In 1962, on the heels of directing Spartacus, Stanley Kubrick would exhibit a rare instance of surrendering the tone of Lolita to the domineering pitch of the novel, allowing its original writer, Vladimir Nabokov, more license than most subsequent novelists he would base his work on. Nabokov, who, back when literary titans still agreed to write screenplays, was a strong force behind the Kubrickian adaptation. Considering the puritanical mores of the day, it’s no wonder Kubrick would eventually say that he likely would not have made the film if he knew how stymying the censors would be (the tag line being: “How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?”). That said, he still exerted plenty of his own influence on the screenplay with the help of James B. Harris (both of whom would later be cited as “uncredited” writers–for one can imagine Nabokov letting go of the “Hollywood project” after enough rewrite requests). Leaving much to the viewer’s imagination in a way that would be dispensed with in the future (and certainly was dispensed with in the book).
It’s no surprise either that, with Peter Sellers’ imprint as Clare Quilty, Kubrick felt obliged to take the tone of the film in a more camply comedic direction (which would also signal their next collaboration after Lolita, Dr. Strangelove). This in contrast to the one that screenwriter Stephen Schiff would for Adrian Lyne’s 1997 version. The latter expresses far more candor both in graphic depictions of Lolita (Dominique Swain) mounting or being mounted by Humbert (Jeremy Irons) and in dialogue (e.g. “I was a daisy-fresh girl and look what you’ve done to me” and “You raped me, you dirty old man”) to match its serious and tragic mood. While, in converse, the former is a study in how to toe the lines between kitsch, hilarity and intermittent solemnity. Making something as disgustingly perverted as Quilty stammering, “I noticed when you was checking in you had a lovely little girl with you. She was really lovely. She wasn’t so little, come to think of it. She was fairly tall… Taller than little, you know, but she was really lovely. I wish I had a pretty, tall, lovely little girl like that…” somehow “funny.” Which, of course, just opened the floodgate for all the creeps to come out of the woodwork later on in the 1960s. But no, take away the comedic delivery from Sellers and there’s nothing laughable about a pedophile with this kind of uncontrollable lust. The kind that makes him come up with elaborate kidnapping schemes to render someone else’s underage snatch his own.
As is one of the most marked distinctions between the two films, Quilty has a more prominent role in Kubrick’s iteration. When this shadowy antagonist is translated to celluloid by Kubrick, he becomes almost incongruously overpowering as he lurks and looms at every corner, sometimes even posing as a German psychiatrist as a means to get to Humbert to loosen his vise-gripped reins on Lolita. Lolita, who more overtly in the 1997 film feels obliged to treat him like shit for the sheer sport of it. Figuring that if all these creepy older men are going to be so unabashed in their sexually violating perversity, she might as well at least bleed some cash and a sense of freedom out of them. But that sense of freedom soon becomes stiflingly oppressive after too much time spent with Jeremy Irons’ interpretation of Humbert–far more ostensibly possessive and prone to being driven to madness by that possessiveness than James Mason’s. Though, of course, he’s not without his flying off the handle moments either, particularly when he comes to learn the Lolita has been checked out of the hospital by someone else posing as her uncle.
In both renderings of the girl, or “nymphet,” there is an undeniable amount of agency portrayed. Lolita is the one pulling all the strings, and she’s the one, ultimately, who wants a different older man’s dick than Humbert’s. Then again, taking into account that she’s sprung from the imagination of white men, of course she’s going to come across this way—“begging for it” in her manipulative machinations that seek to extricate her ties to Humbert so she can have her next wave of a sexual awakening with the grotesque Quilty. To that end, perhaps only a white male writer could also somehow make the vileness of Humbert Humbert seem deserving of pity, as though he is the victim of Lolita’s callousness in all of this. After everything he did for her–every sacrifice he made, every risk he took. But make no mistake, for as garden variety bitchy and impetuous as she is for a little girl, she is still just that: a little girl. With no true awareness of the full weight of her decisions (which is why, for fuck’s sake, it’s no surprise she ends up the victim of teen pregnancy). Even if the nymphet classification makes her ilk a natural “demoniac.” So much so, in truth, that we somehow end up feeling more empathy for the nefarious Humbert than we do for her. Humbert, who tells his reader, “I shall not exist if you do not imagine me; try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity; let’s even smile a little. After all, there is no harm in smiling.” This, to be sure, is the approach Kubrick took in making his film campy in its over-the-topness.
Interestingly, the Lolita of ‘97, who exists in the late 1940s, is more liberal and foul-mouthed (and minded) than the one set in the early 60s (which while it might also be set in the same timeframe as the book–1947–can’t seem to shake the stink of late 50s-ness/early 60s-ness that’s all over it). Then again, how could she not be when the 40s were a time when sexual energy was coursing through everyone’s veins?–what with all that pent up wartime-era gender separation bubbling to the surface post-1945. After the McCarthy era of the 50s, however, repression seemed again in full swing, in turn setting up the next decade for yet another sexual revolution, which 1962’s Lolita was a part of. This is likely why there is a sort of lesser faithfulness to the novel (because of that innate 60s rebellion against convention) than what Schiff and Lyne would come up with, casting Dominique Swain in the part for an effect that was decidedly less “pest”-like (as she is described by her mother) than how Sue Lyon played it, and more in tune with how the Humbert of the book classified a nymphet, the definition of which appears in voiceover form as follows: “A normal man given a group photograph of schoolgirls and asked to point out the loveliest one will not necessarily choose the nymphet among them. You have to be an artist, a madman, full of shame and melancholy and despair, in order to recognise the little deadly demon among the others. She stands unrecognised by them, unconscious herself of her fantastic power.”
