How do you solve a problem like (adapting) LOLITA?
Comparing the novel to the film versions that do exist, and pitching a cinematic re-telling that does not (yet) exist.
WARNING:
Given the subject matter of the book and its films, there is some discussion of child abuse, coercion, sexual assault, exploitation, and assorted other related nastinesses.
There will also be a proliferation of spoilers for the 70 year-old novel, and consequently, its two filmic adaptations, in order to give my best overall analysis possible.
If either of those corollaries are things you want to avoid, you can stop here, and I bid you a nice day.
But if you’re okay to continue, let us begin…
Vladimir Nabokov’s LOLITA (1955)
★★★★★
I don't know if anyone else got this impression, but for me, through the reputation garnered secondhand by Vladimir Nabokov's original novel, and the reputation acquired thirdhand by the subsequent film adaptations (including Stanley Kubrick’s herein, popularising the iconography of those red heart-shaped sunglasses forever after), I felt as though I grew up often being fed the false assertion that Lolita was some sort of ribald black comedy positing a taboo love affair between a middle-aged man, and a 12 year old girl, as a genuine doomed romance you were meant to feel for, and which you’d therefore think was something Nabokov approved of. Akin to the way that J.K. Rowling said it was one of her favourite books, and she interpreted it as “a great and tragic love story” whose final lines made her cry every time she read it... or in the way that Luc Besson wanted Natalie Portman’s pre-teen Mathilda in Léon: The Professional to have a romantic and sexual relationship with Jean Reno’s Léon, which he wrote to echo his own Lolita-esque predatory relationship with Maïwenn (meeting her when she was 12 and Besson was 29; dating her when she was 15; she having his baby when she was 16).
But now I have finally read Lolita for myself, I can tell you with firsthand dead certainty that THAT IS ABSOLUTELY NOT WHAT THE BOOK IS. AT ALL.
Nope. Lolita may have its moments of pitch black humour and surreal absurdity borne of Humbert Humbert’s deceitfulness, paranoia, and unreliable narration of past events we have only his word to go off of… but overall, it is a harrowing psychological horror drama about a sickening child predator with blood-boiling delusions of grandeur (where even his moments of supposed self-pity and self-loathing feel like they’re feeding his ego), as he softens his despicable crimes, deplorable thoughts, and monstrous intentions beneath distancing implication and flowery prose. Nabokov’s writing style is to die for in its poeticism and invention and beauty (same as it was in Pale Fire), and by extension, his vivid portrayal of Humbert’s pathetic evil is rendered even more visceral by the contempt you feel he has for his own character, and the hatred he constantly ensures you feel for Humbert likewise. (The confession H.H. divulges of his ideal envisioned future - “Lolita the Second… Lolita the Third” - made me have to close the book and put it down for a few minutes, just to stare off speechlessly into the middle distance in stunned, silent, queasy horror.)
It almost lost me in the back half, when Humbert’s digressions (deliberately) began to overstay their welcome, and I wanted him to get to the point he was dawdling from arriving at, but knowing that that’s exactly the point Nabokov was making, because that’s exactly what this obnoxiously obsessive and digressive character would do, coupled in conjunction with the knockout power of the final act, saved the novel completely.
Lolita is not some fluffy, easy, romantic read, like so many of its book cover variants would lead you to believe. I think a more accurate description for it would be to say it’s like if Vladimir Nabokov wrote American Psycho (minus the satire of yuppie capitalism, the exhaustive descriptions of graphic violence against women, and the narrator being American at all). It’s not a perfect 1:1 analogy, but I reckon that comparison gives you a much more accurate gauge of what to expect from the experience of inhabiting this grotesque main character’s delusional headspace for page after page after page.
So yes, Lolita is a brilliant book. Often woefully misrepresented in the public consciousness, and frequently misunderstood to be endorsing something it emphatically IS NOT.
To say I “loved it” is as wrong as saying I “loved” Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible: both are 5-star works that are extremely impactful, well made, brutal, at times beautiful, and they make me want to take several chemical showers to wash away the residual ick and desolation they leave behind by design.
That is a recommendation, insofar as it’s only for those who know they can handle such pieces of art made to make them feel such ways.
Stanley Kubrick’s LOLITA (1962)
★★★½
So what, then, do we make of Stanley Kubrick's (heavily Hays-Code-censored and compromised) 1962 film version? As the poster's tagline famously asked:
“How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?”
In Kubrick's case: by stripping away all explicit mention of the true sordid horror of the situation that the novel took great pains to make clear, even in spire of Humbert's minimisations of personal responsibility; flattening out all complexity to the story by removing us from the obsessive, borderline hallucinogenic subjectivity of Humbert's sole perspective; and boiling the plot down to the barest essentials they could get away with at the time, until it's barely more than an arch black comedy of errors and manners, all withering witty exchanges, domestic tête-à-têtes, and a sprinkle of slapstick (namely in the admittedly quite funny hotel scene with the stubborn cot that refuses to open easily or quietly). All the while the film's hands were tied behind its back by behind-the-scenes factors of the era undermining any ability for the film to directly confront what should've always been the unavoidable fact that Humbert Humbert is a fucking pedophile, trying to groom an underage child.
