susan McRae
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Honey Sees Gatsby in 3-D
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
“It’s like an amusement park!” Cries a visitor to Gatsby’s estate in the fictional town of Little Egg opposite Big Egg where the object of his passion lived on Long Island. In the recent film, the house is magnificent -- in the book it’s based on a Hôtel de Ville in Normandy -- but the visitor’s exclamation describes Great Gatsby in 3-D itself: the current movie is quite like an amusement park ride, the high point of which is when Myrtle Wilson’s body hurtles against the car windshield.
There are also two on-line video games of the novel.
Fitzgerald based the locations on Cow Neck and Great Neck, two peninsulas of Nassau County that border Manhasset Bay, where he and his wife Zelda lived in 1922. He wrote by day and partied with Hollywood heroes, Broadway stars, and the “staid nobility” by night. He only got through three chapters in a year and a half.
