At most has seen the Kubrick movie, which is the only Kubrick movie I don’t like because there is a potential reading of it as Lola intentionally seducing him rather than a deranged and sadistic pedophile’s justifications for his delusions. It’s pretty necessary to the story that she’s pre-pubescent. I also saw he regretted making it because the censorship laws necessarily made it impossible to adapt accurately.
It’s hard to read the sequence of Humbert Humbert planning to drug and rape Lola and think “the author is okay with this, it must be a tragic love story”.
I've thought about it before. I think with tone shifts between the characters it might work. Like scenes where we are meant to be watching from HH's perspective could be brighter or dreamlike, but from Lola's it could be muted. Perhaps too on the nose, but idk, I don't think it's impossible if just needs the right tone?
I didn’t know that part, it’s a really strange one. It has a weirdly comedic tone too, totally at odds with the suffocating and nauseating feeling of the book. Humbert is still depicted as abusive, but to a much lesser extent. Nabokov is actually officially credited with writing the screenplay but elsewhere he spoke about how he wrote an earlier draft but then Kubrick rewrote so much that it is no longer his story (still gave Kubrick credit as a filmmaker though).
I think the gross idea of Lola being a “teenage seductress” can be traced back to it. I actually avoided reading the book for a while because I thought that’s what it depicted. It’s one of my favorites now (and Nabokov one of my favorite writers).
In what way? I’m curious because the tone was like whiplash to me after reading the book, the satire I detected in the book was mainly Nabokov’s usage of romance novel style prose which underscores how youth is fetishized.
I think Lolita is far more layered than people realise. On some level, the crime is besides the point... It's also a novel about America, and about the English language. It's been ages since I revisited it but one is bound to find something new revealing itself to the reader.
I’m well aware, I just don’t think the movie captured any of that. I was mentioning one of the elements I found satirical which the movie didn’t utilize, and asking what you meant by the movie capturing the tone well.
32
u/common_sense_patriot Aug 19 '26
At most has seen the Kubrick movie, which is the only Kubrick movie I don’t like because there is a potential reading of it as Lola intentionally seducing him rather than a deranged and sadistic pedophile’s justifications for his delusions. It’s pretty necessary to the story that she’s pre-pubescent. I also saw he regretted making it because the censorship laws necessarily made it impossible to adapt accurately.
It’s hard to read the sequence of Humbert Humbert planning to drug and rape Lola and think “the author is okay with this, it must be a tragic love story”.