Filming Humbert's pedophilia

The biggest obstacle to portraying Humbert's pedophilia on screen, it seems to me, is the character of Lolita. If a girl of the right age were chosen for the role--a girl of eleven or twelve--very few of us could bear to watch the movie. Imagine, for example, the Natalie Portman of LEON: THE PROFESSIONAL, the Brooke Shields of PRETTY BABY, or the Tatum O'Neal of PAPER MOON going through those famous--and, in the written version, hilarious--contortions on Humbert's lap or selling him sex for quarters. That would be a dark movie indeed, with Humbert's monstrousness impossible to disguise or mitigate (one shocking picture easily blowing away a thousand lovely words). But with older girls in the role--Sue Lyon or Dominique Swain--the question of pedophilia is easily got around, or could not easily be brought up. The plain truth is that you don't have to be a depraved predator to be attracted to girls who look like Lyon or Swain. If you chased after one, you'd be considered a pathetic fool, no doubt (unless, of course, you were a teenager yourself), and a potential criminal under the law, but hardly--and certainly not necessarily--a pedophile.

The same point was put very well by Justine Brown when she said of Sue Lyon's Lolita: "Of course, that fully formed, lush blond teeny-bopper -- a girl any red-blooded man would admire -- had nothing in common with the radiant, coltish, brown-haired child who caught Humbert's eye." (Brown, "Lusting after 'Lolita,'" Salon, July 31,1998.) What I'm saying is that until that child, and not some socially acceptable body double, is put on screen opposite the Humbert character, you may very well have a funny/sad story (Kubrick) or a sad beautiful story (Lyne), but what you won't have is LOLITA.

PRETTY BABY is an edgy movie in its own right--a good deal edgier than either version of LOLITA, precisely because an actual little girl is involved, and also because the photographer who takes Violet in is depicted as a decent person despite the fact that he has sex with her--but it doesn't raise the same alarms that an accurate filming of LOLITA would raise. One of Malle's earlier movies, MURMURS OF THE HEART, is edgier still in daring to suggest that a bit of mother-son incest might in some cases be a good thing. In LEON, a twelve-year-old Madonna-cloned waif becomes dependent upon and then actively pursues the man who has become her protector--a man who also happens to be a professional killer. If Leon (a very decent man indeed, at least in his step-fatherly capacity) had let Mathilda seduce him, and even if they had gone off to live happily ever after, the movie would no doubt have been banned. But it's all right, apparently, if he takes her on jobs and teaches her to kill. (A good part of Mathilda's time is spent cleaning, and otherwise handling, Leon's guns. As either Freud or Nabokov might have said, a gun is sometimes only a cigar.)

For a fascinating and terribly depressing account of real-life pedophilia in action, have a look at the attached story from the Los Angeles Times. The relevance of this to LOLITA is that although Humbert is not a denizen of the world described in the Times article--he is capable, for all his faults, of real tenderness and perhaps of morally significant remorse--this is precisely the world in which Quilty is most at home. Part of the genius of the novel is to distinguish between these two men, and the worlds they inhabit, even while suggesting how close they are to being two of a kind. It is a further part of the genius of the book that, of the two men, Lolita herself (even children, as the novel so wonderfully well reminds us, have minds, wills, and dark desires of their own) vastly prefers the worst of them. It is he who breaks her heart, and not merely her life. Such complexity--and the complexity of PRETTY BABY and of LEON--is perhaps part of what Kellie Dawson is getting at in her dissertation. It is a complexity that we as readers and viewers and writers can, and should, appreciate to the fullest. In Sgt. Gillespie's world, by contrast, such considerations might well be an energy-sapping indulgence. And it's to Sgt. Gillespie that even the most sophisticated readers (or psychologists, for that matter) would gratefully turn if their own real child fell into the hands of a real live monster.

P.S. Justine Brown's brief memoir is surely one of the best things ever written about LOLITA. What she says, for instance, about the impact of the book on one bright little girl many years ago, is highly relevant to a discussion of the recent essay by Steven Mintz. For those who haven't read Brown's piece, here's the URL: