Submissions for the Critical Analysis category should critically evaluate or analyze a piece of literature, a theatrical performance, a work of visual art, a historical moment, a philosophical argument, a social movement, etc. Submissions should not exceed 20 pages. Jaime Geary wrote the 2nd place submission in the Critical Analysis Category for the 2026 President’s Writing Awards.
About Jaime
I’m a senior at Boise State University graduating with a Humanities and Cultural Studies major, a film minor and a severe caffeine addiction. I have spent my undergraduate education interning at Boise State Public Radio and participating in community-based research projects with resettled and incarcerated people. I’m headed to Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism in the fall to study audio reporting, and I aim to produce investigative journalism on the country’s state and federal prison systems.
Winning Manuscript – The Pervert’s Guide to Undergraduate Catharsis
Abstract
Media’s repetition-based transformation from sites of purposeful signification to arbitrary symbols upholding ideologies are explored through formal and thematic differences between F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby and Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 film of the same name. Jameson’s theories of “reification and utopia” are employed to determine “mass culture” has absorbed and transposed the cinematic technology of repressed desires onto academic writing, especially in undergraduate education as students are expected to construct reified combinations of pre-existing theory leading to a cathartic conclusion emphasized by film’s libidinal release of repressed emotional excess. Rather than escape this ideological “shitstorm,” an argument is made to embrace its exposure of excess in meaning and embrace theoretical writing as “negativity” that can breathe new life into the undergraduate literary analysis.
Towards the end of Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 cinematic rendition of The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway imagines himself walking through Gatsby’s house musing, “I remember how we had all come to Gatsby’s and guessed at his corruption… while he stood before us, concealing an incorruptible dream,” (The Great Gatsby, 2:07:08). Here, Nick preserves the modern ideological “American Dream” of fiscal success through self-optimization – affirming Gatsby’s romantic yearning for the “green light” while condemning how Gatsby pursues the light. Luhrmann’s film, as part of the modern Hollywood oeuvre, participates in the ideological reification of desires that underpin all modern cultural and academic discourse, absorbing the potential of radical thinking into an environment of coercive repetition. The modern academic institution has fallen into similar modes of repetition through its reification of pre-existing thoughts and philosophies. This promises a cathartic release for the academic, as literary analysis is restrictively articulated through previous ideas rather than explored through new ways of thinking that render the text as an endless ocean of contradictory meanings. Through its depiction of ideological reification, Fitzgerald’s academically lauded text and its modern adaptation expose contemporary ideology of optimization here transposed from the film industry onto the undergraduate theoretical analysis as a vacuous “green light” promising impossible complete understanding of the text and thereby oneself through reduction of literary meaning itself to a “shitstorm” of repeating symbols.
Frederic Jameson’s “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” discards the notion of “high art” to establish all forms of media, from Hollywood to academic scholarship, as products of isolating materialized reification imitating the past known as “mass culture.” For Jameson, “reification” is a method through which cultural productions as “forms of human activity are instrumentally reorganized… essentially restructured along the lines of a differentiation between means and ends,” optimized towards the end of maximum value (Jameson 10). Mass culture does not represent any value other than the quantitative. Mass-produced modern media’s form and content are subordinate to the interests of maximized profit. Jameson notes there is no opposition to this form of cultural production, as even “modernisms” that form in opposition to mass culture’s prolific, repeated aesthetics are absorbed into repetition fundamental to the capitalist system, for “capitalism systematically dissolves the fabric of all cohesive social groups without exception, including its own ruling class, and thereby problematizes aesthetic production and linguistic invention which have their source in group life,” (23). All cultural productions, from cinema to its academic critique, fall prey to economic optimization that enables their own institutional production as imitation based on pre-existing forms of thought, fundamentally severing the ability to think “outside the box.” This impulse is reflected in Fitzgerald’s novel when Nick tells Gatsby, “you can’t repeat the past,” to which he replies, “why of course you can!,” failing to realize in his romantic entrapment that he can only imitate a future based on his pre-existing knowledge of Daisy Buchanan (106).
