American Beauty -- LOLITA (1997)

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.

In this age of the #MeToo movement, it's safe to say that no one was asking for some asshole to come out and defend Lolita. But, here I am. In fact, I don't think there's anything I could say that hasn't already been said about this devious little demon of literature. And no, Lolita is not classified as horror, despite the horrific things that happen in it. But sometimes, folks, the slashers and ghosts get a little predictable and it takes a regular old drama to thoroughly creep you out.

Let's get this out of the way right up top: Lolita is one of my favorite books of all time. It has been apart of my life for so long that I've forgotten how we even met (it was probably because of a Police song...specifically this version). My own worn copy was thumbed through many times throughout college, bought used and further fondled by the 19-year-old aspiring novelist whose passions were as sweaty as her chronically wet armpits. I was going through a phase of reading "dangerous" books--not unpopular, not exactly banned, but rather the "bad boys" of books. These are used almost exclusively to be bragged about by baby literature students and/or made into largely forgettable blockbusters. The kind of material an insufferable nerd like me could vehemently defend to her entire creative writing class through a meticulously-researched essay. Most of these edgy books have not resonated with me much past that rebellious first read, but for whatever reason, Lolita stuck.

And that credit is due to the truly magnificent writing. The best parts about the book will always come back to Nabokov's talent as a writer. (And in case you're wondering, it's pronounced Nah-BO-cov. Don't be like me, the poser saying Nabba-koff for ten years.) He's one of those writers the term "sensuous" was made for, taking all your senses by the throat and injecting them with poetry. He could spin words together that could split your heart in two, and swiftly have you chuckling along with a droll aside to the reader within the same sentence. This is a man who takes time to point out the loveliness of sunlight reflecting of a car windshield and somehow makes it not pretentious.

I think Lolita is worth discussing today for the very thing that gives it such strength as a novel--the writing, for sure, but moreso, the unreliable narrator. While he certainly didn't invent the construct, Nabokov gave it an especially devious twist. To compare, let's look at American Psycho (because I will take literally any excuse to bring it up). Bret Easton Ellis created a more obvious and far less charming unreliable narrator, since you can't ever be sure if Patrick Bateman's nights spent bludgeoning prostitutes are real or fantasy...plus, he's really boring.

What a dork.

Humbert Humbert is a different animal entirely, and even more dangerous than a handsome yuppie with a chainsaw. Humbert's game is all about quiet charisma. If you let your guard down, if you stop paying attention for even a moment, his tender prose and seemingly level head can easily trick you into believing he is the tragic romantic hero he so desperately wants to be. He even hints that he's on to his own game ("you can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style"). He keeps us distracted from the horrors he's inflicting just as he deceives Lolita throughout their road trip, drugging us with pretty words and humble self-deprecation (as well as a few tranquilizers).

It's all a very elaborate, meticulously planned, and surely exhausting dance to convince us that Humbert is not simply a dirty old man. No, he's a romantic with a terrible disease fallen under the spell of an especially devious seductress. And it's here that we come to the "monster" of the story, or what Humbert would like us to believe is a monster--the elusive and deadly nymphet.

• "Now I wish to introduce the following idea. Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as 'nymphets.' "
  - Part One, Chapter 5

Humbert's quick field guide to nymphets is simultaneously one of the most fascinating and disgraceful of the book's many uncomfortable passages. Pages go on explaining the qualifications of this special breed of pervert ("You have to be an artist, and a madman"), the delicate art of spotting the prey in the crowd ("the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limb"), an thoroughly creepy study of when signs of puberty begin to show in young girls ("10.7 years" for breasts, "11.2 years" for pubic hair), along with name-dropping many famous child molesters throughout history and literature, "and nobody minds."

Humbert uses mythic language throughout these pages to further paint himself as just as helpless against these comely little beasts as Odysseus against the sirens' song. Early in, he hits us with the sad story of his first love, with whom he shared a preteen summer romance before she died of a fever before her fifteenth birthday--therefore he is the perfect target for these prepubescent sexual terrorists preying on his heartbroken arrested development. It's gross, and despicable, and the one of the most ludicrous cases of victim blaming you've ever heard--but it's still deeply fascinating that one man has gone to so much trouble to convince himself that his actions were understandable, given these very specific circumstances.

One of the most famous taglines in film history is as simple as it is salacious: "How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?" It's a question worth asking, because god, they really shouldn't have. (They did it twice.) The novel was always going to be difficult to adapt for a variety of reasons, but obviously the trickiest would be Lolita herself. How the hell do you go about casting a "sexy" child, let alone directing her to do very unchildish things without being burned at the stake? Well, both versions of the film decided to avoid that problem and created an entirely new one by aging up the character and casting teenage actresses to portray the infamous baby femme fatale: fourteen-year-old Sue Lyon in the 1962 original, and fifteen-year-old Dominique Swain in 1997. Put a pin in that bit of trivia, because we'll be coming back to it.

