strange_complex | Entries tagged with oscar wilde

This is a truly terrible film which

lady_lugosi1313 and I synchro-watched a couple of weeks ago. It has a terrible script, terrible dubbing and terrible acting. But we enjoyed snarking our way through it, and it did include some marvellously 70s outfits.

Obviously, it is based on Oscar Wilde's novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, with the setting updated to 1970s London. Dorian's extravagant lifestyle is conveyed by showing him on yachts, at lavish parties, at art exhibitions, in discotheques and in swimming pools. And the sexual indulgences only hinted at in the novel are seized as an opportunity to tap into contemporary liberation to maximum titillatory effect. Early on, we meet Dorian and friends in a gay bar with a drag stripper. Then later there is both FF and MM eroticism, as well as two very stereotyped camp chappies cavorting outside a bar called The Black Cock. Also M-on-F and F-on-M oral sex and another scene of what may have been implied anal sex, or perhaps just penetration from behind (we weren't sure), but certainly took place in a stable stall right next to a horse, anyway. I mean none of this was wildly explicit - it's not a porno. But it's very definitely what we are set up to understand.

Dorian himself is objectified a LOT, usually from the male-gaze perspective of Basil (Richard Todd) and Henry (Herbert Lom). In fairness, he (Helmut Berger) is very pretty, and wears a succession of extremely well-tailored suits to pleasing effect. Those suits, along with a few halter-neck maxi-dresses on some of the female characters, were the highlights of the film for me. The portrait itself, sadly, does not do Helmut Berger justice, even before it starts getting corrupted. But at least they had the guts to show it, and indeed, to show it getting older / more evil-looking as the film went on, which cannot be said for all adaptations of Dorian Gray. They also increasingly applied a lot of talc / tippex to everyone's hair except Dorian's to represent them getting old, and about half-way through the film we also realised that the fashions were probably now supposed to look futuristic, like a woman in a mirrored dress. Unfortunately, though, they'd gone for such a high-fashion note in the first place that the change wasn't very clear, because all they had done was further exaggerate existing seventies trends - plus of course we knew perfectly well that that was not what had happened during the '80s and '90s at all.

The script uses lots of Wilde quotations, but unfortunately they are crow-barred in amongst otherwise very awkward and banal dialogue, made worse through being delivered by over-dubbed actors who weren't native English speakers. We had to sit through lines such as "My virginity shocked you", which nobody should have to suffer. Also, some plot points simply didn't make sense. Near the end, Dorian blackmails someone who already doesn't like him very much into helping him get rid of Basil's body by... showing him pictures of himself (Dorian) shagging his wife. Which surely would only make him hate Dorian even more, not suddenly want to help him after all.

On the whole, you very definitely should not watch this film, but then again if you have a friend to enjoy snarking at it with, it can be fun. I have just been reading through our chat log and giggling all over again at comments like these:

those logs weren't big enough to make that amount of crackle
she'll catch a chill
he looks like he needs feeding up
That's the angriest reaction I've ever seen to a chaise longue!
Lom's hairpiece working hard
Christ, this dialogue is laboured!
dangerous naked flames near such manmade fabrics
Eh up, shenanigans in the bushes!
surely the point of erotica is that you can see something - but now you can I take that back
Yikes, what are these terrible velvet shorts he's wearing!?
Looks like we're at an orgy now. Exquisite jacket.
oh thank god we're near the end...
I wonder what the tippex bill was for the make up dept

That was the true joy of this film.

Crossposts: https://strange-complex.livejournal.com/664217.html

The General Election put a stop to my book and film review posts (and indeed to the watching of films in particular), so here's a stab at catching up.

This book is a sequel to The Vampyre: the secret history of Lord Byron, which I read a couple of years ago (LJ / DW) and really liked, despite not otherwise having much respect for the author. Where the first book was both about Lord Byron as a vampire and a pastiche of Romantic vampire literature, this one similarly features Bram Stoker as a character, is set in the 1880s, and plays around with a mish-mash of relevant literature and lore, including military memoirs of British India, the goddess Kali, Sherlock Holmes, Oscar Wilde, opium dens and (inevitably) Jack the Ripper. It's not particularly closely connected to the events of the first novel, but its vampiric Lord Byron does feature in the sequel, mainly concerned with tracing his descendants from his mortal life and trying to get unscrupulous doctors to investigate whether any cure can be found for his 'blood disease'. He goes under the pseudonym of Lord Ruthven, and his real identity is supposed to be a great mystery which one of the main characters decodes in a massive revelation - a device which obviously did not work for me, or (you'd think) anyone who had read and appreciated the first novel.

