The character of Jay Gatsby fascinates beyond his century and era of creation. The recent film production of The Great Gatsby by Baz
Luhrmann (2013) indicates a renewed interest in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s glamourous illustration of America’s Roaring Twenties. The allure resides in Jay Gatsby’s personae and tragic fate of a dandy, a distinction often misconstrued to identify a pompous man who pays excessive attention to his attire. Luhrmann’s Great Gatsby recontextualizes this traditional depiction of dandyism as a caricature of masculinity through Leonardo DiCaprio’s play, revitalizing the philosophical and aesthetic qualities upon which dandyism is built and reiterating its cultural importance in our society. Originating in the 19th century, the figure of the dandy elicits questions of authenticity and performance, of established identity expressions and individualism, and of reality and simulacra. Fitzgerald explores these tropes throughout his 1925 novel, illustrating the different perceptions, practices, and responses of dandiacal behaviour in the face of contested social norms. Luhrmann, in turn, modernizes and revises dandyism by inserting his Gatsby in a contemporary appreciation of America’s 1920s, giving The Great Gatsby (2013) a new layer of meaning within the sociocultural expression of masculine identity and performance in media.
The transition from the big screen to the meme culture is a clear indicator of how the audience echoed and embraced DiCaprio’s on-screen (dandiacal) behaviour as part of their own, inciting a series of cultural (mis)appropriation of dandyism, adding a new tier to modeling male identity and performance. As such, the significance and the use of Jay Gatsby memes hold a unique place in the construction of contemporary cultural identities. The panoply of Gatsby memes on the web and in different online subcultures reinforces
the recent revitalization of dandyism, indicating that the dandy is not an antiquated archetype for non-conventional identity expression. Leo-as-Gatsby memes stack and condense a rich sociocultural baggage already present in Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby with Luhrmann’s interpretation through DiCaprio’s body and performance on screen. Here, I unpack and weigh these interlocking layers to render a more complete picture of the cultural impact of the dandiacal Gatsby as well as contemporary Gatsby memes and their critical relevance in social interactions. Tracing the history of the dandy figure to the proliferation of Leo-as-Gatsby imagery, I show how today’s meme culture encapsulates, punctuates, and comments on the sociocultural and ontological concepts of performance, reality, and simulacra as formulated by Baudrillard and Debord.