Slave to freedom

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Whenever we’re tempted to anything – to indulge in that extra chocolate biscuit, stay in bed an extra half-hour, break a promise or compromise a relationship – a small voice in our heads tries to tell us that there won’t be any consequences. But what would happen if this were true? What if we were free to indulge every urge without fear of the effect it might have on us?

With the death of his uncle, wide-eyed orphan Dorian Gray (Ben Barnes) inherits his estate in London, and moves there to begin a new life. His youthful good looks quickly attract the attention both of infatuated artist Basil (Ben Chaplin), who insists on painting his portrait, and the cynical Lord ‘Harry’ Wotton (Colin Firth), who vows to corrupt his innocence. At first Dorian resists Harry’s goading, but it isn’t long before the opium dens, brothels and gin bottle have begun to exert their pull on him. Captivated by the beauty of Basil’s portrait, and unable to bear the thought of time and excess ravaging his body while the painting remains eternally young, Dorian makes a bargain. He can live a life of reckless hedonism without consequence, indulging his every desire and not ageing a day, whilst, locked in a dark attic, something terrible is happening to his portrait.

Oscar Wilde’s only novel has been put on screen before, but director Oliver Parker, who has previously made film adaptations of several of Wilde’s plays, wanted to do something different this time. ‘When they were written they were great radical, subversive entertainment, works of satire,’ he explains of Wilde’s creations. ‘Nowadays they’ve become part of tradition, and part of the fun is trying to blow off some of the dust.’[1] Unfortunately, in his attempt to freshen Dorian Gray for a contemporary audience, Parker has somehow managed to rob it of much of its sharpness and relevance, reducing it to little more than raunchy teen fare.

Ben Barnes (The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian) lacks the charisma to bring much weight to the role of Dorian, making a passable stab at the protagonist’s initial innocence but failing to convincingly convey his descent into darkness. His flat central performance drags the film down, unaided by an ineffective script. Colin Firth is really the only one injecting any life into the proceedings as the Mephistophelian Harry, but even his performance feels oddly muted. In its handsome hollowness, this adaptation unwittingly becomes in itself an illustration of the principle that it is never wise to choose surface over soul.

Much has been written about the novel’s anticipation of a culture fixated with youth and beauty. ‘Dorian Gray Syndrome’, characterised by an obsessive phobia of ageing, is now a recognized psychiatric condition, whilst billions of pounds are spent on cosmetic surgery each year. Dorian’s willingness to sell his soul in exchange for eternal youth mirrors our society’s mania for attaining the beauty ideal at all costs. But Wilde’s story also has other - perhaps less obvious – insights to offer us. Harry’s words to Dorian are echoed in our own thoughts whenever we try to justify wrong actions by denying that we have any accountability to God: ‘Life is a moment. There is no hereafter. So make it burn always with the hardest flame.’ If there is no afterlife, no such thing as the soul or sin, then conscience is indeed ‘cowardice’, and hedonism becomes the best option. But Dorian finds that, contrary to Harry’s philosophising, being severed from his conscience is a terrible thing. Like a leprosy patient who ends up incurring terrible injuries through lack of sensation in a limb, his lack of ability to feel the moral consequences of his actions actually begins to attenuate his humanity.

Harry envisages – or at least claims to envisage – the human condition as a painful, pointless act of socially-conditioned repression.  He theorises, in Oscar Wilde’s text, that ‘if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream – I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of Medievalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal – to something finer, richer than the Hellenic ideal.’ A kind of paradise, he claims, would flourish on earth if it were not for ‘the self-denial that mars our lives’. Harry’s wit and the rhetorical force of his arguments give them undeniable appeal, perhaps even more so because they have the shocking scent of rebellion about them. There is something gratifying about the idea that there is some force outside of ourselves – society, as Harry would have it, or the religious establishment – that is malevolently preventing us from fulfilling our glorious potential. If the enemy is on the outside, we are spared any need for uncomfortable self-examination.

But in Dorian’s fate, and in the reality of our world and our lives, we see that things are not so simple. When given free reign to indulge his every whim without threat of consequences, man does not tend to build utopias or find personal happiness. In fact, the opposite seems to be true: those who ‘get what they want’ find, so often, that they do not ‘want what they get’. Like Austrian businessman Karl Rabeder, who recently gave away his multi-million pound fortune because he felt he was ‘working as a slave for things that I did not wish for or need’,[2] we soon become ruled by the very things we thought would free us. There is a fatal flaw in the assumption that ‘freedom’ always means ‘freedom to’ – freedom to sleep with whoever I want, to own whatever I want, to feed my every appetite, to yield to every temptation. The story of Dorian Gray is an eerie illustration of what uncurbed human desire can really look like, and its face is a frightening one. Without the guiding hands of conscience and consequence, Dorian does not find his desires resulting in the promised paradise, but instead in utter self-destruction.

So is repression the best that we can hope for – a grey and joyless life of strangling every impulse? The straight-laced Victorian sensibility that Wilde was writing in reaction against seems like a bleak alternative, and one that some still consider to be synonymous with Christianity. When given the choice between this severe and brittle brand of self-denial and the kind of excesses to which Henry tempts him, it is little wonder that Dorian opts for the latter. But the Bible’s real message is a far cry from Henry’s caricature of it. Its diagnosis is that the problem is not only on the outside, in the institutions that encroach on our freedoms, but ultimately, on the inside. Because we have turned away from God, the true source of satisfaction, we crave things that, though not necessarily bad in themselves, end up consuming us when they take the place of God in our lives. We are ruled by the things we think we want, and the solution is neither to give in to our wrong desires nor to repress them; it is to have them changed.

‘I want to be free,’ says the film’s Dorian, when it finally becomes clear to him that he has paid far too high a price for the life that he thought would liberate him. ‘I want to be new, and clean. I want to be good.’ God promises that when we come to him, he is able to transform us so that the things we want are no longer the things that will destroy us: ‘Then I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean. Your filth will be washed away, and you will no longer worship idols. And I will give you a new heart, and I will put a new spirit in you. I will take out your stony, stubborn heart and give you a tender, responsive heart,’ (Ezekiel 36:25-26). Though temptations will always be a battle, Christians aren’t called to resist in joyless frustration, but instead through a genuine recognition that what God offers is far better than what sin appears to offer. As C.S. Lewis put it: ‘If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.’[3]

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