‘A More Glittering, a Grosser Power’: Fitzgerald and Film

Fitzgerald imports cross-stylistic features from the spheres of dance and music into his fiction, and this chapter shows how he also employs filmic technique in his short stories. Joseph Conrad’s Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus was central to Fitzgerald’s fiction-writing credo, encouraging him to make his readers hear, feel, and see. His popular culture references lend themselves to this approach, but nowhere more so than in his references to film. This chapter uses ‘Magnetism’ as a case study, analysing the use of filmic techniques such as close-up, dream sequence, and soundtracking, and offers a reading of George Hannaford as a satiric metaphor for the motion picture industry, reflecting Fitzgerald’s own conflicted relationship with Hollywood. This relationship is also visible in the Pat Hobby stories, which have often been noted for their markedly different style. It is argued that this compressed style metafictively satirises Hobby’s voice, bringing to life the lackadaisical reticence of the industry veteran. This chapter argues that in the Pat Hobby stories Fitzgerald explores, through parody, the shortcomings and inherent potential of the film industry to combine artistic merit and commercial success, using it as a vehicle critically to explore leisure pursuits of the interwar period.