There are numerous notable changes between the book and the Kubrick film that I could pinpoint, which cumulatively diminish, alter, or miss the point of the book entirely. Here are just a select handful I'd like to highlight, taking into account also the changes Nabokov made to his own story with the version of the screenplay he wrote solo - (his first script submission being a 400 page manuscript that was obviously vetoed from the jump for being too long, to which Nabokov complied in then producing a shorter edition, that if we can judge by the published draft of his screenplay publicly available to us, would've still made the film clock in even closer to 3 hours than it already does) - before it got drastically rewritten by Kubrick, and producer James B. Harris, into what you see in the final film, where maybe only 10% (if that) of Nabokov's script-work was kept:
• Right off the bat, there's the fact that not just Humbert, but everyone in the film refers to Dolores as “Lolita”. You'd think this would be one of the Kubrick/Harris misbegotten alterations, but for some reason, Nabokov appeared to choose this to be the case from the get-go in his screenplay, too. Which is odd, because in his own book, Dolores has a variety of nicknames from other people in her life (“Dolly”, “Lo”, “Lola”, etc), but “Lolita” is a name Humbert - and only Humbert - concocts to use to refer to Dolores. Like, this is literally established in Page 1, Chapter 1 of Part One, immediately after Paragraph 1:
“She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.”
He harps on with calling her by “Lolita” at any given opportunity, rather than by Dolores' actual name that he uses rarely and begrudgingly only in front of other people, because he's flattening her personhood down into the shape of his so-called “nymphet” obsession, which he says stems from his brief teenage fling with a girl named Annabel Leigh (not-so-coincidentally sharing the same name as the Annabel Lee title character from the poem by Edgar Allan Poe, who notoriously married his 13 year-old cousin when he was 27), from whom Humbert was separated by circumstance, location, and her sudden death before they could ever sexually consummate their relationship, encasing him in the amber of arrested development that (he says) compels him to constantly seek out “nymphets” (who, to him, are “demoniac” “creatures” with terrible powers of siren-like seduction, rather than the little girls, the children, the human beings they really are), so that they may return him to the feeling of when he was with Annabel, his original Lolita. To Humbert, he has to call Dolores “Lolita” as part of maintaining his fetishistic desire for the image of her as a child, before she inevitably grows up too much into adolescence to still be desirable to him. The closer to adulthood she gets, the more he loses interest. “Lolita” is not who Dolores is, it's who Humbert wants her to be. Which ties into him seeing her as an equal-parts seductress in their relationship to one another, not as a little girl being manipulated and isolated by a deviant adult man who wants to take advantage of her for his own sexual gratification, and knows that that's what he's doing.
So for the film to then have everyone call Dolores “Lolita”, whether it's by her mother, camp counsellors, school teachers, or whoever else knows her, completely negates the sinister connotations of the name's very reason for being.
• Sue Lyon is incredible in the film as Dolores, but her age being 14 at the time of filming, and the way she's dolled up through make-up and costuming to look slightly older than she really was, again diminishes the horror that should be apparent from Dolores originally being twelve in the book. Think of Sofia Coppola's Priscilla, and the way Coppola ensured (via the visually major height differences between Cailee Spaeny and Jacob Elordi, and Spaeny's very young-looking face helping to make her appear just as distressingly young as Priscilla Presley was when she was first courted by Elvis) that there was no mistaking this situation for anything other than a child being groomed by an adult. To me, that's how Dolores should've properly been represented in a film of Lolita, so as to best communicate the indisputable wrongness of everything Humbert thinks and does.
But this is all part and parcel with the misguided adaptational attitudes adopted by the makers of 1962's Lolita, exemplified especially by producer Harris' nowadays-alarming comments about the reasons why they chose Lyon to play Dolores in the first place.
Quote:
- “We knew we must make her a sex object [...] where everyone in the audience could understand why everyone would want to jump on her.”
- “We made sure when we cast her that she was a definite sex object, not something that could be interpreted as being perverted.”
- “We wanted it to come off as a love story, and to feel very sympathetic with Humbert.”
There's only so much of the film's shortcomings you can blame on the censorial efforts of the Hays Code, and the Catholic Legion of Decency, and whoever else Kubrick relented to pressures from, before you get to something like James B. Harris' gobsmackingly obtuse misreading of the Lolita source material forcing you to consider whether these guys simply didn't get the book, or were deliberately trying to make it into something it never was, in order to make it more commercially appealing, less thematically confrontational, or even expressly trying to sanitise and romanticise the dynamic between Humbert and Dolores.
Now why would someone want to do that?
Oh! Well, would you look at that?! I take a quick look for more information on Harris, and it turns out that Harris (allegedly) statutorily raped Sue Lyon, when he became her “first lover”, around the time they were making Lolita when she was just 14.
I guess we have our answer.
• Changing subject sharply away from the gravity of the information just gleaned about Harris' own Humbert-type predilections:
Humbert's name isn't actually Humbert Humbert. Because the entire story in the book is told by him in retrospect, under his editorial edict, that's just the name he chose for himself in his manuscript, written behind the bars of his prison cell. “Humbert Humbert” was the pseudonym he settled on, among a selection of other abandoned choices. So too were every other character's names in the novel a pseudonym “Humbert” chose for them in his retelling to try to hide their identities, including Dolores and Charlotte Haze, where “Haze” was picked because it rhymed with their true, undisclosed surname.
• Humbert’s eventually aborted plan to shuffle Charlotte off this mortal coil differs in the film from the book, where in the latter he figures the “perfect murder” scheme would be to drown Charlotte in the lake and pretend it was an accident, while in the film, he plots to use the late Mr. Haze’s pistol on her while she’s in the bath, pretending he didn’t know it had any bullets in it (in accordance with a conversation he and she had moments earlier about how, to paraphrase, “they always say they didn’t know their gun was loaded”). This comes before Charlotte’s own accidental death from getting hit by the car. What the film neglects to mention is the motivation she has for even being outside in the first place in order to get hit by said vehicle. In the book, she went outside because she’d written a bunch of letters to various people who needed to know of Humbert’s true monstrous intentions before he could lie to anyone about it, and was on her way to mail them, before fate (or “McFate” as Humbert calls it) intervened with the veering car colliding with her fatally, her letters never reaching the postbox before Humbert intercepts them, and rips them apart in his pocket while talking to someone on the scene, acting the part of the dutifully grieving new widower. The film sidesteps these details completely.
