word. When you transfer mediums, and you transfer creative heads, and you transfer time periods, and you transfer what audience is going to be reading this – what audience are going to be marketing to – things are going to change. If you did not have anything else to say about a film, it should not be made, it would not get made.
Of the sources that I have found, there are a couple of sub-definitions and subcategories under the category of adaptation theory.
Translational subjectivity is, in essence, the concept of moving a work from one medium to another and its effects on the source material. Translational subjectivity “looks into the ways in which the adapter’s creative license is manifested in the manipulation of genre conventions and expectations” (Perdikaki, 175). How does the adapter–in this case, how does Luhrmann–change the film to fit this new context in the medium in the current time?
In her chapter on theoretical adaptation models, adaptation scholar Camila Audusta Pires de Figueiredo introduces two terms: proximation and fidelity. According to Pires de Figueiredo, fidelity is “the idea that the adaptation has to bear a close similarity with its original source text” (14). She posits that there is this prevailing hierarchical opinion between the original source text and the adaptation. Obviously, she has seen Shives’ video.
Moreover, proximation is defined as the way a narrative is translated from the source to the adaptation “…so that audiences from the most diverse times, places and social aspects can identify with it more easily” (Pires de Figueiredo, 14). Pires de Figueiredo also advises against the centering of fidelity over proximation, citing the genuinely impossible nature of creating a one-to-one transmedial adaptation (14).
It seems fidelity and proximation can thus be interpreted as two opposing approaches to the act of adaptation. Simultaneously, prioritization of fidelity seems to be directly antithetical to adaptation as a theoretical concept. For the purposes of this paper, I will be categorizing Shives’ stance as one of a fidel mindset and addressing each criticism from a proximal one.
To say that Shives’ critiques – especially for the Baz Luhrmann film – were coming from a place of objectivity would be a lie. For almost the first five minutes, all Shives does is berate Luhrmann’s directorial style while simultaneously and paradoxically going on about how he built up his expectations of the same film to be “the best screen adaptation of [The Great Gatsby] to date” (20:15).
There are three main categories of the points that he hits: the frame narrative, the audiovisuals, and the acting direction. The overarching theme of this section of Shives’ video is that he really, truely, hates Baz Luhrmann; all of his analyses are tainted by this fact. One of the first statements Shives’ utters about Luhrman goes as follows: “I am not a fan of Baz Luhrmann – I find his work to be loud, ostentatious, obnoxious, and vulgar in the sense of being tasteless and unsophisticated” (Shives, 19:38). Clearly there is a bit of a bias there.
Luhrmann’s films, admittedly, can be a bit overwhelming to the average viewer. Luhrmann does not shy away from maximalism. He does not shy away from an in-your-face method of storytelling, and part of me understands that is not to everyone’s taste. Luhrmann does a lot with digital effects. Upon release, he heavily encouraged the watching of the film in 3D. This was way in the early days of 3D. Luhrmann’s Gatsby uses a lot of digital camera movements and green screens and things like that. On the topic of Luhrmann’s use of modern technology in the film, Shives glibly states that “[a] simple, well-composed shot will never do when there’s an elaborate, digitally assisted rushing, sweeping, swooping camera move that could be done instead.” However, in this film, Luhrmann’s directorial style is probably the most cinematically conducive tone that one could ever take when adapting a story like The Great Gatsby. The Great Gatsby is a story about the dangers of maximalism. The Great Gatsby is a cautionary tale about getting swept up in the grandeur that comes from power and the false promises of opulence.
…surely that shot of Gatsby raising a glass of champagne literal fucking fireworks go off behind him is the moment when Baz Luhrmann busts a nut, and then we can enjoy the rest of the movie while he rolls over and goes to sleep. (Shives, 21:09)
As much as I disagree with Shives’ dependence on emotional arguments and overindulgence in flowery language, I have to admit that this quote captures the essence of the first portion of this film better than anything I could ever write myself.