Here's the problem with talking about Lolita: it's really hard not to accidentally wander into the area of sounding like a pervert. But hear me out. I'm not saying I feel cheated because I didn't get the twelve-year-old child molestation movie I was promised, because good god, I don't wanna see that movie. But I do have a problem with this choice in both generations of the film because it is a great disservice to the character, and it makes this story even ickier than the source material ever intended. For the sake of brevity and the fact that Kubrick's version struck me as pretty boring, we'll be sticking to the 1997 version of the film for this discussion.

Let's start with an example. We are first introduced to Lolita lounging on "the piazza," sunbathing in her bikini and reading a magazine, like girls do. In the book and the original film, she barely regards Humbert as he walks by, offering little more than a glance over her sunglasses before returning to her reading material.

The look that would inspire Lana del Rey's everything.

But here in the 90's, we kick thing up a notch. She's still sunbathing, still reading a magazine, but...in a sundress, lying next to a sprinkler, so thoroughly soaked through that the camera takes the time to linger on every inch of flesh beneath the thin clinging cotton. Not only does this make zero sense (first of all, who does that, and secondly, you're gonna ruin that magazine!), but it's just a thoroughly creepy shot, enough to give you the willies. The music swells and the camera's gaze glides over Lo's girlish curves with all the lust of the source material, but little of the emotional context and moral tension it was meant for. Then she flashes him her retainer-clad smile, and the audience throws up.

Hey, you guys remember Poison Ivy? ....yeah....

Lolita--that is, Dolores Haze--has always been a difficult character. For one, we can barely trust a word Humbert Humbert spews at us, no matter how pretty it sounds. For two, twelve is a rough age. I hesitate to call Lolita "problematic" as a character, although it definitely comes to mind, but then again it's rare that the sexual politics of an era can be practically applied to the utter chaos of puberty.

When you're a girl, you spend so much time just waiting to be a woman--watching what other women do, how others respond to it, what kind of woman your mother is, what kind of woman your mother doesn't like, and so on. That's not even getting into those first strange tinglings of desire--the knowledge of "happily ever afters" and where babies come from clashing with the inherent surge that comes with noticing a cute classmate. For better or worse, girls subconsciously hang onto these little indicators, largely from the culture that surrounds them. They understand that females wield a certain power over men, but they don't have the context to really understand what that power means.

A twelve-year-old girl just coming into her own, not getting enough attention at home and no father figure in sight, spending her days poring over magazines full of handsome movie stars, plus a little more physical "experience" with boys her age than one is comfortable enough to expect--that troubled girl just might stretch out her feminine wiles on her mom's new crush.

Remember, I asked you to put a pin in the casting decisions for Lolita's translations to film. Take that pin out, we've come back to it. Despite tweaking the character's age by a few years for film (while still staying safely underage), not one other aspect of Lolita's personality is changed in the slightest, and that's a big problem for me. I don't know if you remember being twelve or fifteen, but for my money, the difference is, in Nabokov's own words,"as different as mist and mast." There is a miles-wide gap between twelve and fifteen, for many reasons, yet somehow the studios of two separate eras decided it was less perverse to market a babyish fifteen year old to the masses than it was to just go with an age appropriate star. While a child trying to act like an adult is pretty unsettling, a teenager acting like a child is far worse.

Dominique Swain's Lolita is a young woman that is forced to act immature to the point of grotesque. She ties her hair in pigtails, she wears skimpy rompers that go ALL the way up and is rarely seen in an outfit that doesn't reveal her belly button. She snaps bubblegum, kicks the backseat, and she's constantly doling out tantrums, yet she's portrayed as this irresistible force of nature despite MANY red flags that she is an underdeveloped child acting out from obvious neglect. This is a girl who gives a sexual edge to her interaction with a cocker spaniel.

I'm no child psychologist, but I can remember what I was like at fifteen. Granted, I didn't look nearly as cute in a bikini as our Lolita, but I was still at that in-between place, wanting to show it off but not knowing what to do with the attention that came with it. Also, I had acne, BO, and major body issues just bubbling to the surface. So, more often than not, I would choose the "don't look at me" road and stayed in that lane till...well, now. When I look back on fifteen, it's less a trip down memory lane than it is a full-body cringe. Your world as a teenage girl is fraught with self-esteem issues and angst, no matter how graceful your development. My job at the public library means I see plenty of fifteen-year-old girls every day and all of them carry themselves with that same awkward self-consciousness no matter how pretty they appear to be.

