The picture of Dorian Gray

There is a confession I have got to make. I love movies. Frankly speaking, I am a movie maniac. I watch every decent movie that comes within my reach when I have time. (And sometimes I free all my time, leave everything aside for the sole purpose of watching a good story to unfold.) Anything that has the IMDB rating above 7.5 is something that I would love to see. I watch even 7.0 movies. On rare occasions I can watch 6.5ers. In the ages before the Internet I have actually watched hundreds of movies without any discrimination. Honestly, the number of movies I’ve watched during last five years might go beyond any sense. If I would compare this to anything, it would be probably that song “So What” by Metallica:

I’ve watched this, I’ve watched that…

I even watched all the parts of Friday 13th when I was a teenager. I will not mention TV series here, for you are going to have a hard time trying to stop me from speaking extensively about House MD or Dexter or True Blood or Breaking Bad and so on. Oh, don’t get me started! (Or, perhaps, shall I write some notes on those some other time?) I am a cinematographic hedonist. I don’t think I am the worst-case scenario of a movie junkie, I’m sure there are many people who regularly watch movies that have rating below 6.5. Who am I to judge them?

What attracts me in the cinematographic art is states and perspectives experience. What I discovered (as, I believe, many other people) is that a work of art is usually a response to a state experienced by the artist, a perspective that he or she is desperate to frame into a painting. Especially great movies by being a work of art are able to show everyone who is open to receiving the transmission some fleeting aspect of universal experience, some unknown corner of consciousness, some experiential continuum that is ready to unfold before you on the screen and enfold you into it by transforming you into a true experiential participant of this very occasion. One of the best masters of dialectical art in cinematography seems to be my favorite David Lynch. When I say dialectical, I mean that kind of art that involves you as a participant of the masterpiece; and the overall viewers’ response is something that helps to make the art consummate. For instance, when I watched Lynch’s INLAND EMPIRE in a movie theater for the first time, I had the sense that everyone who is watching it now is the participant of the mystery unfolding…

So during the last few months I’ve watched some pretty good movies that I didn’t write about. But here is a movie that I don’t want to leave unmentioned. Dorian Gray is the title, and it is an Oliver Parker’s film based on a beautiful book by Oscar Wilde. To be succinct, I think the movie tells the Dorian Gray story the perfect way; and I doubt that it could’ve been told better in terms of a movie at this point in history. It is a huge and timely slap on the face for the folks who are fond of the impulse-gratifying life style and instant-coffee spiritual materialism. It is a story about a Soul trapped exclusively in the sensorimotor world of prerational senses and bodily feelings and flesh by somehow innocently trusting and embodying the rationally formulated worldview of sensual hedonism. (Isn’t it true that our minds can rationalize any invented worldview with some sense of reason; and then trust it; and then make others believe it too?) And, surely, it is a story of maturation and liberation. For blessed are we that it is our flesh that decays and not the soul, even though it can lose itself in reflections and shadows casted by apparitions seen in the mirrors of the Spirit’s Great Play. And eventually, I believe, the Soul will always have a chance for redemption.