Pretty Privilege

Forever young? In our age of manipulated images and faces what significance is left to the term „beauty“? Staying young and agile at all costs instead of eventually getting old and frail is an omnipresent credo. Author and director Wilke Weermann sheds light on our concept of beauty in the shadow of today's body cult shaped by social media and reinterprets one of the most famous novels of modernity: The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1854 – 1900). In this story, a certain Lord Henry Wotton seduces a young man named Dorian into living out his youth to excess. Because „the world belongs to youth“! The desire to remain beautiful and desirable forever grows in Dorian. His invocation of everlasting youth is fulfilled: his painted portrait ages in his place. Dorian leads a reckless life full of excess and pleasure, narcissistically looking at his youthful face in the mirror to compare it with his older and uglier portrait – an image that ultimately becomes his doom.
In his rewriting, Weermann reveals Wilde's central theme: the question of external appearances and the possibility of recognizing inner truth. In doing so he references current discourse about ethics and the influence of technology on our self-image. As an aesthete, Lord Henry celebrates beauty as the highest value of all. But how beautiful can someone be who seems to lack all morals or even becomes a murderer?