The View-Master
The more ubiquitous our image-making machinery gets, the rarer independent perception and personality become.
‘One of the most sublime — if highly introverted — experiences you can have is examining a View Master transparency exposed on a sunny day, on a cloudy one.’
I struggle to convince myself that t’s all just entertainment.
“Wit is the epitaph of an emotion.” So asserted Oscar Wilde; and, as one of the wittiest people ever to have razzed a US customs official, he knew what he was quipping about. When I was reworking his Modernist myth, The Picture of Dorian Gray, for a film adaptation, I went through the text and wrote down every single epigram. There were scores — for, in truth, Wilde’s novel is little else but a thin chain of narrative links, from which depend, jewel-like, scores of epigrams, apothegms, bon mots, and pinpoint-sharp remarks. Which is not to denigrate it: For all its clunkiness as a work of literature, it is as an aesthetic fairytale that Dorian Gray has come to lodge permanently in the contemporary imagination. The reason for this is the timeliness of the book, which appeared in the first year of the decade during which virtuality, having massed its shadowy forces in the very wings of the world, rushed onstage and captured reality. Wilde’s novel proposes easel-painted portraiture and …