• The languorous pacing of the film feels all out of whack, due to how much material had to be (understandably) excised and streamlined in the adaptation process, and how much had to be cut to get around those damn censors, so too much time is spent on certain scenes, while others are breezed through all too quickly. There's an unavoidable imbalance in the to-and-fro between the scenes that needed more, and the scenes that needed less, attention paid to them. It's not the worst adaptational remix ever, not by a long shot, but if this version of Lolita was all you had as a point of reference to what Lolita was about, you'd never be privy to knowing there's so much invaluable detail from the book, and even from Nabokov's own unmitigated screenplay, that was utterly excised, but which would have better informed your perception of the story.
Like with Humbert's whole history with Annabel, supposedly sparking his “nymphet” obsession that plagued him through his years living in Europe, where he even paid for the services of an already-young-but-much-younger-looking prostitute to indulge in his taboo tastes... or his stays in multiple sanatoriums... all of the long lead-up of his pre-established fixation on girls aged 9 to 14, before he ever lays his lecherous eyes on Dolores... all of that's gone!
Or how, in the book, Humbert tests out increasing dosages of sleeping pills on Charlotte to calculate how long they last, and how powerfully they sedate their taker, premeditating a plan to eventually use the pills to drug Dolores into a long enough stupor for his perverted purposes, whenever the opportune time should emerge.
Or the part where book-Humbert divulges his fantasy for an ideal idyllic future for him and “Lolita”, which involves Dolores ageing out of her nymphetdom, but bearing Humbert a daughter who can become “Lolita the Second”, who could then bear him a grandchild who can become “Lolita the Third”.
Or the parts where Dolores, multiple times, directly tells Humbert that she is fully aware that he, in her own words, raped her.
DO YOU GET WHERE I'M COMING FROM, WHEN I SAY YOU ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO IDENTIFY WITH, OR EMPATHISE WITH, OR ROOT FOR THIS MAN IN ANY WAY, SHAPE, OR FORM? AND THAT THE BOOK MAKES IT EXCEEDINGLY BLOODY CLEAR?
Part of me thinks that if things had gone differently, and Kubrick had made the film in the following decade, in his A Clockwork Orange era of uncompromising, uninhibited 1970s boldness, free from the strictures he was bound by in the dying days of the Hays Code, perhaps he could've produced a film of Lolita that was confidently unafraid to confront the book's undeniable darkness head on, rather than the way the 1962 film so flippantly mismanaged tackling the horrors in the novel properly.
Or maybe that would’ve presented its own host of even worse problems. We’ll never know, and that might be for the best.
• What else?
Oh, there's the curious detail that Kubrick seemed to have a penchant for arbitrarily changing notable numbers - specifically hotel room numbers - seen in whatever book he was adapting to film at the time.
Sure, this “pattern” only has 2 examples across 2 films that I can point to, so it's probably better suited to the “I would have 2 nickels, but it's weird that it happened twice” meme more than anything.
Still, in Lolita, Kubrick took the book's recurring number of 342 (a number that haunts Humbert throughout the novel with its insistent coincidence at many key locations), and changed it to 242; then later in The Shining, Kubrick took what Stephen King wrote as “Room 217”, and changed it to Room 237.
Why did Kubrick do this?
Why did Kubrick do anything? Maybe he had his reasons for doing this, maybe he didn't. I guess it's just another quirk for people to speculate on when discussing the man and his art.
(Although we do that with The Shining, the room number change was due to the real-life hotel not wanting the film to scare off visitors to their real Room 217, and so Kubrick changed it to the fictional Room 237 for that purpose, as well as in homage to the code “237” being used at the end of Dr. Strangelove, which he made directly after Lolita, working with Peter Sellers for a second film in a row! Speaking of whom...)
• The character of Clare Quilty is substantially beefed up from his illusory, lingering presence on the margins of Humbert's awareness of him in the novel. Nabokov already made him extra prominent in his screenplay, so as to make crystal clear Quilty's heavy involvement in the course of events that was only teasingly alluded to in the book via clues and inferences he invited you as a reader to piece together. Kubrick and Harris go even further in bolstering Quilty's screentime, so as to accommodate the casting of Peter Sellers, making such a delectable meal out of the character, and his performance, that Kubrick just had to give Sellers more stuff to do. Sellers constantly straddles the line between his character being irritating, and he himself being irritating, the push and pull between Quilty being a hogger of the limelight, and Sellers hogging the limelight at the expense of other actors (usually James Mason, playing the straight man to Sellers' talkatively show-off-y maniac), but ultimately, that tightrope tension lands on the right side of the equation for Sellers, who makes his Quilty a memorably slimy, sadistic, calculating, even creepier dark half counterpart to Mason's Humbert. Sellers may be best known for his comedic work, but as Quilty, he more than made the case for his capabilities in portraying a character with a glint of pure evil lurking behind his sparkling eyes, and his constant babbling patter. (A pattern of speech modelled on Sellers' impression of Kubrick, as it happens!)
• The passage of time between Humbert losing Dolores, and contact being reinstated with her years later, is hardly felt in the film. You don't get the wilderness years of Humbert searching for her through a useless private detective wasting his money, nor his bizarrely stable relationship and cohabitation with the alcoholic, adult Rita (“twice Lolita's age, and three quarters of mine”). In the film, all you get is the fade to black at the end of the scene where Dolores is gone, and a fade in to a closeup of a typewriter anonymously writing a letter to Humbert a few years later. All anguish, malaise, mystery, anticipation, and drama is snuffed out in the blink of an eye, thanks to that aforementioned wonky pacing.