Like Stoker's Dracula, this novel is told via a collection of documents and letters, including Stoker's own journal, and we're obviously meant to understand that its events inspired him to write Dracula. He is the busy manager of the Lyceum Theatre during the period when the novel takes place, but befriends a doctor named John Eliot, who draws him into a web of vampiric goings-on. With Eliot, Stoker visits an asylum run by a Dr Renfield which houses an inmate who rips the heads off doves and smears herself in their blood. They also travel to Whitby to unravel mysteries involving Byron's human descendants, with Stoker's journal at that point echoing some of Mina's language from the novel - it is "a most lovely spot, built around a deep harbour, and rising so steeply on the eastern side that the houses of the old town seemed piled up one over the other, like the pictures we see of Nuremburg." Indeed, towards the end of the novel, we jump forwards in time to a point when he has written Dracula, and his correspondence about it with an Indian Professor called Huree Jyoti Navalkar (who seems to be intended as the in-story inspiration for Van Helsing) helps the other characters to work out what really happened during the main narrative, a decade earlier.

The vampire antagonist-in-chief, taking the place occupied by the Pasha in The Vampyre is essentially all of literature and history's female demon-goddesses rolled into one - Kali, Circe, Lilith - and calls herself Lilah for most of the story. There's an interesting gloss on the Kali-aspect of her, whom we first encounter in a fictional border region of India called Kalikshutra. One of the Indian characters carefully explains that the Kali of Kalikshutra is not the normal Hindu Kali, whom he describes as "a beneficent deity, the friend of man, the Mother of the Universe", but rather a quite different being, the "Queen of the Demons". That reminded me strongly of some very similar comments which I learnt from Kieran Foster's talk at the IVFAF vampire festival last year were made by Anthony Hinds in relation to Hammer's planned vampire film, Kali: Devil Bride of Dracula. Having spent time in India himself during the war, Hinds had realised that it would be quite offensive to portray the real-world Kali as an out-and-out demon, and dealt with this in the draft script by revealing that her apparent cult isn't actually anything to do with the real Kali at all, but rather a fraud perpetrated by blood-cultists. It looks like Tom Holland arrived independently at a similar realisation and solution.

Lilah lives in a massive warehouse in the east end of London, which can only be entered via an opium den in the upstairs room of antique dealership run by a certain John Polidori, her abject servant. Inside, the warehouse itself has an impossible, hallucinatory geography of shifting galleries and stair-cases, which weaves together the artistic and architectural influences of all the cultures in which she has ever been worshipped. Just as I'd found Holland's descriptions of the Pasha's castle with its accreted historical layers one of the strongest elements of The Vampyre, I found this warehouse one of the most striking aspects of its sequel too - though he also did a pretty good job on the narrow, foggy streets of the East End. Lilah is more powerful than the Pasha, though, generating the whole architecture of the warehouse as an illusion in the minds of those who enter it, and she likewise has the power (like Circe) to transform people too into whatever she wishes - usually something which she knows they themselves will utterly despise.

