The Cinematic Art of Nympholepsy: Movie Star Culture as Loser Culture in Nabokov's Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov - Critical Essay

Criticism, Wntr, 1999 by Elizabeth Power

THE MOST RECENT film adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita faced serious opposition before finally being released in the United States.(1) Director Adrian Lyne was initially unable to get an American film company to distribute his film. According to Lyne, the film risked being construed under the 1996 Child Pornography Prevention Act as child pornography even though an adult body double of the fourteen-year-old actress playing Lolita was used for the nude scenes (which ended up on the cutting room floor, in any case).

Lyne's travails getting his film to its intended audience might be regarded as merely another instance of the censorial interference that began with the novel's publication and accompanied its first film adaptation by Stanley Kubrick in 1962. Nabokov's manuscript was initially rejected by American publishers on the grounds that it was obscene, and Kubrick's film was so thoroughly censored in Hollywood that he concluded "if I had realized how severe the limitations were going to be, I probably wouldn't have made the film."(2) Although its narrative of pedophilia may well have hindered the novel's publication and limited the explicitness and/or distribution of its film adaptations, it is not, I suggest, primary among what the author and directors of Lolita deem as its shortcomings. Broadly speaking, the pedophilia theme has led readers (and film reviewers) to view the novel and its cinematic adaptations either as a romantic love story or as pornographic trash.(3)

Discussion of Lolitas in these terms is, to be sure, authorized by the novel itself and the Afterword. Yet pedophilia is, in fact, only one of many problems that have been cited by Nabokov, Kubrick, and Lyne in their attempts to explain the central difficulty of (re)telling the story of Lolita. For example, even before American distributors refused to back Lyne's film, he considered his adaptation a failure, saying "it's such a bloody marvelous book that, no matter what, you're fucked. You are doomed to failure."(4) Kubrick did consider his film's unrealized erotic potential when referring to its failure at the box office. Yet other contemporary and even earlier films suggest that Kubrick's placement of blame on censors is not particularly accurate or convincing. Elia Kazan's 1956 Baby. Doll, for example, was (and may be still) considered quite erotic, despite the fact that Carol Baker (Baby Doll) was even older than Sue Lyons (Lolita).(5) Kubrick's rejection of Nabokov's screenplay and its rewrites also suggests his desire to distance his film from the novel and its potentially salacious content when he represented it on screen. His failure to adapt Lolita on film seems to be just that, his failure. As Kubrick conceded in a 1972 interview, "if it had been written by a lesser author, it might have been a better film."(6) Nabokov regarded Lolita as a failure even as he defended it from the charge that it was pornographic. In his Afterword to Lolita, Nabokov asserts that Lolita couldn't really work as he wanted since he was forced to use a "second-rate brand of English" (230) to write it.(7) Moreover, Nabokov wrote a screenplay at Kubrick's invitation, but its excessive length, among other things, made it impossible to film. Nabokov's own view of his novel as a failure and his subsequent impossible-to-film screenplay, then, call into question the notion that Kubrick and Lyne were merely running into problems particular to film adaptations.

If the reasons why various Lolitas have failed to deliver what their author or director wanted are not simply reducible to the taboo sexual theme and external threats of censorship, then one may ask what is the reason for their failure. In response, I want to focus what follows on Nabokov's conflation of pedophilia with cinema. I will show that for Nabokov stardom is necessarily failed. Cinematic metaphors run rampant in Humbert Humbert's account of Lolita's seduction and betrayal. The affair, Humbert argues, was made possible because he resembled a movie star to Lolita, and ends when Quilty offers her a chance at Hollywood, something Humbert cannot do. Lolita is perceived by the adults in her life--Humbert, Charlotte, and Quilty--as a star.(8) References to movies pervade the novel. Consider just a few examples: Lolita reads movie magazines and loves going to the movies; Quilty makes porn movies; Humbert sees himself as a director, camera, and leading man. The novel's consistent invocation of filmic metaphors to describe Lolita invites us to read her as a literary version of Hollywood's child star. Her career is as short-lived as the average child star's: as first Humbert's lover and then Quilty's whore, Lolita's career spans roughly four to five years. (She then settles down, pregnant and a waitress at the over-the-hill age of seventeen.) Humbert scrupulously remarks throughout the confession that he is working with the wrong medium. He is convinced, and he obviously wants his reader to become so, that Lolita could be forever his, that his seduction would be a complete coup, if only he could film her rather than write about her. In short, Humbert uses film as a metaphor to account for his own failure at rendering Lolita immortal. What Humbert cannot overcome (and, to an extent, neither can Nabokov in his screenplay) is the fleeting nature of his own fame, imagined or actual. Lolita is at once a chance for the male narrator (and author and director as well) to redeem and make immortal their own stardom, and the recognition that this stardom will always entail failure since it depends on making into a star a gift who will outgrow those features which made her capable of being a star in the first place.