That Knowing Stare Through Heart-Shaped Shades
One wonders at the reactions of audiences in 1962 upon the release of Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita. Was it one of moral outrage at adapting a novel about a child molester for the silver screen? Was the audience titillated by the subversive trailer—set to the cloying “Lolita Ya-Ya”—presuming that the audience should be shocked by its mere existence, while simultaneously flashing arousing photos of the attractive (and still very much a minor) Sue Lyon, who plays the eponymous “nymphet”. The word “controversial” seems all too easy an appellation for a film that would prove to be a turning point for Kubrick, yet an inevitable one given the source material. It is ironic that Nabokov’s literary masterpiece is overshadowed by its own unfair reputation. (Consider how the name “Lolita” has since ascended into the ranks of verboten given names, alongside “Adolf”.) The name itself has become synonymous with underage sexuality, evoking a salaciousness that continues to insinuate that both Kubrick’s film and Nabokov’s novel are something “dirty”. Nabokov’s protagonist is a neurotic pedophile called Humbert Humbert, and is easily interpreted by even halfway attentive audiences to be a selfish monster and defiler of children like the titular Dolores “Lolita” Haze. Challenged with presenting a compelling narrative featuring a dirty old man at its center, Kubrick made the clever choice of not portraying this literally, but by depicting Humbert—performed by James Mason—as a bumbling schlub and conceited snob. Kubrick takes this further by turning this sorrowful tale of child abuse and the destruction of innocence into a black comedy, cynical satire, and even melodrama, while foreshadowing motifs that would emerge in his most memorable films, from Dr. Strangelove to Eyes Wide Shut. Lolita is layered with double entendre and innuendo at almost every turn—a bold move for a movie about pedophilia. To entice audiences, the trailer repeatedly asks “How did they ever make a movie about ‘Lolita’?” The answer is by not making one strictly about “Lolita”. (Notice how the title in the trailer is in quotations?) The provocative trailer is an early example of a “thirst trap” in the most unsettling of ways—by sexualizing a child actress.
Lolita begins at the end, where Humbert finally confronts his rival for Lolita, an even sleazier playwright named Clare Quilty—performed by the chameleon-like Peter Sellers with insidious gusto—and executes him for “taking advantage” of the object of his affection; his vengeance is the acme of hypocrisy. Equipped with this dramatic irony, the audience is taken back four years prior to when Humbert has come to America after being offered a teaching position. In the interim, he looks for a place to lodge, and crosses paths with the neurotic and clingy widow, Charlotte Haze (Shelley Winters), who plies Humbert with her awkward attempts at seduction and refinement. (She even goes so far as to describe her community of “West” Ramsdale as one simultaneously comprised of “good Anglo-Dutch stock” and “progressive” in the same breath.) All of this seems like a farce of a screwball comedy until Charlotte shows Humbert her backyard. Reclining in the sun like an odalisque in her bikini, fuzzy sun hat, and heart-shaped sunglasses is Charlotte’s teenage daughter, Dolores, better know as Lolita. This introduction doesn’t come as just a passing glance at the scantily clad girl soaking in the sun; the camera lingers on her—ogles her, really—while Charlotte continues singing her own unheard praises. The camera returns to the stunned Humbert, paralyzed by lust. When Charlotte suggests that her “cherry pies” would be an incentive for Humbert to move in, the camera returns to the leggy lass, who removes her sunglasses and stares a knowing stare at the emigrant professor. In that moment, the audience has no doubt as to what Humbert envisions when he hears “cherry pies”.
