81 MS Humbert and Charlotte. (18:26)

CHARLOTTE: Thank you. What was the decisive factor? My garden?

HUMBERT: I think it was your cherry pies.

82 MCU Lolita. (18:36)

Charlotte laughs.

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A PROBLEM WITH DISCUSSING KUBRICK'S LOLITA

A problem with even beginning to try to compare Kubrick's Lolita to either Nabokov's book or his screenplay is resemblance is strained due the disparity in Lolita's age. A Lolita of twelve is not a Lolita of fourteen, as was Sue Lyon. In the book, Humbert was a pedophile/hebephile, attracted to girls from about age nine to fourteen, fourteen being the far limit. It's never made clear in the movie the age range of Humbert's attraction, but Kubrick's Lolita is fourteen, and though fourteen is certainly a child, those two years cause chaos in a society that says one thing about appropriate sexual age boundaries, but in which it is standard operating procedure for young teenage girls to be sexually harassed on the street for having graduated to puberty, and the Lolita of the film was clearly pubescent. Most women will have numerous stories of having been barely twelve or thirteen when they become magnets for unwanted and abusive attention on the street, unable to walk a few blocks without cars slowing, tailing them, wolf whistles the least of it as they are often aggressively pursued, and then verbally abused and threatened with physical abuse when they rebuff or simply attempt to ignore the situation. In the real world, some manner of this would already be experienced by Lolita, just minding her own business walking to the store.

The advertisements capitalized on Humbert's attraction to the young female who has just bloomed and is conscious of blooming. The question "How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?" begs for people to come see and find out how salacious it may be. On the other side of town, across the railroad tracks, Peyton Place (1956) depicted a teen who is raped by her step-father and kept this secret from a critical society that often held a female victim as liable and thereafter tainted. To support her vindication, the victim was portrayed as hyper-responsible both in school and at home, a good girl above reproach, while the rapist was an overtly contemptible, problematic drunk, and the family was lower class, residing in poverty. Middle class Lolita is her step-father's sex slave, but Sue Lyon and her candy red, heart sunglasses, sucking on lollipops in publicity photos by Bert Stern, is represented provocatively and sexualized. No one, for an instant, could look at those photos and not see the symbolism suggested in the props, enhanced by the direct-eye gaze. They were images that were half and half, just as adolescents are half and half, becoming adult but are still children, tormented by hormones, seeking independence and knowledge of their new selves and the world, experimenting with sexuality, but are also decidedly powerless and vulnerable children still reliant on adults for emotional and physical support and guidance. The iconic shot of Sue in heart-shaped sunglasses, red lips sucking on the red lollipop, tore the young adolescent straight down the middle between being innocent child and not-very-innocent jailbait. The kind of girl of whom many men have said was the seductress, older than her years.

But I have also heard and read individuals speak of the seductive eyes of younger children, misappropriating to them adult sensibilities and apprehensions.

Humbert (and others) would argue that Lolita's forbidden status is a matter of time and place and culture. Humbert holds up Poe's relationship with his Virginia, his cousin, who he married when she was just thirteen, as an exonerating example, but even Poe, despite having Virginia's mother's consent, was concerned and lied about Virginia's age for the marriage certificate, giving her as twenty-one.

Lolita's like a slippery pea that keeps escaping one's fork. She is a minor and a victim. But, oh no. Because she was already not a virgin in the book, because she initiated some manner of game with Humbert, which led to sex, she is declared as having agency and the fork spears her. This is the poster Lolita that beckons an audience to the theater.

In Mexico, to where Humbert and Lolita were eventually headed, in some places the minimum age of consent was twelve years of age. I read on Wikipedia that in the United States, in 1880, the age of consent was an astonishing ten in most states. However, in my experience, comb through census records and genealogies and it's pretty rare you'll find any girl under the age of eighteen marrying. I have a great-great-grandmother who was married at the age of fourteen to a nineteen-year-old male who had two sisters who both married at the age of thirteen to men in their early twenties. My family genealogy goes back generations on all sides and this was such a radical exception to the norm that I wonder what in the world was going on with these people. This was in post Civil War America, in Kansas, and is tantamount to marrying off little Laura Ingles in the 6th or 7th book of the Little House on the Prairie series. No one expects that. Try to visualize Little Women beginning with Meg, Jo, and Beth being married and consequently the bulk of the book concerned with them comparing pregnancies.

The legal agreement for individuals possessing the maturity to vote is now eighteen, and to drink is now twenty-one. The legal age to drive is typically sixteen. Society concedes that youth hasn't the maturity for appropriate decision-making on an adult level until the age of eighteen. But in twentieth century America, the tantalizing teen paired up with the much older male has been not only well-worn comedic material, but also provided serious contenders for true romance.

She may have been seventeen, but 1947 had Cary Grant, age forty-three when the movie was released, comically fending off Shirley Temple, a fervently devoted teen, in The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer. Shirley Temple had been America's little angel for years. In this case, the film never considered Shirley, almost of college age, to be suitable material for a romance with a man old enough to be her father.

Again, she may have been seventeen, but 1954 had Debbie Reynolds as a juvenile delinquent, in Susan Slept Here, pursuing fifty-year-old Dick Powell in another comedy. She, in her ernest and abiding love, won out over Dick Powell's twenty-something girlfriend who was of course more concerned with money and status than real love. The teen girl's love, in film, was portrayed often as the real, pure thing, whereas even a slightly older woman with a few more miles had settled into dishonest wiles. More than a few movies had older men saying, "No, no," to a lovesick teen, and by film's end had been educated they were the prejudiced, self-denying ones, not giving the young girl credit for the validity of her feelings, uncomplicated youth bearing the grail of the truest and purest of loves.

