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.
Yes, and he indirectly causes her mother’s death, destroys the evidence of this, and takes custody of the child.
You mean the lyric from the song that goes:
“They’re booked but never caught?”
\sarc
Seriously, that was how I “heard” it for decades....
Even Sting said this....”I’ve used that terrible, terrible rhyme technique a few times. Technically, it’s called a feminine rhyme – where it’s so appalling it’s almost humorous. You don’t normally get those type of rhymes in pop music and I’m glad!”
?????
Katy Perry is 30. Britney Spears is 33. Miley Cyrus is 22. Though they may have started out performing in school girl uniforms they're all adults. And was Miley ever really a Lolita-type? For that matter, was Nabokov's Lolita really what we think of now as a Lolita-type?
“was Nabokov’s Lolita really what we think of now as a Lolita-type?”
Not at all. That’s the thesis of this article.
Still a great song just the same. (Unlike the totally unnecessary 1986 remix)
Care to expand on that idea? What was the comparison between the two?
They just act like 12 year old tarts... that I think is the point... women acting like little girl, a sexual provocative coy coquette little girl /slut is destructive and dangerous for women and men that react to it.... it a subset of the trophy wife immature high maintenance bs game..
The men need no games adult women ...that act like adult women...
Humbert is a European intellectual who is used to rigid lines between high culture and mass culture along with a strong sense of aesthetic tradition and heritage. That was the Angleo-European Modernist ethos - in the U.S. he comes across a pop culture saturated landscape that doesn’t seem to distinguish between anything. Great poetry is in the same bag with camps named after Disney characters and celebrity magazines. He’s completely fascinated by this along with the human embodiment of it all...a completely ordinary 12 year old girl.
I had read the book almost 40 years ago, and just attempted the movie recently. The movie was a real disappointment, and boring. The book was provocative, the movie had some funny parts, but on the whole fell flat.
Which film? The one from the 1990s was terrible.
Well it is one thing to evoke fantasy. But some events such as Miley Cyrus shoving her butt and rubbing against men’s crotches would cross a line, in my opinion.
“He did suggest that they try and make Lyons a little bit more grubby, but I don’t think Kubrick tried hard enough.”
How on earth would they have gone about doing that?
In case anyone was wondering about the Sting Cough reference.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Stand_So_Close_to_Me
I think Sue Lyon was 14 when Kubrick cast her as Lolita. A little older then the character in the novel.
No, the one from 1962, which was pretty bad.
It was so bad, it was hilarious. Humbert comes across as a ridiculous oaf, rather than a serious intellectual. James Mason was badly cast in the role.
It is now a cult classic. One you watch in order to laugh and satirize.
My wife had seen it and thought I was interested in Sue Lyon. She wouldn’t watch it with me. Sue Lyon was only 17 at the time and lived up to the billing, no doubt. But trying to recapture the narrative of the book was impossible. The opening scene, where James Mason (Humbert) kills Peter Sellers (Clare Quilty) is amusing.
Lyon and Sellers were very good in the movie.
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