The America of Lolita is practically a satire, filtered through the lens of hedonistic oversexualization—that same post-World War II vivacity that gave rise to the “Baby Boom”. Charlotte experiences such pent-up sexual frustration that she all but denies Humbert in his attempts to flee from her bedroom after showing her classic art “reproductions”—and they’ve just met! Charlotte’s friends include Jean and John Farlow (Diana Decker and Jerry Stovin), who look as normal as any other upper-middle class suburbanites. But their conversations with Humbert are loaded with lines that hint at a predilection toward polyamory, including one less-than-subtle comment Jean makes, describing her and her husband as “extremely broad-minded”. Local celebrity Clare Quilty stands out as a paragon of depravity. Not only is he wallowing in the ruins of an old-fashioned Roman orgy when Humbert comes calling, but he almost always has a bemused comment loaded with double meanings at his disposal, like the ping pong balls he somehow manages to tuck away in his pajamas. (Consider when Charlotte tells Quilty that Lolita will be having a cavity filled by his Uncle Ivor—who happens to be a dentist—and Quilty replies “yes”, chuckling with an easy smirk.) Compared to the lasciviousness of these Americans, the native European Humbert seems almost prudish—but lest we forget, he is a pervert that secretly pines for a girl whose barely in high school. Is Lolita actually moralizing about a perceived laissez-faire toward sexuality in Americans? Probably not. The film instead adopts the technique of an “unreliable narrator”, just as it had been prominently featured in Nabokov’s book; we’re forced to doubt his perception of the world around him. Lolita even points out on multiple occasions in the midst of their increasingly frequent arguments that he is “imagining things”.
As in the novel, Lolita experienced her first sexual encounter prior to Humbert’s introduction into her world. But this is far in the background of the film, not just because of attitudes regarding frank sexual discourse in 1962, but also to emphasize that—despite the eventual incorporation of her name as a derisive term for a promiscuous girl—she is meant to be an all-American teenage girl, not dissimilar to other teens, whether in the fictional New Hampshire town of Ramsdale or otherwise. Humbert’s past in Europe is deliberately cut from Kubrick’s film, with only the faintest of details that barely hint at what fetishes fuel his hebephilia. Humbert is quickly folded into the Haze clan through everyday rituals like playing chess or going to the drive in. And though each of these moments in this expository montage includes hints at a mutual attraction between Lolita and Humbert, Lolita’s involvement can almost universally be explained as innocuous. Yet from Humbert’s perspective, they all have an erotic tinge to them—even the childlike act of playing with a hula hoop has the slimy, old professor drooling behind his book. In spite of Humbert perceiving Lolita’s behavior as flirtatious, there is always the sense that Lolita’s feelings toward Humbert are purely platonic, and that she is never confused about her emotions on the matter. (It is ironic that she and her mother bicker—albeit on many things—over the affections of none other than Quilty, who is as much a dirty, old man as Humbert.)
The great sadness of Dolores Haze is in how she is forced to part with her innocence, which has nothing to do with her sexual curiosity. The people who are responsible for raising her and guiding her into adulthood are primarily concerned with exploiting her. Her mother harbors resentment at being stuck as a single parent, overcome with anxiety and insecurity. The Farlows half-jokingly assume that kids like Lolita must be as willful as their own daughter, encouraging Charlotte to shuffle her inconvenient teen off to summer camp—whimsically named “Camp Climax”—so the “adults” can indulge in their own pleasures free from the burden of parenthood. Even minor characters like the unctuous concierge (aptly) named George Swine (Bill Greene) and the underhanded father of the man who runs down Charlotte, leaving Lolita the ward of Humbert, are portrayed as unscrupulous and corrupt. And does Humbert display even a modicum of shame by informing his new stepdaughter of the untimely death of her mother after picking her up from camp? No; he soullessly takes her to a hotel under false pretenses that they’ll eventually be going to see Charlotte—who is not dead, but merely sick—and tries to get her alone to have sex. His anxiety isn’t born from any semblance of shame, but from the coincidence of the hotel hosting a state police convention. I can’t believe that—despite her age—Lolita isn’t conscious of the terrible betrayal Humbert has inflicted upon her. It is more likely that she realizes how she is stuck between two horrible fates—staying with a liar and pervert who obsesses over her, or becoming an orphan with nothing to her name. It’s easy to stand on the high ground and say that the choice is obvious, but to a child barely emergent from puberty and having her sense of trust and security recently shattered, I doubt the view is as clear.
