Lolita: from abused child to erotic icon (part 2)

Trigger Warning: Mentions of Physical and Sexual Abuse

Kubrick’s movie: from abused child to erotic icon

Hearing about Lolita today, you may have in mind a young girl with heart-shaped red glasses, wearing red lipstick and looking at you while sucking a red lollipop. This is the poster Kubrick chose for his movie, the first adaptation of Nabokov’s Lolita, made in 1962 and nominated among others for Best Adapted Screenplay at the 35th Academy Awards. 

Lolita has long been – and probably still is – perceived as the forbidden fruit just asking to be eaten. The film helped lock her into this role. 

Lolita was considered “unfilmable” by the time Kubrick acquired the rights to the novel when it was finally published in the USA. Kubrick and his team took two sides to film the unfilmable. Firstly, the book’s most provocative scenes – which had been called pornographic by many – are toned down in the film to comply with the restrictions of the Motion Picture Production Code (1934 – 1968), leaving audiences free to imagine whatever they wish. Secondly, James B. Harris, co-producer of the film with Stanley Kubrick, said that he and the filmmaker had decided to change the tone of Nabokov’s book, as they “wanted it to come off as a love story and to feel very sympathetic with Humbert.”

French film critic Iris Brey denounced the film in her book, La Culture de l’inceste (Incest Culture), published in 2022; arguing that it presents the young girl as a deliberate temptress, scandalously distancing itself from the sordid reality where it is adults who abuse innocent children. 

Nabokov had written a scenario for Kubrick’s movie but, even if Nabokov’s name appears in the credits, the final result is far away from the scenario he proposed. Some believe that his answer in 1964 to the question, “Were you satisfied with the final product?” To which he said, “I thought the film was first-rate,” believing it was a polite answer.

As a matter of fact, Lolita’s image has been considerably distorted and Nabokov, when invited to appear on the French TV program Apostrophe in 1975, took it upon himself to clarify matters when host Bernard Pivot asked him if he wasn’t “tired” of Lolita’s success sticking to his skin and if he wasn’t afraid of being thought of as the “Father of a single little girl a little perverse.” The author replies firmly: “Lolita isn’t a perverse little girl, she is a poor child, a poor child who is debauched and whose senses never awaken under the caresses of the filthy Monsieur Humbert.”

He explains to the presenter that he has read the book very badly, as many people have because there is nothing perfidious about the character of Lolita: “Apart from Monsieur Humbert’s manic gaze, there is no nymphet. Lolita, the nymphet, exists only through the haunting that destroys Humbert.” He adds, “In reality, Lolita, I repeat, is a twelve-year-old girl, while Monsieur Humbert is a mature man. And it’s the abyss between his age and the girl’s that produces the emptiness, this vertigo, the seduction, the lure of mortal danger.”

Nabokov goes on to emphasize the distortion suffered by his character: “It’s rather interesting to consider, as journalists say, the problem of the inane degradation the character of the nymphet I invented in ‘55 has suffered in the minds of the general public. Not only has the perversity of this poor child been grotesquely exaggerated, but her physical appearance, her age: everything has been altered by illustrations in foreign publications […] And here is an essential aspect of a singular book that has been distorted by factitious popularity.” 

In reality, a second film adaptation of Lolita was released in 1997. This Franco-American adaptation was directed by Adrian Lyne. According to French sociologist Alexander María Leroy, Lyne’s film differs significantly from Kubrick’s adaptation, this time portraying Humbert as pathological. However, this more realistic and less romantic film was much less successful than Kubrick’s Lolita: with a budget of $61 million, the film barely made one, making it one of the biggest box office failures.