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Lolita
Directed by Adrian Lyne
Starring Jeremy Irons, Dominique Swain
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Critic Pauline Kael began her review of Stanley Kubrick's 1962 Lolita noting that the ads for that film read "How Did They Ever Make a Film of Lolita For People Over 18 Years Old." Of course, as Kael points out, those were two distinct sentences. But the cultural shock Lolita caused in 1962 was duplicated this year when British director Adrian Lynn tried to release his new film version of Vladimir Nabokov's novel. Lynn discovered that because it dealt with what's now called "pedophilia"-- older man-of-the-world and a 12-year-old girl-- and contained some subdued, erotically-suggestive scenes, he could not find a distributor. Now, after almost a year-and-a-half of shopping the film around, it has made a dual premiere both on Showtime TV (which bought rights to it) and in art theaters. The question still is "How did they make a film out of Lolita?"-- only this time, for American audiences.

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Lynn's Lolita is perfectly competent, visually gorgeous, and highly respectful of Nabokov's writing. Kubrick's 1962 movie had a host of problems-- the main one being that Sue Lyons in the eponymous role looked not 12, but a more matronly 18 (she was in fact 15 at the time).

Lynn's version is a technically more faithful adaptation-- Stephen Schriff's screenplay captures the book's romance with the kitsch and boredom of American culture, as well as plot complications that Kubrick's film glossed over. But too often, Lynn misses the antic and playful aspects of the novel. And while Jeremy Irons' Humbert Humbert has dignity and a profound sense of desire and loss missing from the first film, these very qualities de-center Lynn's movie, making us respect it more but like it less.

While Pauline Kael was onto something with her deconstruction of the 1962 film's ad campaign, the real question should have been-- and should be now-- "How did they ever make a film of Lolita for an audience-- and a culture-- that cannot deal honestly with sexual relationships between adults and children?" Nabokov's novel-- written in 1955 and published in the US three years later-- was an unprecedented combination of high literary style, intellectual verbal play, social commentary, and sex. The book's defenders always took Nabokov's own line and claimed that it was a highly moral tale of a man grappling with unholy desire. But even at the time this seemed an evasion.

As a novel, Lolita is many things, but at its core is an examination of the sexual desires and needs of both adults and children. But both films miss out on the novel's insightful sexual shenanigans. Kubrick-- always at heart a satirist-- turned his movie into a delicious pan of US culture. Director Lynn, always at heart an arty sentimentalist, cannot help but focus on the beauty of thwarted sexual longing. This makes perfect sense-- how sophisticated in the 1950s to turn threatening sexual material into satire, and how obvious in the late 1990s to turn this same material into sentiment.

What Lolita-- the novel-- does so well (and this was why it was banned for a time in France, parts of the US, and in Great Britain) is to force us to think about what it means that children have sexual feelings and desires that may be focused on adults. Nabokov was no sentimentalist-- Lolita actually extorts money from her lover/stepfather and has little compunction in leaving him for someone more interesting. In many ways, Lolita is far more savvy and sophisticated about sexual politics than her adult companions. But Nabokov understood the complexity of intergenerational sexual desire in ways especially threatening to us now.

Lolita the novel and Lolita the 1962 film were less challenging to their respective audiences than Adrian Lynn's film is today. While Lynn's version is more sexually explicit-- although nothing by current standards of adult/adult sexuality in films-- the outcry against it would have been inconceivable in 1962. Today the very discussion of adult-child sexuality and sexual relations is so heightened and antagonistic that rational discourse is nearly impossible. Major Hollywood distributors didn't touch the movie because US "kiddy porn" laws are so loosely written that Lynn's tame film could have fallen prey to prosecution. Various right-wing and Christian-right groups also threatened boycotts.

The demonization of any sexual activity between adults and children (and to some degree of children's sexuality in itself) is so comprehensive that the topic has become undiscussible. From the draconian (and unconstitutional) "Megan's Laws" to a wholesale attack on individuals and art with broadly sweeping "kiddy porn" statutes, to organized sting-operations to "catch" Internet users, the attack on intergenerational sex has produced a social and political culture far more repressive than 30 years ago. Is it any wonder that Adrian Lynn's film avoids the harder issues raised by Nabokov's novel? How did they ever make a film out of Lolita in 1998?

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com