Introduction Archive |
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It is true: in one week's time you'll be able to watch the new film version of Lolita on the squared screen of your living room boobtube. But what, really, is the point? The first time Lolita was made into a film, the French promotion poster challenged, How could they dare make a film of Lolita?, but perhaps not even the French realized that Kubrick was foolhardy not so much for depicting pedophilia on celluloid as for attempting to render, in the lipogrammatic language of the cinema, the coral reef beauty and complexity of Nabokov's idiom. He enlisted Nabakov's help with the script, but still good fucking luck! The world has known few stylists such as Nabokov, and few characters as dependent as Humbert Humbert on the verbal alacrity of their makers. Humbert's rarified discourse and aesthete's discernment twist the very knife of perversion. He is all the more compelling, and thus all the more monstrous, because he employs the language of an oenophile to describe the decanting of a particularly immature vintage. To me the scandal -- the actual crime -- of Lolita is our need to render visual the nuanced eroticism of a consummately bookish book. Every shift in the technological age from the mind to the eye involves a rewriting of our visceral response. Watching Lolita, we will feel pleasure's feather duster, but only passively -- forced, like Alex in Clockwork Orange, to ogle and be aroused, even if it's disturbing. With the book Lolita, however, we remain active, complicit, constructing images from our own repertoire of fantasy props. As such, we have no choice but to take responsibility for our engagement. Yet this engagement should not only be troubled and troubling, but instructive. For if we always give in to the easy fix of visual stimuli, our sensual minds, like any muscle left unexercised, will atrophy. I thus argue for the written Lolita, as I would argue for erotic reading in general, as part of a sexual fitness regimen. It's guaranteed to incite a few cartwheels in the brainstem. From Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov |
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