How Do You Solve a Problem Like “Lolita”?
Thursday Farrar, Robert Sella, Caitlin Cohn in a staging of ‘Lolita, My Love’ in 2019 at the York Theatre. (Photos: Ben Strothmann)
by Ashley Griffin, Stage Directions
Trigger Warning: Discussions of sexual abuse (specifically of a minor), kidnapping, and assault.
In 1971 John Barry and Alan Jay Lerner (yes, of “My Fair Lady” and “Camelot” fame) opened a pre-Broadway new musical out of town in Philadelphia. A few months, and significant cast changes later, they opened out of town in Boston. The show never made it to Broadway and is considered one of Lerner’s great flops (and one of the great Broadway flops of all time). The show was called “Lolita, My Love” and was a musical adaptation of Nabokov’s 1955 novel “Lolita”.
It was quite a coup that they’d managed to get the rights to adapt the book at all. Nabokov notoriously refused many previous offers to adapt the novel, insisting that the distasteful plot was acceptable because it existed only in his head…to make a real twelve-year-old girl play the part, on stage night after night, “would be sinful and immoral”.
The show was unanimously panned, though Ken Mandelbaum and Frank Rich have found elements of the show worthy of praise. Mandelbaum contended that it is unlikely anyone could produce a better musical version of what is probably fundamentally impossible material. In 1982, a non-musical adaptation of “Lolita” by Edward Albee opened to negative reviews. Frank Rich compared Albee’s version to the musical and said that even the “flop musical version…got the scenery right.”
“How did they ever make a movie of ‘Lolita’?!” Was the famous tagline in the trailer for Stanley Kubrick’s infamous film adaptation of the book.
Guess what? They didn’t. None of them. Not the movies, not the musical…Not really.
You’ve probably heard of “Lolita” at some point even if you’re not familiar with the novel from which the word found its way into the cultural zeitgeist.
“She’s such a ‘Lolita’”
“Little Lolita”
When used colloquially “Lolita” has come to refer to a young girl who is a seductress. An underage female who is a little siren, advanced beyond her years, who seduces men older than her.
There are a lot of problems with that idea in general, but we’re going to unpack this a little at a time.
The term originated with the novel which, if you’re even vaguely familiar with it, you’ve probably heard referred to as “that banned book about a love story between a young girl and the older man she seduces.” Some people have raged against the book claiming it glorifies such a relationship, and abusers have long twisted the tale for their own ends.
There are infamous stories of abusers grooming their underage victims by giving them “Lolita” to read, claiming that it glorifies a love story similar to their own. Marilyn Manson wrote the song “Heart Shaped Glasses” as a not-so-veiled homage to “Lolita”, and starred his VERY young girlfriend at the time (Evan Rachel Wood) in a music video for the song. He literally put her in heart-shaped glasses (made famous by the Kubrick film, though they are nowhere in the book) and *allegedly* proceeded to actually r*pe and abuse her on the set. People say Nabokov must have been a pedophile himself to write such a book.
But this is a prime example of why it is so important to be personally familiar with the material and to read it critically - especially when you’re adapting it for the stage or film. “Lolita” is a brilliant case study of how an epic cultural game of telephone has distorted what this book is actually about.
I read the book for the first time after I graduated college. And do you know what my reaction was? Not “This book was written by an abuser” but “This book had to have been written by someone who was abused and was giving us a major warning about it.”
I related to Dolores Haze (the real name of the girl dubbed “Lolita” by her abuser). Not because she’d had a romantic relationship with an older man, not because she was flirty but because I saw in her a manifestation of some of the not great things I’ve experienced in my life.
Now, this isn’t a case of my happening to read my own interpretation into an artistic work. That can happen and personal interpretation is valid. But that’s not what was going on here.
Nabokov himself said “Lolita” was “not a love story” and that sexualizing young women was the opposite of his intention. He would be livid with how his story is thought of in the collective consciousness, and how it has been interpreted on screen and onstage. Check out Revelreads YouTube analysis which points out that Nabokov was in fact a victim of abuse himself and that he made it abundantly clear that Lolita was a CHILD, not a young woman (unlike how she, unfortunately, is often interpreted as)
I want an adaptation of “Lolita” that mirrors the experience I had when reading the book. Of feeling like abuse was being called out in a really interesting way. That could allow victims to feel seen. And it made me mad when I saw the adaptations of “Lolita” that exist and basically felt gaslit.
