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Showing posts from August, 2016

The Neon Gatsby

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This post contains spoilers for the film, The Neon Demon. Hollywood excels at masking the shallow as profound. It is ironic, then, that a film offering a profound critique of Hollywood is widely seen as shallow. The film is Nicolas Winding Refn’s  The Neon Demon , and its surface is so stunning that  some critics  assume that’s all there is. Yet,   there is a familiar alienation and darkness beneath its skin, just  as the grotesque lurks beneath the seductive glitz and glamour of a  decadent party from  The Great Gatsby . In fact, Refn's stylized portrait of Hollywood is strikingly reminiscent of F. Scott Fitzgerald's  New York. Both  explore the romanticization of a corrupt narcissist while exposing the depraved society that consumes him--or her, as the case may be. Though many view  The Great Gatsby as a tragic love story between Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan,  Fitzgerald’s novel is primarily about Nick Carraway,  the narrator and purveyor of Gatsby's image. We se