John Eliot, the maverick doctor whom Stoker befriends, starts the novel in Kalikshutra, shunning the ex-pat community and investigating the local blood-born disease, but then comes to London to treat the poor and downtrodden of the East End instead. He is partly Sherlock Holmes, leading investigations into Lilah using logic and deduction, and having been taught at Edinburgh by Joseph Bell, while Stoker is his Watson, making naive observations and suggestions which turn out to be of great importance. The Sherlock Holmes stories evidently also exist as fictional works within the novel, though, as one character recommends them to John, and when he has read 'A Study in Scarlet' he remembers Conan Doyle from his university days and realises he must have taken on board Joseph Bell's methods of deductive reasoning. During the middle part of the novel, John treats and helps women with the same names as Jack the Ripper's historical victims, but this is intended to have a dark pay-off. Eventually he is seduced by Lilah and transformed by her into Jack the Ripper - that is, what she judges the antithesis of everything he wanted to be - and is thus able to go out and murder the very same women he had been treating, because they already know and trust him. I suppose it's not the worst way to deal with Jack the Ripper in fiction, since in between his episodes of murderousness he does indeed suffer, as Lilah had intended, with the knowledge of what he's done / going to do. But I still just don't ever want to read about Jack the Ripper, ever at all, and found it very unpleasant indeed to have to be inside his head (as he was narrating it all in the first person in a letter) during those episodes.

Oscar Wilde features as a patron of the Lyceum Theatre, and indeed the novel's title is (sort of) taken from De Profundis, the long letter which he wrote to Bosie from prison, and which was published posthumously. But the relevant line there, in which he's talking about his association with rent-boys etc., reads: "It was like feasting with panthers. The danger was half the excitement." And indeed Holland evidently knew this, as his character of Wilde speaks more or less the same line during a dinner hosted by Stoker: "I prefer a beauty that is dangerous. I prefer to feast with panthers, my Lord." Given all of that, I really can't explain why the book itself is called Supping with Panthers, rather than Feasting with Panthers. (I should add that it does feature the occasional mention of actual panthers, living in Lilah's warehouse, but they're not a substantial element of the plot.) Meanwhile, Holland can't resist the conceit of sending a little literary influence back in Oscar's direction. At one point, Byron, with the insight of a true immortal, gives Oscar the idea for The Portrait of Dorian Gray by observing: "A face that did not age would be nothing but a mask. Beneath its show of eternal youth, the spirit would be withering, a hideous mess of corruption and evil."

In the end, it is vampire-Byron who defeats Lilah by drinking her blood, after which John Eliot / Jack the Ripper cuts out her brains and heart and the whole elaborate interior of the warehouse disappears, leaving behind only the very ordinary abandoned warehouse building it really was all along. Though we're given to understand that she probably isn't really dead forever, and will resurface some time in another guise, her hold over John / Jack does at least evaporate, so that he ends up as merely a vampire.

Overall, worth reading I guess if you like this sort of thing, but it never quite sang to me in the way the The Vampyre did - especially the earlier parts set in Albania and the Pasha's castle. Much like the latter parts of The Vampyre, it felt a bit too beholden to the weight of Holland's historical research, and probably more so in this case for attempting to weave together a wider range of late Victoriana. I'm kind of glad he didn't write any more sequels.

Crossposts: https://strange-complex.livejournal.com/656323.html

I should probably impose a personal moratorium on watching, listening to or reading anything to do with Oscar Wilde, because he just makes me irritable and grumpy, and that isn't nice for me or anyone else. I completely understand the importance of his status as a queer icon. That's why he fascinated me in my mid-teens, and I can absolutely understand how important he must be to someone like Rupert Everett (who wrote, directed and starred in this) - a gay man born while homosexuality was still illegal, who has clearly had to negotiate a lot of homophobia throughout his life and career, and who works in the same professional sphere that Wilde also inhabited. But over the years I've found that for me, Wilde's smug arrogance and selfish, manipulative behaviour towards both his wife and many of his friends outweigh the credit that he is undoubtedly also due for defying prejudicial social norms. As the world I live in has changed and stories which once had to be suppressed have been discovered and shared, I've also of course found that plenty of other brave queer people in the past negotiated the same minefields as he did, including in some cases serving the prison sentences, without also being assholes. So I just can't scrape up much sympathy for him these days.

In full fairness, we do see plenty of his ass-hattery in Everett's film. It's nothing like as much of a white-wash as I found Wilde (1997; LJ / DW). But for my taste it did lean too heavily on unsubtle symbolism and syrupy clichés. Examples of the former would include the scenes in Dieppe, where Wilde is pursued through the streets by braying English homophobes to the point where he is cornered and beaten up in a church - but he gets to roar righteous yet dignified condemnation back at them for the twenty-first century audience to cheer at. Or his orgy with Bosie and various local young men in their villa near Naples, complete with an angry local mother who comically doesn't realise it's a gay orgy and begs forgiveness for disturbing them when she realises there are no women there, pointedly cross-cut with Constance and their sons' joyless, pious Christmas. Meanwhile the most syrupy of the syrupy clichés must be the decrepit Wilde telling the story of The Happy Prince to the two orphan boys who have rescued him from a drunken stupor on the streets of Paris, once again cross-cut with scenes of him reading the same story to his own children in happier days.