Woody Allen's Manhatten is a sterling example of this. Seventeen-year-old Mariel Hemingway is not only sleeping with Woody Allen, who is forty-two and saddled with two ex wives, she is crawling all over him for great sex because her three prior relationships have been with stupid, inexperienced boys. Her love is the purest of loves not yet twisted by years of adulthood, while Woody is the immature one for eventually feeling guilty about the age difference. When I saw the film at the age of, I guess, twenty-one, I may have been won over by the glorious romance of the opening shots of New York, but I was infuriated by the myth of the so profoundly mature high school senior, whose parents, it seemed, were perfectly okay with her relationship with the far older, twice-divorced Woody. She didn't strike me as a real person but a fantasy, and I was aware the only reason she was depicted as the mature, clear-eyed individual was to excuse the desire and behavior of the dominant male. I may have left home at seventeen but I was well aware of the power imbalance of older men and younger women, of how younger women were used, and steered clear. As a teen I had known peers who were in relationships with older men, and maturity had never struck me as being characteristic of them. Instead they were always girls who were being manipulated. That Woody didn't even have Muriel being sent off by her parents to her great opportunity in London, instead having her parents already in London, reserving that good-bye moment for Woody and Muriel alone, was because to have all four of them standing there together would have blown his fantasy sky high. Though jokes were made in the film about Woody being older than her father, the jokes were not so much intended to point out the absurdity of their relationship, but to ultimately win the audience over to believing that young Muriel was the one with the power, not poor, decaying, neurotic Woody, and if there was anything that might stand in the way of this true and uncorrupt love it could only be misbegotten bad faith and a bowing to society's reluctance to accept their relationship (though, if I remember correctly, most everyone in the film did accept it).

In 1958, Maurice Chevalier was singing "Thank Heaven for Little Girls" in Gigi, and though no definite age is given for her in the movie, in the book she was fifteen going on sixteen when she went into training to be a professional mistress. Enough history can be gleaned of many "muses" of artists to know it's not uncommon for them to come from a harsh background and be prostituted out by the age of fourteen or fifteen, and if they were lucky they instead were set up as mistresses.

1943 found Joan Fontaine, in The Constant Nymph, ably playing a fourteen year old in love with a composer who marries her older cousin, but very quickly he comes to learn that it is little Joan who really knows his heart and soul, who really understands him and his music, and he realizes that it is she he has always truly loved. The young teen's absolute devotion and singular focus on her hero, the same that fuels fan clubs, was preferable to the composer over a mature woman's resistance to that brand of absolutely self-sacrificial constancy, and ultimately to the audience as well. But the age gap was still a problem, the girl being only fourteen--for reason of which she had to die. She was already preparing to leave town, traumatized at coming between the composer and his wife, but she breathed her last in a gentle, some kind of heart problem manner, as, in death, the film could then end with the pair depicted as bound eternally, spiritually. Profoundly creepy for some people (like me, though I appreciated Fontaine's acting). Others get swept away by the spiritual end and weep.

Kubrick directed Kirk Douglas in Spartacus in 1960. In 1961's The Last Sunset, Kirk Douglas meets an old flame in a Mexican town, a woman he had an affair with sixteen years beforehand when she was about sixteen. Belle's daughter, who would be about fifteen, portrayed as a child, falls for him. It's coming of age time for Missy. She dresses up in Belle's old gown, one her mother had worn when romanced by Kirk, and announces to Kirk her love. At first Kirk pushes her away, protesting she should be with boys her own age, but is quickly captivated (a couple of minutes pass at most) and insists he is the only one for her, the love of her life. When Belle learns of their plans to run off together, she reveals to Kirk that little Missy is his daughter. Uh-oh. In 1943, Joan Fontaine had to die as the fourteen year old in the love affair with a married man. Now, it is Kirk who commits suicide for sake of his daughter, allowing himself to be killed in a gun battle. Still, it isn't Missy's age that is the problem. It is the fact they were unwittingly father and daughter, though Belle proposes he was attracted to Missy because he recognized himself in her.

The older man paired with the young woman or girl was often a trade off between the older man getting a second lease on life, rejuvenated by her, and the younger woman getting money and status in exchange for the purity of her love and her enthusiasm for life.

Sometimes, however, the younger woman or girl was a user, as I've discussed in Portrait of Lolita, and the morally corrupt femme fatale, who has no love for the older man, ends up murdered.

Lolita is fourteen in Kubrick's film, so perhaps I shouldn't be pulling in movies about seventeen year olds who are almost legal material for May-September or May-December relationships, and I don't care about legal age consensual sex. Except all of the above stories did involve a minor female.

Let's turn back to twentieth century real life and some things that were going on about 1962 in the ball park of the fourteen-year-old age range, using celebrity land stories, because those are the ones we know about.

In 1958, Jerry Lee Lewis, at the age of twenty-two, married (his third time down the aisle) a thirteen year old who was the daughter of a cousin. The news was that she was fifteen, and I don't know if the public knew differently. It was scandalous, but she was also his cousin, which was part of the scandal. By the way, Myra now says she had long waited to be married and a mother, that like all teenagers she thought she was grown up. "I was that stupid.". Here they are, in the below video, not long after they were married. When they tied the knot, it's said she still believed in Santa Claus. She also seemingly told reporters, "You can marry at ten if you can find a husband."

About 1959, Elvis Presley met Priscilla, who was only fourteen, and began courting her. The PR was "chastely". She was fifteen when she moved into Graceland.

Over in England, with the 60's, Jimmy Saville began his decades-long career of sexual abuse, often of young teens. The public didn't know about it though for many decades. Not until he was dead and then it was okay to break the story.

In America, we were entering the rock-and-roll tour era of groupies, and a number of those girls were very young. Two of the famous, so-called "baby" groupies were Lori Maddox and Sable Starr. Sable Starr was apparently thirteen when she became a groupie, having sex with Iggy Pop at that age. Lori Maddox was reportedly fifteen (more likely thirteen or fourteen) when she reports herself as having first had sex, which happened to be with David Bowie. She reported it as an excellent experience. After this, she was either fourteen or fifteen when she hooked up with 29-year-old Jimmy Page for a year-and-a-half "romance" that commenced, after her self-reportedly rebuffing Page, with his tour manager "kidnapping" her and taking her to his room.

