My Year of Flops (31 page)

I don't want to dissuade anyone from reading Tom Robbins. By all means, read Tom Robbins, young person, especially if you think it will help you get laid. Live. Love. Dream impractical dreams. Set out on a spiritual and intellectual journey of self-discovery with folks like Tom Robbins as your guides and gurus, even if you'll probably wind up with a mortgage, a drinking problem, a bad back, and a lifetime of regrets. (Man, I feel like I'm delivering the world's most depressing graduation speech here.) Don't let me kill your youthful idealism and curiosity. Life will do that for you soon enough.

Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success?
Failure

How Do You Solve A Problem Like Lolita?
Book-Exclusive Case File: Lolita

Rereading
Lolita
for this Case File was like getting a chummy letter from an old friend. That might seem like an odd sentiment, considering that
Lolita
takes place largely in the psyche of a pedophile, alcoholic, and murderer. But revisiting
Lolita,
I discovered anew how much I like Humbert Humbert.

What's not to like, beyond murder, statutory rape, snobbery, deceit, sham marriage, sinister calculation, kidnapping, lying, and pedophilia? What I responded to was not Humbert's deplorable morals but rather a voice that is erudite, brutal, self-lacerating, viciously funny, sad, perversely
wise, and oftentimes just plain perverse. Above all, Humbert speaks to us in a voice that is so brazenly modern that the book might as well have been written tomorrow.

More than half a century later,
Lolita
doesn't feel like a period piece. Vladimir Nabokov is still the smartest guy in the room, a man who perfected a highly evolved form of snark decades before “snark” became a nauseating buzzword. The world Humbert describes with such delicious disgust is recognizably our own, a naughty pop realm of motels and billboards, highways and ubiquitous advertising where the emptiness of pop culture assaults us from every direction in the form of clamorous pop songs, B-movies, and glossy magazines adorned with this week's reigning pretty boy.

It's a mad world filtered through the myopic prism of a madman. Humbert Humbert is the ultimate unreliable narrator. While professing to reveal all, he tilts everything in his favor.
Lolita
inhabits a moral universe so corrupt that it all but absolves its simultaneously self-deprecating and self-serving narrator of his mortal sins. Humbert presents himself not as a wolf in a henhouse, but rather as a wolf surrounded at all sides by mega-werewolves and figures beyond even H. P. Lovecraft's imagination.

So you see, ladies and gentlemen of the novel's imaginary jury, Humbert is ultimately blameless. It was that devilish minx Dolores Haze who seduced him. He was powerless before her nubile charms. He was likewise blameless in the unfortunate death, deceit, and betrayal of her mother. Surely a woman that pretentious, deluded, and worst of all gauche deserved to die. Actually, being run over by an errant automobile in the prime of her handsome womanhood was too good for such a monster of banality.

Humbert isn't even the worst pedophile in
Lolita.
That dubious honor belongs to Claire Quilty, shape-shifter, intellectual, appreciator/defiler of truth and beauty, sexual adventurer, orgy enthusiast, and child pornographer. Compared to his sinister shadow self, Humbert is a pussycat. Humbert ultimately isn't even to blame for his sexual attraction to preadolescent girls. Or rather that's what Humbert
would have you believe. There are two big problems with Humbert's account: He's mad as a hatter, and he's lying.

Having written a memoir, I can attest that narrators have entirely too much power. The people I write about in
The Big Rewind: A Memoir Brought To You By Pop Culture
don't get the back half of my book to tell their version of the events chronicled within. It isn't
Rashomon.
It isn't a democracy, or a message board where the ghosts of my past can confront me. The reader is at my mercy. It's my version of the tale they're buying.

In the same vein, we see the tragicomic world of Humbert Humbert solely through his eyes. He seduces us with his wit, intellect, eloquence, and cracked romanticism. He renders us complicit in his crimes. This charming devil's greatest trick is not convincing the world that he doesn't exist, but rather that he's really not that bad, that it's the world that's mad and cruel, not him. Humbert may be a victim, but he's also a victimizer. Only in his own mind is he equal parts predator and prey.

“How did they ever make a movie of
Lolita
?” famously teased the tagline for Stanley Kubrick's deeply flawed, deeply compelling 1962 adaptation of Nabokov's masterpiece. It refers, of course, to the thorny problem of trying to smuggle an adaptation of a book about a man's passionate affair with a 12-year-old temptress past the puritanical busybodies of the early 1960s.

But it also speaks to an even larger problem facing filmmakers hoping to do right by Nabokov: So much of the book's brilliance is fundamentally unfilmable. It's rooted less in film-friendly fodder-like dialogue and plot than in the exquisite nastiness of Humbert's narration, in the unspeakably cruel, viciously funny little character studies of the sad souls who populate his tawdry tale. Humbert is like the world's meanest, funniest sociologist, casting a cold, judgmental eye toward the American booboisie in their natural habitat. He takes in their bizarre customs, laughable pretensions, shameless perversions, and pathetic delusions with visceral disgust. He's equally ruthless with himself. We see the world through Humbert's eyes as a realm of
unspeakable beauty and unrelenting horror. He gets under our skin. We become one with Humbert.

Kubrick's film captures the dark comedy and scathing satire of Nabokov's novel while draining it of sex. Part of this is attributable to the times; had Kubrick filmed a doggedly faithful, literal adaptation, his film would have been banned in every country, and he'd be sent away as a child pornographer and moral degenerate.