As Luhrmann points out, the way the film is structured has audiences going on the same journey as the characters. At the very beginning, Gatsby’s life is presented as enviable. Everything’s, to put it in Luhrmann’s terms, “razzle dazzle.” To interpolate on a wonderful metaphor from the DP/30 interviewer: we, as the film and the audience, start at the top of the hill. Fireworks, champagne, fashion, parties. Then, Gatsby asks for Nick’s help and Tom questions if Gatsby is a criminal. Everything we’ve experienced thus far is transformed in meaning. However, things are moving too fast. The film is too lost in the spectacular momentum to stop and process. What could possibly happen next? This brings us back to the frame narrative and the importance of capturing Nick’s voice that Shives is so against. “You start inside Nick’s mind, and you go out, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed – the dazzle, the razzle,” says Luhrmann, “and then it strips down” (13:17). Suddenly, the hill isn’t a hill anymore; it’s a cliff. We’re teetering on the edge. The pacing slows down, just a little bit, and then we fall and it’s a crash. Daisy kills Myrtle. Gatsby is shot. Suddenly there’s minimalism that wasn’t there before. Luhrmann continues, “Once Gatsby dies, you really want to know that it’s just, cinematically, between Nick Carraway and a dead man.” Everything else is stripped away. Without the crutch of sensory overload there to lean on, both the characters and viewers are left vulnerable.
One of Shives’ only substantive analyses of the film comes from a narrative device that is introduced in the beginning of the film. When Nick Carraway’s narration says “Reading over what I have written so far, I see I have given the impression that the events of three nights several weeks apart were all that absorbed me” two things are clearly laid out: (1.) In the context and world of The Great Gatsby novel, Nick Carraway is the author, and (2.) Nick is more concerned with impressions than with telling a story as he remembers it. This comes into place as a framing device that’s utilized throughout the entire movie.
Let’s see what Shives has to say: “The frame story accomplishes nothing other than making the narrative more complicated, and creative and clumsy, an obvious and unnecessary parallel between the character of Nick [Carraway] and F. Scott Fitzgerald…” (Shives, 21:49). It is extremely clear that Shives does not know much about Fitzgerald. Sure, it does sound like he did some preliminary research; he is correct in saying that both F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, were notorious alcoholics, with ending up in sanitariums numerous times until her unfortunate death during a stay at Highland Hospital in 1948 (Smith).
However, that is not where the filmmakers got the actual idea for this frame narrative from. In actuality, Luhrmann states in an interview that he and his team were doing large sums of research in an effort to faithfully transfer Nick’s voice between mediums. “The key thing is, if you could just unlock Nick’s inner voice, there’s a great movie to be made about that” (4:13). Without Nick Carraway, there is no Gatsby. If Nick’s narrative control is removed, complex characters like Daisy and Tom Buchanan become flat and unengaging. When Nick declares “they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made” it is not because Fitzgerald was telling readers what to think, but because Nick is showing his own bitter grief over Gatsby’s death (Fitzgerald, 1925).
Let’s circle back to Shives’ critique of the sanitarium. Luhrmann says, “Then comes the big problem: how do you reveal the inner poetic narrative of Nick Carraway?” (9:23). There is an obvious reverence in Luhrmann’s words; he understands that the novel’s–and thus the film’s–essence comes from Nick’s perspective. The true story of The Great Gatsby is one of love and loss–of regret and catharsis.
So, Luhrmann and his team did a bunch of research. Luhrmann credits one of his assistants who read through Fitzgerald’s last uncompleted novel, The Last Tycoon, and found that Fitzgerald came up with the idea of having the narrator be writing a book in a sanitarium. For all intents and purposes, it was not Luhrmann’s idea to use this as a framing device; it is Fitzgerald’s idea that they are taking from another novel and placing it into this work, to work in the context in the medium of film.
Luhrmann continues on to say that it wasn’t enough that they put him in a sanitarium. What’s going to be the motivating factor of Nick writing if he’s just in a sanitarium? There’s no stable connection between his stay and him writing a novel. So, Luhrmann actually met with a man named Walter Menninger whose family–the Menninger family–brought psychoanalysis to America in Kansas City. Reportedly during their meeting, Menninger told them about the use of therapeutic journaling starting in the 1920s (Luhrmann, 10:13). Menninger proves there is a historical reasoning behind Nick’s writing.