It was dimly lit by candles...and Jimmy was just sitting there in a corner, wearing this hat slouched over his eyes and holding a cane. It was really mysterious and weird...He looked just like a gangster. It was magnificent. Can you believe it? It was just like right out of a story! Kidnapped, man, at fourteen!...And that was the beginning of our romance. We like fell in love...We were madly, madly in love. It was like a fantasy or a fairy tale. But the others were really against me at the time. They were concerned because somebody warned them that if Jimmy was discovered with a fourteen-year-old girl, he'd be deported immediately. So Jimmy kept me locked in the room at all times. Both Peter Grant and Richard Cole insisted that I be kept locked up. They didn't let me go anywhere because I was so under-age...Jimmy met my mom and everything. He called her one day and said, 'I hope you don't mind that I'm seeing your daughter.' He was a real gentleman, and she knew that he was a really respectable guy and that he had money and, I mean, what is she gonna say? You know, she knew I was doing it anyway, so she figures if I'm gonna be doing it, who better with?

I mean, he was a real romance. He's the most romantic person in the world. He's so sweet and gentle...He'd give me presents, like an old scarab necklace to keep away evil spirits, and I'd give him like an antique music box or something. It was real sweet. And it was really an innocent, beautiful perfect love, you know? Like he knew I just loved him for himself and nothing else...

This ended real well with Lori when, eventually rejected, disconsolate and angry, physically fighting with her rival, Jimmy laughed and reportedly said she was too young to know how to mix fantasy with reality.

Which is the problem. Emotional maturity is sporadic and hard to come by in adults, much less fourteen year olds. Not to mention the power differential, the emotional and mental maturity of teens is a serious liability for them when mixing with the adult world, as evidenced in the real life situation of Lori Maddox who was kept hidden in hotel rooms and honestly believed hers was the romance of the ages, just like out of a fairy tale.

However these girls came about doing what they did, they were certainly used and abused but saw themselves as special and report themselves as willing, even despite a purported "kidnapping". They were famous and broadly received. How many were not so famous?

The "baby" groupies of the music world are especially relevant as Lolita, along the way, becomes a willing "groupie" of Quilty. Not only is there the assumed prestige of the fan garnering the attention of the celebrity, he promises her stardom in Hollywood.

Society says, "No!" And society says, "Yes!" I'm not going to get into the problem of underage prostitution, but there's that as well and I wanted to at least mention it. 200,000 to 300,000 children are estimated as being prostitutes in the United States alone. When I was about fourteen I was standing in line excitedly waiting for an Orange Julius when a man who was probably in his forties approached and asked me how much. I was stunned, offended, perplexed as to why he would think I was a prostitute. I also wondered if he was an undercover police officer. Whoever he was, he'd ruined my afternoon and my Orange Julius. I felt like a little fool for having been standing there just thinking about how great an Orange Julius would taste. I felt like a fool for having been taken off my guard. It never occurred to me to yell out to the surrounding customers and employees, "Hey! This guy is trying to buy a minor!!" It felt so grotesque that all I wanted to do was escape the experience. I didn't want to cause a scene. Plus I'd already come to expect to have my experience discounted, it didn't matter, and expected more of the same.

Everyone has difficulty with maintaining their own agency in situations with significant power differential, but with children and adults this is especially the case. Children may not know when boundary lines are being crossed, and even if they do they have a difficult time saying no to an elder. An anonymous survey of fashion models reported that about 55% began working between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, only about 37% when they were seventeen to twenty and only about 7% when older than twenty-one. Ages were not given but about 30% respectively had experienced inappropriate touching on the job and being pressured to have sex with someone at work. Over 86% were asked to change nude without advance notice and over 27% posed nude as they felt they had to, even if they didn't want to do so. if it seems odd that I went from a paragraph on prostitution to the fashion industry then google modeling and sexual abuse of minors or prostitution.

Children do not have agency.

Children often don't realize they don't have agency.

It's true that some girls do equate the forbidden, secrecy, and even abuse, with love. More than a couple of times, as a teenager, I found that I, in an outing with a friend, was nothing more than a cover story. Though I'd believed we'd planned to go to a movie, the real purpose of the outing would be revealed to be a meeting with her older boyfriend, usually in his early to mid twenties, which is a broad gap when one is thirteen or sixteen. I would be told it was real love, which must be secret for now. There was the age factor, no one could know about it as the girl's parents wouldn't approve, but sometimes there was a complicit reason for secrecy, the secret boyfriend's excuse being another girlfriend whose fingernails were still stuck in him, but just wait, just wait, like married men who say wait for the divorce. Shiny "pre-engagement" momentos would be shown me. A slip of a gold ring with a little stone, worn only at school. A little gem stone pendant on a necklace beneath the shirt. "You're naive, he's using you," I would think. And there were instances of tearful phone calls about how the boyfriend who gave her the baubles was making a girl do things she didn't want to do and if she didn't do them she would be roughed up, yanked around by her hair, struck. She would be called a whore and a slut. When thirteen, I chose to tell on a friend who was in such a relationship because she would call me about how the boyfriend was abusing her, would start talking about suicide, and would pass out on opioids while we were still talking on the phone. I didn't divulge the relationship she was in. I just told her mother I was scared because I was afraid she was going to overdose. We never spoke again.

Then there is the idea of the older male artist and his young female muse, and that of the learned older man being sometimes a sophisticated bridge from adolescence to adulthood, educating intellectually and aesthetically and the sexual relationship being part of it, the professor and the student, the instructor and devoted protégé.

Peter Sellers, after winning Lolita as a playwright, in 1964 was a famous pianist pursued by two fourteen-year-old fangirls in The World of Henry Orient. The antics and mindsets of the girls were decidedly teen and Sellers' character was horrified. But not so the director, George Roy Hill. The 44-year-old married man with 4 children seduced the sixteen-year-old Tippy, who played the troubled teen of the pair, and carried on an affair with the high-school senior for months before she came to the decision it had to end. Decades later she described herself as having been sexually innocent, naive, isolated, and overwhelmed by the director's fame. She didn't count herself as a victim but the emotions she had when being seduced tell a different story.

