‘There’s an Ocean in the Way’: Written Words, Unreachability and Competing Testimonies in The Great Gatsby

Abstract

Avatar, Gravity and The Hole are all, to some degree, concerned with characters’ mastery over the stereoscopic diegesis. In the first, a character rejected the opportunity to master Pandora in favour of a more participatory engagement with it, a relationship articulated through their enjoyment of the locus. In Gravity, Stone gained control of her situation by crossing back and forth over the screen plane at will and in the last chapter we saw how Dane’s victory was evidenced by his ability to inhabit the platea and the off-screen space that it implied. The following two films, The Great Gatsby and Frozen, are less concerned with the loss and eventual achievement of mastery than they are with intimacy that is either reached or rejected. I want to read these two texts closely in order to see how stereography spatializes the relationships between characters in each film. They each do this by limning our impression of either those characters’ closeness to or their distance from each other, as well as their spatial relationship to us. In The Great Gatsby, it is largely a case of distance rather than proximity. In this chapter, then, I will analyse how the film stereographically manipulates the impression of distance in order to spatially articulate its source novel’s explorations of the inaccessible past.