How Stanley Kubrick corrupted Lolita

A master of portraying the darkest psychology of men could not transcend his own

Susan Kruglinski

NB: This essay was written in November, 2017, not long after the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke.

To this day, when Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel Lolita is broached in conversation, the vast majority nods along to the incorrect assumption that the character of Lolita was a seductress. This is an obvious example of how the interpretation of a piece of art can be permanently distorted if the leading critical figures of a time are of one narrow mindset, and that mindset excludes most of the population. The sullying of such an important novel is a key bit of evidence that, historically, the dominating perspective of an elite few may promulgate a complete disconnect from reality. As Lolita-the-temptress-promoting critic Lionel Trilling stated in a televised discussion of the book, with none other than Nabokov seated next to him, “You cannot trust a creative writer to say what he has done. He can say what he meant to do, and even then we don’t have to believe him.” Trilling would have liked us to have supposed that he knew better than Nabokov what Nabokov meant. And it seems that, somehow, most have gone along with this.

But the misinterpretation of Lolita would not have locked so solidly into place if it weren’t for the movie version of 1962, starring James Mason, Shelley Winters, Peter Sellers, and Sue Lyon as Lolita. Having received critical acclaim for the monumental Spartacus in 1960, Stanley Kubrick was the director lucky enough and daring enough to tackle the controversial novel. The movie was a hit, and has since remained the entryway for many into Nabokov’s twisted tale.

Of all the elites of his time, one might have imagined that Kubrick held the most potential to push back against the dominant interpretation of Lolita. If there is one thing we’ve come to learn about the director over his career, it’s that he was masterful at examining the psychology of villains like Lolita’s Humbert Humbert.

All of Kubrick’s movies are adaptations of books, and the literary theme Kubrick chose to portray, with almost every movie of his career, was that of “toxic masculinity.” Although we are currently bombarded with this term as we peruse stories of Harvey Weinstein’s sexual aggression and bullying of employees, this word was not in the mainstream when Kubrick was alive. He may not have ever heard it. But if one were reaching for fictional examples of toxic masculinity to exemplify the phenomenon, one would find dead-center examples in Kubrick’s stable of lead characters, including Jack in The Shining, Alex in A Clockwork Orange, or the generals and sergeants of Paths of Glory,  Dr. Strangelove, or Full Metal Jacket—take your pick. Even the seemingly sensitive Dr. Harford in Eyes Wide Shut is flipped by his circumstances to explore the darkest side of his masculinity by the end of the film.

Because it is clear that Kubrick was on a mission to explore the psychopathology of men, modern critics should be a bit more forgiving of the lack of female presence in his body of work, and for the “weak” portraits of the women who are included. He may have only one woman in the entire 94 minutes of Dr. Strangelove, and she may be in a bikini and stiletto pumps for her less-than-five-minute appearance, but that makes sense in the context of a movie in which a war is launched by a man obsessed with his virility, with character names that are euphemisms for the penis, and that concludes with a plan to shield military personnel from nuclear attack in a bunker, with “a ratio of ten females to each male.” War is a dick-waving contest. You can’t fault Kubrick for hitting this point hard.

But with that in mind, we can fault him for his adapting one of the greatest and purest literary portrayals of toxic masculinity, Lolita’s Humbert, into a sympathetic victim, completely at odds with Kubrick’s razor-sharp interpretations of “masculinity run amok” that came before and after.

One might challenge this accusation by pointing out that  Nabokov himself is credited with writing the screenplay.

In fact, that Nabokov wrote the original screenplay only incriminates Kubrick further, as the novelist and director were inevitably in close consultation for the initial writing process. Kubrick is one of the lucky few who had the privilege of discussing the character of Lolita at length and in depth with her creator. Unfortunately Kubrick, who was known to rewrite scenes up until the final shots were filmed, was not afraid to override even a literary genius. It is clear from reading Nabokov’s original screenplay that Kubrick stripped the story of all meaning, and we are left with an odd film about a charming, “innocent” older man having an affair with a precocious “brat” of a young teen. (Both “innocent” and “brat” were the words used by Kubrick’s production partner and creative collaborator James Harris.)