I pick those three episodes out in particular because as far as I can tell by checking back to Ellmann's biography, there is no record of any beating-up or roared words of defiance in Dieppe (though there were a few social snubs), or of Wilde reading stories to orphaned Parisian boys, while there is positive evidence that Bosie had left Naples well before Christmas in the year when they stayed there. So in other words, these three events aren't in the film because they are part of Wilde's known life history which had to be included. Rather, they have been invented by Everett for this film, and as such show us clearly what kind of figure Everett wants to sculpt Wilde into - tragic, rather mis-guided, but tugging hard on the twenty-first heart-strings and telling a very neat story about homophobia in twenty-foot-high neon letters as he goes. The real problem, though, doesn't actually lie with Everett's inventions. The feeling that everything in the film is narrativised, every scene laden with a conscious symbolic weight which the author is begging us to 'get', comes right from Wilde himself, who appears to have lived almost his entire life to that end. It's annoying enough in Wilde himself, and doubly so when magnified by Everett.

I should say that this film is meticulously researched, beautifully shot and well acted. In many ways it is about as good a film about Wilde's last years as it would be possible to make, and I do think it was quite brave of Everett, whose personal brand has always rested so heavily in his looks, to take on Wilde at his syphilitic end, complete with blotchy face, infected ear and vomit down his front. I am also probably more than unusually irritated by Wilde at the moment due to feeling like he rather hijacked a recent biography I read which was supposed to be about Bram Stoker (LJ / DW). And nor do I really think that stories with a conscious symbolic weight are necessarily a bad thing, though I have written with that implication above. On that, I think that in a story which is not based on real life, and therefore where the audience knows the entire narrative could readily be constructed for the sake of conveying a symbolic point, it's fine and can indeed be excellent; but when a real person is narrativised that way, either by themself or others, it becomes an irritating arrogance, because it amounts to a claim that that person is a work of art. In any case, I am going to try very hard to remember to take this film as my final reminder to steer clear of Oscar Wilde in the future - much as I now do with Stephen Fry for similar reasons. Life's just too short.

Crossposts: https://strange-complex.livejournal.com/613863.html

This book is at once excellent and infuriating.

Excellent because it is very well-researched and bang up to date on all the latest Stoker-related discoveries (e.g. Makt Myrkranna, though news of Mörkrets Makter came post-publication). For me it was particularly valuable as a research resource for my Classical references in Dracula paper. I knew for example that Stoker's education must have included plenty of Greek and Latin literature, but Skal supplied the full details, including lists of what he would have had to cover for the Trinity College entrance exam, and then what he would have studied (however perfunctorily!) once there. Various further snippets illuminating Stoker's knowledge of and exposure to ancient literature and mythology continued to pop up periodically throughout the book, while of course the wider tide of influences which flowed into the novel permeate the narrative at every stage. I wanted to know more about the latter anyway, as it will certainly further enrich my paper by allowing me to situate the Classical stuff effectively into its bigger context.

But also infuriating because of two related flaws: one, a tendency towards serious over-speculation, especially where Stoker's sexuality was concerned, and two, an apparent obsession with Oscar Wilde. On sexuality specifically, a quick Google tells me that Skal is gay, and I completely get the importance of queer icons for those of us in that bracket. It's also probably true that if Stoker had been born a century later, he might well have emerged as being some flavour of queer - his gushingly enthusiastic letters to Walt Whitman alone pretty much guarantee that. I am with Skal up to that point. But it's all the unsupported speculation which follows from there which I couldn't stomach. Here's an example of what I mean, set at the opening night of Lady Windermere's Fan, when Wilde famously shocked everyone by giving out green carnations to his friends which clearly signified something scandalous:

We don't know what words Wilde exchanged with the Stokers that night, but we can assume he always thought of Stoker as something of a prig – the priggishness covering a submerged self Wilde could imagine all too well. It would have been so very easy, at the interval, while complimenting Florence on what a newspaper described as her 'marvelous evening wrap of striped brocade,' to discreetly slip a carnation into Bram's pocket to be discovered later. When he undressed.

