The video about Fall Out Boy’s song “This ain’t a scene, it’s an arms race” we can see a band that gets signed by a label and becomes famous. The band members try very hard to fit in with the famous people. When they are recording the singer makes weird hand gestures and the people of the label look at him weird, which then makes the other member to do some crazy twirls with his instrument. This causes to knock of someone’s drink and breaks into a fight, making Fall Out Boy get “thrown out of the hood” as the magazine in the video calls it. They go to parties some of the band members “dress up” to make themselves look cooler; one of them puts on a fake mustache. It turns out to be a dream of one of the members of the band. He wakes up sharing a tiny room from a small hotel and they go play in a high school. In the song they sing
“I’m a leading man
And the lies I weave are oh so intricate,
Oh so intricate”
They imply that to be on top of the social chain and be a "leading man" you have to have a well thought of façade. It is social darwinism; to survive in this era you have to try your best to be a person someone else and weaving your way into the social circles. This is kind of like the evolutionary arms race or the Red Queen's Race from Lewis Carroll's novel Through the Looking-Glass because all the people are doing what they can to be on top and develop skills to do it, just like in evolution.
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| Zebra finding a way to outrun its predator |
In Fall Out Boy's song the title is "This ain't a scene it's an arms race" refers to this evolutionary arms race. That even though it may appear as a "scene" or something they staged it actually is their way of staying on top. So all the parties and costumes is just their way of winning the social arms race. Gatsby does this he tries his best to fit in by throwing parties and and invent stories to appear old money snd be accepted by all the important people, especially Daisy. The people from West Egg are the people that recently have gained their money while the people from East Egg have had their money for generations. In these parties we see the difference between old and new rich when Jordan's party:
"Assumed to itself the function of representing the
staid nobility of the countryside-East Egg
condescending to West Egg" (44).
They are trying to make sure the people from West Egg know their place and that they will never be considered from nobility. This is the way the people from East Egg conserve their place as number one in the race while the others struggle to come up with the new way to throw them out. Fitzgerald is trying to tell us that this fight to be the best is never ending because like the Red Queens said "it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!" Did Fitzgerald intend for us to see the absurdity of this philosophy? or is it just the human's natural instinct to compete. Like in the video we can see that even though helping each other worked; the animals got more advanced by trying to beat the other one. After a while it stops becoming about the reward and just about winning. In The Great Gatsby we see that Gatsby does want the American Dream but he also wants to win. When he was younger meeting Daisy "It excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy- it increased her value in his eyes"(149). He wanted what the other men couldn't have. He wanted that bragging right and wanted something to brag about. Daisy was the the perfect candidate because since so many men wanted her they would be jealous of him and in that way he would win. Is it about the dream or winning or do you need one in order to have the other one?