• Nabokov and Kubrick appeared to agree it was a good idea to begin the film in medias res by shunting the book's climactic showdown between Humbert and Quilty to the very front of the film, then flashing back to show how and why we got there. But in Nabokov's scriptual rendition, he has the scene play out completely silently, and over just a minute of screen time. Kubrick's rendition of the scene, however, takes more time to build suspense, intrigue, and an establishment of the darkly comic tone, via Peter Sellers and James Mason having a surreal, drunken game of table tennis, while dialogue from the book is used verbatim in their conversation. In fact, with the exception of the table tennis, this entire scene is one of the most faithful reproductions of anything from the novel.
• I must say, the ending is rather abrupt, circling back to how the film began, but concluding with a brief expository title card informing us of what happened after this scene, then THE END, and fade to black.
It's only just occurred to me, writing this at this very moment, how little voiceover there is throughout the film. I mean, it's interspersed here and there, James Mason's voice reading snippets ripped directly from the book, and small moments of expositional world-building to tie scenes together, but overall? Surprisingly sparse, given how integral Humbert's voice is to the way the story is told (unfortunately).
Which means that none of the novel's profound poetic melancholy in the final few pages makes it into the film, nor does the devastating revelation of Dolores' death, which had been revealed in the first couple of pages without us yet knowing it was talking about her.
The film makes Dolores more worldly and knowing in appearance and temperament than she was in the book, painting her as more in control of events - as being a deliberate seducer, and schemer - to whitewash away any notion that she was wholly victimised by Humbert's disgusting actions. And, to add insult to injury, it omits the tragedy of the untimely death of her and her stillborn child happening almost in tandem with the death of Humbert, the film instead leaving us with the lasting impression that Dolores got thousands of dollars of Humbert's money to make her new life with her new husband and her baby, getting her happily ever after, while Humbert goes to jail for murdering Quilty, then dies from what you can insinuate is a broken heart.
Humbert's heart problems are present and accounted for in the book, and... it's only occurred to me this very second that him dying from heart disease can be read as him literally dying of a broken heart (sorry, I'm slow on catching symbolisms)... but the way it's communicated by the film, with the curt conclusive title card bluntly telling you he died before he go could go trial, only adds to James B. Harris' earlier assertion that they were actively trying to make audiences “feel very sympathetic with Humbert”, rather than the appropriate sympathy one should feel for Dolores, who was the victim of Humbert, and Quilty, and everyone who ever took advantage of her, or neglected her.
So in the final analysis, that about sums up why I reckon the 1962 Lolita fails to be as good an adaptation as most people involved would've wanted, especially when Nabokov was still alive to creatively consult on the film's production in any way.
And now, for some bonus stray observations, and things I did like about Kubrick's Lolita:
• I can't recall Quilty's silent, constant companion ever being mentioned by name onscreen, but the eye-catching, all-black-clad, goth-chic woman always by his side is meant to be Vivian Darkbloom - whose name I didn't realise, until a later post-book/movie research session, is actually an anagram of Vladimir Nabokov! Who, incidentally, gave himself a cameo in his original submitted screenplay as himself (never named in the dialogue, but credited as both “The Butterfly Hunter” - for his real-life side-profession as a lepidopterist - and forthrightly as “Nabokov”).
It’s also said that he has an uncredited appearance in Kubrick's film as none other than Charlotte Haze's late pre-Humbert husband, Harold, his visage seen in a photograph framed above the urn that her dead husband's ashes are kept in. I can’t find any real confirmation of this anywhere, and the man seen in the photograph doesn’t really look like Nabokov to my eyes, so the veracity of this is unclear. If it is true, though, then who knows if this was intentional, but semiotically, it certainly comes across as a cheeky acknowledgement that for the purposes of the film, Nabokov was enshrined and revered even as he and his work and words were mostly disposed of, so as to get this watered-down adaptation off the ground. (I've heard of “death of the author”, but this is ridiculous!)
• Credit where it's due now to James Mason, and his towering turn as Humbert, because that casting was a sublime stroke of genius that makes this very flawed film an ultimately worthwhile watch, primarily due to his performance (as well as everyone else's). Both he, and later Jeremy Irons for Adrian Lyne's 1997 version, were simply pitch perfect to play this loathsome, loquacious, lascivious, “Lolita”-loving lunatic. Both were ideally suited for playing men who could be handsome yet skin-crawling, poshly charming yet off-puttingly pretentious, intellectual and self-destructive, egotistical and self-loathing, witty and crass, hammy and heart-wrenching, smooth and coarse. Even the unique tenor and elocution of their voices just fits like a glove with exactly how you'd imagine a man like Humbert Humbert would sound, to the point where reading the book, one can alternate between imagining either of their voices speaking aloud Humbert's words, and it effortlessly works both ways. And in the case of Jeremy Irons, you don't even have to imagine it, because he already recorded an unabridged audiobook of Lolita years ago.
• I love Sellers' meta Spartacus quip at the beginning of the film, which from what I've gathered was an improv'd line deliberately referencing Kubrick's previous film to make him and everyone else laugh. Much of Sellers' scenes in Lolita are built around him riffing and improvising dialogue, Kubrick shooting him from multiple angles to catch the best stuff. Given Kubrick's reputation for demanding a bajillion takes from his actors, Sellers apparently delivered his best work within only a couple or a few takes, and then Kubrick was happy. Or maybe this was just in the years prior to Kubrick's auteur status being cemented, before he got carte blanche to satisfy his compulsive need to shoot dozens and dozens of takes without anyone telling him no. Who's to say?
