From Page to Screen: Multimodal Reconstruction of the American Dream in F. Scott Fitzgerald's the Great Gatsby and Baz Luhrmann's Film Adaptation

This article examines how the American Dream, as represented in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925), is reconstructed through the multimodal cinematic language of Baz Luhrmann's 2013 film adaptation. Adopting a descriptive qualitative design grounded in representation theory (Hall, 1997), adaptation theory (Hutcheon, 2013), and social semiotic multimodality (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006), the study analyzes textual citations, symbols, characters, spatial settings, and film shots concerning wealth, class, love, memory, and the collapse of aspiration. Primary data were drawn from the novel and the film; secondary data comprised recent Scopus-indexed studies on the American Dream, symbolism, adaptation, and multimodal discourse. Data were processed through a five-stage analytical procedure: identification of novel data, interpretation of representational meaning, identification of corresponding film data, analysis of multimodal reconstruction, and interpretation of intermedial difference. The findings show that the American Dream is constructed in the novel as a social and moral illusion mediated by Nick Carraway's retrospective narration and by the green light, Gatsby's mansion, Daisy Buchanan, East Egg, West Egg, and the Valley of Ashes. In the film, the same meanings are reconstructed multimodally through color grading, non-diegetic contemporary music, camera movement, editing rhythm, costume, and performance, which convert reflective irony into affective spectacle without erasing Fitzgerald's central critique. The study contributes a five-stage intermedial reconstruction model that can be extended to other novel-to-film comparisons and argues that adaptation is best understood not as reproduction but as reinterpretation across semiotic modes.