The pages of “The Great Gatsby” are suffused with romance and dusted with sexual implication, but perhaps the most intensely and disturbingly erotic scene — the one that distills the novel’s seductive blend of desire and sorrow — involves clothes. Showing off his mansion to Daisy Buchanan, the great love of his life, and Nick Carraway, his diffident, dazzled neighbor, Jay Gatsby opens a cabinet in which his shirts are “piled like bricks in stacks a dozen high.”

He throws them into a pile, and as Nick notes the wondrous textures and colors — “stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, with monograms of Indian blue” — Daisy bursts into tears: “ ‘They’re such beautiful shirts,’ she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. ‘It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such — such beautiful shirts before.’ ”

A reader might speculate about other causes of her weeping, but there is no reason not to take Daisy at her word. One of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s points is that beautiful things in abundance can produce a powerful aesthetic response, akin to the sublime. And the sublimity of stuff, of shirts and cars and Champagne flutes and everything else that money can buy, is surely what drives Baz Luhrmann’s wildly extravagant adaptation of “Gatsby.”