Because the principal adaptations of “Lolita” have been written by men (not that men couldn’t do a good adaptation of this book but, really? Not one woman working on a story about an abused girl?) and glamorize a pedophilic relationship. They blame Lolita and romanticize her abuser.
But from Dolores’s perspective (the accurate perspective)…this is a horror story.
I was going to do an in-depth breakdown of exactly what this “telephone” situation is – analyzing the book and the adaptations that sprang from it. But Youtuber Doki Doki Discourse just released a fantastic analysis of exactly that and I highly recommend you go check it out. I don’t want to retread what they’ve said – they did it brilliantly.
Doki Doki Discourse video on “Lolita”
However, I have gotten a lot of requests through the years, and especially recently, to talk about what my interpretation of “Lolita” would be if I were to adapt it into a film. So, though I am going to give a little backstory first, I want to offer up a new envisioning of “Lolita”. FYI there are two main cinematic adaptations of “Lolita”, the 1962 Stanley Kubrick film and the 1997 Adrian Lyne film.
For some clarity, I want to point out that, while the Kubrick film credits Nabokov as one of the screenwriters, that’s only a legal technicality. He had nothing to do with the filmed screenplay. Originally, Nabokov was approached about writing the script, and he did – a two-hundred-page version which Kubrick completely threw out, ignored, and did his own thing. So Nabokov’s original intention is not represented in either film version (or in any adaptation I’m familiar with, which includes a musical, a ballet, and some literary adaptations (such as “Lo’s Diary”) that completely miss the mark.)
The Backstory
So, what is “Lolita” actually about?
This is the plot in the simplest terms – what can be agreed on throughout all interpretations.
The story is principally set in America between 1947 and 1952. Our narrator is a man named Humbert Humbert who is obsessed with what he dubs “nymphets” – a specific type of girl between the ages of 9-14 who he calls “deadly demons” and sexual seductresses. He travels to a small town in New England and, looking for a place to board, is offered a room in the home of Charlotte Haze. Charlotte has a young daughter named Dolores and, upon seeing her, Humbert instantly decides to take the room. He becomes obsessed with Dolores (who he calls Lolita) even going so far as to marry Charlotte so he can stay near her.
One day, while Dolores is at summer camp, Charlotte discovers Humbert’s diary where he has blatantly described his obsession with Dolores and his hatred for Charlotte. Horrified, Charlotte confronts him and tells him she’s planning on sending letters warning her friends about Humbert, and that he will never get his hands on her daughter. While running away from Humbert to mail the letters she’s hit by a car and dies. Since Humbert is married to her, and is legally Dolores’s stepfather, this now means that he has sole custody of Dolores.
Humbert picks Dolores up from camp and takes her on a road trip. They begin a sexual relationship (Humbert says, “Reader, she seduced me,”) and eventually he tells her that her mother has died. When the school year starts he enrolls her at a girls school near where he is teaching and obsessively monitors what she does.
While at school, a famous playwright named Clare Quilty arrives to put up one of his plays with the girls at the school. After receiving pressure to allow Dolores to participate in the play he finally agrees. That summer Dolores suggests they go on another road trip, which they do, but this time Humbert is sure they are being followed by someone. One day Dolores falls ill and is taken to the hospital. Humbert goes back to the hotel when visiting hours are over, but the next morning when he returns to the hospital he finds out a “relative” has already come and checked Dolores out.
Humbert spends the next several years obsessively trying to figure out what happened to Dolores, with no luck. Finally one day he receives a letter from a now seventeen-year-old Dolores saying that she is married to a man named Dick, pregnant and desperately in need of some money. Humbert goes to see her and Dolores assumes any financial help will be contingent upon her sleeping with him. But instead, Humbert begs her to tell him where she went. She tells him she and Quilty (who it turns out she knew prior to the play) devised a plan to rescue her from Humbert… but it turned out Quilty was a pornographer and he planned on forcing Dolores to participate in his films…she ended up having to escape from Quilty. Humbert asks her to come back and be with him. She refuses. The last thing she says in his presence, when she turns down his offer, is to look at her pet and say “Say goodbye to my dad.”