Now, twelve? Twelve is completely different. You're still a kid at twelve. You're not worried about grades or boys or really anything. You may be getting your first period and maybe you're already wearing a training bra, but you're far from what anyone would mistake for an adult. You're excitable, prone to occasional tantrums, and although you're certainly not a baby anymore, you're still buying Barbies with your allowance. You pin movie star posters to your walls and moon over boy bands, but your reference point for what a relationship is either your parents or "Stacy and Danny are going out" (even though they never "go out" anywhere because they don't have money or drivers licenses). It's innocence, pure and simple, aware of the grown up world without being corrupted by it just yet.

Maybe it's splitting hairs to argue that an attention-starved fifteen year old is so much more disturbing than an attention-starved twelve-year-old, but GOD IT'S SO HARD TO WATCH. This teenage Lolita is a nightmare of a child, bratty and stubborn and generally insufferable. Even the mourning of her mother is portrayed as a miserable stab for attention, howling in the other room only to trudge to Humbert's room, still howling, and crawl into his arms. She is consistently, obnoxiously childlike, almost to the point of being an act, which bring up a more unsettling possibility--that would mean that she's putting out an image that she thinks is attractive, the only kind of behavior that's ever gotten her any attention. The cinematography telegraphs as much with many of her most childish outbursts swiftly translating to seduction, almost as if the camera wants us to find this behavior just as endearing as Humbert does. And it's not, it's really, really not.

Don't play with your food!

The tragedy of Dolores Haze is best portrayed by the scene where she and Humbert first have sex, which is upsetting enough by its own merits. But note the way our Lolita broaches the subject--as some secret thing she did at camp and can't quite explain, so she "will have to show you everything," as if she's discovered some unknown phenomenon--when you do this with that it makes such wonderful feeling. The way a child would, a child who knows nothing of sex and, for once, feels like they have got one up on everyone else. I don't know how many of you were naive to the gorier details of the birds and the bees at fifteen, but god bless you, because I sure knew it.

What I'm saying is that the idea of a grown man carrying on a relationship with a twelve year old is just as bad as a grown man carrying on a relationship with an infantile teenager, so the film didn't do us any favors by casting a teenage actor besides making us feel a little less dirty for looking at her. The film's version exacerbates, if not glorifies the act of pedophilia, by making the title character (and the undoing of our "hero") forbidden fruit that is both dangerous and irresistible in a way the audience can understand--that is, making her look "womanly" enough that we believe she is not as childish as she seems. It frames Lo's behavior as the outbursts of a tempestuous lover, which just as quickly turns her into a pouting temptress, as if she is the master manipulator all along. That is, she knows exactly what she's doing, and everything that happens to her is her own fault. That is a very damaging and extremely disturbing message to send, even if it arguably stays true to the source material--material that's intentionally written from a self-admitted lunatic's point of view. This robs Lo of a great deal of the innocence that she's meant to represent, because given her age and her behavior, our instincts tell us she should know better.

Look, she's on top! She's in control! That hussy!

See, Lolita succeeds as a novel because it's a constant balancing act between pitying Humbert and being disgusted by him, all because of the language in which it's presented. Humbert repeatedly manipulates us just as he does Lolita, but even more insidiously because, for all intents and purposes, we become Humbert through reading and we are more easily seduced by him than we'd like to admit. There are plenty of moments in the novel where Humbert is so convincing that we find ourselves believing (even for a moment) that he actually is living a great tragic love story because his feelings for Lolita reach such passionate, obsessive heights. And all the while we're completely aware that these intense passages of lust and devotion are directed at a naive little girl.

Here, on film, with little of the novel's powerful poetry to guide us, and under the camera's unbiased gaze, we're simply watching a grown man leering at a teenager, and all we can feel is "ewwww." If I can liken the experience of watching Lolita to anything, just imagine a high-schooler sitting on Santa's lap. That weird mix of revulsion, judgement and guilt you're feeling? That's just about right, but stretched out for two hours.

This story never should have made it to the screen. It's too involved, too intimate to possibly be translated to a blockbuster crowd, this magnetic unreliable narrator instantly revealed as the wretch he really is under the camera's judgement. Even with big names like Stanley Kubrick at the helm or the unmatched talent of beloved actor and personal crush Jeremy Irons as our lecherous hero, Lolita was doomed to forever be that one romance that everyone gags at. And it's a real shame, because for all the debauchery and disgust, it really is a beautifully written novel that deserves more than its back of the box reputation. Just stick to the audiobook read by Irons himself. It's a much more fulfilling, more sensuous and intentionally unsettling experience.

So, in conclusion of a film adaptation of Lolita, in the immortal words of the Cohen brothers: "Well, what did we learn here today?....Well, I guess we learned never to do it again."

Please, please never do it again.