{"id":158,"date":"2012-08-05T19:50:29","date_gmt":"2012-08-05T19:50:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/katybutler.com\/site\/?p=158"},"modified":"2012-08-05T19:50:29","modified_gmt":"2012-08-05T19:50:29","slug":"dont-call-it-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.katybutler.com\/author\/articles\/dont-call-it-love\/","title":{"rendered":"Don’t Call It Love"},"content":{"rendered":"

San Francisco Magazine
\n1988 Aug
\nBy Katy Butler
\n
\nThe latest version of Lolita still hasn\u2019t gotten it right.<\/em><\/p>\n

LAST SUMMER, IN A half-empty theater in Siena, Italy, I saw Adrian Lyne\u2019s Lolita<\/em>\u2014a film that could not find a U. S. distributor, supposedly because of its shocking subject matter. (You can, however, see it on cable television this month and in some theaters next month) Once again, I saw professor Humbert, Humbert come upon 12-year-old Lolita, sunning on her mother\u2019s lawn. It was a big improvement over the same moment in Stanley Kubrick\u2019s 1962 film, but it didn\u2019t come close to the complex moral vision of Vladimir Nabokov\u2019s novel. Watch either film, and you will see what my local newspaper called \u201ca romance\u201d between a 40-year-old professor and his \u201cnubile\u201d stepdaughter. Reread the book, and you will find the portrait of a young girl as seen through the eyes of a pedophile with a fancy prose style.<\/p>\n

In the novel, when brown-haired Lolita<\/em> first looks at Humbert over \u201cstern dark spectacles,\u201c she sends him into a paroxysm of reminiscence of his first love. The self-described \u201cnympholept\u201d Humbert has already told us that, obsessed by the memory of this preteen romance, he used to haunt Paris parks watching girl-children with a newspaper over his swelling lap. In Kubrick\u2019s adaptation, this is the moment when starlet Hue Lyon, all bleached hair and woman\u2019s breasts, looked knowingly at James Mason over heart-shaped sunglasses and burned the word \u201cnymphet\u201d into our brains. Grown up and seductive, she was fair game.<\/p>\n

In Lyne\u2019s version, Lolita (Dominique Swain) is a child again, as unconsciously succulent as my own goddaughter, her cotton shorts and T-shirt drenched in the hypnotic spray of a circulating sprinkler. She smiles shyly at Humbert (Jeremy Irons), revealing the silver glint of her retainer. At that moment, the camera\u2019s eye conveys her devastating loveliness without confusing for an instant who is predator and who is prey.<\/p>\n

And make no mistake. Even though Lolita<\/em> has been misdescribed as a \u201cgreat love story\u201d (as well as \u201csheer pornography\u201d), the novel is about the relationship between predator and prey. With Nabokov\u2019s help, the reader can peer through the topiary of Humbert\u2019s self-justifying, French-bespattered prose for glimpses of the living child. Nabokov\u2019s Lolita tongue-kisses her handsome stepdad and slips her hand into his. She has a crush on him. But she\u2019s a kid with unwashed hair and grass stained shorts; she says \u201cswell\u201d and \u201cswank\u201d and \u201cwow,\u201d Though initially true to Nabokov\u2019s vision. Lyne\u2019s Lolita becomes more and more garishly made up as the film progresses, and she, not Humbert, is the sexual aggressor. In the novel, Lolita\u2019s pubescent flirtations end after a night at what she later calls \u201cthe hotel where you raped me.\u201d Over time, she becomes less love object than sex captive, kept malleable with bribes and judiciously applied threats of juvenile hall. As Humbert notes, she has \u201cabsolutely nowhere else to go\u201d when, after her mother dies, he takes her on the crosscountry motel wanderings he later calls a \u201csinuous trail of slime.\u201d He admits that \u201cnever did she vibrate under my touch\u201d and that he listened to \u201cher sobs in the night-every night, every night-the moment I feigned sleep.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s still taboo to put this tragic aspect of the novel\u2014 and therefore give much meaning to Humbert\u2019s final redemption\u2014on film. It\u2019s not considered too risqu\u00e9 to show Lolita bouncing on Humbert\u2019s lap, but it\u2019s still too shocking to show him persuading her to masturbate him underneath a schoolroom desk in return for 65 cents and permission to take part in a school play.<\/p>\n

See the Lyne film for its fine acting and production values, but go back to the book\u2014a brilliant satire by a mordant master of crosslingual puns and literary allusions. It is testament to its artistry that even today it can enthrall, and not enrage, a feminist like me. It survives in part because it so carefully describes a controlling one-sided obsession masquerading as love\u2014an experience not limited to pedophiles. No filmmaker has yet had the guts to call Lolita<\/em> by its true names: not passion or love but narcissism, domination, and vanity.<\/p>\n

\u00a91988 Katy Butler. All Rights Reserved. Not to be reprinted without permission.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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