• Hey, look! It's Lois “Moneypenny” Maxwell, playing the small part of a nurse in Lolita the same year Dr. No was released! How splendid!
• Apparently, the band Good Charlotte (whose music I don't think I've ever knowingly heard) got their name from some children's book of the same name, but if they had gotten the name from the moment Humbert refers to Dolores' mother as “good Charlotte”, as I thought they must've done when I read that combination of words in the book, it would've been a fitting origin, given how their frontman Joel Madden dated Hilary Duff while she was 16, and he was 25.
(You know, I'm getting real tired of finding more names to throw on this proverbial pyre of shitty men who took a leaf out of the Humbert Humbert playbook. We need a dose of Kendrick right about now. “Say, Hum / I hear you like 'em young...”)
Adrian Lyne’s LOLITA (1997)
★★★★
Who would've thought that in the battle of duelling Lolita adaptations, the one that comes out on top isn't the version directed by the man who gave us Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Barry Lyndon, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, and Full Metal Jacket... but instead, the victor is the version directed by the man who gave us Flashdance, 9½ Weeks, Fatal Attraction, Indecent Proposal, Unfaithful, and Jacob's Ladder?
That's right, folks! Leaving out all the behind-the-scenes reasons as to why the 1962 adaptation couldn't and wouldn't go as far as the 1997 re-adaptation did, in this one and only regard, a Stanley Kubrick film is bested by an Adrian Lyne film, and it's not even close.
Well, okay, it's a little bit close, and crucially, neither film has the monopoly on using the visual medium of cinema to get the book's point across anywhere near as adroitly as the book itself could, but if I had to pick between them, Lyne's film gets more right than it gets wrong, and is the far more engaging, beautifully shot, appropriately disturbing, and emotionally devastating adaptation of the two.
From the opening minutes of Lolita (1997) - the tone set perfectly by Ennio Morricone's unsurprisingly brilliant score, soothing woodwinds offset by discordant piano notes contrasting wistfulness with unease - there's a promising sense that this version just gets the mood of its source material. A feeling emboldened by how it becomes quickly clear that this is a stupefying labour of love for the filmmakers, who've paid extraordinary attention to bringing to life the minutest details from Nabokov's prose.
In conjunction with the emphasis on hearing more of Humbert's thoughts expressed in voiceover (one of those rarified absolutely necessary times to implement the practice in a movie), director Lyne, screenwriter Stephen Schiff, cinematographer Howard Atherton, and editors David Brenner and Julie Monroe - alongside, of course, the long list of production designers, art departments, prop makers, and everyone else who was involved in bringing Nabokov's book to life - collectively imbued the film with veritable riches of immersive details ripped straight from the pages of the novel. The minutiae of specific imagery, locations, side characters, cultural references, and snippets of dialogue, altogether delivering an enviably faithful adaptation that somehow never feels too busily overloaded by its slavish attention to detail. Fans of the novel will notice them, but novices coming into the film blind ought not to feel like they're missing out on any in-jokes. To me, it feels seamless, and beautifully resplendent in the cast and crew's unquestionable adoration for the book.
Here are just some of the details I picked up on as hailing straight from Nabokov's words:
• Humbert's hands stained black with the oil he sloppily applied to the pistol he used to kill Quilty (shown with him holding what we'll come to learn is Dolores' old hairpin, an addition made by the film).
• Him straying his car carelessly across both sides of the road (“not by way of protest, not as a symbol, or anything like that, but merely as a novel experience - that since I had disregarded all laws of humanity, I might as well disregard the laws of traffic”).
• Unlike Kubrick's version, Lyne and Schiff take time to include Humbert's history with Annabel, which he claims informs his “nymphet” fixation thereafter.
• The other house Humbert was supposed to board at having burned down before his arrival in Ramsdale, fatefully putting him on a course towards Charlotte and Dolores Haze.
• The elderly neighbour, Miss Opposite (unnamed in the film, but matching her description in the book).
• Reinstating the vital detail that Humbert is the only one in the story who calls Dolores by the “Lolita” nickname he made up for her.
• Humbert cruelly experimenting on Charlotte by drugging her with sleeping pills to test their effectiveness for future illicit use upon Dolores (though for some reason, this setup isn't paid off by him actually using the pills on her later at The Enchanted Hunters hotel).
• The maintaining of the recurring number, 342.
• The Beardsley college headmistress (played by the headmistress from Uncle Buck!) constantly getting Humbert's name wrong.
• Keeping her interrogation - albeit in truncated form - of Humbert's “parenting” that Kubrick previously transplanted onto Peter Sellers playing Clare Quilty playing German school psychiatrist, Dr. Zempf (a proto-Dr. Strangelove before Sellers played that eponymous character for Kubrick a couple of years later).
• Reverend Rigger.
• Dolores' friend, Mona.
• Humbert finding Dolores and her bike at the drugstore next to Marie's Beauty Salon.
• The planned trip to the ceremonial dances at the Magic Caves.
• Dolores deliberately fudging the writing of the license plate numbers transcribed from their pursuer's car.
• The bunch of bananas Humbert buys Dolores because she's his “little monkey”.
• Humbert saying he thinks their distant pursuer looks like his uncle Gustave (best known by his surname Trapp in the book).
• Humbert finding Quilty's trail of hotel guestbook logs writing under various pseudonyms.
• Humbert using an old sweater tied to a tree as target practice for the gun he'll use to kill Quilty.
• The phrase “all those beastly boys”, which in the book made me wonder if that inspired Beastie Boys' band name (it didn't).
• The macabre image of the pinkish bubble of blood forming from Quilty's mouth as he lays in his bed, dying from the gunshots Humbert inflicted upon him.
