The Mirror and the Vamp

Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture ofDorian Gray conjures the narcissistic fantasy of eternal youth and beauty against the background ofa story of seduction, initiation and failed social responsibility. The device of visualizing the moral turpitude of Dorian in the form of an ever increasing ugliness in his portrait addresses not only the romantic theme of the double, it also invokes a peculiarly modern preoccupation: questions of identity no longer conceived of in terms of some inner substance, but, in the face of the enormous proliferation of images, as a problem of appearance. Little less than half a century later, the story of Dorian Gray acquired a new sinister bend, namely the possibility of manipulating lives through the manipulation of images. As Fritz Lang's worst apprehensions crystallized in the figure of Dr. Mabuse were surpassed by political realities shortly after, the wave of euphoric expectations about the emancipatory potential of the mechanical reproduction of sound and image subsided throughout Europe. Ulrike Ottinger's new film The Image ofDorian Gray in the Yellow Press (Dorian Gray im Spiegel der Boulevard Presse) which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 1984 (ominous year and title for another grim future fantasy of the misuse of the media), gives little cause for optimistic speculations about impending changes for the better in this area

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Beauty · Dracula · Face (sociological concept) · Fantasy · Gray (unit) · Literature · Politics · Portrait · Psychoanalysis · Romance · Theme (computing) · Art, Aesthetics, and Perception · Decadence, Literature, and Society · German Literature and Culture Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Psychology

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• Ottinger's Benjamin

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