Humbert gives her some money and leaves. He tracks down Quilty and kills him. At the end of the book, we find out that Dolores died in childbirth and Humbert was arrested. He writes his memoir in prison but dies soon after of heart failure.
Those are the facts that every version can agree on.
But there are a lot of important things that have been left out.
First of all, the book isn’t solely Humbert’s narration (only in the films do we only ever hear Humbert’s point of view…) The novel begins with a statement by the doctor who has been treating Humbert. He makes clear that this novel is being presented as a clinical case study of a deranged mind. He calls Humber “demented”, “horrible”, “a shining example of moral leprosy”, says that Humbert’s opinions are “ludicrous” and that he has committed “sins of diabolical cunning.” “He is abnormal.” He continues that “’Lolita’ should make all of us – parents, social workers, educators – apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world.”
Why is this so important? Because it sets us up to not believe everything that comes out of Humbert’s mouth. But in both film versions we never hear any of it. We are left to take Humbert’s words at face value. When he says that Lolita seduced him… other than what should be a common understanding of the fact that a child cannot seduce an adult (which, sadly, it isn’t always), we are forced to accept it as a truth of this story – we are given no reason to doubt Humber when, in fact, Nabokov wanted us to know that he is as unreliable a narrator as you can get.
There are significant plot points that have been flat out ignored/omitted or just changed. For example:
- A major plot point in the book is Humbert’s plan to drug Dolores so he can, well, you get the idea, with her unconscious body. To this end, he goes to a doctor and asks him to prescribe sleeping pills for his wife. He uses these on Charlotte only to test their strength, then gets the doctor to up the dose when he decides they’re not powerful enough. Once again, the purpose of this is to test them on Charlotte, then use them on Dolores (which he ultimately does, though they’re still not strong enough to keep her totally unconscious). In the film by Adrian Lyne these sleeping pills are only used so that Humbert can avoid sleeping with Charlotte.
- Quilty is not a huge character, nor is he comic relief. Stanley Kubrick cast Peter Sellers in the role and milked it to the hilt. Kubrick’s Quilty is foolish, charming and ever present. The fact that he’s a child pornographer is kept far in the background (some viewers may not realize it at all.)
- In the novel, Humbert is convinced to let Dolores participate in her school play because the school is worried about her socialization and development. In the Lyne film the school is not involved. Instead, Dolores seduces him into giving her permission (and raising her allowance.) In the book, Dolores only ever uses sexuality to manipulate Humbert by doing everything she can to withhold it… not by seducing him. After this school meeting Humbert wonders if he should marry the headmistress and then strangle her (one of several times he debates murdering someone – specifically a woman…)
- Humbert himself deliberately calls out the fact that he is an unreliable narrator. The thing that really sold me when reading the book is how, after sucking us in for a good amount of time, Humbert would suddenly make a comment like “well, actually, now that I think about it again, Lolita would cry constantly and try to lock herself in her room…” Um…excuse me? To my knowledge, none of those moments have ever been included in an adaptation. Here are some of my favorite examples:
“…her sobs in the night – every night, every night – the moment I feigned sleep.”
“…I was despicable and brutal, and torpid, and everything…and there were times when I knew how you felt, and it was hell to know it…”
“I recall certain moments, let us call them icebergs in paradise, when after having had my fill of her…I would gather her in my arms with, at last, a mute moan of human tenderness (…her grave gray eyes more vacant than ever – for all the world a little patient still in the confusion of a drug after a major operation)…all at once…lust would swell again – and “oh, no,” Lolita would say with a sigh to heaven…”
“At the hotel we had separate rooms, but in the middle of the night she came sobbing into mine, and we made it up very gently. You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.”