We fell in love during the filming of the World of Henry Orient and remained so through most of my senior year in high school[actually, the story goes, he had lunch with me every day starting during the rehearsal period to win my trust and calm me down and gradually gradully we developed a strong bond. he was one of the only adults that sanctioned my personhood ever, my family was so competitive and I was the daughter. We stared filming in June, I got more and more used to the camera as time went by, never comfortable, never really confident, but had begun to be able to think abit after the terrifying ACTION. So, it was August, I was in his office, a basement cement block room reaking of lysol, the whole place reaked of lysol except the soundstages which reaked of aerosol--movie making wasn't the healthiest environment, having the framiliar lunch, suddenly he jumped up, I can't remember what we were talking about whether there was some sort of creciendo or if it was apropos of nothing, and came over to me saying he was going to teach me how to french kiss, and started to kiss me in this most passionate way-agressive-serious sloppy way. I know I had a second to react, a world of thought rushed through my mind, a jam of screams and curiosity, resistance, fear. How could I refuse him? the director, he had become the only person in the world I depended on for validation, he made my performance in the film possible, how could I turn him away? Risk the loss of his support, admiration? I was 16, and not the worldly 16 that is so often depicted now or then. I had never had a boyfriend, was so shy I could hardly speak to the soft spoken ladies in the library...It happened, he Kissed me, and that line was crossed. To this day I wish he hadn't or that I had been able to be firm in a self protective way, but I didn't know how. On the other hand, these things happen at some point. That it was him for me was so intensely romantic and profound. I loved him, he loved me, I believe. It had no future. There was no marriage there. I would never want to ruin his family. The secrecy nearly killed me, and the controversy. No turning back, very tough to go forward...It feels wrong to be writing about it even now. He took me to the the Gugenheim, to my first Charlie Chaplin movies, took me to see Elvira Madigan, after which I couldn't speak for a good 15 minutes, he watched anxiously. He was so smart and funny and interested in me, for the first time in my life an adult wanted to know what I thought about things, watched me for reactions. I guess everyone's first love feels like that, but Mr. Hill was such the accomplished man...It was one of the huge events of my life. And because of the enormous secrecy, having to keep it from my parents, the effect it had on me as a person, my connection to the world was torn apart and I couldn't tell any adult why I was so changed, so rocked, so disaffected suddenly. It was very destabilizing. And at the very beginning of my "career".

She was sneaking away during trips with her classmates to NYC to museums to see him. That kind of thing. The power dynamic of the older man and the inexperienced teen, in what is viewed as a consensual relationship, couldn't be more transparent, how he knew what he was doing and how she hadn't a clue as to the full extent of the manipulation.

The seduction of the student by the mentor-teacher. I remember my first experience of this with a friend when we were fourteen (she may have been fifteen), both in training for years to be classical musicians. She was shy, delicate, showed no interest in boys, seeming entirely disinterested in anything but practicing her instrument, her chaste profile captured as if from a John William Waterhouse painting, loose brown tendrils of hair framing a somber profile. She didn't look so much like a Botticelli as a somber, withdrawn teen-aged Virginia Woolf. Then she revealed to me one day she had been sexually active for a while with her music instructor. She was "special", and their relationship was comprehended as a special and beautiful one touched with the holy, golden glow that came with sexual subservience to the arts. Initiated into the mysteries, she could bring that passion to her music, or so she was told. (Speaking of Virginia Woolf, she said her half-brother, George Duckworth, abused her, but biographers excused this as fantasy thinking on her part, reasoning she desired George so she imagined he abused her.) Then I met another young teen who had been sexually involved with her instructor, but she wasn't a romantic and behaved as though the sex had been just another one of so many exercises to be practiced and was no big deal except for the fact that she'd reached an awareness that maybe it shouldn't have happened. No red lollipops and no red heart sunglasses, these were careful girls who would rouse no suspicion. No shiny pre-engagement momentos were involved. Art was all.

[NOTE: While doing an extensive rewrite of this post, it was at this point that I became really depressed, thinking of all the abuse out there I'd encountered as a young teen, and our code of silence, and had to stop working on the rewrite of this page for a few weeks.]

Despite the ad campaign, Kubrick's film is partly a parody of both the comedic jailbait (or near it) and dramatic society-won't-accept-our-love tropes, as well as as a parody of the old style tear-jerker romances, one of the two main, musical themes being the dramatic style associated with overblown melodramas, a musical style that was dying out, and the other a fresh and jaunty, adolescent pop tune that would be covered by the Ventures. Lolita, who has photos of Hollywood stars papering her walls--the industry desiring adolescent fixations that translate into sales--is attracted to Quilty in the fan girl crazy way that she says the rest of her peers are, and then is problematically presented as willingly consummating a relationship with Humbert. But my read on the film is that it's a deadly serious parody that pokes at society's predilection to see the girl as a femme fatale. We are shown how fatherless Lolita does actually look upon Humbert as a father substitute, but she has no clue how to properly relate to him as her mother treats her as a sexual rival and also due Humbert's signaling his interest in her. Lolita's father died seven years beforehand, and though the age difference between her parents in the book was twenty years, the picture of him that glowers out at us in the film is of a man who was far more than old enough to be Charlotte's father when they married, so Lolita has daily observed that photo and absorbed the older man as romantic partner. We are never told how old Charlotte was when she married but she describes herself as having been a baby with no knowledge of the world, which is why she credits Humbert as being able to fool her as he did. The mother-daughter relationship strained, Lolita has a number of reasons for wanting to get back at her mother through Humbert, and after having been introduced to sex at camp she knows how to do it. However, sex also has no meaning for her other than as a naughty game. She is not the femme fatale. She's a young teenager with a man who was ready to kill her mother to get to her (though she doesn't know this), who unexpectedly finds that her mother is dead and that Humbert is stepdaddy and all she's got left in the world. He is her guardian. She believes that if stepdad Humbert abandons her she'll be put in a juvenile delinquent facility (in the book Humbert tells her that she is a juvenile delinquent and what will happen to her if she tells anyone about them). This is a child who, before she learns her mother's dead, is focused on malts and fries, and afterwards only knows to ask if she can have her record player and records from home. She's held prisoner, used as Humbert's sexual slave, and finally really comprehends his desire for girls her age and taunts him that he can't get his hands on her friends, which is to demean herself and fully acknowledge her own position. When she's offered an escape route, which she seizes, it's through another abuser who she idolized and knows to be idolized by others. She hopes he will be better than Humbert. When she and Humbert last meet, she is so clueless she even apologizes to Humbert for cheating on him, that's how screwed up Lolita is, and how little she understands about what has happened in her life, and the fact is she's going to understand very little as a product of her environment plus the times. It's made very clear that, calling on Humbert for help, she perceives him as dad, and is even concerned about hurting him. And if she sees him as dad at the film's end, that clarifies how she has related to him throughout. He was dad, though a stepdad, with whom she is forced to have sex. While kept prisoner by him, she helped him hide what was going on from the world as she didn't want to get in trouble for being bad, and she still hides it, even from her husband, perhaps because she wants to repress the past but also because she worries about being seen as a bad girl juvenile delinquent. She is so young, immature and jaded as to say that Quilty was the only guy she was ever crazy about (perhaps because she first related to him as a teen fan to a demi-god celebrity), despite his having abused her. Has she been thirteen or fourteen years old ten years later she would have been kidnapped to Jimmy Page's hotel room and thought it the advent of a marvelous love affair.