Naturally however, both Lolitas Lyon and Swain are all too aware of the power they have over Humbert, which is perhaps why they toy with him so mercilessly. For the sheer amusement of seeing him dance. A scene of Irons’ Humbert watching Swain’s Lolita eagerly gorge herself on sweets from the refrigerator speaks not only to this, but to Nabokov’s more in-depth description of the nymphet appeal, described in the book as it relates to an insatiable appetite met with no consequences: “Sundaes cause acne. The excess of the oily substance called sebum which nourishes the hair follicles of the skin creates, when too profuse, an irritation that opens the way to infection. But nymphets do not have acne although they gorge themselves on rich food.” In Kubrick’s version, this gorging is subtler than a refrigerator scene or Swain constantly eating bananas seductively in between less seductively taking out her retainer (a prop Lyon doesn’t feel obliged to use). Instead, it consists of a more constant state of eating on the part of Lyon, consuming from a pouch of potato chips like it’s a hay bag without using her hands and sipping on Coke while doing so. She does, to Nabokov’s point, also order a sundae (both the 1962 movie and book make mention of a tongue-in-cheekly named joint called The Frigid Queen), a scene in which its preparation on the part of the soda fountain worker is both lovingly and almost sensually portrayed. A mimic of Humbert’s own bifurcated feelings toward Lo.
The emblems of being a “girleen” are rampant in both, yet more prominent in Lyne’s–from Lolita’s doll to her constant chewing of gum to her shameless movie magazine obsession. Even her “unwitting” methods of seduction seem more child-like than Lyon’s, who has an inherent adult maturity that shone through in most child stars of the time (blame it on Shirley Temple and Judy Garland). At twelve, it was her first role, and one that would not be recaptured with the same fanfare ever again. At fifteen (and also in her first role), Swain had a similar curse in playing Lolita, though she did go on to be somewhat “spokesperson-y” for a generation in 1998’s Girl. A more avid series of re-creations from the novel appear in Lyne’s, including an homage to Lolita rocking back and forth on Humbert’s lap as he gets his jollies from it. Except in the movie, Lolita is actually aware of what is going on, even if she’s reading a comic while it happens.
While the two Lolitas are played with nuanced variations, it must be said that both Mason and Irons play Humbert in the manner that he sees himself in the book–though neither director seems wont to call out Humbert’s not so “debonair” history of being admitted to sanatoriums, ergo often being relegated to the category of unreliable narrator. Though it seems highly likely that he isn’t lying about his constant scheme to drug Lolita with one of the powerful sleeping pills he’s procured so as to have a night “uninterrupted” with her. Hmmm, date rape indeed. Yet what also differentiates the 1962 version from the 1997 one is that the former leaves out entirely that there is a “reason” for Humbert’s unhealthy obsession with nymphets (a.k.a. his pedophilic tendencies), stemming from the loss of his first great love when both were barely adolescents. From that moment forward, Humbert seemed to unwittingly search for Annabel in every girl, until finding her seemingly reincarnated in Lolita. Except that Lolita wasn’t exactly the “inexperienced” “innocent” that Annabel was, bringing us to one of the major themes of Nabokov’s book, which is that, “the old link between the adult world and the child world has been completely severed nowadays.” In short, children–least of all girls–are no longer so blithely “unaware” as they once were in less modern times.
Lolita is certainly aware–and even proud of–her diabolicalness. After being picked up from her summer camp (Camp Climax, on par with The Frigid Queen), Humbert describes her saying, “‘The Girl Scout’s motto,’ said Lo rhapsodically, ‘is also mine. I fill my life with worthwhile deeds such as–well, never mind what. My duty is–to be useful. I am a friend to male animals. I obey orders… I am absolutely filthy in thought, word and deed.” To this end, Humbert, at least as viewed from his perspective, seems to be used for little more than a practice machine and a money dispenser. Both Los run away from his oppressive clutches yet must go “crawling back” (in epistolary form, anyway) to him for the purposes of extracting some cash for her, her husband and her future child. Girls just wanna have funds, after all.
Still plagued with the need to know who ripped her from his grasp those few years before, Lyon’s Lolita is incredulous over his obliviousness, retorting, “I don’t suppose it ever occurred to you that when you moved into our house, my whole world didn’t revolve around you. I’d had a crush on him ever since the times that he used to come and visit Mother. He wasn’t like you and me. He wasn’t a normal person. He was a genius. He had a kind of… beautiful Japanese, Oriental philosophy of life.” The “he” in question, of course, is the child pervert that usurped Humbert, Clare Quilty. Playwright of such works as The Little Nymph. Chameleonic transformer into all things and all forces that preyed upon Lolita whilst Humbert’s back was turned for even the slightest second.
For that is the quality that both cinematic renderings of Lolita embody: a girl who dissolves through your hands like quicksand. Who needs you one minute, and discards you the next–immune to your sentimental blubbering. She is built of blasé sexual energy that can only be rattled out by sticking some change into a Magic Fingers bed. Or simply, by growing up and losing some of the nymphet appeal. Even if, no matter how old she gets, is forever crystallized in Humbert’s a.k.a. Daddy’s depraved mind.