• The final moments where Humbert describes hearing, from his perch atop a hill as police close in to arrest him, a distant echoing chorus of playing children in the valley below, and the sorrow he says he feels that Lolita should not be among them.
Some other notes on new additions and alternate interpretations Lyne and company make with their cinematic abridgement of Lolita:
• It's a bit of a shock (which I know is the wrong word, given the subject matter, but used for lack of a better one) to hear an iteration of Lolita use actual profanity somewhere. Nabokov would always have Humbert obscure any swearing - most often Dolores' - with parenthetical asides censoring anything profane with derisory comments about his distaste for such words, while Kubrick's film was made during the era of Hollywood where profanity was the first thing out of the equation when making films the censors would approve for release. So it's quite a jolt to hear Dominique Swain's Dolores provide the first instance of profanity in any Lolita property, during the moment she's saying goodbye to her friend, they're volleying variations of rhyming phrases to bid farewell (“see you later, alligator!”, etc), and Dolores cheekily ends the exchange with “get fucked, Daffy Duck!”
• There's a marked increase in visual and editorial energy compared to Kubrick's film, which is to be expected from a former music video/commercials director like Adrian Lyne, whose glossy sensibilities bore a lot in common with fellow Jerry Bruckheimer acolytes like Tony Scott and Michael Bay. Lyne is canny enough to let scenes breathe with the intoxicatingly woozy atmosphere throughout the majority of the film, but that freneticism of his thriller work pays tremendous dividends with the second act's descent into a paranoid fever dream, evoking the bone-chilling horror energy of Lyne's career-best work on Jacob's Ladder. (There's perhaps a bit too many arbitrary cross-fades for my liking, but it's not overdone enough to be movie-ruiningly obnoxious.)
• The introduction to Frank Langella's Quilty is appropriately enigmatic, alluring, and quietly sinister, his face always just out of shot, always slightly obscured by objects or shadows, or too far away to get a good look at him. But the quiet baritone rumble of his voice is unmistakable. A far cry from Peter Sellers' take on the character, doing away with the facade of annoying bumbling affability Sellers had his Quilty hide his evil behind, Langella's performance bears the same suave yet menacing quality as his work in John Badham's Dracula portraying... well, Count Dracula. A certain vampiric quality is definitely becoming of Quilty's brand of villainy, so it's a hellish match made in heaven.
• Why does neither film have time for Rita? Yes, this is a minor bugbear, and I know it makes adaptational sense to skip past her time with Humbert in the grand scheme of things, but dang it, I think there's interesting unexplored thematic territory to explore with the tiny part she has to play in the plot! But oh well.
• And now for the title character herself.
In contrast to Sue Lyon's excellent, yet somewhat overly mature performance as the eponymous role in Kubrick's film (a consequence of the direction and writing Lyon had to follow, not a flaw of her performance itself whatsoever), Dominique Swain - who looks like Rachael Leigh Cook mixed with Jennifer Jason Leigh, and who was previously most familiar to me as John Travolta's daughter, Jamie, in John Woo's Face/Off - brings a winning wittiness, vibrancy, and raw immature grossness to her Dolores that properly underscores what should always be the unforgotten fact that she is a child. Lots of fingers, feet, spit, chewing gum, milk moustaches, and splaying uncoordinated limbs, where any moments of performative allure are just that - a performance, put on by a kid acting more adult than they actually are. Any person not addled by Humbert's sick attitudes can see that that's all it is, but for Humbert and his ilk, they see these feints towards maturity as invitations to take advantage of a kid who, developmentally, simply cannot know better, compared to a full-grown adult who definitely does.
Lyne's film does well to amplify the obviousness of Dominique-as-Dolores' youth, with the doll-like costuming, the makeup highlighting the mild spottiness of her skin, her hair done up in pigtails and other childish hairdos, and most of all, the retainer braces on her teeth. Swain was 14 at the time of filming - the same age as Lyon when she shot Kubrick's Lolita over 30 years prior - and while one could argue that they went a little overboard in infantilising her to appear younger than she was, I think that it's only a good thing to hammer home Dolores' childhood as emphatically as humanly possible. To do one's damnedest in conveying that she is not Humbert's twisted idea of a “nymphet”, by glaringly highlighting the cognitive dissonance between his description of her as a seductress, and what you can see with your own eyes is a bratty kid who plays with dolls, and has goddamn braces on her teeth.
But alas, here now is where we get to the problem of cinematic depiction being its own ethical minefield when the subject matter is this inherently abhorrent, especially when reinstating the “aesthetic bliss” spirit of eroticism that Nabokov laced Lolita with through his incandescent prose.
In terms of films whose depictions of sexuality in girlhood are carried out through indelicate and unnecessarily explicit means which only end up feeding into the very exploitation the films are theoretically meant to criticise, this Lolita isn’t anywhere near the level of such grossly misguided examples as Louis Malle's Pretty Baby (haven't seen it, but its reputation precedes it enough that I have no wish to), or Maïmouna Doucouré's Cuties (also haven't seen it, and will happily never watch it, thank you very much), or even Luc Besson’s Léon: The Professional (namely his Director’s Cut).
I mean, the makers of 1997's Lolita knew well enough to use a combination of body doubles, deceptive camera angles, and editing illusions to cumulatively convey the illicit nature of Humbert and Dolores' fucked-up relationship, without actually delving into real-life illegality themselves on set. (Immorality is another story, one dependent on whether you believe they should ever have tried to adapt the book into film form whatsoever, given the risk and harm that could easily arise from having actors with such significant age gaps perform this material at all, no matter the steps taken to keep them duly separate during any moments of simulated on-screen intimacy.)