Lolita begins to adopt a form of camouflage in this unfamiliar territory, and carefully coordinates an escape plan with the “only guy she was ever crazy about”. Quilty in turn stokes Humbert’s paranoia with insidious glee, making him increasingly more unhinged and distracted from Lolita’s intentions to flee. What follows is, perhaps, the cruelest cut of all for Lo. After reaching out to Humbert years later, she reveals that Clare Quilty was even more depraved than her stepfather, and tried to coerce her into making an “art movie”, which serves as a Hayes Code-era euphemism for a stag film. Imagine how Dolores’ terrible revelation about Quilty’s true self must have played out while in his company. Her mother hated her, her stepfather raped her, and now the would-be Theseus to her Ariadne—saving her from the brutish minotaur that is the dual-named Humbert Humbert—sees her as his plaything...a “piece of furniture” to use and abuse. The details of Lolita’s adventures between her escape from Humbert and their reunion years later are vague; but when they are reunited, Lolita exudes a confident maturity that befits putting her adolescent suffering behind her. She and her kindly husband, Richard (Gary Cockrell), may be poor, but Lolita has finally found something missing from her life in Ramsdale or Beardsley: trust. Lolita’s pregnancy reflects a maternal inner strength—a direct contrast to Humbert’s pathetic weakness. The sniveling man breaks down into tears, begging for her to run away with him in spite of all he has done to her, unwilling to admit to himself or Lolita the extent of his abuse. Humbert essentially continues his tantrum by revenging himself against Quilty, racing to the playwright’s castle-like mansion—a knight charging headlong to slay a dragon as monstrous as himself. Conversely, Lolita has since moved on with her life, and has forgiven him—not for his sake, but for hers. Even though she wrote to him asking for money, it’s clear that she won’t repeat the mistakes of her youth by letting Humbert bargain for her love with riches.
Despite every claim made by Humbert to the contrary, I believe that the loathsome protagonist of Lolita doesn’t love Dolores, and even resents her for being smarter than he is. Humbert is actually pretty dim, yet behaves like such an erudite pseudo-intellectual that he often gets away with it. (Consider his absurd inner monologue about committing the “perfect murder” on Charlotte, and it becomes immediately clear that he is no mastermind.) One scene that subtly underscores this is when Humbert subjects Lolita to a reading from the poetry of “the divine Edgar”. Lolita describes the poem as “corny”, referring to the feminine rhyme; but she elaborates on her point through an example, underscoring that she really does understand the poem—she simply doesn’t like it. It is because Humbert underestimates Lolita’s intelligence again and again that Clare Quilty is able to sneak Lolita away from him right under his nose. It always surprised me that Sue Lyon’s acting career never flourished the way it should have after Lolita, given her spellbinding performance at only fourteen years of age, while holding her own alongside greats like James Mason, Shelley Winters, and Peter Sellers; but I suppose this is a commentary in and of itself. After Lolita—like so many other young actresses before and after her—she was virtually typecast into roles that favored promoting her youth and attractiveness first and foremost, relegating the intelligence and depth of her performance to the background. Like Humbert, many audiences likely entered Lolita with preconceived expectations ranging from the offensive to the erotic—and biases are notoriously hard to counter, even with mountains of evidence to the contrary. And little has changed in the public eye; films like Lolita are often perceived as sexually perverse by those whose only exposure to it was in the form of a sexualized movie poster or flirtatious movie trailer, promising titillation but instead delivering a tragic tale of abuse and innocence lost. The unspoken message of Lolita is that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover—or people for that matter—because all you end up with is a sad reflection of your own warped view of reality.
Lolita begins at the end, where Humbert finally confronts his rival for Lolita, an even sleazier playwright named Clare Quilty—performed by the chameleon-like Peter Sellers with insidious gusto—and executes him for “taking advantage” of the object of his affection; his vengeance is the acme of hypocrisy. Equipped with this dramatic irony, the audience is taken back four years prior to when Humbert has come to America after being offered a teaching position. In the interim, he looks for a place to lodge, and crosses paths with the neurotic and clingy widow, Charlotte Haze (Shelley Winters), who plies Humbert with her awkward attempts at seduction and refinement. (She even goes so far as to describe her community of “West” Ramsdale as one simultaneously comprised of “good Anglo-Dutch stock” and “progressive” in the same breath.) All of this seems like a farce of a screwball comedy until Charlotte shows Humbert her backyard. Reclining in the sun like an odalisque in her bikini, fuzzy sun hat, and heart-shaped sunglasses is Charlotte’s teenage daughter, Dolores, better know as Lolita. This introduction doesn’t come as just a passing glance at the scantily clad girl soaking in the sun; the camera lingers on her—ogles her, really—while Charlotte continues singing her own unheard praises. The camera returns to the stunned Humbert, paralyzed by lust. When Charlotte suggests that her “cherry pies” would be an incentive for Humbert to move in, the camera returns to the leggy lass, who removes her sunglasses and stares a knowing stare at the emigrant professor. In that moment, the audience has no doubt as to what Humbert envisions when he hears “cherry pies”.