“Now, squirming and pleading with my own memory, I recall that on this and similar occasions, it was always my habit and method to ignore Lolita’s states of mind…”
And when an adaptation does reference a moment in the book that starts to peel back the layers of Humbert’s manipulation, they alter the delivery so that it only confirms Humbert’s point of view. For example, after Humbert sleeps with Dolores for the first time, he describes an exchange that happens in the car later that day. Dolores is in pain, accuses Humbert of “tearing something inside her” and asks to use a bathroom She says to him:
“You chump…You revolting creature. I was a daisy-fresh girl, and look what you’ve done to me. I ought to call the police and tell them you raped me.”
In the film, this line is spoken, but Dolores is smiling and laughing as she says it – implying that she’s just messing with Humbert and doesn’t really mean it.
Um…
- Lolita is not her real name. In the book, she is only called Lolita by Humbert when he is in bed with her. But in adaptations she is almost never referred to as Dolores or implied to have any identity outside of being Humbert’s plaything.
- And, possibly most important of all, Dolores has been deliberately aged up in the films. Sue Lyon who played the role in the Kubrick version was 14-15 while filming and 16 when the movie was released. Dominique Swain who played the part in Lyne’s adaptation was 15 when she was cast and 17 when the film was released. Now I want to point out that the Lolitas these girls played (assumed to be the same age as the actresses playing them) are still underage and everything that happens to the character is wrong in every way. But let’s not forget that in the novel Dolores is twelve years old. People do all sorts of mental gymnastics to justify how a seventeen-year-old might seduce a man in their forties (again, wrong in so many ways…) but let’s get real about the implication that a twelve-year-old girl thinks and acts in the way that Humbert implies Dolores does in the novel. It’s completely disturbing and there’s no way around Humbert being a despicable predator.
There is also a historical element to “Lolita”. There’s a great YouTube video that goes into this in more detail (check out The Real Lolita video by True Crime With Jenny) But it’s well known that when Nabokov was having trouble structuring “Lolita” he turned to a horrific true crime of the day (the kidnapping of Sally Horner) to hang his story on. He even references this case in the novel, with Humbert wondering if he’d done to Dolores what Frank La Salle did to Horner (spoiler alert: he did.)
Sally Horner was an eleven-year-old girl who was abducted by serial child molester Frank La Salle in 1948. Sally, trying to pledge to an exclusive girls club, was ordered to steal something from a local department store as a hazing ritual. La Salle saw her and, pretending to be an FBI agent, got her to come with him saying that because she’d broken the law he had to take her into custody, but would make sure she didn’t go to jail.
He ended up taking her on a sort of extended road trip, during which time he repeatedly sexually assaulted her all while enrolling her in school and pretending to be her father. It’s all there from the road trip to being set up at a new school to being followed by a suspicious party to a trip to the emergency room, etc. Sally even died a few years later, after being reunited with her mother, in a horrible car accident (in “Lolita”, Dolores dies shortly after the events of the story in childbirth).
But what’s even worse about the case, and is partially what Nabokov was likely responding to, was the amount of victim blaming Sally received (even from her own mother) once the real FBI rescued her. It would literally be like if when Elizabeth Smart was finally found and brought home the only thing the reporters could talk about was “Well, what was she wearing when that guy broke into her bedroom and kidnapped her?”
Everyone reading “Lolita” when it came out (certainly in the U.S.) would have known about the Sally Horner case and would have easily made the connection.
I’d also like to point out that part of Humbert’s definition of a “nymphet” is: a certain “demonic” young girl between the ages of nine and fourteen. Those ages are the “boundaries.” So…when they turn fifteen they just…stop being demonic? Do they choose to stop? Does a demon possess them between those ages and then just leave?
This definition in itself is evidence of Humbert being an unreliable narrator (and a pedophile). The truth of what he’s saying, however much he tries to disguise his inappropriate attraction as being “a force enacted on him by the young girl” is that…he’s just not sexually attracted to women. He’s only attracted to children. There is no arguing around that. And that’s on him. Not the girl. What, a girl just decides “not to tempt him anymore” once she turns fifteen?!
And, while we’re on the subject of this term, let’s dive in a little bit into what a “nymph” actually is. A nymph was originally a kind of ancient Greek demi-goddess. Usually tied to one physical location, and very connected with nature, nymphs were elemental spirits - not humans, but not gods. They often inspired intense “mad” (and accepted as very unhealthy) sexual desire, usually from men.
