Posted on 07/17/2015 1:56:54 PM PDT by Borges
We are awash in Lolitas - Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus, Katy Perry. As Ira Wells says in a New Republic piece, “at a certain echelon of pop music megastardom . . . they are all Lolitas now.”
Yet Wells insists that as the number of Lolitas has risen exponentially, we've forgotten Lolita, the original Nabokov novel.
These two phenomena coexist because we've taken Stanley Kubrick's film Lolita as our model more than Nabokov's. The contrast is evident from the film's opening scene:
“Nabokov repeatedly emphasizes that there is nothing conventionally beautiful about the nymphet. The novel’s Lolita is a tomboyish, malodorous little urchin: Humbert comments on her ‘monkeyish nimbleness'; he duly notes every time she picks her nose or adjusts a wedgie. Kubrick airbrushes this character into a 1950s pin-up model. In her introductory shot, Lolita is (un)dressed in a bikini, propped up on one arm, the posture and lighting carefully coordinated to accentuate the womanly swell of her hips, the smooth perfection of her long legs, her sultry expression as she looks up to meet our gaze.”
We've forgotten that the original Lolita was twelve years old, that she was an unwilling victim of Humbert Humbert's fantasies, and that she was a rape victim and sex slave. We see everything through Humbert's self-justifying gaze, yet the book makes clear that “Lolita spends much of the novel as the narrator’s sexual captive.” Only occasionally does “Humbert allow the baroque veil of language to slip away,” so that “we are momentarily reminded of Lolita’s youth and fragility, of ‘her sobs in the night—every night, every night—the moment I feigned sleep.'” Nabokov “never lets us forget that there is something monstrous about Humbert’s desire for Lolita.”
So a movie image has replaced a book. So what?
It matters because the Kubrick Lolita “in her heart-shaped sunglasses, a glistening lollipop entering her moist lips [has] supplied America with the instantly recognizable signifiers of Lolita that would endure in the age of Instagram. That image, once seen, cannot be unseen.”
That image has come to life in girly pop stars, and the audience is in on a slimy game. We know that the little girls twerking on stage aren't as young as they appear, and that licenses the viewer’s imaginative erotic enjoyment of her as a child.” In short, today's “popular culture rewards adult women who act like children for the collective erotic enjoyment that will not speak its name.”
Wells argues that Katy Perry's “childishness is the real secret to her success”: “Perry’s vestigial childishness, like the leering attention paid to Hannah Montana’s mutation or pupation into Miley Cyrus, reveals that nothing stokes the fire in our collective loins quite like the blurring of lines around childhood sexuality.”
Forgetting Lolita is also a problem because the book has never been as relevant: “the novel itself constitutes a vicious satire of a culture that fetishizes young girls . . . while simultaneously loathing pedophilia as an absolute moral evil on par with genocide.” We are that culture: “The widespread cultural acceptance of this fantasy at face value is tantamount to the declaration: #IBelieveHumbert. The American public imagination has accepted Humbert’s definition of the nymphet while strenuously muffling the pedophilic exertions involved in the creation of the myth.”
The novel satirizes us. It is a chilling irony that Nabokov's novel should lend its name to the thing he satirized.
In the novel, she is is a normal kid who does not act or dress provocatively.
It is the mentally ill narrator who misinterprets her every word and gesture to justify his predation.
I’ve been thinking this for a while and came across this article which exactly that. Projecting the current ‘over sexualized nymphet’ culture on the novel is borderline obscene not to mention false.
I don’t disagree with this opinion piece however, Nabokov wrote the screenplay for the movie and got an Oscar nomination for it.
His credit was spurious. Virtually nothing of what he wrote was used in the film. He published his own screenplay later on. I actually like Kubrick’s film. The girl in the film is clearly about 16 or 17. Over the age of consent in many states back then.
And Sting got a word that rhymes with "cough".
I think Spears and Perry are pushing 30.
But their initial claim to fame was the Nymphet image.
But he spent a lot of time with Kubrick and I don’t believe there were any major disagreements during the making of the film.
None of these cheap hookers are Sue Lyons - who practically steals the movie.
It’s my favorite Sting rhyme/line and most likely a product of his English teacher background.
In the letter correspondence he states that he would not allow any film that used an actual 12 year old.
I confress that’s how I ended up finding out that Nabokov wrote Lolita.
The song was written just a few years after Nabokov died. I wonder what he would have thought.
I could just imagine Stewart Copeland rolling his eyes when he heard that one.
I suspect Nabokov would have loved the mention. And how could you roll your eyes at lyrical perfection?
Well he pronounced the name wrong to begin with. It’s Na-BO-Kov.
And worse, he MARRIES the mother to get access to the child! (at least, that is my memory from reading it 25 years ago.)
He did suggest that they try and make Lyons a little bit more grubby, but I don’t think Kubrick tried hard enough.
The book was not just a simple tale of a sexual abuser of a child. I read it also as an allegory of the relationship of Europe and the US, intellectuals vs. mass culture, the postmodern vs. the high modern. Nabokov described the fault lines in postwar American culture.
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