Literally the only detail in that paragraph which is supported by any evidence is that Florence Stoker wore a striped brocade evening wrap. I do appreciate that Skal doesn't try to hide this, signalling clearly that he is speculating, but the historian in me is just yelling 'why write this at all?' Especially when it is so obviously geared towards trying to build up some picture of sexual frisson between Stoker and Wilde which we just don't have any evidence for.

Here's another one, this time relating to Stoker's long-term and very close literary friend Hall Caine, to whom (under his Manx nick-name 'Hommy Beg') he had dedicated Dracula, and specifically Caine's contact with Stoker's widow after his funeral:

Florence Stoker never heard from Hall Caine again. Perhaps, after a time, she finally had a candid conversation with Mary Caine, who had left her husband to live in London after decades of marriage, because he simply preferred the company of men. And perhaps Florence finally read the voluminous personal correspondence that must have existed between her husband and Caine during their intimate, decades-long friendship, the kind of letters that can only be written between two mutually trusting confidants looking for fathers and brothers and wives to their souls. And then, perhaps, she burned them.

Again - whyyyyyy???? If I had been Skal's editor, I would have crossed out everything after the first sentence with my red pen, and written 'unsubstantiated' in the margin. Argue that Stoker probably felt same-sex attraction, absolutely. There's a good case to be made for that. But don't build up fantastical scenarios about specific people on the basis of it which we just don't have any evidence for - at least not in what is supposed to be a research-based biography. Write it as fiction and label it as fiction if you want to go there.

I've just included two examples here, but there were passages like this throughout the book, and as it is 652 pages long in total by the end of it all I was getting really Quite Irritated each time yet another one appeared, and closer to throwing the book across the room than I can remember having got for a long time. And that feeling was just exacerbated by the sheer proportion of the book which wasn't actually about Stoker at all, but given over to those he over-lapped with, and especially Oscar Wilde. Now, don't get me wrong - Oscar Wilde is fun to read about. Indeed, I vividly remember spending every lunch-break and free period I could spare in the school library reading Richard Ellmann's biography of him when I was fifteen. But that's just the point. I've already read a biography of Wilde. I don't want to spend pages and pages re-treading the same material when I've bought a book specifically purporting to be a biography of Bram Stoker.

Sure, I know they knew each other and can see that there were significant parallels between their life paths. But again I think Skal is over-fixated on that idea, to the extent that it distorts his arguments about Stoker and his work in some places. In particular, writing about the Wilde scandal and the way Dorian Gray was used as evidence against him in court, Skal argues that as a direct response to this Stoker must have removed from Dracula a subplot about a painter who is unable to capture Dracula's image, which his notes (LJ / DW) show he had planned early on and which Skal has imagined as Dorian Gray-ish in tone. Specifically, he claims that in the climate created by the court case, "for Dracula to be saved as a publishable tale, it had to be shrunken, collapsed, and dwindled down into a bedtime story of childhood abandonment and rescue".

I just can't agree. I've just read those notes, really carefully, and the painter character in particular appears only on the very earliest character-lists, written when Stoker first started kicking ideas around in 1890. By 1892, the full plot was pretty well sketched out, and indeed bar some extra material at the beginning which was eventually excised and (in part) resurfaced as 'Dracula's Guest' it is not that different from the novel as eventually published. No references to painters or painting are anywhere to be seen. Meanwhile, the Wilde trial was in the spring of 1895, long after this, and there's no sign in the notes of it prompting Stoker to undertake a major re-thinking, still less toning-down, of Dracula. Quite the opposite, in fact - notes from late 1895 and early 1896 show that he is still fleshing out the fine details of the final chapters, still much in line with the earlier plot outline, but with the scope and scale growing rather than shrinking. Skal's idea of some earlier, racier version which had to be hurriedly edited down is clearly sheer fantasy - but this time not even signalled as such.

