Basil Hallward has painted the best picture of his life and will not show it to anyone. Lord Henry Wotton, stretched along a divan in the corner of the studio, asks him why. Basil says he has put too much of himself into it. This is the first page of The Picture of Dorian Gray, and nothing has happened: two men in a summer studio, the smell of roses coming through the open door, a finished portrait on an easel. A reader who has never heard of the book already knows that something in the room is wrong.
Nothing in the scene will say what. Basil’s refusal is phrased as a principle about art, and it is a good principle, and it is also a confession he does not know he is making. Lord Henry answers in aphorisms that are funny in the way a man is funny when he has decided that nothing matters very much. The wrongness is in the arrangement rather than in any single line: a painter frightened of his own painting, a friend amused by the fear, and a young man who has not yet walked in and is already the subject of the conversation.
This is a technique, and its parts can be named. A scene establishes that something is badly wrong before anyone in it can say so, using details that each have an innocent explanation available. The reader assembles the alarm out of parts that are individually harmless. Get Out (2017) opens with the same technique, executed at close to the same level, and the two openings explain each other.
The film begins with a young man walking alone through an unfamiliar suburb at night, on the phone, lost, complaining about the street signs. A white car slows behind him. The car doubles back. The song playing from it is cheerful and from another era. He turns to avoid the car, says something about not wanting trouble, and is choked from behind and carried to the boot. The sequence takes four minutes and contains no supernatural element, no gore, and no obvious villain. It contains a man walking somewhere he has correctly registered he should not be walking.
The house sequence that follows is where the technique does its real work. Chris arrives with his girlfriend at her parents’ place, and the parents go out of their way to be welcoming. There is a tour. There is the father’s remark that he would have voted for Obama a third time. There is the mother, a psychiatrist, offering to help with the smoking, and later stirring a teacup with a small silver spoon. There is the housekeeper, whose smile is held about two seconds past where a smile ends. There is the groundskeeper, running full speed across the lawn in the dark, and then stopping. None of these is a threat. All of them are wrong.
The first rule of the technique is that every detail must survive an innocent reading. The father is trying too hard, which is what nervous parents do. The mother is a psychiatrist, and psychiatrists offer to fix things. The housekeeper is awkward around guests. The groundskeeper likes to run at night. Any one of these can be explained by a viewer who wants to explain it, and the film knows that the viewer wants to, because the alternative is to believe something that cannot yet be said out loud. Wilde runs the same mechanism in reverse: Basil’s fear of his own canvas is explained, plausibly and at length, as an artist’s scruple.
The second rule is that the details accumulate rather than escalate. Lord Henry’s remarks in the first chapter do not get darker as the chapter proceeds. There are simply more of them, and the reader begins to notice that a man who says everything charmingly has not yet said anything he believes. The party guests in the film do not become more offensive over the afternoon. They arrive at their level immediately and stay there, one after another, admiring Chris’s build, asking whether it is true what they say, mentioning Tiger Woods. Escalation would give the protagonist grounds. Accumulation gives him nothing to point at.
What this produces is not dramatic irony in the ordinary sense. Dramatic irony gives the audience a fact the character lacks: the audience has seen the letter, or knows the identity of the man in the mask. Here the audience knows nothing the character does not. They are watching the same tour and hearing the same aphorisms. What they have is a position, outside the room, where the social codes are legible as codes rather than as manners. The character is inside the room and has to be polite. That difference, and not information, is the entire source of the dread.
It also creates the clock, which is the part most often missed. Once a reader has registered the wrongness the protagonist has not, the question of the scene stops being what will happen and becomes how long this will take. Wilde makes the reader wait through an entire chapter of charm before Dorian appears, and then wait again while he is worked on. The film makes the audience wait through an afternoon of small talk. The waiting is the thing being made.
Then there is the third rule, which is what makes the openings watchable: someone else can see it. In the second chapter of the novel, Basil begs Lord Henry not to spoil the boy, and says that his life as an artist depends on him. He is entirely right about the danger but he says it to the wrong person, quietly, while Dorian is at the piano with his back to them turning the pages of some Schumann. The film gives this role to the friend on the phone, who hears an account of the weekend, correctly identifies what is happening, and is four hours away with no standing to do anything about it. In both, the person who understands the situation is outside the room where it is occurring, which prevents that person from being useful. It is a very old device and it still works, because the audience is in the same position as the friend: certain, and unable to act on the certainty.
Both also have to decide where deniability ends, and both place the collapse late and give it to an outsider rather than to the protagonist. In the film it is a photograph. A camera flash goes off in the face of another guest, and the man comes apart and screams at Chris to get out, the first moment in the afternoon when anyone says a true thing in a plain sentence. The room immediately covers it with a seizure and an apology. In the novel the collapse is Dorian’s own, in front of the finished portrait, where he says aloud that he would give his soul to trade places with the painting. Before that sentence the book could still be a comedy of manners about three men and a picture. After it, it cannot.
The fourth rule is the hardest to execute, and it is what separates both of these openings from imitations of them: the protagonist’s failure to act must be socially reasonable. Chris cannot accuse his girlfriend’s mother of anything. There is no sentence available to him. To say it aloud is to be the guest who accused the psychiatrist of hypnotism over dinner, and that costs him far more than another hour of small talk. Dorian is in the same position, and worse, because the man corrupting him is delightful and has not proposed anything. Both are trapped by courtesy, which is a stronger cage than a locked door and is harder to write well.
Politeness as a trap is also why both works can use pleasure as the delivery vehicle. Lord Henry is the funniest character in The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Wilde knows exactly what he is doing by making the corrupting influence the best company in the book. A reader who finds him delightful, which every reader does, has been placed inside Dorian’s error rather than above it. The film does the same with its party scene, which is often very funny, and the laughter is the point: a viewer who is enjoying the absurdity of these people is, for the length of the laugh, doing what Chris is doing: treating an emergency as an awkward afternoon.
The version of this technique that fails is the one where the wrongness is legible as wrongness. A character who says there was something strange about that house has blown the entire effect, because the alarm has been moved from the reader to the page. So has the writer who makes the detail undeniable, the smile that is described as sinister, the aphorism that is openly cruel. The whole apparatus depends on plausible deniability being maintained on both sides at once, for the character and for the audience, until the moment it collapses.
I learned this the slow way. An early draft of a chapter I had been working on had a character ask, in the third paragraph, whether everything was all right. It was a reasonable question and it destroyed the chapter, because the moment the question exists, the scene is about the answer. I cut the line and replaced it with a conversation about a dinner. The reader now had nowhere to put their alarm, which is where it belongs.
Neither of these openings is subtle, exactly. They are legible, deliberate, and quite loud once you know where to look. That is the mark of a technique executed well. What they share is a refusal to let the audience discharge the tension by naming it. A reader watching Basil refuse to exhibit the portrait, or a viewer watching a smile held two seconds too long, is given no way to be right yet.
The novel was published in 1890 and the film in 2017, under conditions that share almost nothing. They arrive at the same structure because they need it for the same reason: both are about a man being taken apart by people who are being nice to him, and neither can afford for him to notice early.
Each sequence ends the same way. A man decides to stay.