Against a backdrop of increasingly homogenous mass culture, Gatsby’s individual journey is portrayed in Luhrmann’s film as a desirable, neutralizing image of the American dream – aligning with Slavoj Žižek’s analysis of cinema as the instructor of ideological desire. In the opening sequence to The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, Žižek says “we have to be taught to desire. Cinema is the ultimate pervert art, it doesn’t give you what you desire, it tells you how to desire,” (The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema 00:30). For Žižek, any enjoyment or violence that becomes too poignant in the individual or social consciousness must be fictionalized to be observed from a safe distance, or it would fundamentally disrupt our modern self-perception.
This fictionalization is peppered throughout Luhrmann’s Gatsby film, externalizing interpellated desire for excess through lavish set design and exaggerated depictions of enjoyment. Luhrmann explodes Fitzgerald’s writing of Gatsby’s parties with energetic electro-swing, oceans of ticker tape, and a splashing pool in the center of a giant atrium. Gatsby looks at Nick in the eyes as he raises a glass to exploding fireworks, to which Nick thinks, “His smile was one of those rare smiles… it seemed to understand you and believe in you as you would like to be understood and believed in,” (The Great Gatsby 30:00). Fitzgerald’s Nick immediately undercuts the splendor of the scene, saying “at that point it vanished, and I was looking at an elegant young rough-neck… whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd,” But Luhrmann’s Nick sustains his awe, upholding Gatsby as an avatar of positivity associated with wealth, the alluring American Dream achieved through optimization (Fitzgerald 49).
Gatsby’s downfall releases the libidinal tension of this inflated image of excess, providing a cathartic release deepening the film’s ideological reinforcement of the mass cultural consumption “shitstorm.” Byung-Chul Han’s Psychopolitics explains digital communication is a distinctly emotional medium arousing catharsis, an “immediate release of affect… simply on the basis of its temporality, digital communication conveys affect more than it transmits feeling.
Shitstorms are streams of affect [representing] phenomena of digital communication,” (Han 42). For Han, the most potent and effective source of this catharsis is short form video content and headline news posts that immediately cut to the release of the subject’s feeling of excess consecutively, creating the “shitstorm.” Cinema, through its plot curve delaying the payoff of its inciting incident, is a prolonged, more significant delay of catharsis that leads to a greater cathartic libidinal release of emotional affect at the end of the film. Luhrmann achieves this through foreshadowing (Owl-eyes in Gatsby’s study, pulling fake books from the shelf, and the eyes of T. J. Eckleburg), and a midpoint shift (the reveal of Gatsby as James Gatz) that delay gratification until Gatsby’s climactic downfall, set in motion by he and Daisy’s car crash (The Great Gatsby). This allure of catharsis ingrained in the film’s symbolism is reifying and masturbatory in nature.
Luhrmann’s addition of the green light “gazing back” at Gatsby at the end of the film closes a loop of utopic optimism to offer resolution in repression underneath the symbolic, weathering the “shitstorm.” In Pervert’s Guide, Žižek says “gaze is that obscured point, the blind spot, from which the object looked upon returns the gaze,” exposing (The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema 40:41). Luhrmann dramatizes Gatsby’s death by placing Gatsby’s piercing gaze straight into the camera after being shot by Wilson, as he makes direct eye contact with the “green light” from the Buchanan’s dock and utters “Daisy,” an ambiguous phone call ringing in the distance (The Great Gatsby 2:02:16). While Fitzgerald states “no telephone message arrived,” Luhrmann’s film cuts to Nick holding the phone in the bond office, to imply there was a real caller that could have been either Daisy or Nick (Fitzgerald 153). By briefly opening Gatsby’s eyes to a lasting fulfillment within green light gazing back at him, imitating an encounter with symbolic closure, Luhrmann grants character and viewer a brief glimpse of eternal satisfaction while simultaneously burying it underneath the shitstorm. Nick’s last words to Gatsby in the film are “They’re a rotten crowd, the whole lot of them. You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together,” omitting Fitzgerald’s note that Nick disagreed with nearly everything Gatsby stood for, transforming him into a martyr for the modern viewer to project and bury their desire in the name of distancing and optimizing themselves away from excess’ frivolity, (2:00:19).
