Gatsby and the Kardashians: The missing link

While promoting Baz Luhrmann’s new adaptation of The Great Gatsby, the actress Carey Mulligan declared in an interview with Vogue that Daisy Buchanan, the character she plays, is “like a Kardashian,” referring to the family in the American reality TV show, Keeping Up With The Kardashians. Mulligan went on to explain: “[Daisy] feels like she's living in a movie of her own life. She's constantly on show, performing all the time. Nothing bad can happen in a dream. You can't die in a dream. She's in her own TV show."
The comment attracted a great deal of attention, and Mulligan later clarified it, saying that what she meant was that, like the Kardashians, Daisy is always obliged to look perfect, that this is part of her “business.”
It’s arguable that this interpretation may help to bring Daisy to life on the screen, or may fit into Luhrmann’s larger vision of the story. But as a reading of the character in F Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel, it leaves something to be desired. In fact, it is almost exactly back to front. Daisy, Fitzgerald tells us, is a “careless person”: that is her great shortcoming. The old-money world of East Egg is a world of effortlessly doing and saying the right thing, because you are privy to the rulebook. Daisy represents the “leisure classes,” which meant just that: such women were expected to be ornamental, but they were also profoundly suspicious of the vulgarity of anyone who tried too hard.
Daisy does not have a “business”  – that is for the likes of Jay Gatsby. Neither is she a celebrity, nor a performer – indeed, in an early draft of the novel, Fitzgerald shows that Daisy was profoundly unimpressed by mere movie stars. At one point in the draft, Gatsby tries to convince Daisy to share her hairdresser with a movie star at his party by telling her “impressively” that it will make her “the originator of a new vogue all over the country.” Daisy responds, “Do you think I want that person to go around with her hair cut exactly like mine? It’d spoil it for me.”  Daisy carefully guards her status, but that is the only effort she takes, and she would have been horrified to have been likened to a Kardashian.
Sensuality and superficiality
There are, however, two characters in the novel who do merit the comparison. The first is Myrtle Wilson, Tom Buchanan’s mistress, who aspires to Daisy’s position in life. Myrtle is in her mid thirties, “and faintly stout,” Fitzgerald tells us, “but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can.” She is not beautiful, “but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering.” Myrtle puts on “an elaborate afternoon dress of cream colored chiffon, which gave out a continual rustle as she swept about the room,” and then airily dismisses it: "It's just a crazy old thing," she says. "I just slip it on sometimes when I don't care what I look like."
Myrtle tries very hard to appear effortless; but the cracks constantly show. When she throws a sordid little party at her apartment, Myrtle becomes “more violently affected moment by moment,” as she minces, flounces and raises her eyebrows at the shiftlessness of the lower orders, trying to pass herself off as a woman of taste and refinement – but her vulgarity cannot be disguised. Myrtle’s living room, Fitzgerald tells us, was “crowded to the doors with a set of tapestried furniture entirely too large for it so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles.”