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movie

The Great Gatsby (2013) by Baz Luhrmann

role

rationale

Designing: to explore typography as a tool for expressive communication in creative advertising - how typography can be manipulated to communicate an idea or concept, to unearth the essence of the movie and construct a layout and visual structure.

Baz Luhmann’s The Great Gatsby (2013) is an adaptation of the same-titled original novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1925 that exhibits a superficially-realistic glimpse of America’s famous era – the Roaring 20s (Žeňuchová 2015). The story begins with the Midwesterner Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire), a would-be writer searching for his opportunities in 1922 New York. He is the narrator and the observer bearing witness to the journey of Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio), who is chasing his American Dream in the glamorous world of the super-rich, their illusions, loves, and deceits fuelled by the fruits of economic prosperity (Blimey 2021).

The American Dream, in this movie, is a concept that is connoted under a concrete object of green light (Fitzgerald 1993), representing the goals that seem so beautiful but feeble and far away. That connotation can be perceived through (1) the physically out-of-reach distance between Gatsby’s mansion and that green light at the end of Daisy’s dock and (2) the green color obscured by fog. Elaborately, the light is methodically color-coded as green that carries two contrasting cultural associations: either a guiding light of hope and optimism or a sign of sickness, greed, and the “orgastic future” that the characters continually dedicate their life to chasing despite the impossibility of reaching it (Kniaź 2017). Eventually, the characters were stuck in their blind pursuit of their goals (e.g., material achievement and infatuation) like they got trapped in an illusion that could never escape (Ismael and Samardali 2018; Mantooth and Miller 2021). This “illusion” metaphor can be linked to the image of getting lost in the labyrinth: with the green light as the ostensibly appealing American Dream that lures them into the labyrinth, one dares to step into it will soon get confounded in their efforts to escape in the midst of wrong turns and unknown destinations, resulting in the inevitable tragic end.

In other words, the characters get stuck in their illusion like they are stuck in the labyrinth. Aside from the dominant theme of illusion, the movie dazzles with the sparkle of jewelry and furniture lavishly decorated with bold geometric shapes and smooth lines that is reminiscent of the Art Deco style (Egan 2014). From these aforementioned analyses, the proposed movie poster aims to depict the labyrinth image constructed with Art Deco-like geometric shapes and lit by the integrated electric lamp of a monochromatic green scheme.

initial concept
development

final execution

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