Nabokov did want and expect Lolita to be portrayed differently from the Lolita Kubrick depicted. In the book she was about 4 feet 9 inches tall and weighed 78 pounds. That is a young child. That is not an adolescent with breasts, hips and a menstrual period. Nabakov wanted her at least grubby and childish in the film. Instead, Kubrick gives us a more polished Lolita in make-up, nylons and heels, a child who is being educated by society for her future station as a (likely married) woman, but it is all imitative womanhood at this stage, mimicry, So, we need to give up the idea of Lolita being twelve and barely pubescent, for Kubrick has, whether due his worries over censors or because he was interested in parodying and playing with the hypocrisy inherent in the teen girl trope. But whether she was twelve or fourteen doesn't much matter, though an adolescent Lolita is more acceptable to the public than a prepubescent Lolita, for they are both minors, and both are prisoners.

In an interview, Kubrick once said, "Because of all the pressure over the Production Code and the Catholic Legion of Decency at the time, I wasn't able to give any weight at all to the erotic aspect of Humbert's relationship with Lolita, and because his sexual obsession was only hinted at, it was assumed too quickly that Humbert was in love. Whereas in the novel this comes as a discovery at the end." I've difficulty believing he would have later dealt with Humbert and Lolita in a much more explicit way than in 1962, because as close as he ever got to erotic was in Barry Lyndon, and that wasn't much.

As for whether or not Humbert was really in love with Lolita by the end of the film? Did Kubrick believe Humbert truly discovered, at the end, he was in love with Lolita?

This section has been extracted to a longer post, at this link, on the problems with discussing Lolita, and the movie having been sometimes promoted as a love story.

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Differences Between Kubrick and Nabokov in this Section

The underlined dialogue being what was drawn (paraphrased mostly) from Nabokov, in the film we've the bare bones in Nabokov's treatment of Humbert's arrival in Ramsdale and that's about it. He was to have stayed elsewhere but that house burned down. Kubrick adds humor, a visit to Charlotte's bedroom, the shrine to her husband, the discussion on art. Quilty did not address her club, speaking about Zhivago and Schweitzer, instead it was another person.

Kubrick even discarded Nabokov's description of Charlotte's garden as having lilies, and exchanged them for yellow roses. The rose adorning the back of Charlotte's dress at the Summer Dance will likely be yellow as well.

Nabokov pays attention to name origins. Charlotte is the feminine of Charles which means "free man". Kubrick iterates this for us with the inclusion of "the declaration of independence". Independence was mentioned in the introduction with Quilty saying he was Spartacus and asking if Humbert was there to free the slaves.

Nabokov specified that a reproduction of Rene Prinet's "Kreutzer Sonata" be in Humbert's prospective bedroom, by which Humbert would be repelled. I read that the painting, depicting a violinist grasping up a pianist and giving her a kiss, was once considered as immoral, promoting immoral values. Leo Tolstoy wrote "The Kreutzer Sonata", named after Beethoven's sonata, and is a work in which the main character addresses the question of "what is love" when a woman insists marriages shouldn't be arranged but be based on true love. The main male character, in response, holds that love passes quickly, complains women dress to arouse lust and that there won't be sexual equality unless women are no longer subjects of desire and men no longer manipulated by carnality. The character does marry, then kills his wife when he believes that she has an affair with a violinist. Due his profession that she committed adultery, he's acquitted, then "rides the trains seeking forgiveness from fellow passengers" according to Wikipedia. I've not read the book.

The Mexican art work that Charlotte says she's asked Lolita to keep in her room, in the Nabokov screenplay was instead...

...a painted screen...pictured on it is a nymphet in three repeated designs: (1) gazing over a black gauze fan, (2) in a black half-mask, (3) in bikini and harlequin glasses. There is a rent in the fabric.

Kubrick dispensed with the nymphet art and instead made it Mexican. Rather than the nymphet there is a man in the sombrero in the doorway. He relates this to Lolita with the wide-brimmed hat she wears upon their meeting. He has transferred the bikini idea to when Humbert first meets Lolita, for Nabokov had asked that she be instead portrayed as observed by Humbert in this way:

From a mat in a pool of sun, half-naked, kneeling turning about on her knees, my Riviera love was peering at me over dark glasses...As if I were the fairy-tale nurse of some little princess--lost, kidnapped, discovered in Gypsy rags through which her nakedness smiled at the king and his hounds, I recognized the tiny dark-brown mole on her side.

Lolita is not in gypsy rags, which was how Lewis Carroll/Charles Dodgson photographed Alice Liddell.

Annabel was the name of a twelve-year-old girl with whom Humbert fell in love when fourteen. They didn't consummate their relationship, though not for want of trying. Then she died. Nabokov has pages upon pages on this back story and others, such as his wife and their divorce, Kubrick discarding nearly all of it. Humbert seeks to blame his predilections on this lost child love, and Kubrick, I do believe, makes a veiled reference to her in the next section.

