Thursday, May 15, 2008
Adrian Lyne's "Lolita" is too timid and tasteful to be very good, but it's still the target of censors and hysterics.
Apr 30, 1998 | Americans wanting to see Adrian Lyne's new film version of "Lolita" this spring are in roughly the same position as the Americans who wanted to read Nabokov's novel when it was first published more than 40 years ago -- you have to go to Europe to do it. So I left for London two weeks ago, with decidedly mixed feelings.
When I first heard that Adrian Lyne was filming "Lolita," I swore that I wouldn't cross the street to see it, much less the Atlantic. "Lolita" is my favorite novel, and I had no desire to see what the director of "Nine 1/2 Weeks," "Fatal Attraction" and "Indecent Proposal" would do when he got his sleazy mitts on it. But, as every major American movie studio refused to release Lyne's "Lolita," it angered me that I wasn't even going to have the choice. A week before I went to London, Showtime announced that it would premiere the film in America in August. That's a gutsy move and one that Showtime should be praised for, but the political and cultural controversy around the film remains galling.
It's virtually unheard of for every major American movie studio to refuse to distribute a major movie made by a name director with name stars. The studios would like to paint the movie's fate as the result of a business decision pure and simple: "Lolita" couldn't earn enough profits to make up for the pressure they'd have to face from the government or watchdog groups. But when the studios' refusal to release a film prevents the public from seeing it at all, the effect is no different from censorship -- and more insidious because there's no avenue of legal recourse. The studios can't be blamed for creating today's cultural climate; we have to take the rap for that.
"You cannot divorce a work of art from the cultural climate in which it locates itself," wrote Paul Vallely in a craven piece in London's Independent newspaper, arguing that "Lolita" could act as a dangerous incitement to pedophilia. Vallely goes on to list the usual horrors: the children killed in Belgium's pedophile ring, child porn on the Internet, the Ramsey murder. He was almost as hysterical as London's tabloid Daily Mail, which screamed, "Perverts will flock to this travesty." On one point, though, Vallely is right. Lyne's "Lolita" cannot be divorced from the society that produced it. However, that moment seems defined less by violence directed at children (which, sadly, is nothing new) than by a terror of acknowledging that sexuality plays any part in childhood at all.
Our particular cultural climate has produced urban myths -- like the unsupported belief that a chain of Satanic cults engages in ritual child abuse -- and legislation like the Child Pornography Protection Act. Currently under review in the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, the CPPA defines child pornography as "any visual depiction ... that is or appears to be of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct." Pay attention to that language -- "that is or appears to be." Under that definition, child pornography isn't just the stuff that is already illegal -- actual child pornography -- but any movie or TV show with a sex scene that includes an underage actor, or even an adult actor merely playing an underage character. In other words, "child pornography" would be extended to include the bedroom scene between Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes in "Romeo + Juliet," the scene of Tom Hanks fondling Elizabeth Perkins' breast in "Big," the episode of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" in which Buffy sleeps with Angel and "The Tin Drum," which Oklahoma police, citing the CPPA, seized from the homes of several people who had rented it last year.
Ironically, Lyne and his screenwriter, Stephen Schiff, have made a film that, in an odd but crucial way, feels right at home in this climate. For all of their vaunted (and, it turns out, false) fidelity to Nabokov, Lyne and Schiff have made a pretty, gauzy "Lolita" that replaces the book's cruelty and comedy with manufactured lyricism and mopey romanticism. Lionel Trilling observed that "Lolita is about love ... Almost every page sets forth some explicit erotic emotion or some overt erotic action and still ... it is about love." The twist is that Humbert's pedophilia makes it easier to see love's constant potential for possessiveness and monomania. Nabokov achieves rapture without denying Humbert's ruthlessness. But he never slights Humbert's bliss, either, and he never, from the first incantatory utterance of her name, tries to keep us from sharing a taste of that bliss. Just as Humbert drugs Lolita with sleeping pills, Nabokov drugs his reader with narcotic descriptions of his nymphet's brown skin and musky, tomboy odor. The moralist denies that intoxicant; the artist, the sensualist, can't. Humbert's rapture is both a parody of the artist creating in solitude and a celebration of the glories that solitude brings forth. Nabokov might be asking if life is too high a price to pay for art.
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