Now, I understand that Shives’ criticism is not about the historical accuracy or whether or not it was Luhrmann’s idea. However, it is also apparent that Shives is taking quite an aggressive nature toward an argument that he has is built not upon logic, but upon an emotional connection to Luhrmann–a negative emotional connection, but an emotional connection nonetheless. It’s as if his entire stance is based on the idea that anything Baz Luhrmann touches is automatically tainted. Fidel choices like Nick’s narration are both lazy and overcomplicated. Adaptive changes like the exorbitantly overstimulating portrayal of Gatsby’s parties are not intentional to the greater narrative message; no, they are, in Shives’ own words, “…the tools of the carnival barker or the medicine show huckster…” (23:23).
Even when Shives seems to express an effort to understand the thought put into the film, he can’t help but twist himself into yet another tired and sophomoric jab at Luhrmann. “The people I feel the most sorry for are the actors,” he cries! “What good is a cast that impressive when they’ve all obviously been directed to play their roles in such a way as to prevent them from giving good performances,” he laments (Shives, 26:09). It is at this point that I would like to sincerely apologize to the reader; throughout the process of writing this paper, I have been under the assumption that there are people in the film industry outside of the almighty Baz Luhrmann who have free will. Clearly Shives knows something you and I do not. Hopefully this isn’t news to Shives, but the actors in this film are adults who can make their own decisions. I assure you Luhrmann was not using the production of the 2013 movie The Great Gatsby to jumpstart his babysitting career.
As Shives observes, the film’s cast is nothing to scoff at. With Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby, Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway, Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan, and many, many more, there’s some serious star power here (Shives, 27:09). All this to say, these are professionals that have the power to say “no” at any point.
I can understand this misconception of Shives’; it is standard practice that the title of “author” for a film be attributed to the director (Fox, 51). Having a base assumption that it is a director’s creation and a director’s creation alone is only reasonable when one lacks a deeper understanding of the industry. However, I encourage examining these kinds of assumptions before posting them publicly.
“Am I supposed to be invested in these people and what happens to them or am I supposed to think that they and the world they inhabit is ridiculous, and shake my head at the whole thing,” Shives questions while continuing to petulantly attribute every element in the film he disapproves of solely to the meddling hands of Luhrmann (27:26). This quote really underlines how much the content-creator does not understand the point of The Great Gatsby. If one does not understand that Nick’s voice is the driving beat of the film–if one does not understand that these people are supposed to be tragic characters who are victims of both their own making and permeating socio-cultural factors, then it might be time to reevaluate one’s authority on the subject. The beauty of Fitzgerald’s characters comes from the knowledge that even though they are bad people, readers still can sympathise with them because of how they are shaped by the world around them.
Daisy is a perfect example of this. I think that Luhrmann’s film did a fantastic job as well as the actress herself, Carey Mulligan. She does an amazing job of giving so much depth to Daisy’s character and making it so much more clear that her situation and the way Nick viewed her are not conducive at all. There’s a scene a little over halfway through the film in which Mulligan’s performance absolutely moved me; story-wise, it’s just before the main cast decides to race off to the Plaza Hotel where Gatsby and Tom confront each other. Tensions are high, yet stay unaddressed. Shives bemoans a perceived lack of subtlety, yet the film arguably does a better job with restraint than the novel itself. In Fitzgerald’s original work, Daisy in this scene is impatient and senseless. After demanding Tom get her a drink from the other room, “she got up and went over to Gatsby and pulled his face down, kissing him on the mouth” before boldly declaring she loved him (Fitzgerald, ch. 7). In comparison, there is no declaration; just the inner voice of Nick interpreting her words as such. Mulligan’s Daisy never once explicitly says she is in love with Gatsby, and there’s a tragedy to that fact of which the actress’ restrained performance only elevates (Luhrmann, 2013).
