The 2023 Classic Literature on Film Blogathon: Examining Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita (1962)

Image source: Derek Winnert

This post is for the 2023 Classic Literature on Film Blogathon at Silver Screen Classics. Check out the link for more posts.

(AUTHOR’S NOTE: Lolita deals with grooming and childhood sexual abuse, so proceed with caution if any of that is especially sensitive for you.)

Of the thirteen features Stanley Kubrick put out during his near-fifty-year career, he was only ever tempted to remake one: his 1962 adaptation of Valdmir Nabokov’s 1955 novel Lolita. Though a modest financial success, the moral straightjacket imposed by the tag team of the Production Code and the Catholic Legion of Decency prevented Kubrick from infusing the story with what he felt was the right amount of frankness. In the 1970s, there was talk of Kubrick remaking the movie with Tatum O’Neal, but the project died. Nabokov’s book would not see the big screen again until Fatal Attraction director Adrian Lyne released his own adaptation in 1997. Fans of the novel tend to lean more towards Lyne’s more faithful to the letter version, consigning Kubrick’s older, quainter movie to the “failure” bin. Kubrick probably would not have argued with that.

But is it a failure?

For a control freak like Kubrick, it was a failure because the finished product didn’t live up to his vision. For Nabokovites, it is a failure because it barely resembles the novel and certainly does not reflect what makes Lolita a masterpiece of literature. I cannot argue with either of these sentiments, though I do dispute their unanimous conclusion. Kubrick’s Lolita is certainly not like the book nor is it the film an unfettered Kubrick would have shot. It isn’t a failure, but it is flawed.

A 1958 edition of Lolita. Image source: LitHub

(AUTHOR’S NOTE: I am about to spoil the entire book, which is kind of necessary to adequately discuss the movie. I’ll try to be as concise as possible. And I promise this is the last author’s note.)

So what is Lolita the book even about? Plotwise, it follows the misadventures of a thirty-something European expat who calls himself Humbert Humbert. He harbors an erotic obsession with girls between nine and fourteen, a demographic he calls “the nymphet.” Moving to the US, he boards in the northeastern household of Charlotte Haze, a pretentious widow with eyes only for Humbert. However, Humbert is only interested in Haze’s twelve-year-old daughter Dolores, who he nicknames Lolita.

Though repulsed by “the Haze woman,” he marries her to stay near Dolores. After Charlotte dies in a freak accident, Humbert kidnaps Dolores from summer camp, declines to tell her about her mother’s death, and plans on drugging and raping her at a hotel. His sedatives don’t take so he keeps his hands off, but in the morning, Dolores—who’s harbored a schoolgirl crush on him and recently lost her virginity to a boy at camp— makes an advance on Humbert which he eagerly takes advantage of, any guilt assuaged with the knowledge that he is not “her first lover.”

From then on, he sexually abuses Dolores during an extended road trip, using threats of juvenile detention and his newfound status as her guardian to keep her under his control. The abuse continues when Humbert settles down and enrolls Dolores in a fancy private school. Eventually, Dolores manipulates Humbert in turn, offering sexual favors in exchange for allowance money and then escaping with a mysterious man who’d been trailing them during their travels. Dismayed, Humbert now lives with one hope: to kill the mysterious stranger who took Dolores from him, a man he learns is celebrity playwright and pedo extraordinaire Clare Quilty, whose presence was hinted throughout the book. Their confrontation in Quilty’s mansion ends the story.

Yeah, imagine a Hollywood that can barely handle married adults in twin beds taking on this material? Admittedly, by the late 1950s, more movies were nudging at the long-entrenched Code, such as 1959’s controversial court room drama Anatomy of a Murder, but James Stewart mentioning “panties” during a rape trial was one thing— a grown man sexually enslaving his underage stepdaughter was another.

Combing through IMDB reviews, I’ve seen some people argue Kubrick cut out Humbert’s sexual motives entirely and that he only harbors the sentiments of a controlling father. I get that art is subjective but— yeah, no. Mason makes it pretty clear that Humbert has the hots for Dolores, from his gaping at her shapely hips gyrating within a hula hoop to his flustered reactions to her surprise visits to his study. And while one might have to be eloquent in “Old Movie-ese” to get it, Humbert and Dolores do have sex in the hotel room, just as in the novel. Dolores suggestively describes her “camp games” in Humbert’s ear before we get a fadeout. To make it even clearer, Humbert dresses in dark colors from that point onward, a visual symbol of his moral point of no return.