Contemporary academia upholds ideological reconfiguration of desire in its reading of Gatsby as itself a product of “mass culture” through deliberately avoidance of new forms of interrogation, in service of pre-existing ideas. In his article “Sleeping With the Enemy,” Peter Goodrich says modern legal studies has limited itself to the processes of reification and optimization. Encounters with media that “gaze back” at the viewer to expose repressed desires and understandings are avoided, in Goodrich’s view, through the processes of legal studies’ reconfiguration as a vein of mass culture, and academia’s misrecognition of the nihilism at the core of the law itself. For Goodrich, “The political goal of exposing legal doctrine to cultural analysis, the history of legal practice to theoretical reconstruction, is threatening because it challenges the boundaries of the discipline and particularly the seclusion – the innocence – of its practice,” (Goodrich 317). In implicating the law as “doctrine,” Goodrich references binaristic perceptions of right and wrong that evade transgression, ultimately determining the law as a monolith evading challenge. Such readings and interpretations, like Luhrmann’s film, invite and imitate the impossible closure in the symbolic, resulting in a release of the viewer’s repressed excess. But law itself is consistently subjected to reinvention, reinterpretation – reification based on present and future circumstances, which defies the notion of morals as static, monolithic belief structures.
Literary criticism, despite its promised diversity of different “lenses” of analysis in the undergraduate education, may offer a similar imitation of closure in the interest of capital.
Students are prepared to compose their claim, evidence, and analysis using theory as methodological “glasses” through which to observe the text, rather than embodying the stated theoretical approach in their writing. This practice of academic writing is academic journalism, reifying past articles, symbols, and reflections of thematic content in literature to assemble an interpretation written with passionate objectivity, not subjectivity. Goodrich suggests “the translation of continental theory is market led and subjects critical scholarship to a breathless journalism which follows the immediate fashions one after another like paparazzi,” (315).
Students are instructed to seek out pre-existing knowledge to weigh against other pre-existing knowledge under the lens of a historical philosopher, relating their claims to ultimately subjective “evidence” with a lens of objectivity. Literary symbols like the glasses of T.J. Eckleburg overlooking the Valley of Ashes in Gatsby, in their spectral all-seeing multiplicity, can be reduced to a static set of meanings to close the ideological gap between the reader/viewer and the narrative, undercutting the fundamentally fragmented, contradictory forces of meaning that underpin mediological symbols, themes, and content.
The reifying reduction of this practice lies in the promise that, like Luhrmann’s film, theory can be construed as presentation of a satisfactory, summarizing resolution that becomes a cathartic release, in conflict with its intended dismantling or “opening” of perspective. Goodrich writes that theoretical approaches to criticism should not be an umbrella for the writer to shield itself under, “[it] does not need to shelter, it is rather the institution and the law which imposes a standardized rhetoric… a writing for bureaucracy, a prose for conformity and for defeat,” that protects itself through reification – for a new form of thought may transgress the institution itself (307). Here, undergraduate criticism may serve as a form of consolidating previous scholarship, reifying the repertoire of the institution via academic journalism rather than an exercise of theoretical analysis. As Žižek notes in The Sublime Object of Ideology, “the function of ideology is not to offer us a point of escape from our reality but to offer us the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real kernel,” while theory intends to probe for and expose the kernel or fissure that would lead one to a revelatory “netherworld” within the “shitstorm” of ideological repression that would recontextualize Gatsby, Eckleburg, or the green light (Žižek 45). Departure from theory as journalism is reclamation of theory as a discursive approach from the fantasy of objectivity, allowing for exploration of the structures upholding modern utopic portrayal of theory as an “answer” rather than facilitator of questions.