So no, it's not Pretty Baby or Cuties… but still...
…having Dominique Swain kiss - nay, downright snog - Jeremy Irons right on the lips multiple times... or the lingering closeups of Swain's legs... or when she's in the back of Humbert's car as he takes her away from the unnamed Camp Climax, and she begins to undress and undo her bra (though not taking it off, because that was probably the absolute limit of what she could or should perform, and even that was more than what I would’ve thought was appropriate or necessary)... or the scene of her in Humbert's lap on a rocking chair, in a sweatily sweltering hotel room, where her orgasmic enjoyment is shown without explicitly showing the cause (where my hope is that this was a case of the competing illusions of camera angles, Swain's 19 year-old body double, the quick-cut editing, and the sound design all making it look and feel genuine in a way you hope didn't exploit the underage Swain for real).
It's all the stomach-churning stuff like this that likely makes prospective viewers have cause to believe this Lolita - and by extension, any version of Lolita - is a glamorisation of Humbert and Lo's relationship, rather than a condemnation of it that it sure felt like Nabokov wanted his book to render unmissable. (If media literacy was bad enough back in the day for people to mistake the novel for a glamorising endorsement of Humbert's beliefs, imagine how bad it must be nowadays in our anti-intellectual epoch of rage bait, hot takes, and general social media brainrot.)
The thing is, when reading the book, I don't trust a single word Humbert says. My defences and hackles are raised by his way of describing the things he does, and the things that happen to him, and having read Nabokov's Pale Fire long before Lolita, Humbert comparably felt as self-aggrandising and delusionally braggadocios as Pale Fire's unreliable narrator, Kinbote. Plus, you know, Humbert is a pedophile, so of course he'll say anything to diminish his monstrosity in the eyes of his readers (“gentlewomen of the jury”). All of which means I do not trust any of his suggestions of Dolores having acted in any supposedly “seductive” way to lure him in. That's what rubbed me the wrong way the worst in Kubrick's film, was that adaptation's insidious changes colluding to suggest Dolores was more in control of events than her age would belie, and even worse, that Humbert was, if anything, more a victim of her. (Again, considering the influence of James B. Harris, who slept with - read: statutorily raped - Sue Lyon when she was 14, and he was 32, there's a real indication he used his influence as producer to sway the film into looking at men like him in a more favourable light than the book ever did.)
So for Lyne's Lolita to have that moment, of what's made to look like mutual sexual gratification between Humbert and Dolores, thoroughly muddies the waters of all other visible insurances that the film knows Dolores is a victim of Humbert's criminally predatory behaviour.
Yet in fairness, this moment is immediately followed by a short scene of Dolores lying in bed and heartwrenchingly sobbing in grief and pain, away from a guilty-looking Humbert watching from afar through a crack in the door, suggesting the film is attempting to communicate how emotionally conflicted and beset by raging inner turmoil Dolores is in her situation, trapped with a man who lied to her about her mother's death (trapped “because, you see, she had nowhere else to go”, Humbert hatefully says in both book and film).
And despite Lyne's propensity for shooting with long lenses from voyeuristic distances that subconsciously suggest a sense of objective third-person omniscience, there's plenty on display to otherwise indicate the film is meant to be seen as being entirely through Humbert's unreliable subjective perspective, therefore entailing the book's clear stance that what you are seeing is not the truth, but Humbert's truth.
The pervasive inclusions of Humbert's narrated thoughts (frequently quoting the book verbatim).
Showing us the world through Humbert's gauzy, fragmented, slow-motion memories, as well as his momentary fantasies, his surreal nightmares, his encroaching mental instability and paranoia changing the fabric of the film's shooting style, as camera angles get more canted and handheld, and the lighting evolves from golden sunlit warmth to cold wintry hues.
That everything we see is from Humbert's perspective, and that the film should uniformly look and feel predominantly like a romantic dream inconveniently punctured by intrusions of horror and despair, does feel like Lolita done right.
Incidentally, regarding H.H's flawed POV:
In the book, Humbert thinks every man he sees whom he suspects of being a fellow pedophile - including his dark half, and Dolores' covert paramour, Quilty - looks like his uncle, Gustave Trapp. The film simplifies this into applying just how Humbert sees Quilty from a distance.
Now, a common observation/supposition made about Nabokov's motivations for writing Lolita are that there are roots to his childhood experiences of being sexually abused by his Uncle Ruka (which Nabokov briefly wrote of in his autobiography, Speak, Memory).
What's important to note here is that the more you read about, and from, Nabokov, the more rapidly evident it becomes that he hardly ever expressed ideas and beliefs in a straightforward manner. It just wasn't his style, nor befitting his staggering intellectual acumen and linguistic playfulness. (To think that he thought his writing in Lolita was “a second-rate brand of English” is positively flabbergasting, and demonstrably untrue.) Nabokov's mode of expression weaved together wordplay, poetry, punnery, anagrams, literary and historical references, inferences, innuendos, and so on. Yet from what I can tell, he was also vehemently opposed to any analyses and criticisms that saw fit to read any allegory or symbolism into his work that he didn't intend to include.
Even so, it feels as though there's a line one can't help but draw between Nabokov having an uncle who sexually assaulted him as a child, and Humbert having an uncle whose image he associates with the predation of pedophilia. Is it too easy a conclusion to draw? Maybe. But it's a conclusion whose ramifications hurt one's heart a little bit to consider, and that impact makes it hard not to feel as though there could be a sting of truth to that pain.
But anyway, that's Adrian Lyne's Lolita.