Becoming obsessed with a nymph was not a good thing – it was unhealthy, indicative of a complete loss of reasoning, and frequently violent. Pursuing a nymph did not end well, often for either party. Men sometimes died and, frequently, a nymph being pursued by a man would have to resort to turning herself into a tree (or something similar) to prevent an assault. A nymph is also the term for specific kinds of insects that don’t change much physically during their maturation. Nabokov would have been incredibly familiar with both of these associations as someone who studied entomology and, as Lola Sebastian said, probably wanted to explore the implications of this when applying the perspective Humbert has as a narrator. This is a man setting himself up for disaster by wanting to keep and possess (in every way) a stunted child.
So, back to the musical. The show starred thirteen-year-old Denise Nickerson (who had recently played Violet Beauregarde in “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory”). Reviews, as I said, were savage and the show closed before ever reaching the great white way. However some believe the show was actually a masterpiece, but that the subject matter was just too dark for a musical adaptation.
The York Theatre Company did a semi-revival of the work (as part of a celebration of Lerner’s work they explored several of his “flop” shows) and two things this particular production did really right were adding a framing device of talking to a doctor (yay!) and casting Caitlin Cohn as Lolita – Ms. Cohn honestly looks twelve onstage, but was really in her twenties when she played the role. This, unfortunately, is not something that works to a great effect on camera. The director of the York production, Emily Maltby, had an interesting comment in an interview about the piece that sums up the essence of the problem with adaptations of “Lolita”:
“If you put a man center stage in beautiful lighting and he sings a beautiful aria to a love interest, that’s a sacred space and we as an audience are conditioned to believe that a.) We’re supposed to root for that character and b.) What he’s saying is true.”
Though even in this revival the character of Dolores is aged up to fourteen and we don’t get much of her perspective on any of the events. Dolores, the title character, gets a grand total of two solo numbers in the show (three if you count a reprise), one of which is simply her singing about not wanting to do schoolwork on the weekend. The trailer for the York Theatre production doesn’t feature the character Lolita singing or speaking at all…
A Different Kind of Adaptation
So, how would I do a film adaptation of “Lolita”?
Here we go.
I’m going to stick with the broad strokes here because, otherwise, well…I would end up literally writing a screenplay and unless I get permission from Nabokov’s estate (which, I would love…let me know if you wanna help me try to make that happen…) would be a waste of time for me, and an enormous amount of work for you to either read or even watch me act out for you as a one-woman YouTube performance, either of which would, honestly, likely still require permission from Nabokov’s estate.
So, this is, basically, a “pitch”.
Also, for now, I’ve made the decision to try to stick as close to the text as possible – I’m not going to invent a massive amount of dialogue or add scenes…there may be some differences from the book to adapt it to a film medium, but my goal is to stick as closely to what Nabokov wrote as possible.
We open not with romantic, hazy images and narration from Humbert but as if this is a recording for medical archive and analysis purposes made in the early 1950s. I’m talking film strip, badly done title card that doesn’t say the name of the film, but rather is the medical information about Humbert, the date, and the name of his doctor.
We cut to a close-up of the doctor talking directly to the camera. He literally says, word for word, what is said in the opening pages of the book. We learn that Humbert is sick, he’s a criminal and a mental patient, and that this recording is a case study.
Yes, I’m keeping the doctor male (though in later scenes I will be giving him a female coworker…)
I gave this a good amount of thought. There’s a lot to be said for making the doctor female – we’d get to see an adult woman reacting to what Humbert’s done, there’s a great opportunity for Humbert to try to charm and flirt with her when he uses such phrases as “gentlewomen of the jury”…but I think it’s important to have another man be face to face with Humbert when he’s making his confession, otherwise this could very easily turn into certain people interpreting this as “see, women just manipulate and condemn men!” Which is ridiculous, but, still, it happens. I think it helps us treat Humbert as an unreliable narrator to have a fellow man look him in the eye and be horrified by what he’s done. To watch another man basically reject the “boys will be boys” and “girls are seducers” mentality and hold another man accountable. By having an additional female coworker in the room we can get the best of both worlds, have both of them be horrified, and still have a female outlet for Humber’s very inappropriate flirting.