What isn’t clear is the physical extent of their subsequent relationship. The literary Humbert uses Dolores for sex on a daily basis. Dolores resents the arrangement, even as she learns to better manipulate Humbert with her body. In one heartbreaking scene, she even breaks off a friendship when she suspects Humbert has unwholesome attentions on a fellow “nymphet” classmate. The movie cuts this darker material out, making Humbert out to be more of a sadsack, jealous father figure once he’s initially satisfied his unholy desire. The most intimate they get onscreen is when Humbert gives Dolores a pedicure.

Of course, Lolita’s champions will tell you the sensationalist plot isn’t the point. It’s the way Nabokov tells the story that makes the novel remarkable. Written in the form of a first-person criminal confession, Lolita is a puzzle born of unreliable narration. A prologue penned by a fictional psychiatrist makes this clear upfront: Humbert is a liar, pervert, and killer. He’s willing to say anything to make himself seem reasonable and romantic. Just saying, “I want to have sex with a twelve-year-old” is far too crass, so instead Humbert goes off on tangents about how girls married as young as ten in ancient cultures, so his passion for a minor should also be okay. The prose is sheer ecstatic lyricism, making it easy to be carried away by Humbert’s word magic, but Nabokov sometimes allows reality to shine through the lies. The greatest example comes from his first sexual encounter with Dolores: Humbert claims he was seduced, while Dolores always refers to the event as rape.

The unreliable narrator is a difficult device to depict in cinema. The assumption that the camera doesn’t lie lingers. A movie can have voiceover that contradicts what you see onscreen (Kubrick’s own Barry Lyndon does this in a subtle way) or the director can withhold information, then reveal it later to make us reconsider what we’ve already seen (Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo is a classic example; Park Chan-wook ’s The Handmaiden is a modern one), but translating Nabokov’s strategy is a much trickier deal. However, neither screen version of Lolita even tries to emulate this crucial part of the book. Both Kubrick and Lyne take Humbert at his word, more or less, and this knocks out much of the source material’s complexity.

What Kubrick does do is undermine Humbert’s romanticized self-image. James Mason plays the character as a dewy-eyed buffoon, a continental stranger in a strange postwar America. He sees himself as an elegant gentleman scholar, a lovestruck Petrarch, and then a noirish knight-in-rusted-armor out to avenge Dolores’ honor and redeem himself. All of these idealized identities are undermined, either by the details of Mason’s understated comic performance or the reactions of the characters around him.

The interaction between Humbert and Quilty in the film’s prologue is a great example of this strategy. Kubrick chose to open the movie with the murder of Quilty, thus refocusing the narrative drive from “Will Humbert bed Dolores?” to “How did Humbert become a killer?” This not only gives the movie a fine hook, but it also gives us a taste of Humbert’s dynamic with the rest of the world. Humbert marches into Quilty’s ornate but dilapidated mansion, brandishing a gun and demanding Quilty look upon him with terror.

Played by Peter Sellers, the hungover and pajama-clad Quilty doesn’t give Humbert the satisfaction. He cracks jokes. He pulls ping pong balls from his sleeve like a conjurer at a kiddie party. He puts on funny voices when reading an accusatory letter Humbert penned especially for him. But Humbert is insistent and ends up shooting Quilty dead through a portrait of a young woman—one of the bullets hits her face, suggesting that Humbert’s actions throughout the story have not just led to murder, but have also harmed the girl he’s claiming to avenge by proxy. Overall, the prologue is a potent blend of silliness and dread—an apt foretaste of the film to come.

Like the book, Kubrick’s Lolita is a film of two halves. After the prologue, we shift into part one, which follows Humbert’s “romantic” (I cannot put enolugh quotes around that word) pursuit of Dolores. Noirish gloom gives way to bright lights and sunny Nelson Riddle muzak as we enter an American suburb right out of a 1950s sitcom. We are promptly introduced to Shelley Winters’ Charlotte and then, in the movie’s most iconic scene, Sue Lyon’s Dolores Haze.

