In 1925, the year F. Scott Fitzgerald published his magnum opus The Great Gatsby in the United States, across the ocean, in Germany, writer Thea von Harbou turned expressionist filmmaker Fritz Lang’s treatment into the science fiction novel Metropolis – which Lang would transform into the landmark film with the same name two years later.
Set in a dystopian city of the future – sustained by an exploited underclass of labourers who toil beneath the surface, far removed from the gleaming world above – Metropolis follows the journey of the city master’s son and a revered girl from the underground, whom he falls in love with, as they try to bridge the immense divide between their worlds. The story’s message is encapsulated in the 1927 film’s final inter-title: “The mediator between the head and the hands must be the heart.”
The anxiety that pulsed beneath Metropolis – and no doubt inspired its vision of the future – reflected the socio-political upheavals of the early 20th century, when unchecked industrial capitalism had fuelled the rise of socialist movements across Europe. From the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 to the growing influence of socialist and communist parties in Germany’s Weimar Republic, workers throughout the Western world were organising en masse in response to exploitation and inequality. The spectre of class struggle was no longer confined to political theory – it had spilled into the streets, into parliaments and into the cultural imagination.
In contrast to Metropolis, The Great Gatsby offered a very different, yet equally resonant, critique of capitalism’s excesses. While Metropolis envisioned a distant future where the classes were forcibly kept apart, Fitzgerald’s novel laid bare the illusions and moral decay beneath the glittering surface of the American Dream in the Jazz Age. Set against the backdrop of the ‘roaring twenties,’ the book maps a society no less stratified than Lang and von Harbou’s futuristic city, where the divide between old money and new wealth, idealism and reality, is just as vast.
Last week marked exactly a hundred years since The Great Gatsby was first published and its critique of wealth and social stratification remains as relevant today as it was in 1925. The world we live in today is not exactly like the future Lang and von Harbou imagined – although the Maschinenmensch, the robot fashioned in the image of the heroine of Metropolis to deceive and manipulate the working class, offers a chilling parallel in the age of AI, deepfakes, digital filters and mass disinformation spread by firebrand populists. Yet the core warning of The Great Gatsby – about the hollowness of a culture that idolises wealth and lacks a moral compass – feels even more urgent now, in a world dominated by social media spectacle, hyper-consumption and growing inequality.
In his 2001 piece on the novel, New York Times columnist Matthew Mirapaul argued that there are no heroes in Gatsby, only moral failures. Still, many continue to read the titular Jay Gatsby as a tragic figure, mythologising his romance with Daisy Buchanan as the 20th century’s Romeo and Juliet kept apart by old and new money.
Gatsby’s obsession with Daisy isn’t driven purely by love. For Gatsby – who loathes his impoverished past and reinvents himself to escape it – Daisy represents the wealth and luxury he has always craved. In his own words, her voice was “full of money.” He lies to Daisy in an attempt to convince both her and himself that he is worthy of her. When he misses his chance to be with her because of his own ambitions, he puts everything into winning her back – to reclaiming the past.
“You can’t repeat the past,” Nick, the narrator who seems to reinvent Gatsby to fulfil his own obscure needs, remarks at one point. “Can’t repeat the past? Why, of course you can!” Gatsby’s replies.
Events prove him wrong. Before Daisy’s husband Tom kills him, Gatsby catches a glimpse of his dream for what it truly is – nothing more than fiction. But death is not the tragedy Fitzgerald’s story outlines; it may even be seen as emancipation from the never-ending rat race of a society obsessed with wealth and status. The real tragedy lies in the inherent hollowness of Gatsby’s dream.
A century on, we live surrounded by the doppelgangers of the characters of The Great Gatsby. As the already wealthy grow wealthier, like the figures of the novel, they chase and flaunt excess with little regard for the destruction they cause along the way – from entire communities to the environment. Meanwhile, their lives, their “voices full of money,” are broadcast to us 24/7 through tabloids, talk shows, reality TV, and red carpets.
On the other side of the divide, from Andrew Tate to Ashton Hall, take your pick from any number of social media Gatsbys – each with legions of ‘Nicks’ who idolise them in an electronic landscape that drowns out any moral centre. In the age of the Internet, the pursuit of wealth and status has become a performance for millions of spectators, driven by vanity, consumption and in many cases outright lies and crippling debt.
Scores of young would-be influencers entranced by the mirage of wealth in an increasingly unequal society, succumb to the ‘fake it till you make it’ philosophy as any dream of actual success “year by year recedes before us”. As that pursuit becomes an endless cycle, they, like Gatsby and the ‘green light’ he believed in, will see it as no matter. Instead, they will run faster and stretch their arms farther for that “one fine morning.” Some, perhaps, will eventually realise that within the current order, it is forever out of reach.