As we move through the story we’re going to use three cinematic conventions:
1.) We establish that this story is being told by Humbert to his doctor(s). We routinely flashback to the hospital and actually watch Humbert narrating in this context.
2.) As Humbert is talking, we transition into watching the scenes he’s describing (i.e. we aren’t watching him narrate to his doctors, we witness the scene in question, though occasionally with voice-over narration still present.) Whenever we are seeing the story from Humbert’s point of view the cinematography has a dreamy, idealized quality to it. To put it bluntly, it looks very much like the 1997 Adrian Lyne film.
3.) Throughout the film, Humbert’s version of events will be called into question. It doesn’t necessarily warrant a discussion with the doctors (like I said, I’m trying to keep the dialogue as close to the book as possible,) but throughout the story we will see a scene as described by Humbert, then cut back to the hospital and see a dubious, or even angry look on the doctor’s face, then see Humbert start to backpedal (this is a perfect opportunity to use those quotes from the book that are so often left out, where Humbert suddenly “remembers” something he left out) and we watch the same scene again, but this time it’s clearly meant to be an outside, accurate perspective on what happened. It’s not from Humbert’s point of view. And these scenes are filmed completely differently to Humbert’s memories. They are not dreamy. They are not romantic. They’re as close to documentary filmmaking as we can get.
Ok, so let’s hit the main points.
Humbert is cast more closely to how he’s described in the book. Less “leading man” and more an intellectual, not sexy, Sherlock Holmes-type (not the Benedict Cumberbatch Holmes, the book Holmes). He is charming. He gives us some backstory – this is part of the book that talks about his childhood, his first, budding romance with Annabel (who is twelve, but in this part of the story, so is he…) who dies before they can actually do anything…and when we see this section, it really is two kids just playing around (in the book they don’t do anything more than have some sneaky hand holds)…not a mature first sexual encounter as it has often been portrayed. Keep in mind, (this is important later), Humbert uses this childhood romance as psychological justification for his obsession with young girls He talks about his first marriage, his stay in a mental hospital, etc. We see this all in his idealized memory. We even get his descriptions of how to spot a “nymphet”.
The doctor gets him on track and we quickly move on to his working on an academic book and his desire to get out of the city. He’s invited to stay with an acquaintance for the summer – an offer he accepts because he is enticed by the prospect of living with their twelve-year-old daughter who he wishes to, quote, “Coach in French and fondle in ‘Humbertish’.” We learn that that invitation fell through (as his acquaintance’s house burned down) and get to Humbert’s meeting Charlotte Haze. We see the house, go to the garden, and see the moment when Humbert meets Lolita.
So, I have an idea about the casting of Lolita…
I propose having two different actresses play the character – one plays “Lolita”, the other plays “Dolores”. The same actress who plays Annabel plays Lolita – that is, she’s Lolita any time we’re viewing the story from Humbert’s point of view. Another actress plays Dolores – that is, any time we are seeing the story told from a neutral point of view, we see this actress. Both actresses should look very similar – easy to mistake for each other, but it will give an almost “Twilight Zone” esque feel to the switching perspectives – emphasizing how Humbert isn’t telling us the truth. It will also emphasize the fact that Lolita and Dolores are two different people – one that is solely the invention of Humbert.
For example, when I was little and saw “Hocus Pocus” for the first time, I thought that the same actress played Emily and Dani, and the same actor played Thackery and Max. They didn’t, but the actors looked VERY similar and, for me, this created a strong thematic connection…Max is going to have to stop what happened with Emily from happening to Dani – in essence, doing what Thackery couldn’t. I think there could be an interesting thematic subtext having the same actress play Annabel/Lolita, and a different actress play Dolores.
The other thing this can accomplish is, while I think it is very important not to age up Dolores (we need to be clear that this is a twelve-year-old little girl) this might allow for the possibility of casting a slightly older actress as Lolita – meaning the actual actress who is playing the “flirtatious nymphet” is not in reality a twelve-year-old child. This version of the character should be everything we’ve come to expect from the moniker “Lolita” – heart-shaped glasses and all. But “Dolores” needs to very clearly look like a CHILD. You know how on “Toddlers and Tiaras” those little girls look like different people when they’re made up for competition versus when they’re just themselves? Yeah, we’re talking that kind of visual difference. Keep in mind, from Dolores’s perspective, “Lolita” is a horror story. We need that to be clear.