In the end, I should probably have chosen a different biography of Bram to read. Ironically, I met and had a very nice chat with Paul Murray, the author of another one at the Dracula Congress I attended in Dublin, during which he railed about flights of over-imagination in yet a third and said that he preferred to stick to directly-attested facts. This sounded like very much the approach that I favour, and I was very impressed by the paper he gave at the conference for similar reasons. Later I let myself be seduced by Skal because his book was brand new, and although reading it certainly wasn't entirely wasted time I will probably still need to go back and read Murray's some time anyway. Oh well. I do at least feel considerably better for having had a good rant about it here!

Crossposts: https://strange-complex.livejournal.com/599060.html

Seen at the Cottage Road cinema with

ms_siobhan

I must admit that I went to see this with a kind of train-wreck mentality. From what I'd seen on trailers and posters, it looked destined to be pretty awful - a CGI-heavy Gothic horror fest with little subtlety and no resemblance to the book beyond the title. I was braced for something which was to Wilde's Dorian Gray as the film Van Helsing was to Stoker's Dracula. But I went all the same, because somehow I just couldn't resist seeing for myself how bad it was going to be.

And in that I was sorely disappointed. It isn't perfect by any means -

ms_siobhan and I agreed on the way home that there were points at which they had gone slightly overboard with the CGI, especially in the final scenes. But it was a lot better than I had been expecting. It had subtlety and structure and clever thematic allusions, and succeeded in bringing out the essential character of Wilde's book while at the same time bringing its own contributions to the table. In short, I think it has been mis-marketed, and actually if you like Wilde's novel and like dark and grungy modern visions of Victorian depravity (think Sweeney Todd), you will probably like this.

( OK, the rest is going to be spoilerific )

There's a lot there, then - more, in fact, than I'd intended to write when I sat down to do this review! It's just a pity that Parker occasionally let himself get just a little carried away with the CGI effects - particularly when 95% of the way the always-tricky issue of whether or how to show the picture itself was actually handled quite cleverly and subtly, and it was only that rogue 5% that over-egged the pudding. With only a very little editing to trim out the worst excesses, it would be a really brilliant film - and as it is, I'm glad I saw it.

Click here to view this entry with minimal formatting.

As promised, now that I've watched every single one of his stories, I want to draw together my thoughts on the Tom Baker era, and why the Fourth Doctor is, and always will be, 'my' Doctor.

( Before last January )

So, now that I have seen his full oeuvre, what is it that makes me think he is such a bloody great Doctor? Well, in a way it hardly needs examining, because he is so widely recognised as brilliant in the role, and so many people have analysed why that is extremely effectively. (The Wikipedia article has a decent stab, for a start). But what the hell - I'll have a go anyway, because it's fun to do.

( Grins, grimaces and fight scenes )

( Fannish drooling )

( Companions )

( My top five Fourth Doctor stories )

( My bottom five Fourth Doctor stories )

( And now? )

IMDb page here. Watched in Brum with Mum on DVD.

Oscar Wilde and I have a History. Like many teenagers, around the age of 15 I thought he was LIEK OMG SO COOL AND CONTRAVERSHUL. I worshipped his witty aphorisms, cultured decadence and jibes at the establishment, spent hours reading Ellman's biography of him in the school library, and set myself to devouring every word he'd ever written. Well, actually in the event I think I skipped quite a lot of the lit crit and the poetry. But, by any reasonable standards, I did my homework.

Moving into my twenties, the passion began to fade, as excessive adulation always does. I realised that Wilde had only been a human being like the rest of us, and that plenty of other people were just as clever, perceptive and eloquent as him. In fact, I began to find him pretentious and tedious. This is probably more the fault of people who think that quoting him liberally makes them seem funny and intelligent than it ever was his, but the effect was the same. "Get over yourself!", I wanted to scream down the century. When this film came out, I went to see it in the cinema at Oxford - but by then as much for old times' sake and because Stephen Fry was in it as anything else. Clearly, it didn't have that much impact on me at the time, because on this rewatch I found that there were vast swathes of it I had completely forgotten. I remembered touching scenes with his children, arguments with Bosie, performances of his plays and the period in jail - but that was about it, really. Very little about Robbie Ross, for instance, or about his direct interactions with the Marquess of Queensberry.

