What it does instead is make Dorian sort of straight. Other than a few pansexual clinches, in this version our man certainly has an eye for the ladies. Excuse me, but this is not how I understood the subtext of the book. All Wilde's vague allusions to Dorian's various degradations, all that man-on-man talk about beauty and youth, all that adoration — it was certainly enough for me, as a teenager on the school bus, to read it hidden within the covers of a Harold Robbins. The needs of the market can doubtless be blamed for the attempt at making Dorian more, as it were, mainstream, but they needn't have worried: Brokeback Mountain has come and gone and nobody died.
It probably has something to do with the teenage following of Ben Barnes, whom we last saw as Prince Caspian in The Chronicles of Narnia. He is Blue Peter handsome, which is to say, nothing very much going on below the waist. But if past adaptations are anything to go by, this makes him a perfect fit for Wilde's anti-hero. In the best-known film version from 1945, Dorian was played by Hurd Hatfield, an asexual poppet who, with his beady eyes and pert nose, looked like a meerkat in a frock coat. Similarly, Peter Firth in the 1976 BBC version occasionally resembled Bo-Peep. None of these actors gives the impression of being a beast in the bedroom. They play Dorian as a passive character, revelling in the simpering admiration of those who want to be him, or make love to him. A figure of self-conscious "beauty" as opposed to sex, he is to the Cecil Beaton-loving crowd what Brad Pitt is to the multiplexes.
This means that there has yet to be a Dorian who could convince a popular audience. Maybe this is not the fault of screenwriters or directors. Perhaps it goes back to Wilde himself, and that odd little cultural tradition of aestheticism, which accorded studied refinement an exaggerated reverence, was disdainful of sexual nitty-gritty and so affected a snobbery about it.
But surely we can take a chance and be a little earthier today? After all, with a bit of imaginative casting James Bond lost his father figure image and became a porn stud. Imagine the frisson there would have been watching Brad or Jude, in their prime, playing Dorian. All that beauty, and sex too. And it would have meant something. Not once did I find myself really believing or caring about what Ben Barnes got up to behind closed doors. Which, especially in this case, rather defeats the point.