So, picture this:
We get to the moment Humbert meets “Lolita”. Same actress who played Annabel – still a child but flirting with womanhood. She’s in a wet dress, heart-shaped glasses, reading a teen magazine, sucking on a lollypop, and smiling at Humbert. We hear Humbert’s narration over it. “I’ll take the room” he says to Charlotte.
Cut back to the hospital.
The doctor gives Humbert a look. “Come on. Don’t B.S. us,” he seems to say.
Cut back to Charlotte’s garden – but this time it’s filmed in documentary fashion. Charlotte leads Humbert out of the house.
But where’s “Lolita”?
Nowhere.
Instead, we hear a joyful yelp and see a VERY childlike Dolores in long, too big jean shorts she’s clearly expected to grow into, and a misbuttoned blouse, running through a barely working sprinkler. She’s jumping over it and having a grand old time. She doesn’t pay Humbert any attention. She grabs a doll and runs off.
OMG. This is a baby.
We see Humbert staring after her. “I’ll take the room.”
Shit.
I also want to take this moment to make clear that, while I don’t intend for this adaptation to shy away from the realities of the book, my intention would be for it to be shot in a way where no young actresses are being exploited in any way. Editing is a wonderful thing, and I think it’s very possible (I was a child actor) for children to play the role of Dolores/Lolita without ever being expected to shoot sex scenes, sexual situations, or do anything it would be wildly inappropriate to even think of asking a child to do. No child actor should ever be exploited or feel even minorly uncomfortable with what’s being asked of them (nor, by proxy, should their parents or anyone involved with the filmmaking.)
This is not a movie I would want twelve-year-olds to watch, but my intention would be to script it and film it in such a way that everyone should be comfortable with a twelve-year-old acting in it. If you’re not someone who works in the entertainment industry, trust me, movie magic is a lot of smoke and mirrors and, just as Hitchcock showed us a horrifying murder scene where only later do we realize we never actually saw a knife even touch skin, so too is it possible to shoot a film involving young actors that is horrifying in its finished product without ever actually involving the young actors in the horror.
We continue on. We learn about Humbert’s plan to use sleeping pills on Dolores. We see him go to a doctor and get the pills, continuously upping the dosage. His true motive is abundantly clear.
We see a copy of one of Claire Quilty’s plays on Dolores’s desk, with a personal autograph from Quilty himself.
We see Charlotte find the journals and confront Humbert. We hear all the horrible thoughts Humbert has about her in voice-over as she is hit by a car.
Charlotte’s death is a frequently debated part of the book…by this point in the story, Humbert has described multiple times, in great detail, how he imagined (and planned) to kill Charlotte… it seems a little too convenient that Charlotte happens to die accidentally right when Humbert is most invested in her not mailing the letters telling what he’s done. I think Charlotte’s death would be an interesting moment to show multiple scenarios of what might have actually happened – one of which is exactly as Humbert describes it, another strongly implying that Humbert murdered her, etc. (Even in the Lyne version we see the later book scene where Lolita screams at Humbert “Murder me like you murdered my mother!”) We know Humbert is a liar and should view Charlotte’s death with as much doubt as others.
We see him get Dolores from camp.
More and more we start seeing conflicting views of what happened – even down to a line reading. We hear Lolita say: “The word is incest” as she smiles and giggles, immediately followed by a trying not to look frightened Dolores saying very seriously, “The word is incest.” We see Lolita playfully ask why she can’t call her mother and seem almost glad that her mother’s not there to bother her. We see Dolores frantic about what’s happening with her mother, even trying to sneak off to a payphone a few times to secretly attempt to call her.
We also ground this story in history and reality. I think it would be really interesting to pepper in the real-life case of Sally Horner (remember, Humbert even mentions it himself.) We see headlines in newspapers with a photo of the young girl, we hear the news talking about it on the radio. We also actually hear Humbert wonder if he’s doing to Dolores what was done to Sally.