I've written elsewhere in my Kubrick analyses on anamnesis in his films and his version of Nietzche's "eternal return", which is tied in with the anamnesis. With Nabaokv, Humbert's immediate "recognition" (as he describes it) of Lolita is his expression of anamnesis, of the eternal return. Annabel has appeared again in his life.

Charlotte's garden would be an obvious reference to the paradisical garden of Eden, which belonged not only to Adam and Eve but to Lilith. In section three, I discuss Lilith.

So, that's a no-brainer. The garden comes with temptation. The knowledge of good and evil.

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Harold Haze

Nabokov, in an interview, admitted to Harold Haze's name being a play on the German word for hare, which is hase. So, Harold Haze's name has a hidden double. Har (as in hare) - old + Haze (German for hare). I would take the "old" as referring to Harold's age, for we know from the wonderful picture of him, presiding as a god above Charlotte's icons, staring always at the viewer, that he was much older than Charlotte, so they had themselves a kind of spring and winter relationship.

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THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN

83 Cut to the monster ripping off the bandages around its face in the 1957 Hammer horror film, The Curse of Frankenstein, the camera zooming in. (18:41)

84 Cut to Peter Cushing/Frankenstein. (18:43)

85 Frankenstein's monster (Christopher Lee). (18:46)

86 MS of the monster grabbing Victor baron Frankenstein. (18:48)

87 MCU Humbert in a car at a drive-inn between Lolita and Charlotte. (18:49)

MOVIE: No!

Sound of breaking glass.

88 MCU of Humbert's hands on his legs. With the mummy yelling, Lolita grabs one hand and Charlotte (hands gloved) the other. He slips his hand out from under Charlotte's. (18:52)

89 ...to scratch his nose. back to the MCU of Humbert between Lolita and Charlotte again. (18:58)

90 MCU of the hands again. Humbert places his left hand on Lolita's which is on his right. Charlotte has her hand on his left leg. (19:00)

91 MCU Humbert and Lolita and Charlotte, they reacting to screams on screen. (19:02)

128 MS Lolita sitting. (33:36)

LOLITA: But mom.

She stands and walks over to the bookcase with the hand and quill and outlines the eyes of a bust on it.

LOLITA: I'm hungry and I've got to have something to eat.

CHARLOTTE: All right.

Humbert exits right.

CHARLOTTE: But you take it upstairs and after you've eaten it you go right to sleep, hmm?

LOLITA: Did you have a good time dancing with Clare Quilty?

CHARLOTTE: Well, of course. He's a very erudite, gentleman.

LOLITA: Yeah I know. All the girls are crazy about him, too.

CHARLOTTE: That's neither here nor there.

LOLITA: Since when?

HUMBERT (returning with the sandwich): Here we are. Excuse me. It's loaded with mayonnaise, just the way you like it.

NOTE: Thanks to David for alerting me as to the titles of the different books in this scene. "In Lolita, the book that you were referring to as MA is Maya: The Riddle and Rediscovery of a Lost Civilization by Charles Gallencamp. Underneath Maya on the lower shelf is The Rainbow In The Spray by Pamela Wynne (pseudonym of Winifred Mary Watson Scott)."

129 MS Lolita sitting again. (34:11)

LOLITA: Thank you.

Taking the sandwich, she sits and digs in.

CHARLOTTE: Uh, darling, take it upstairs.

LOLITA: I don't wanna go to bed, it's too early.

CHARLOTTE: We all think that Lo should go to bed.

LOLITA: I don't have to. This is a free country.

CHARLOTTE: Which means there will be no allowance this week.

LOLITA: Which means I think you stink this week.

CHARLOTTE (grabbing her): To bed, this instant!

130 LS Lolita crossing the room away from Charlotte and Humbert. (34:34)

LOLITA (in a mocking duck voice): Go to bed.

CHARLOTTE: I heard that.

131 MS Lolita mounts the steps, glancing back. (34:38)

132 MLS Humbert and Charlotte gaze after her. (34:41)

HUMBERT: Night, Lo.

133 MLS Lolita on the second floor continuing to her room (34:45)

134 MS Charlotte and Humbert. (34:47)

CHARLOTTE: Well, that miserable little brat. (Cleaning up after her, picking up her gloves and stole.) She is becoming impossible. Simply, impossible. The idea! The idea of her sneaking back here and spying on us!

HUMBERT: I don't think she was spying on us.

CHARLOTTE: Oh, really? What would you call it?

HUMBERT: I'm sure she intended no harm.

CHARLOTTE: Like hell she didn't. She's always been a spiteful little pest! Since the age of one! (Picking up Lolita's shoes.) You know she kept throwing her toys out of her crib so I would have to keep stooping over to pick them up?! She has always had some kind of gripe against me. Now, now, she sees herself as some kind of a starlet! Well, I see her as a sturdy, healthy, but decidedly homely child!

Humbert, returning to the table, cracks a nut.

CHARLOTTE: I mean, is it my fault if I feel young? Why should my child resent it? You don't resent it, do you? Do you think that I'm just a foolish, romantic, American girl?

HUMBERT: No, no, no.

CHARLOTTE (trying to recover): Let's uh... (She takes the nut cracker from Humbert.) Why don't I throw on a wrap and we can go out for a little ride in the car.

HUMBERT (Shows her his watch): It's a little late, Charlotte.

CHARLOTTE: Well, let's at least finish our, champagne? (Grabs the champange from the shelf.) Shall we?

HUMBERT: I've had a very exhausting evening, I think I'd best go to bed.

CHARLOTTE: But it's not even one.

HUMBERT: My neuralgia's about to strike, with heartburn, an old ally. And, so...oh. (He places the broken nut shell in her hand.) Good night. And thank you for a charming evening.

CHARLOTTE: You've very welcome.

135 LS Humbert ascends the stairs, glancing back. (36:15)

136 MS Charlotte. (36:20)

Charlotte whimpers with exasperation. Fade to black.

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Comparing Nabokov and Kubrick

What a marvelous scene this is and Kubrick is to thank for nearly all of it. And Shirley Winters and James Mason, of course. They are amazing.

