Book the Great Gatsby and the Film 6 Degrees Starring Will Smith

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 contend of "passing" is to pass for white, not to pretend one is Sidney Poiter's son nor that one is of a higher class than one was born to in New York Roaring 20's society. 'Passing' is usually understood to be 'passing' for the light skin tone of white in the body of a presumably fair-skinned African-American. (Larson, 2001)

Passing does not necessarily have criminal connotations, either, one might argue, as Black men and women once 'passed' to take advantage of greater social and economic opportunities accorded to whites, as does the protagonist of Nella Larson's 1929 novel Passing, later reprinted in 2001. The novel revolves around detailing the protagonist's conflicted identity and status in a world that demands she shed her racial and cultural identity to become a fully-fledged citizen and rights-bearing person in America. Will Smith's character Paul 'passes' as a rich Black young man to burgle the home of a wealthy couple. He 'makes himself up' much as the bootlegger and adherent in organized crime Jay Gatsby does, from the bits of knowledge he gleaned from the Kitteridge children, one of whom Paul has had an affair with. Ironically, this young homosexual man is currently passing for heterosexual to his parents.

But Paul's motives, like Gatsby's, are not purely economic in nature. As the narrative progresses, it becomes clear Paul desires the maternal influence of Ouisa Kitteridge as well as her wealth. He wishes to be a part of the Kitteridge world and to be loved by it, as Gatsby desires to be loved by Daisy Buchanan. Moreover, the act of passing or dissembling one's race was once considered an illegal act in American history, just as intermarriage between the races was illegal. Thus, by 'passing' as white, one committed a kind of burgling by making one's self a social and economic interloper, based on one's appearance in white, mainstream, Caucasian society, taking advantage of the opportunities only accorded to whites. Also, one destabilized racial categories, questioning the notion that race, any more than class, was self-evident in one's character as it was upon the skin. The boorishness of Tom Buchanan, evidenced amongst many other traits in the young man's openly expressed racism and sense of superiority for no evident reason, brings this lie to sharp relief in Fitzgerald's novel.

It is clear that many African-American men and women 'passed,' just as many men and women (and men, as Guare's play and film makes clear) of different races engaged in sexual activities. The supposed obvious quality of 'passing' is contradicted by the successful dissemblance of individuals such as Paul and Gatsby. Although neither Gatsby nor Smith's Paul construct themselves in the personas of alternate races, it could also be argued that Sidney Poiter's own persona as a Black man of culture and taste was often seen as a way of rendering Blackness acceptable or white in the eyes of the majority of Americans.

Sidney Poiter and Paul, his spurious son in Guare's fiction, are seen as acceptable as well because they are talented or the son of talent, and rich. Wealth and access to Hollywood are allowed the great equalizers in the American schema of class and racial hierarchy, both plots suggest. Through wealth and the construction of status through material possessions, Gatsby hopes to buy love and status just as he buys his expensive and beautiful shirts that Daisy is so impressed by, when he shows them to her. However, the sense of class in American society, like the sense of race, is still fragile enough that neither Paul nor Gatsby can fully become a part of its fabric, without tearing the worlds they desire to enter seamlessly, completely apart.