We don’t see anything from the first time Humbert sleeps with Dolores. The entire sequence is consigned to Humbert in the hospital describing it to the doctors. This is a convention that will continue throughout. Any explicit sexual moments are never seen. We only watch Humbert pathetically describe them to the doctors and occasionally get a pick-up shot of Dolores crying.
We continue with the events of the story with the car ride the next day – again, first we see Lolita flirtatiously asking for a bathroom and playing with Humbert that she’s going to call the cops on him. Again, we get a reaction from the Doctor. “Tell us the truth.” We cut back to “reality” and see a deeply distraught Dolores asking for a bathroom because she’s in pain. Her threats are tentative (she doesn’t want to anger Humbert), but serious. If she encounters a police officer on her way to the bathroom, you can bet she’s telling them everything.
We are now jumping back and forth between a hyper-stylized romance and a horror film. We see evidence of Dolores trying to get away and/or deal with her abusive situation – her hiding money and Humbert “stealing” it back, him threatening that if he goes to prison she’ll be an orphan, the fact that every time Dolores brings over a female friend that Humbert personally identifies as a “nymphet”, “for some reason”, once Dolores realizes he’s identified them as such, she won’t bring them over anymore…
We continue in this way through the rest of the story. The play, the second road trip, Dolores’s disappearance, and what happens with Humbert afterward. His search for Dolores, his relationship with an unstable adult woman (who he makes live at a hotel separate from him).
He gets the letter from Dolores and goes to see her. I would actually cast a different, seventeen-year-old actress in this part. It’s always odd trying to age a young person up a few years (it was famously ridiculed in the Lyne adaptation,) and this would allow an eighteen-year-old (playing younger) actress to play the scene with the full weight of the abuse that transpired.
And then Humbert goes to kill Quilty.
Many argue that Quilty is a foil to Humbert… the monster he could become if his conscience were not in check (I’m sorry, but what conscience?) I, however, would say that Quilty is not the monster Humbert could become…but a mirror of the monster he already is. No, Humbert is not making pornographic films with under aged girls, but neither is Quilty kidnapping and raping his stepdaughter…I think that Humbert kills Quilty so that he can shout to the world (and himself), “See! I might be bad, but I’m good at heart! I could never be like HIM! I killed that horrible person! See! I’m really a good guy!” He’s forcing a comparison with someone he makes out to be worse than himself. Even one of his final lines about ultimately regretting his actions - that Dolores’s voice will never be amongst the joyful children he hears playing in a playground, is too little too late (if it’s even sincere in the slightest at all.)
I think this is the first time the audience should properly see Quilty in the film… and I think it would be really cool to cast the same actor as Humbert and Quilty (using a lot of make-up and prosthetics so it wouldn’t be immediately apparent.) The idea of Humbert locked in this eternal struggle of never being able to come to terms with who he really is would be poignant.
I would end by showing Humbert being transported from the hospital to prison then watch him sit, alone, rotting in jail. All he can do is obsess over the story, over, and over and over. He sits in his cell starting with the first words all over again…literally he starts with the first words of narration Humbert has in the book, and tells the story again from the beginning, to himself – both exonerating himself of his guilt, and rapturously enjoying the memories once more. This is who this man is. This is what he will be for the rest of his life. A disturbed man on repeat.
We cut to a black screen with text about what happened to Humbert and Dolores (again as if it’s from this medical film,) and then we just end. The reel runs out. And we are left to ponder this disturbing case study.
And, for a completely different interpretation, I also think it would be really cool to just adapt “Lolita” from Dolores’s point of view. Don’t call it “Lolita”, just tell the story of a young girl growing up outside of the city, being kidnapped and abused by her stepfather, escaping, all the rest of it. Only at the end do we realize that this is the story of “Lolita”. We think we’ve just been watching a horror story about a young girl and then suddenly, OMG, this was… “Lolita”?!
So, if anyone’s interested…
Wanna make a new version of “Lolita” with me? Send me a message. I think it’s about time Dolores Haze had HER story, and Nabokov finally had his version, told.