Nabokov's screenplay version of this is briefer. As Charlotte puts on music (a choice of Bardinsky or Bartok, Bardinsky is chosen, I think Bardinsky refers to the Bard as I can find no Bardinsky composer before the 1950s) Humbert protests that he doesn't think these teen parties are properly chaperoned. She attempts to teach him to dance. Almost immediately, Lolita arrives home. There's no sandwich that's made. She gets some cookies to take upstairs. Charlotte complains, "Well, if you want to pamper your pimples". Lolita asks if her mother enjoyed her talk with the famous author, remarks that Rose is crazy about him then goes upstairs. Humbert asks who is this author and Charlotte tells him he's the author of The Nymphet. Humbert also then retires, pleading neuralgia and heartburn, rather than accepting an invitation for a nightcap. There is no overtly passionate revelation that Humbert must sidestep.

Some of the conversation comes from the book, on a night when Lolita, Charlotte and Humbert are sitting on "the piazza" and Charlotte is describing a movie about a down-and-out boxer who meets a priest who was once a boxer. In turn, Humbert tells of his Arctic adventures while stroking Lolita. When Charlotte tells Lolita, "And now we all think that Lo should go to bed," Lolita replies, "I think you stink," and Charlotte threatens her with not being able to go on a picnic the next day. Lolita protests it's a free country but goes to bed. Charlotte then complains about Lolita throwing the toys out of the crib etc., how she's a regular pest.

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Cat Woman

From Charlotte's first appearance on, Kubrick has played with her being a cat woman, and she is sometimes described as a cat woman in the book. In the scene of Humbert's arrival she was wearing a leopard pattern belt. In the kitchen scene following this one she will be wearing the same belt with a leopard print shirt. Here, slipping into something cozier, she chooses (mrooow) full on leopard.

Though the murder of Quilty scene had the Romney portrait sitting atop a ferociously fanged tiger rug rather than a leopard, that too would be an allusion to Charlotte.

Domino, in Eyes Wide Shut was accompanied by a plush tiger as she reclined on her Tree of Life bedspread.

But the film in which Kubrick really pursued the cat woman and linked it with other symbols so to make it more than a predatory female was in A Clockwork Orange.

It is in A Clockwork Orange that Kubrick pairs the cat woman of the health farm with twin sphinxes before her door, and other ideas that make clear she is intended to be evocative of the legendary sphinx of the Oedipus myth, a subject which I've already discussed at length in my analysis of that film. And we should look at Charlotte's outfits as suggesting this myth appears in Lolita as well.

Not only do we have Humbert becoming Lolita's stepfather, in the book, after Charlotte's death, Humbert leads the Farlows to believe that he is Lolita's real father, that he and Charlotte had met just prior her marriage to Harold Haze, had a brief but hot relationship, then he had returned to Europe and Charlotte had been already pregnant when she married Harold Haze. In the book, Humbert takes pleasure in imagining Lolita as his daughter.

In A Clockwork Orange the encounter with the cat woman leads to Alex murdering her, which propels him into prison and thus eventually into the Ludovico experiment.

In Eyes Wide Shut, Bill fortunately does not have sex with Domino as when he returns the next day he learns she discovered she has HIV. He would likely have had sex with her, however, had he not been interrupted by Alice's phone call..

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On MA and the Hand and the Quill

Lolita picks up a hand sculpture that is holding a white quill, picks her fingernails with it then outlines the eyes of a sculpted head with it as she queries her mother as to whether or not she had a good time dancing with Quilty. The quill refers to Quilty both as a play on his name and as a reference to his being a writer.

As Lolita speaks to her mother about Quilty, we see also a book in the background. The name on its title seems to be May but we only see Ma at this point. (The title is actually, Maya: The Riddle and Rediscovery of a Lost Civilization by Charles Gallencamp. Thanks to Madison J for alerting.) I think there would be relevance to the situation as it so stands out. There's MA, big and bold. But there's no reason to reiterate the concept of mother. We already know that Charlotte is the mother. Instead, especially with Quilty referred to several times as having an "Oriental" sensibility, I'm opting to look at the Japanese word Ma, another pointer to this being Charlotte saying, "That's neither here nor there." Which is Ma. It is the place between. Wikipedia, which shows the kanji, gives it as translating roughly in Japanese as a gap, space, pause, or the space between two structural parts. Suggestive of an interval. "...ma can be defined as experiential place understood with emphasis on interval." The violinist, Isaac Stern, related it in music as the spaces between the notes, "silences which give form."

That space between interests me as I believe we have it expressed with the monolith at the end of 2001. The monolith is there fully revealed as the "inbetween", the line that divides symmetry, reversals.

The kanji for Ma is made up of the symbol for "door" and the one for "sun", which also fits with the monolith's conjunction with the sun in 2001, and it becoming a door in the end for Dave and the viewer as we pass through it with his rebirth.

Take a look back at shots 72 and 73. I suggest we have Ma here three times. It is the interval, the space, as Charlotte and Humbert pass from room to hall, the camera crossing behind the black interval of the partition. Kubrick's usage of these spaces as Ma will be explicitly felt in the next section, part three of the analysis, relative Charlotte's death, and I will review it there. But once one becomes sensitive to Ma one can find its expression in any number of ways in Lolita.

Some further word play with Ma is had when Humbert returns with Lolita's sandwich. What is a sandwich but two pieces of bread with whatever inbetween. In this case, extra ma-yonnaise, just the way Lolita likes it. Just as she will like Quilty's "oriental" philosophical look on life. I know that will probably sound absurd but it possibly does fit, reinforcing that Ma here is the space between. We also have "maya" in mayonnaise.

The book beneath the Maya book is Rainbow in the Spray. I find that someone has commented on the internet, concerning baby names, "For the person who does not know the meaning in japanese - ma means true, ya is night. Though it's more common to spell it maaya, ma for true, aya for rainbow." Instead, aya means "colorful" or "beautiful". The Ma here is a different kanji and means "genuine" or "pure".

The Ma that is the space or pause is read "aida" in the original Japanese. I also read that it means "to take some time" which will have significance in section three.

The sandwich may remind of the speared sandwich at the opening of the film.

Toasted. I bet they tried untoasted bread first and it fell to pieces.

