Word: eggs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...West Egg was as spiritually bankrupt as it was materially rich. Jumping off place and last stop for the ambitions and wealthy, it was for them a moral wasteland. Even as Gatsby wrought West Egg in the image of his dreams; his heaven on earth it could not be. More could it be his Hell, his dreams as phantoms, his mansion their graveyard. Embalmed in midsummer mists, the place even looked something of a mirage: shimmering on Saturday evenings with wealth and youth and beauty, and so heavy, up close, with the heat and sweat of life; dream and disillusionment...
...however, the heat and sweat that was remembered in his legend, but the wealth and youth and beauty. If West Egg for Gatsby had been a sort of haunted place, it had to look much more like paradise to most who had not lived there. And even more in the Depression that followed so close upon his death could it offer the fascination of the forbidden. If men could not have it and men could much less forget it, then it could still be had in dream and fantasy. In a grandeur of escapism might Gatsby's dream be borne...
...ending after ending applauding eternal love comes true; story after dreamy-eyed story where spectacle was half the thing and blissful love as life's reward the other half. As Gatsby dreamed of love and money, Hollywood made life out as all romance and pageantry. The picture of West Egg as a factory of pleasure could have been their fantasy factory's Model...
...Hollywood was not unlike Gatsby's West Egg. It could grow as cocksure, as raunchy with all its wealth. It could make pictures with extravagance to rival Gatsby's parties. It could appear to outsiders as walled off and desirous a world, and to insiders it could offer a future as closed. Even further, just as Gatsby intrigued with gamblers and built a bootlegger's paradise, Hollywood's machinery worked more like a crap game than like clockwork. Few moguls were unlike, at least in the way they came by their fortunes, descendants of Gatsby...
...Hollywood's attributes were so amply like West Egg's, Hollywood was bound to lure Fitzgerald into a mad hate-love affair. Its attraction could magnetize the man as certainly as it could rot his art. As the peeling Dr. Eckleberg--monument to America's first age of advertising and god of the ash heaps--mocked the death of Gatsby's dreams, so Hollywood--monster bulwark of materialism and smug summit of the equation--tortured Fitzgerald. Yes, the place could be as hostile to Fitzgerald as West Egg had been to Gatsby. Though both could dream unto death, neither could...