Played by Lyon at age fourteen, this Dolores is more obviously pubescent than Nabokov’s “coltish” tomboy. From her first appearance, she is clearly aware of the effect of her body on Humbert, and seems more amused by it than anything. She’s old enough to be aware of sex and naive enough to see it as only a game. While prettier and less grubby than Nabokov’s literary nymphet, this Dolores wouldn’t strike a normal person as anything special beyond the surface: she’s lazy, mouthy, and petulant. She has no taste for literature, mocking Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry as “corny” and listening to mindless pop music while she suns herself. Regardless, Humbert sees her as his Nymphet Ideal, and so endeavors to fight tooth and nail to fulfill his illicit fantasy.

Though Mason is our protagonist, this entire section belongs to Shelly Winters, whose Charlotte is both grotesque and nuanced. I’d even argue the movie becomes half as entertaining after she gets bumped off. In her first appearance, clad in a leopard belt and waving about a cigarette holder while she mangles French, Charlotte makes an immediate impression. Her pursuit of Humbert is desperate in all its pathetic horniness, but Winters also lends pathos to her characterization. She married a much older man and became a mother at a young age. She loved her husband but he died, leaving her lonely and with a young child to raise on her own. Her pretentious posturing and pursuit of Humbert come off as a desperate attempt to regain the youth she lost to premature adult responsibilities. Well, that, and they reflect the all-American obsession with sex, beauty, and never aging.

That’s not Kubrick’s only jab at American culture either. The all-American setting is not populated by upstanding citizens but covert perverts hiding behind wholesome facades. Being the early 60s, Kubrick couldn’t show any nastiness outright, but that didn’t stop him from smuggling a lot past the censors. Gone are the book’s (honestly not even that descriptive) sex scenes, replaced with volleys of innuendo and suggestive imagery. Charlotte apologizes for a “soiled sock” littering her hallway and later entices Humbert to take a room with mentions of “cherry pies” and “late night snacks” while he ogles her bikini-clad daughter. Charlotte’s neighbors John and Jean both size Humbert up while chaperoning a school dance, then ask him if he wants to “swap partners,” assuring him they’re “broadminded.” Dolores has her sexual initiation at “Camp Climax.”

The most quietly audacious of these innuendos occurs when Humbert is trying to make love to a randy Charlotte in their marital bed. While Charlotte’s face is buried in Humbert’s neck, he stares at a bedside photograph of Dolores to arouse himself, only for Charlotte to dampen his mood by informing him Dolores will be sent directly from summer camp to boarding school. When a despondent Humbert stops the lovemaking session, Charlotte says, “Darling, you’ve gone away…” From her tone of voice, the “you” refers both to his attention and something more immediately tactile. And that’s the brilliant thing about the innuendos in this movie. They fly by so quickly that the censors probably didn’t catch all of them.

Kubrick also beefed up the Quilty character, with Peter Sellers making routine appearances throughout the two-and-a-half-hour runtime as a beatnik intellectual. Kubrick was enamored of Seller’s improvisatory abilities and so would let him cut loose during filming, much to the chagrin of some of the cast. What resulted is a performance people either find brilliantly manic or overbearing. While some of his improvised schtick does go on too long, I enjoy the protean elements of Sellers’ Quilty. Outside of his gothic mansion, he lends the mundane surroundings a surrealistic flair and reminds one of his three-role turn in 1964’s Dr. Strangelove. He comes off like a shapeshifter, taking on whatever persona will best suit him in the moment. In the first half, he makes his chronological introduction at the high school dance, where we learn he had a brief fling with Charlotte and, it is implied, is already wondering how best to seduce her daughter—a feat that might not be too hard considering that Dolores has a Quilty poster hanging up beside her bed, right alongside images of hunky movie stars and musicians. Quilty becomes the embodiment of Humbert’s darkest qualities, only he’s absolutely content and comfortable with his perversity. He fits right in with the debauched “elite” found in other Kubrick films, their monstrousness protected by their celebrity and wealth. You could easily imagine him cutting a rug at the mansion in Eyes Wide Shut.

So, what we have is a love square dominated by delusions and manipulations: Charlotte “loves” Humbert, who “loves” Dolores, who “loves” Quilty, who loves only his own pleasure. No one can really see the object of their love clearly and all four of them are awful to varying degrees. The dynamics of this square are fascinating—combined with the cultural satire and dirty jokes, the first half of Lolita is a subversive delight, a cynical story of romantic delusion and sexual hypocrisy in Smalltown, USA.