An approach to dismantling cathartic optimism and academic journalism may lie in Berlant and Edelman’s definition of negativity. In his article, Goodrich emphasizes the importance of “writing otherwise” in relation to the academic institution, stating “writing differently or writing otherwise are far more threatening to the academic institution and indeed to bureaucracy generally than many more overtly radical strategies or politically subversive messages,” (307). Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman conceive a perspective of “writing otherwise” through their definition of negativity, as demonstrated in the preface to Sex, or the Unbearable. For Berlant and Edelman, sexual repression and activity becomes a site for the technologies of optimism, reification, and catharsis to play out, while “negativity, far from being reductively antisocial, is invariably an aspect of the social: that sociality’s inherent contradictions give rise to structures of self-relation fundamentally out of sync with themselves,” (Berlant, Edelman XIV). In contrast to optimism’s conformity, negativity is resistance, forming the opposition to optimism that paradoxically structures political discourse and opposing resolution through the sexual drive. A reading of Fitzgerald and Luhrmann’s Gatsby through the lens of negativity might probe incoherences, contradictions and disturbances across mediums, themes and content to reveal political and ideological gaps that rupture the text as a completed object.
The stare of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg embodies a rupturing negativity in The Great Gatsby. Žižek’s Pervert’s Guide refers to “autonomous partial objects” in cinema as embodiments of the “death drive” – “the dimension of the undead… of something that remains alive even after it is dead,” which can only be eradicated once one becomes the object (The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema 25:22). Witnessing both the desolate Valley of Ashes and Daisy’s pivotal murder of Myrtle Wilson, Eckleburg seemingly symbolizes the gap between the glamorous American dream and its often bitter reality, or the eyes of God watching the worst of humanity’s actions. But Eckleburg, in Luhrmann’s film, can be seen as an embodiment of repressive desire – its eyes watch Gatsby create a mythological identity of himself for Nick and observe the moment of Myrtle’s murder where Gatsby’s desire to run away with Daisy retreats back into fantasy. While Gatsby and Daisy leave, Eckleburg’s eyes remain as a perpetual observer to further libidinal fantasies. The eyes’ persistence even after the characters leave contradicts the apparent resolution of Gatsby’s death, reflecting the death drive, an ultimate lack of conclusion undermining media’s cathartic release and rupturing resolution itself, forcing the viewer back into an expanding ideological “shitstorm” of existence.
F. Scott Fitzgerald and Baz Luhrmann’s renditions of The Great Gatsby stand as pillars of maximalism in the literary and cinematic canons. Each film is marked by an immense breadth of literary review that shape how the two works are perceived in mass culture through coercive repetition and reification of desire that remains intrinsic to cultural productions. Mass culture embodies a space for reification and optimization of pre-existing symbols, rather than “reading otherwise” to form novel interpretations that expose ideological gaps within pre-existing forms of theory. Through its depiction of ideology and reification, Fitzgerald’s academically lauded text and its modern adaptation, when read alongside Žižek’s observations of cinematic expression of ideology, expose the contemporary ideology of optimization transposed into all forms of media, from academic review to cinema, as a vacuous “green light” promising impossible self-unification via reduction of meaning itself to a “shitstorm” of repeating symbols. Like Gatsby, the undergraduate cannot embrace the resolution of the “green light” that clears away the excrement and fulfills repressed desire – seemingly far away, but actually at the core of one’s being – so they can write through negativity without the promise of a satisfying conclusive catharsis.
Bibliography
Berlant, Lauren Gail, and Lee Edelman. “Preface.” Sex, or the Unbearable, Duke UP, 2013, pp. I-XVII.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. Scribner, 1925.
Goodrich, Peter. “Sleeping with the Enemy: An Essay on the Politics of Critical Legal Studies in America.” Legal Studies as Cultural Studies: A Reader in (Post)Modern Critical Theory, edited by Jerry D. Leonard, State University of New York Press, 1995, pp. 299–325.
Han, Byung-Chul. Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. Verso Books, 2014.
Jameson, Frederic. “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture.” Signatures of the Visible, Routledge, 1990, pp. 9–34.
The Great Gatsby. Directed by Baz Luhrmann, Bazmark Films, Red Wagon Entertainment, 2013.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, Part 1. Directed by Sophie Fiennes, 2006.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. Verso Books, 1989.