Andre 3000 sings these lines in the opening of Beyonce’s “Back to Black”, reversing the first and second person narrative of Amy Winehouse’s original first verse. The cover remains, like the original, a song about lost love mixed with drug addiction. Unlike the opening lines here, though, The Great Gatsby is a story full of regret, of looking back, indeed of trying to return to the past and remake the future.

The Great Gatsby is in part a novel about the proliferation of symbols in our lives and how our desires come to be represented by objects whose meaning can shift and time to confuse our original aims. This line is in fact taken directly from Fitzgerald’s text, and evidences how Gatsby’s love for Daisy was not about her in many ways—just as the green light is not just a green light—but about Gatsby’s own struggles against the barriers of class in the narrative. The full passage, taken from Chapter V in which Gatsby and Daisy are reunited, reads:

There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams — not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

Florence and the Machine’s “Over the Love” makes explicit reference to the text of The Great Gatsby with its mention of the “green light.” In the novel, the light is literally that at the end Daisy’s dock across the bay from Gatsby’s house, but it comes to stand for something larger, indeed “beyond her.”

Fitzgerald returns to the symbol in the closing passages of The Great Gatsby with Nick imagining Long Island as the “green breast of the new world” while looking at Daisy’s dock light:

…Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

Here Lana Del Rey’s “Young and Beautiful” kicks in. While not written for the film, it’s themes relate with those of The Great Gatsby, though the title might be changed to “Young and Beautiful and Rich.” The romantic sentiment of del Ray’s song runs counter to that of the novel: youth and beauty, symbolized by money, are prized above all else. As Nick reflects on Gatsby’s infatuation with Daisy:

Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes, and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor.

This is Jordan speaking to Nick, likely remarking on the rumors that circulate about Gatsby, which are revealed as true over the course of the novel. He is in fact a bootlegger and involved in a number of illegal schemes that have brought him great wealth.

Jordan’s attitude here is one of excitement at the revelation of a scandal; though Gatsby’s reputation and life will be ruined, it’s all a joke to her, further delineating the difference between her old wealth and his new money.

The tall woman we see accompanying Nick throughout the trailer is Jordan Baker, who the narrator dates during the time the narrative is set. She is a member of the old rich social class, a famous golfer, and, according to Nick, a bad driver. When he first meets her, Nick reflects:

I knew now why her face was familiar — its pleasing contemptuous expression had looked out at me from many rotogravure pictures of the sporting life at Asheville and Hot Springs and Palm Beach. I had heard some story of her too, a critical, unpleasant story, but what it was I had forgotten long ago.

Though they don’t accompany each other to Gatsby’s party in Chapter III, Nick ends up joining her group of friends.

That Wolfsheim mispronounces Oxford and feels the need to explain its significance is indicative of his position, like Gatsby, as an outsider to the East Egg, old wealth society.

Though well-educated themselves, Nick and Tom don’t draw attention to their education, allowing it to be assumed, as when the narrator relates that he “went to New Haven” instead of naming Yale.

Here Tom Associates Daisy with the new liberated women of the 1920s, often referred to as flappers.

Gatsby is constantly being called away by phone calls from other cities. These phone calls might seem innocuous, but are significant in at least two ways.

One, they are sketchy, suggesting that Gatsby’s business associates must not be named, so instead the butler says “Chicago is calling.”

Two, they are evidence that Gatsby actually works for a living. This differentiates him from the leisurely aristocracy — exemplified by Tom and Daisy.