But all good things come to an end. The perverse sitcom vibes and the love square give the first half of the film an energy the latter lacks. The moment Charlotte dies and Humbert beds Dolores, it’s like Kubrick has no idea what to do. The road trip aspect from the book is never well-developed, probably because the film was shot in England largely on soundstages. Once Dolores starts going to school, the conflict loses urgency because the film doesn’t have the darker material of the book, where Humbert is more paranoid about being outed, and his treatment of Dolores is far more sordid. Even Sellers becomes more tiresome, particularly when he impersonates a German psychiatrist in a scene that goes on FOREVER.

That’s not to say there’s nothing of worth in the latter stretch. Lyon is still very good, her character becoming more calculating and resentful as Humbert tries to corral her. A common criticism of this film is that Humbert is made more palatable while Dolores is made out to be the real villain, but I think the movie is more complicated than that. Villain protagonists are common in Kubrick’s filmography—see Alex DeLarge (rapist, murderer, gang leader), Redmond Barry (conman, abusive stepfather, philandering husband), and Jack Torrance (abusive father, abusive husband, murderer, slayer of doors) for a few examples. The only thing that makes most of them “palatable” is that they’re entertaining to watch, though that’s not the same as the storyteller absolving them of their toxic behavior. If anything, Humbert comes off as the most foolish character in the story, with only Charlotte (who he ironically sees as “brainless”) for competition. As for Lyon’s Dolores, she lacks the open vulnerability we get in the novel, and she does always seem to be in control, but her final scene butts against that idea for me.

As in the book, when Humbert tracks down Dolores for the last time after she sends him a letter asking for money, she is seventeen, married to a war veteran, and pregnant. She was left adrift after Quilty used and abandoned her (in the book, it’s made clear he wanted her to appear in pornography; in the movie, Dolores uses the term “art films”). Despite Quilty’s abusive behavior, she still views him with rosy glasses as a “genius” and “the only man I was ever crazy about,” showing she’s just as deluded as Humbert or Charlotte when it comes to “love.”

Lyon is truly poignant. She comes off like a kid playing at being grown-up, a quality I’ve seen labeled as a flaw but which I think is appropriate given this girl is just seventeen. An astute viewer will notice she’s living an exaggerated version of what happened to her mother: she’s forced to adopt adult responsibilities way earlier than anyone should. The more you think about it, the sadder it is. She was sexualized by all the adults in her life, either because they saw her as a romantic rival (Charlotte) or because they saw her as sexual prey (Humbert and Quilty). Any interest she had in Humbert seems to come from wanting to get back at her mother for having an affair with Quilty. Unfortunately for her, Humbert was more than willing to take advantage of her emotional immaturity, as was Quilty. It doesn’t matter if she “wanted” any of it—the adults in the room could have said no.

Humbert is heartbroken by what’s become of his former ideal of nymphetry and claims he still “loves” her even if she is a touch too old for his taste, but Dolores is unsentimental in making it plain she never loved Humbert and just wants to live a normal life with her new husband. When he begs her to run away with him, Dolores assumes Humbert is asking for the old exchange of sexual favors for money. Distraught and guilt-stricken, Humbert gives her the money she asked for and leaves to hunt down Quilty, bringing the film full circle. The last image is the damaged portrait of the young lady obscuring the dead Quilty—a reminder of the ultimate cost of the competition between the dueling predators.

Kubrick’s Lolita is a shaggy monster of a film. It’s too long. It’s hampered by censorship problems. It loses steam halfway through. And yet, there’s just too much of the good and the interesting present for me to stamp the “Failure” label on it. In terms of entertainment, I much prefer it to the Lyne version, which for all its faithfulness and frankness is also dour and pedestrian in the usual 1990s Oscarbait mode. And as I said before, neither version actually mirrors what makes the book brilliant anyway, so at the very least Kubrick’s film is a mostly engaging satire, warts and all.

Sources:

BFI Film Classics: Lolita by Richard Corliss

Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov

Stanley Kubrick, Director: A Visual Analysis by Alexander Walker

“Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita– A Most Ambitious Fantasy” from https://plotandtheme.com/2017/04/30/stanley-kubricks-lolita-a-most-ambitious-fantasy/