Since then, my opinion has settled and balanced a little. I still find some of the one-liners rather trite - but recognise that they weren't when he first came up with them, and that he probably would have cringed himself at the way they're used now. As for his stance as a self-proclaimed aesthete and general artiste (dahling!), I can appreciate better now that it was something which the Zeitgeist of the times demanded someone play about with, and that it was in a way as much a part of his professional life as his plays or poems were. I've started going to performances of some of his plays again, and discovered rather deeper themes in them than I'd remembered previously. And I've even had his Complete Letters on my Amazon wish-list for a couple of years now.

So when Mum and I had settled down the other evening, intending to watch Ladri di Biciclette, but finding ourselves let down by a dodgy tape, the DVD of Wilde which my sister had left with my parents so I could watch it some time seemed an obvious choice. Time to give my former hero another outing.

I must say that the film itself seems rather a Wildean whitewash. It's basically set as a classic tragedy, with Wilde's Tragic Flaw being his blind love for Bosie, itself exacerbated by society's Tragic Flaw of failing to accommodate homosexuality. This makes for a neat and quite moving morality tale, and both Stephen Fry and Jude Law carry it off very nicely. But while it is all certainly extractable from Ellman's biography (after all, the screenplay is based on it), I don't seem to remember Wilde coming across in the book as quite such a constant model of perfect empathy, humanity and compassion, and I'm certain that he was already entirely capable of neglecting his wife, spending extravagantly and behaving foolishly and dismissively well before Bosie came on the scene: all things which the film quite explicitly blames on his influence.

Nonetheless, it's enjoyable enough, and certainly reminded me that I really do want to read those letters. Seeing it from this stage in my life, I also couldn't help but view his story in terms of Classical parallels. It wouldn't surprise me if he himself saw his accusation and trial as a retreading of Socrates' for corrupting the youth, and certainly now that the original trial transcripts have been uncovered, his 'defence' (essentially, "You're the ones with the problem, not me, and I relish being a martyr to my cause") bears a remarkable similarity to the one Socrates presented, as recorded in Plato's Apology.

And then of course there is Ovid - exiled to the Black Sea by Augustus, partly for writing scandalous poetry, but also for a mysterious error which may well have had a political aspect. And this was brought home to me particularly by a rather loose translation in the film. Wilde explains to Robbie Ross that the title of his letter to Bosie from Reading Gaol, De Profundis, means 'From the Depths'. Really, it doesn't - conventionally 'De' in a Latin title means 'about' or 'concerning', as in Cato's De Agri Cultura, Cicero's De Re Publica or Vitruvius' De Architectura. They all mean 'About' + exactly what it looks like they mean from their modern derivations - so similarly, 'De Profundis' means 'About the Depths'. But if Wilde's letter had been called 'From the Depths', that would have translated as Ex Profundis - and thus of course inexorably have recalled Ovid's poetic collection of exile letters, Ex Ponto (Pontus being the particular area he was sent to). What I don't know is how similar they are in content, since I've only read an abridged version of De Profundis, and snippets of the Ex Ponto. But it would be interesting to know how much, despite avoiding the more obvious potential tribute in the title, Wilde was aiming to cast himself as a modern-day Ovid as much as a modern-day Socrates.

ETA: and browsing idly through Ellman's biography, I now find a) that De Profundis wasn't Wilde's title anyway, but a suggestion from a friend, possibly E.V. Lucas, and b) that it is the opening line of a psalm, so was presumably intended by whoever did suggest it to have Biblical, rather than Classical resonances. Wilde apparently suggested In Carcere et Vinculis ('In Prison and in Chains') instead, which to me recalls the names of martyr churches in Rome such as San Nicola in Carcere and San Pietro in Vinculis, and thus masterfully incorporates both the Biblical and the Classical traditions, while also stressing the idea of his own tragic martyrdom. Still doesn't mean he wasn't thinking of Ovid, though, either when he wrote the letter or later as he wandered Europe in exile.