A dramatic adaptational improvement over its 1960s predecessor, helped in no small part by the long-ago dismantling of the Hays Code, and the freedom thus afforded to filmmakers to explore the darkness and taboos of the human condition, unencumbered by censorship (within reason, of course; filmmakers' own personal ethical lines they won't cross, and the hard lines of the law, are fair guardrails against exploitation of free speech that could cause harm to other people, if that makes sense).
It still brushes up against the same old problems of trying to adapt Lolita to the big screen. How to visualise the novel's contents without falling into obscenity; how to thread the needle of the eroticism of the prose to go hand in hand with the horror of knowing the ways Humbert thinks, without explicitly depicting the violence of rape, nor inadvertently idealising a toxic dynamic that should never be portrayed as romantic in the slightest; how to portray Humbert's gaze of Dolores Haze without the film itself glorifying or revelling in that gaze to a criminally implicating degree. I'd be lying if I said it 100% avoided those traps, and if it weren't flawed in its own inimitable ways, but as an attempt to translate a difficult book to a difficult film, it is admirably ambitious, largely successful, and perhaps the best we can ever hope for from a Lolita movie.
However... there is a version of Lolita we haven't gotten yet, which I pictured more clearly with every passing chapter of the book, and can see so vividly in my mind's eye.
A version of the story told not by Humbert, but by Dolores.
A pitch for an alternate cinematic re-telling of LOLITA that I want to see in the world.
As I found out through a quick Google search, the concept of “Lolita, but from Dolores’ perspective” has been explored in fiction before. The problem is that neither of the two most prominent examples of this idea ever did so in the way I began strongly envisioning as I progressed deeper into my reading of Lolita.
The second-most well known attempt to ostensibly delve into Dolores’ point of view (or a character heavily modelled on Dolores, at least) is the 1999 novel, Roger Fishbite, by Emily Prager.
But the first, and most notorious attempt to look at the story of Lolita through Dolores’ eyes, and the headlining example that comes up when you Google “lolita from dolores perspective” (per the verbiage of the top search result), is Pia Pera’s 1995 novel, Lo’s Diary.
Unfortunately, the immediate summary of the book you’re presented with, to deflatingly demoralising effect, is that Pera's version of Dolores depicts her as “a sadist and a controller of everyone around her; for instance, she enjoys killing small animals.”
God-fucking-dammit.
No, that simply won't do. So if you'll indulge me, allow me to present my pitch for what I would want a Dolores-centric film to look like, if I were a producer giving the reins to a woman director.
This is also my first decree: as I see it, it is for the best if a woman - someone like, for example, Aftersun's Charlotte Wells, off the top of my head - handled this material in cinematic form, rather than a man who might botch the job with male gaze bullshit, and worst case scenario, might get lost in the weeds of wanting unconsciously to return to Humbert's male POV.
Next, I want this imaginary film about Dolores - (which could be titled Dolores, or Haze, echoing Lolita's mononymous title, but instead using her real name her mother gave her, not the name Humbert forced on her) - to show everything she was thinking and feeling during the course of the novel's story, with and without Humbert around. Conversations she had with Charlotte before Humbert ever arrived; chats with her friends; what she got up to at Camp Climax; rehearsing for the school play written by Quilty; every time she met up with Quilty, and seeing more of how he was manipulating her infatuation with him; how she really looked and really felt, not what Humbert claimed she looked and imagined she felt like.
Cinematography-wise, I want the camera to always be at her eye level, seeing the world from her diminutive stature, up through her progression in age from 12 to 17, seeing Humbert as a looming, imposing presence, so as to better communicate the disparity between their heights, ages, and power dynamics. Also, never depict any of Humbert's advances as erotic or consensual; communicate those instances through mood, implication, music, sound design, and anything but showing anything directly. Less is more. Think The Zone of Interest, or Nickel Boys, or even Aftersun.
My most pretentious idea, but one I completely believe in the power of, is to deploy the Boyhood method of casting a young actress to age in real time, over an intermittent production lasting multiple years. Have her begin the film at a book-accurate 12 years old, definitively disavowing the cop-out of ageing her up to quell audience or studio executive nerves. It needs to be palpably horrifying for it to be recognised just how young she really is, and how truly madly deeply fucked up it is for Humbert to yearn for who is visibly a child. Then, over the course of 5 years, pick back up the shooting of the film incrementally, and have this young girl actually age into 13 years old, then 14 years old, before the three year time-jump to 17 years old, in order to fully show how much she's changed from pre-teen to late adolescence.
And with these pieces in places, now imagine Dolores as a film that shows everything Humbert said in Lolita was a narcissistic exaggeration, or flat-out fabrication. Show Dolores doing everything she can to figure out ways of escaping him. Show her lashing out at him, and acting up at school, and behaving in all the childish ways he doesn't like dealing with, as being the inevitable result of her enduring and trying to process his abuse at too young an age. Show her anguish over her mother's death. Show her having to steel herself every time she has to “seduce” Humbert to get a measure of freedom from him by way of bargaining for his money, or his permission to get any amount of time for herself, free from his controlling clutches. Show her confiding in friends at Beardsley, and finding solace with Mona trying to help her as best she can. Show her escaping Humbert, then having to escape Quilty when she realises he's just as bad, if not worse, than Humbert, and she has to find a new path in life. Show her emotional tumult over having to re-engage contact with Humbert years later, desperate times and a baby on the way forcing her into using his blind obsession with her as a tool to get his money, and starting a new life away from all the heartache she faced because of this man.
I don't know if I want to show her dying in childbirth. Maybe I'd prefer that to be an omission, or maybe a complete twist to the material. Maybe on Christmas Day 1952, I'd prefer to imagine Dolores survives, and her daughter survives, and she gets the chance to finally live a happier life, and it's only Humbert who dies alone with his rotten heart in his prison cell, with no say in the matter.
One can dream...