The America of Lolita is practically a satire, filtered through the lens of hedonistic oversexualization—that same post-World War II vivacity that gave rise to the “Baby Boom”. Charlotte experiences such pent-up sexual frustration that she all but denies Humbert in his attempts to flee from her bedroom after showing her classic art “reproductions”—and they’ve just met! Charlotte’s friends include Jean and John Farlow (Diana Decker and Jerry Stovin), who look as normal as any other upper-middle class suburbanites. But their conversations with Humbert are loaded with lines that hint at a predilection toward polyamory, including one less-than-subtle comment Jean makes, describing her and her husband as “extremely broad-minded”. Local celebrity Clare Quilty stands out as a paragon of depravity. Not only is he wallowing in the ruins of an old-fashioned Roman orgy when Humbert comes calling, but he almost always has a bemused comment loaded with double meanings at his disposal, like the ping pong balls he somehow manages to tuck away in his pajamas. (Consider when Charlotte tells Quilty that Lolita will be having a cavity filled by his Uncle Ivor—who happens to be a dentist—and Quilty replies “yes”, chuckling with an easy smirk.) Compared to the lasciviousness of these Americans, the native European Humbert seems almost prudish—but lest we forget, he is a pervert that secretly pines for a girl whose barely in high school. Is Lolita actually moralizing about a perceived laissez-faire toward sexuality in Americans? Probably not. The film instead adopts the technique of an “unreliable narrator”, just as it had been prominently featured in Nabokov’s book; we’re forced to doubt his perception of the world around him. Lolita even points out on multiple occasions in the midst of their increasingly frequent arguments that he is “imagining things”.
As in the novel, Lolita experienced her first sexual encounter prior to Humbert’s introduction into her world. But this is far in the background of the film, not just because of attitudes regarding frank sexual discourse in 1962, but also to emphasize that—despite the eventual incorporation of her name as a derisive term for a promiscuous girl—she is meant to be an all-American teenage girl, not dissimilar to other teens, whether in the fictional New Hampshire town of Ramsdale or otherwise. Humbert’s past in Europe is deliberately cut from Kubrick’s film, with only the faintest of details that barely hint at what fetishes fuel his hebephilia. Humbert is quickly folded into the Haze clan through everyday rituals like playing chess or going to the drive in. And though each of these moments in this expository montage includes hints at a mutual attraction between Lolita and Humbert, Lolita’s involvement can almost universally be explained as innocuous. Yet from Humbert’s perspective, they all have an erotic tinge to them—even the childlike act of playing with a hula hoop has the slimy, old professor drooling behind his book. In spite of Humbert perceiving Lolita’s behavior as flirtatious, there is always the sense that Lolita’s feelings toward Humbert are purely platonic, and that she is never confused about her emotions on the matter. (It is ironic that she and her mother bicker—albeit on many things—over the affections of none other than Quilty, who is as much a dirty, old man as Humbert.)
The great sadness of Dolores Haze is in how she is forced to part with her innocence, which has nothing to do with her sexual curiosity. The people who are responsible for raising her and guiding her into adulthood are primarily concerned with exploiting her. Her mother harbors resentment at being stuck as a single parent, overcome with anxiety and insecurity. The Farlows half-jokingly assume that kids like Lolita must be as willful as their own daughter, encouraging Charlotte to shuffle her inconvenient teen off to summer camp—whimsically named “Camp Climax”—so the “adults” can indulge in their own pleasures free from the burden of parenthood. Even minor characters like the unctuous concierge (aptly) named George Swine (Bill Greene) and the underhanded father of the man who runs down Charlotte, leaving Lolita the ward of Humbert, are portrayed as unscrupulous and corrupt. And does Humbert display even a modicum of shame by informing his new stepdaughter of the untimely death of her mother after picking her up from camp? No; he soullessly takes her to a hotel under false pretenses that they’ll eventually be going to see Charlotte—who is not dead, but merely sick—and tries to get her alone to have sex. His anxiety isn’t born from any semblance of shame, but from the coincidence of the hotel hosting a state police convention. I can’t believe that—despite her age—Lolita isn’t conscious of the terrible betrayal Humbert has inflicted upon her. It is more likely that she realizes how she is stuck between two horrible fates—staying with a liar and pervert who obsesses over her, or becoming an orphan with nothing to her name. It’s easy to stand on the high ground and say that the choice is obvious, but to a child barely emergent from puberty and having her sense of trust and security recently shattered, I doubt the view is as clear.