Nabokov's book is full of puns. Why not look for them in Kubrick's work?

Quilty refers to himself also in the "inbetween" sense at the Enchanted Hunters Hotel. When asked how he occupies himself to get rid of excess energy he replies that he does Judo with Vivian Darkbloom (remember, she is Nabokov's way of implanting himself in the novel by way of an anagram). Quilty says that Vivian sweeps his ankles out from under him and he goes down with a hell of a bang. Of it he says, "I sorta lay there in pain but I love it, I really love it. I lay there hovering between consciousness and unconsciousness. It's really the greatest." It's a liminal experience. So, we once again have a state of "inbetween" and here it is united with Japanese through Judo. None of this is about the Judo is in either the novel or Nabokov's screenplay. If it was improvisation, one needs to remember that the improvisation was not entirely without direction and that Sellers worked on it with Kubrick coming up with what was appropriate for the scene.

The next time we have a "bang" in the film, after Quilty's speaking of going down with a bang, is with the blow-out of the tire in the Badlands. It's in this scene that Lolita comes down with the Asiatic flu. I discuss this further in that section.

Ma carries within it the concept of the void, negative space. Implied is a demarcation, as a fence. MA is prominently placed in this scene. In the next scene, in the kitchen, a big box of ALL is display. All is rather its opposite, the idea of everything.

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BREAKFAST WITH THE DIVINE EDGAR

137 CU Humbert writing in a journal. 36:46

Fade in from black, Humbert writing with a nib fountain pen (reminding of a quill).

HUMBERT: What drives me insane is the two-fold nature of this nymphet. Of every nymphet, perhaps.

138 MS Humbert writing in a journal. (36:53)

HUMBERT: This mixture in my Lolita of tender, dreamy, childishness, and a kind of eerie vulgarity.

139 MS Charlotte cooking breakfast. (37:01)

HUMBERT (voice over): I know it is madness to keep this journal, but it gives me a strange thrill to do so. And only a loving wife could decipher my microscopic script.

The camera zooms out as Charlotte advances to the table, where Lolita sits with her cereal, to place eggs on a plate for Humbert.

As I've noted above, in the section where I discuss the concept of Ma, we have its opposite expressed in the "all" displayed on the box of detergent that is as prominently displayed as the Ma book.

CHARLOTTE: Miss, in this house we don't eat with the table on the el...with the elbows on the tables!

She pulls Lolita's elbow off the table. Lolita is pouring sugar on her cereal.

CHARLOTTE: Must you pamper your pimples?!

She takes the sugar from her and puts it on Humbert's tray.

LOLITA: Do you mind if I eat? I've got to meet Mona.

CHARLOTTE: Oh, this morning you have to meet Mona. Last night...first, you wash every dish then you go upstairs and you make your bed and you clean up your room. I am not picking up after you today, miss!

140 MCU Lolita (37:45)

CHARLOTTE: Or any day!

141 MS Charlotte enters the front hall from the kitchen, carrying the tray. (37:48)

The phone rings. As she answers the phone, Lolita rushes for it.

CHARLOTTE (answering): Hello?! Excuse me.

LOLITA: Is it Kenny?

CHARLOTTE: No. Just a minute. Jean, uh, just a second. Take this tray up to Professor Humbert, and do not disturb him. Yes ma'am.

LOLITA: Yes, ma'am!

CHARLOTTE: Jean, I'm very glad you called.

The camera pans up away from Charlotte to follow Lolita up the stairs as she snacks on Humbert's bacon.

CHARLOTTE: Yes? Mona? What time? Well, I'm very glad you called me, Jean. Well, there's something very important we both have to talk about. That's a good idea. I'd rather not discuss...

142 MS Humbert writing at his desk. (38:35)

HUMBERT: Come in.

He turns the journal over to blot it. As Lolita brings in his tray he slips the journal in a drawer.

We may notice the big sugar bowl is gone.

HUMBERT: Thank you, very much. Good morning.

143 CU Humbert shutting away the journal. (38:45)

LOLITA: Good morning.

NOTE: Thanks to David" for noting that "we see 'Europe' by Thomas Pickles in Humbert's desk drawer". Appreciate the info.

144 MS Humbert and Lolita. (38:50)

He locks the drawer and slips the key in the next drawer. Lolita continues eating his breakfast, taking his toast.

LOLITA: Don't tell mom but I ate all your bacon.

HUMBERT: You have a very long face today.

LOLITA: Oh, yeah? (She makes a face behind his back.) What were you writing?

HUMBERT: I was writing an uhm poem.

LOLITA: Oh, yeah? What's it about? (She tries the locked drawer.)

HUMBERT: It's about people.

LOLITA: That's a novel subject. You know, it's funny, it sort of looked like a diary when I came in.

HUMBERT: I always write my poems in a diary. It's one of my little idioysyncracies.

LOLITA: Afraid someone's going to steal your ideas and sell them to Hollywood, huh?

HUMBERT: Perhaps. Would you like me to read you some poetry?

LOLITA: Sure, why not?

HUMBERT: This is my favorite poet. (Opens a book and begins to read.) It was...

LOLITA: Which poet?

HUMBERT: The divine Edgar.

LOLITA: Who was the divine Edgar? Edgar who?

HUMBERT: Edgar Allen Poe, of course.

"It was night in the lonesome October
Of my most immemorial year."

Notice how he emphasizes this word.

"It was hard by the dim lake of Auber
In the misty mid region of Weir."

You see, he takes a word like "dim" in one line and twists it? You see? And it comes back as "mid region of Weir".

LOLITA: "Mid region" and twists it to "dim". That's pretty good, pretty clever.

HUMBERT: "Thus I pacified Psyche and kissed her
And conquered her scruples and gloom
And we passed to the end of the vista
But were stopped by the door of a tomb
And I said, 'What is written, sweet sister?'
She replied, 'Ulalume, Ulalume'."

145 CU Lolita. (40:41)

LOLITA: Well, I think it's a little corny, to tell you the truth.

HUMBERT: Oh. What do you object to?

LOLITA: Well, the "vista-sista", that's like, "Lolita-sweeta".