Gatsby and Six
Passing for white -- Both a white and a black man can 'pass'
The Great Gatsby, only six degrees and six decades separate from Will Smith's Paul
Perhaps, if F. Scott Fitzgerald were to write his famous The Great Gatsby today, Gatsby would be a Black man. Gatsby, much like the protagonist of the film "Six Degrees of Separation," the cinematic version of John Guare's play of the same name, is 'passing' for a member of the Long Island Hamptons aristocracy, just as the young Black hustler Paul as depicted by Will Smith is passing for the son of Sidney Poiter. By definition Paul is passing as a son of the new Black aristocracy of talent, prep schools, and poise, just as Gatsby is passing a member of a wealthy and class bound society where image and parentage and where one went to school means everything.
In their act of 'passing,' or idealizing a false world, these protagonists unintentionally stir up some "foul dust," that is the foul and decaying ideology of race and the importance of money in both the decadent world of the New York Hamptons and of the Upper East Side Manhattan of the tail end of the 20th century. (Davis, 2001) Ironically, both Paul and Gatsby wished to blend in, yet they make the contradictions of the world they unsuccessfully attempt to become a part of all the more evident. Gatsby's society pretends it is a world of old money and class, yet all the money is new and the morality is decadent and dead and those of high class lack any class at all, really, even less so than the interloper Gatsby. Guare's society is liberal, but liberal only in racial constructs that make these wealthy, educated liberals comfortable and secure in finely decorated apartments and homes.
The introduction of Gatsby and Paul to these societies thus makes the hidden hypocrisies of class and race respectively evident and uncomfortably present upon the surfaces of these surface-conscious societies. Of course, strictly speaking neither Paul nor even Gatsby are 'passing' in the traditionally understood racial sense of the Harlem Renaissance or the antebellum South. The true definition, one might...
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