Whatever she may have felt for him, even if she pitied him…she couldn’t ever relate to him because she wouldn’t let herself. It was easier to stick with her team.
Noah, on Brandon James and his “Daisy”
“Careless People: A Tale of Two Daisies- Violence and Retribution in the The Great Gatsby and the Brandon James slayings,” shortened to “Careless People” is a school paper written by Noah Foster in October 2015, for Seth Branson’s English 10 class.
Part of a class-wide assignment to provide an analysis of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby, Noah sought a thematic parallel between the novel and one of his pet hyperfixations: the 1994 Brandon James murders. As morbid luck would have it, the weekend after the paper was turned in saw the return of murder to Lakewood, with the violent slayings of freshmen Stacy Winters and Brock Carmichael by an unknown attacker.
The killings, and the attacks that followed in the coming days, leant an eerie resonance to Noah’s paper, making it more timely than he’d intended.
Background
The Great Gatsby was assigned reading for Seth Branson’s English 10 class at George Washington High School in the fall of 2015. Noah Foster, fond of going the extra mile in class assignments, especially in English, seized on an opportunity to write about one of his interests: the 1994 Brandon James murders, in which a bullied youth sought a bloody revenge on his tormentors and was only stopped by the intercession of Daisy, a girl he was in love with, who lured him to Wren Lake, where he was shot by the police.1
Content
The paper was composed of four chapters. The first was an opening argument, the second a historical background of the murders, the third an analysis of the novel, and the fourth a dissection of overlapping themes between them.
The connective tissue between the murders and the novel manifests in the two “Daisy” characters: Jay Gatsby’s Daisy Buchanan and the anonymous Daisy who was the alleged object of Brandon’s attentions, and the instrument of his downfall. Noah put forth that Brandon and Gatsby both projected their desires on their respective Daisies, who represented lives they may have led had things gone differently for them.
Noah’s ultimate argument relies on a quotation from Gatsby’s first person narrator, Nick Carroway, describing Daisy and her husband Tom as “Careless people […] they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
Noah argues that even if Brandon’s Daisy had loved Brandon back, she would’ve been as unable to be with him as Gatsby’s Daisy, having grown too comfortable with the world she already inhabitated.2
Reception
The paper was graded and returned on October 19th, the day after Lakewood was rocked by the murders of Stacy Winters and Brock Carmichael: the most sensational crime to plague the town since the events of Halloween ’94, over 20 years earlier. Given this, the in-class discussion took on a particularly heated element, even as most of the class was accustomed to just letting Noah run away on his tangents.
Noah’s notions faced mixed exasperation and pushback, mostly on the macabre subject matter, though he also received a good-faith argument from Riley Marra, who argued the parallels fall apart if one considers that Gatsby had more privilege than Brandon James ever had.
Emma Duval, son of the only survivor of the attacks, was unsurprisingly irritated by Noah’s characterization of the victims, wondering if he was implying they got what was coming to him, an insinuation Noah denied.3
Other Interpretations
Scream the TV Series
In the pilot episode of the TV series, Mr. Branson’s class is discussing Horace Walpole’s 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto, which leads into a broader discussion of the gothic genre, which leads into citations of its applicability to genre TV of the 2010s (Seth cites The Walking Dead, American Horror Story, Bates Motel, and Hannibal), which leads to Jake randomly referencing Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which leads to Noah infamously arguing that “you can’t do a slasher movie as a TV series”, an obvious wink-and-nudge from the writers that requires the viewer to be unaware of the 2009 miniseries Harper’s Island, which was explicitly billed as “Agatha Christie meets Friday the 13th“, and which Scream the TV Series’s Executive Producer Jill Blotevogel wrote for.
Season 1 AU
In the Season 1 AU, Noah tells Seth the story of the Brandon James murders, at which point Seth perhaps inadvisedly compares Brandon and “Daisy” to Romeo and Juliet. Noah then goes off on a tear claiming the Shakespeare play is more like…well, maybe it’s better if I just quote it:
Yea except Romeo and Juliet was more of a roleplay, and you can’t do a roleplay of a slasher flick. Theres just too many elements that couldnt be done. You know you can try to describe how scared your character is while they are getting chased but it doesnt have that same feel. You want to see the fear on the characters face, thats what makes you feel for this character actually want them to live or not. Descriptions just arent enough, most people would say what about Goosebumps? Goosebumps focused on science fiction villians. Plus most people just wanted the killing, they didn’t care about the teenagers they cared about the evil demonic things that were doing the killing.”
Noah
Impressively, this assertion goes unchallenged.4
This would be the first of a few attempts in the SRU’s evolution to refer to the medium of forum roleplay in the metatext. Interestingly, Noah’s (here portrayed by BeartoothGuy) assertion that the average Goosebumps reader cares more about the monster than the victimized teenager is an applicable criticism of some broader horror fans, particularly within the slasher subgenre. It may be interpreted in alignment with the overarching SRU theme about the divide between “good people and bad people” that would eventually be reinforced when this scene was rewritten around Careless People.
Trivia
Noah’s analysis was more cogent than he could’ve known at the time. Brandon’s Daisy, Maggie Anderson, was in love with Brandon James as Daisy Buchanan was in love with Jay Gatsby. Like Daisy with Tom Buchanan, Maggie chose to settle for a former football player in Kevin Duval. At the time of writing, however, the identity of Brandon’s Daisy wasn’t public knowledge, Maggie having been a minor at the time of the murders, and so protected in the official records.
Brandon and Gatsby also meet a similar fate: they are both shot, with their bodies subsequently plunging into water: a swimming pool for Gatsby, and Wren Lake for Brandon.
Gallery
Leave a Reply