Lolita begins to adopt a form of camouflage in this unfamiliar territory, and carefully coordinates an escape plan with the “only guy she was ever crazy about”. Quilty in turn stokes Humbert’s paranoia with insidious glee, making him increasingly more unhinged and distracted from Lolita’s intentions to flee. What follows is, perhaps, the cruelest cut of all for Lo. After reaching out to Humbert years later, she reveals that Clare Quilty was even more depraved than her stepfather, and tried to coerce her into making an “art movie”, which serves as a Hayes Code-era euphemism for a stag film. Imagine how Dolores’ terrible revelation about Quilty’s true self must have played out while in his company. Her mother hated her, her stepfather raped her, and now the would-be Theseus to her Ariadne—saving her from the brutish minotaur that is the dual-named Humbert Humbert—sees her as his plaything...a “piece of furniture” to use and abuse. The details of Lolita’s adventures between her escape from Humbert and their reunion years later are vague; but when they are reunited, Lolita exudes a confident maturity that befits putting her adolescent suffering behind her. She and her kindly husband, Richard (Gary Cockrell), may be poor, but Lolita has finally found something missing from her life in Ramsdale or Beardsley: trust. Lolita’s pregnancy reflects a maternal inner strength—a direct contrast to Humbert’s pathetic weakness. The sniveling man breaks down into tears, begging for her to run away with him in spite of all he has done to her, unwilling to admit to himself or Lolita the extent of his abuse. Humbert essentially continues his tantrum by revenging himself against Quilty, racing to the playwright’s castle-like mansion—a knight charging headlong to slay a dragon as monstrous as himself. Conversely, Lolita has since moved on with her life, and has forgiven him—not for his sake, but for hers. Even though she wrote to him asking for money, it’s clear that she won’t repeat the mistakes of her youth by letting Humbert bargain for her love with riches.
Despite every claim made by Humbert to the contrary, I believe that the loathsome protagonist of Lolita doesn’t love Dolores, and even resents her for being smarter than he is. Humbert is actually pretty dim, yet behaves like such an erudite pseudo-intellectual that he often gets away with it. (Consider his absurd inner monologue about committing the “perfect murder” on Charlotte, and it becomes immediately clear that he is no mastermind.) One scene that subtly underscores this is when Humbert subjects Lolita to a reading from the poetry of “the divine Edgar”. Lolita describes the poem as “corny”, referring to the feminine rhyme; but she elaborates on her point through an example, underscoring that she really does understand the poem—she simply doesn’t like it. It is because Humbert underestimates Lolita’s intelligence again and again that Clare Quilty is able to sneak Lolita away from him right under his nose. It always surprised me that Sue Lyon’s acting career never flourished the way it should have after Lolita, given her spellbinding performance at only fourteen years of age, while holding her own alongside greats like James Mason, Shelley Winters, and Peter Sellers; but I suppose this is a commentary in and of itself. After Lolita—like so many other young actresses before and after her—she was virtually typecast into roles that favored promoting her youth and attractiveness first and foremost, relegating the intelligence and depth of her performance to the background. Like Humbert, many audiences likely entered Lolita with preconceived expectations ranging from the offensive to the erotic—and biases are notoriously hard to counter, even with mountains of evidence to the contrary. And little has changed in the public eye; films like Lolita are often perceived as sexually perverse by those whose only exposure to it was in the form of a sexualized movie poster or flirtatious movie trailer, promising titillation but instead delivering a tragic tale of abuse and innocence lost. The unspoken message of Lolita is that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover—or people for that matter—because all you end up with is a sad reflection of your own warped view of reality.