Kubrick felt
Lolita
dragged after Humbert and his Lolita consummate their strange, cursed union, so he essentially skips directly from the hell of Humbert being around Lo without being able to consummate their strange bond to the torment of being at the mercy of a petulant, bratty lover who can destroy his life with a few words to a teacher or a policeman. He doesn't allow our antihero even a few moments of carnal heaven in between. In a 1969 interview with Joseph Gelmis, Kubrick said he bitterly regretted not being able to do justice to the erotic elements of the novel; he also reflected that he'd never have made the movie if he'd known the kind of restrictions censors would impose on his work.

While Kubrick gives us an understandably sexless
Lolita,
there's also a lot about it he gets right, beginning with the casting. Few actors convey inner torment like James Mason. In the 1956 Nicholas Ray masterpiece
Bigger Than Life,
Mason plunges deep into a moral abyss as a man driven so megalomaniacal by cortisone and the all-American lust for success that he's willing, even eager, to murder his son to make a point. So playing a man who lives to fuck little girls is a cakewalk by comparison.

The supporting roles are cast with equal aplomb. Shelley Winters engages in brilliant self-parody as a tragically tacky housewife convinced she's an intellectual. In Nabokov's brilliant turn of phrase, she's a “handsome woman” who represents to Humbert the infinite horrors, physical (womanly hips, full breasts, and wrinkled, sagging skin) and psychological, of the adult woman.

The casting of Peter Sellers proved even more inspired. Beefing up the Claire Quilty role remains the only way either Kubrick's film or the
1997 adaptation improved on the source material. In the book, Quilty functions as a ghost, a phantom whose presence is felt throughout but whose actual appearances are sporadic. He's Humbert's shadow self, a double who trumps him in every sense. Humbert writes and teaches about art; Quilty creates it. Humbert must pay for Lo's body; she willingly gives Quilty her heart. Quilty even tops Humbert in perversions; where Humbert is content with a single nymphet, Quilty needs to film a whole gaggle of children fornicating in novel formations in order to get it up. He even manages to die a more pathetic death than Humbert.

In many ways, Sellers seems to be playing himself, a sexually tormented chameleon uncomfortable in his own skin and happy only when adopting various masks. Just as there seems to have been no “real” Peter Sellers, Quilty is such a creature of the theater that he seems to exist only while pretending to be somebody else. When Humbert tries to get him to confess and atone for his sins at the end of the book—acting as a sublimely hypocritical priest/executioner—the best Quilty can muster is a bad vaudeville routine and a slapstick chase around his haunted mansion.

Where Kubrick was cursed by being able to show too little, Adrien Lyne, in his well-intentioned but hopelessly misguided 1997 adaptation, is cursed by being able to show too much. Lyne lingers over the erotic aspects of the book to such an extent he misses everything else. But his film does have one huge advantage over Kubrick's version in Dominique Swain's transcendent Lo, the daughter of Melanie Griffith's poignantly pathetic Charlotte Haze. Where Sue Lyon played Lo as a bleached-blond 25-year-old sexpot in the body of an adolescent, Swain plays her as a woman trapped in the purgatory between girlhood and adulthood. She's the Lo of Nabokov's novel, a reddish, coltish eternal ingenue with impossibly long limbs and a precocious seductiveness borrowed from teenybopper magazines and the popcorn movies she devours voraciously.

She's simultaneously brazenly sexual and disconcertingly girlish, as when she dances to an inane ditty with unself-conscious abandon.
Swain's fearless performance alone gives the film a transgressive sexual charge only hinted at in Kubrick's version. It also made the film a prohibitively tricky proposition for American studios and a minor cause célèbre for a handful of prominent intellectuals—and also Erica Jong.

A 1998 piece by Jong in the
New York Observer
maps out the case for Lyne's
Lolita
in the shrillest, most hyperbolic terms imaginable, positing the film's inability to find theatrical distribution as yet another sad case of a serious European artist (in this case, the man behind
Flashdance
and
Indecent Proposal
) trying to bring great art to the masses and being confronted at every turn by the monkey-like screeching of puritans convinced the film was a ringing endorsement of pedophilia. In Jong's fevered imagination, Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg should take to the streets to protest what she describes as the film's “de facto censorship” at the hands of cowardly studios.

Is there an element of truth in Jong's rant? Perhaps. In addition to being residents of the greatest country ever (USA! USA! USA!), we Americans tend to be a little on the puritanical/hypocritical side where sex is concerned, especially when it comes to the young people. It's entirely possible that Joe and Jane America would blanch at paying bloated ticket prices to see a sexy film about a pedophile in a theater where they could easily be spotted by their pastor, grandmother, third-grade teacher, and Bible group. It's also likely that studios took a look at what Jong describes as a “$58 million art movie” and thought, to borrow the title of an early George Jones single, “There's no money in this deal.” American studios would release sex fights between toddlers if they thought it would fatten their coffers.

Lyne brandished his supposed fidelity to Nabokov's novel as a sword of righteousness in his battles with would-be censors and critics. Yet he managed to preserve much of the book's text while completely missing its spirit. This is evident from the very first image of Jeremy Irons' Humbert Humbert swerving drunkenly in a giant old
boat of a car en route to his showdown with Frank Langella's Claire Quilty. Irons purrs narration from the book, caressing each word as he lingers fetishistically on his memories of Lo. Words that ooze irony in the novel are uttered with hushed, breathy romanticism. Apparently no one told Lyne that
Lolita
is a comedy.