The Great Gatsby and The American Mobster

    Americans have long been intrigued by crime. especially organized crime. Criminals have a sense of glamor about them that make for exciting conversations and stories. Their illegality, immorality, and general difference from the average life make criminals semi-heroes to the American public. Films such as The Godfather and books like The Great Gatsby provide examples of this, both in the works’ stories and in their receptions. The Godfather, although it portrays a family immersed and consumed by crime, it is hailed as one of the best films of all time. The stories and actors’ portrayals won the acclaim of the American people, not to mention Best Picture at the Academy Awards. Gatsby, like Don Corleone in The Godfather, is a man of mystique to his peers. He is seen and gawked at, but the people who know him never fully understood him.

    The Godfather and The Great Gatsby contain larger-than-life characters. Don Corleone, his son Michael, and Gatsby affect audiences because of how they are not relatable. Most people can’t seem to understand crime, so it intrigues them

Snazzy, Menacing Mobsters

to see criminals in person. Mobsters and the Mafia add another level of interest because of their organization. To the average person, the Mafia represents a government turned bad. It has its own social hierarchy and organization, but it is still criminal. Such order and precision in something that is normally associated with chaos fascinates people. The mob treats murder, cruelty, and illegality with complete familiarity and acceptance. What makes these criminals so appealing to an audience is their stark difference to normal life. People are amazed and awed by contrasts to normality. The characters in The Godfather are different both in their crimes and their nationality. The Italian origin of the Corleones adds to their mystique, like Gatsby’s experience in Europe and Oxford adds to his.

    Organized crime has a flair for the dramatic; petty larceny never interests people, but rigging the World Series or running a bootleg business can. Gatsby is a criminal, but he gives the people at his parties something to talk about, which elevates him above any simple thief. Because few people know Gatsby well, yet everyone knows who he is, no one at his parties can stop gossiping about what they think they know about him. His silence about his past only adds to this mystique. Indeed, the reader’s first glimpse of Gatsby is on a dark night a distance away, after which he vanishes inexplicably. At the first party Nick attends, a girl says of Gatsby, “You look at him sometimes when he thinks nobody’s looking at him. I’ll bet he killed a man” (44). Gatsby inspires awe in his admirers; no one knows exactly how he got his money, so they all assume that it had been obtained illegally. The people admire Gatsby for making his own money, for being a “self-made man,” but by making it in a way that is mostly taboo and by being secretive about it, Gatsby has inspired wonder in them. The main cause of this wonder is the secret-but-not-quite nature of it. Everyone suspects that Gatsby is a criminal, but no one has anything quite near proof of it. However, when faced with proof, when Gatsby is accused up front of his bootlegging successes, he falters, and Tom shames him into realizing that Daisy is out of his reach. From the beginning to 0:35 in the video shows Daisy and Gatsby running from Tom's accusations.

    When crime is out in the open and overt, criminals lose their “star status.” People see criminals who are caught as nothing but trouble and deserving of their prison sentences. Americans don’t like to be confronted with the criminal underbelly of their society; they are entertained by quick glimpses of it that keep the mystery, but when it is completely revealed, they are quick to distance themselves from it. After Tom reveals Gatsby’s bootlegging and gambling schemes, Daisy and Nick lose their

Crime Isn't All Glamor

respect for him. He becomes a broken man and relinquishes all claim on Daisy. Nick says, “Then I turned back to Gatsby- and was startled at his expression. He looked -and this is said in all contempt for the babbled slander of his garden- as if he had ‘killed a man.’ For a moment the set of his face could be described in just that fantastic way” (134). Nick has no respect for the people who gossip about Gatsby’s glamorous past; when confronted with the truth of the matter, the idea of “killing a man” becomes horrific rather than exciting. Gatsby's crimes, though not as severe as murder, are a badge of shame on an otherwise proper man.  By being unmasked as a criminal, Gatsby loses all respect and admiration he once had. He is a now just a man fleeing from his accuser, and if he had not been killed, he would certainly have been put to trial and been subject to the derision and shaming of his peers..

The reaction to a criminal depends on the crime and the person. Were Gatsby and the Corleones simple shoplifters or murderers, they would not have received the positive reactions from their crowds of adoring fans. Gatsby had a perfect life set up: he had money, a future wife, and a great house to throw parties in. Any whisper of his criminal past only served to further his reputation and mystique. A good criminal leaves an aura of mystery around the crimes, leaving people to wonder if it actually were committed. Society punishes bad criminals, both with legal action and with ostracizing. An unmasked criminal is only someone to be ashamed of and to be abandoned. Americans are fascinated with illegal action, but when confronted with it directly, they revile the same people they used to gossip about.


Patrick O'Hare