The curious influence of Oscar Wilde on Hollywood

The Importance of Being Earnest was NBC’s first coast-to-coast broadcast of a play in 1929. It was ideal for radio, partly because Oscar Wilde’s crisp dialogue obviated any need of facial expressions or gestures. Epigrammatic speech, as Noël Coward found, was a signifier of modernity in the 1920s. Beyond that, as Kate Hext shows, the America of Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover had a sinewy and hardy sympathy for the Anglo-French fin-de-siècle literary mode of the 1890s known as Decadence.

For too long, Hext argues, historians have focused on the American Dream as a mercenary business, concerned with the optimisation of personal wealth, sociopathic ambition, competitive ruthlessness, grinding long hours of work, mass production, cultural uniformity, winners and losers and he-men and patsies. Yet, she continues, Wilde, shorn of his sexual deviance and disassociated from pretty boys, offered a philosophy of life that was an antidote to corporate America, Wall Street, provincial pettiness and meddlesome neighbours. His state of mind gave a sort of subversive hope to men and women – especially those in the Midwest and West – who hankered to live more for pleasure than profit. Putting the sexual history aside, Wilde’s writings were a gallant and inspiriting counter to killjoys and the insatiable demands of wage slavery. Wilde satisfied a yearning for non-monetary fulfilment and recreational rapture.

The Picture of Dorian Gray, says Hext, is the story of a habitual criminal. In pursuit of his ideal of perfect beauty and voluptuous living, Gray steals, blackmails, uses opium, visits dens of iniquity, performs illegal sexual acts, learns the tricks of coiners and commits murder. He becomes, in Wilde’s depiction, a dandy criminal performing acts of fabulous duplicity. As such, Gray is a harbinger of that dominant 20th-century phenomenon, the cinematic crime thriller.