And no, it’s not about reinventing yourself.
Or the effectiveness of exclusive VIP events out on Long Island. Or garish automobiles. Or pink suits. Or holding on to your dream.
It’s not about what we can learn from Baz Luhrmann about multi-platform marketing or mash-ups with hip-hop.
It’s rather about the fact that Jay Gatsby, the former Jimmy Gatz and the central figure of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, gets shot at the end.
Come again?
We were saying that the desire for happiness is the deepest desire of our common human nature. Everyone desires happiness, whether he realizes it or not.
Of course, not everyone desires happiness in the same way. Where you place your ultimate fulfillment may not be where I place mine.
To which you might be inclined to reply: De gustibus non est disputandum. (“There’s no arguing with taste.”)
To which I would reply: Hooey.
Don’t we recognize that the person whose happiness is structured around pleasure–I mean physical pleasures like comfort, sex, food and drink, sleep, and whatever other stimulants and pain-relievers are enlisted in the battle–is living a less human life than the person whose happiness is structured around raising a family, feeding the poor, educating the young, or creating a business that enhances the life of a community?
What is this distinction based upon?
On the thought that human nature flourishes when we serve others, not when we indulge our sense appetites.
And it follows from this that there is a crucial difference, at times, between what we think is going to bring us happiness, and what actually does bring us happiness. Screenwriters call this the difference between external wants and internal needs. At the end of a movie, at least if there’s a happy ending, the now enlightened hero brings his external wants into alignment with his internal needs (i.e., what his nature requires to flourish). So by the end of Groundhog Day Bill Murray’s character has learned what it takes to flourish on a truly human level–and so he is released from the prison of reliving February 2nd.
But in the tragic melodrama that is The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby unfortunately never realizes how wrong he was to make Daisy Buchanan an idol of his feverishly romantic imagination. We, the readers, see Daisy herself deciding that she cannot remain on Gatsby’s pedestal. But Gatsby himself dies without ever discovering that the thing he wanted so badly was out of sync with what could really make him happy (and how it in fact set in motion the series of accidents that resulted in his own murder).
As we seek to tell stories that will move others at their deepest level, it is imperative that we think through and implement this distinction between external wants and internal needs, between what seems to make ourselves and others happy, and what really does so.
Only then will our stories eschew the slick, the superficially beguiling, the illusory, and address that in us which is capable of being enlightened and truly entertained.
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