The overarching thing that Shives criticizes about the film…is Luhrmann. “I can’t think of another successful, mainstream director who places himself between his story and his audience as insistently as he does” (Shives, 22:35). But, just as a painter cannot sever themself from the art they create, it is impossible for a storyteller to detach themself from theirs. Dr. Katerina Perdikaki, an expert in translation and adaptation studies, emphasises that “adaptations affirm their value as creative entities through reinterpreting the source material and assigning new messages to it. Such reinterpretation is inextricably linked with the adapters’ creative vision and individual intertexts” (Perdikaki, 173). You cannot adapt The Great Gatsby without putting yourself between the audience in the narrative. It’s just impossible. It isn’t enough to take everything at face value and absorb the story that you are being told. You have to look deeper. You have to analyze different viewpoints and different angles of the same work. You have to think about it from different perspectives. It continues old conversations while simultaneously beginning new ones. It is not a secondary text, but a parallel text.
Shives continues: “Show-offy insecurity radiates from every frame…[Luhrmann] clearly cares less about telling the story of the film and more about making sure we never for one second forget that it’s him who is telling it to us” (Shives, 22:52). There is a reason that Baz Luhrmann created this film. It got released in 2013, however, Luhrmann fully decided that he was going to do the film much earlier. He states that “[i]t was right in the middle of the crash – it must have been ‘08 or something, I don’t know – but the crash was on, and I thought, ‘Now I must do Gatsby’” (5:07). It’s interesting to note that Luhrmann is from Australia. He’s not American. He’s not an American director, but he’s so fascinated with this story. Because a financial crisis the size of those seen in both 2008 and the great depression doesn’t just affect America, it affects the entire world.
In the final dredges of his critique, Shives says, “I can understand why he was attracted to the material, though – if there’s a filmmaker anywhere in the world who is as obsessed with appearances, insecure, and desperate to impress as Jay Gatsby, it’s Baz Luhrmann” (27:59). Obviously, no one can say, for sure, if Shives’ view of Luhrmann is true or not; only Baz Luhrmann can say if that’s true…
At the end of the DP/30 interview, the interviewer asks about what’s next for Luhrmann.
You know, in the film, the little boy is reaching out and all that, and I think if I’m honest – I [grew up] in a very small place,…and it was a very tiny eleven houses, big, long highway stretching down – and I think that, if I’m honest, I was like that little boy in Gatsby. I saw my life. I did. I saw this big life, and I probably have this part of me that’s endlessly going towards that. (Luhrmann, 29:08)
In Luhrmann’s eyes, he himself is not Gatsby. He is the little boy, hoping for bigger and better things.
Bibliography
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. The Project Gutenberg, 1925, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/64317/64317-h/64317-h.htm.
Fox, Alistair. “THE AUTEUR THEORY.” Truffaut on Cinema, Indiana University Press, 2017.
Luhrmann, Baz. DP/30: The Great Gatsby, co-screenwriter/director Baz Luhrmann. 2013. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2LX8LzC9Ns&list=PL4VDBrremT6gQ0KbC3m4alB5KmYh4jOCx&index=3.
Luhrmann, Baz, director. The Great Gatsby. 2013, https://www.amazon.com/Great-Gatsby-Leonardo-DiCaprio/dp/B00ESY6TKY.
Perdikaki, Katerina. “Film adaptation as the interface between creative translation and cultural transformation: The case of Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby.” JoSTrans: The Journal of Specialised Translation, no. 29, 2018, https://openresearch.surrey.ac.uk/esploro/outputs/journalArticle/Film-adaptation-as-the-interface-between/99514346102346.
Shives, Steve. Why Every Great Gatsby Adaptation Fails: The “Unfilmable” Classic Explained. 2024. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65STWS2eEUo&list=PL4VDBrremT6hdWKK90EtwFlx9kICI_t_Y&index=13&t=1712s.Smith, Anne Chesky. “Inside the 1948 Highland Hospital fire that killed Zelda Fitzgerald.” Asheville Museum of History, https://www.ashevillehistory.org/zelda/. Accessed 10 May 2025.