There is no “innocent” older man or teen brat in Nabokov’s novel.

Lolita, the novel, is a brilliant portrayal of pathology, told through the voice of the ultimate unreliable narrator, writing from his jail cell after murdering the man who helped his victim escape. It is written from the point of view of a mentally unhealthy person who is delusional, narcissistic, and who feels justified in every crime he commits, accurately reflecting what forensic psychologists already know about sex offenders. This sugary description of his life is the only one he can write, because he cannot see past his own pathology.  Nabokov reported that part of his inspiration to write the book was hearing the story of an ape who was taught to draw in charcoals. The first thing the ape drew was the bars of his own cage. Humbert is writing the only thing he knows: his own delusion about how he has led his life. And like most sex offenders or serial killers, everything is everyone else’s fault. He is not the perpetrator because he is simply reacting to others. Everything is justified. Nymphets are temptresses, whether they are nine years old, fourteen, or adult.

The narrator, Humbert Humbert, is a sociopathic, child-molesting, child-raping pedophile who would have raped some other unfortunate girl if he had not raped Lolita. This is not an interpretation. This is what is in the story. And that is why the story is so brilliant. It is a portrait of insanity. It is the delusional vision of a narcissist who has convinced himself that he is justified in killing one (or more) people, in lusting after small children, in kidnapping a girl and keeping her as his sex slave under threat. He drugs her, he isolates her, he brainwashes her, all while attempting to brainwash us, the audience. “[A] murderer with a sensational but incomplete and unorthodox memory…” is how he describes himself. He tells us that orphaned, kidnapped and drugged, Lolita—surprise!—decides she must have sex with this older man who she has only known for a few months. Let me remind you: In the book, Lolita is twelve. She is four-foot-ten. She is around 90 pounds. All of that is in the book.

But of course, his guilt also bleeds through. When it does, that is Nabokov tipping us off to the reality hidden behind Humbert’s flowery telling of his own story.

This essential set-up, the entire perspective of the book, seems to have been purposefully left out by Kubrick.

And although we can excuse the bikini and pumps in Dr. Strangelove, chalk up Wendy’s nonstop trembling and crying in The Shining to being a realistic human reaction to a murderous psycho, or tolerate the sadistic rape scenes in A Clockwork Orange in the service of world-building for a patriarchal dystopia, Kubrick’s true misogyny is laid bare in how he chose to handle the content of Lolita. Here, the task was not simply to authentically reproduce toxic masculinity on celluloid. With this particular story, he was forced to reckon with its titular female character being the true heart of the movie. He was, for once, compelled to absorb the perspective of the female target of the masculine aggression.

He chose not to do this.

And because this movie was a hit so soon after the book’s release, Kubrick’s work greatly contributed to the interpretive flipping of the novel that still exists today, with “Lolita” evolving from “name” to “noun,” likely embedded in our vocabulary for future generations that won’t even bother to read a book so outdatedly cruel.

Lolita | Lo·​li·​ta | \ lō-ˈlē-tə : “a precociously seductive girl.”

THE CRITICS

It was easy enough for Kubrick to assume the “sexually precocious child” perspective for Lolita. The book was first published in 1955, only seven years before the movie’s release, and his intellectual contemporaries were already cementing the legend of the unrestrained nymphet. It could be argued that Kubrick was just nodding along to the supposed smartest people of his time.

Reading through the major reviews after the book’s release, the essential concept of the “unreliable narrator” is barely acknowledged.

Most of the top reviewers hit the same pretentious notes. They point out that the book is, despite its themes, not really all that pornographic—which surely must disappoint the average saps who are too dull to buy it for any other reason. And to the critics it is damn funny and cleverly written. They get the jokes! Because they are smart, like Nabokov! Some point out that it is a moving love story.

All of them seem to accept, along with the book-cover designers, that Lolita is a little slut.

Let’s examine the words of some of these intellectuals and how their takes contrast with the content of the book:

KINGSLEY AMIS, THE SPECTATOR (1959): The pity is that Humbert could not care less about the darkness of her life at home, and although the teenage vulgarity of Lolita’s behaviour is caught with an equal precision he could not care less either about what she was really like. She is a ‘portrait’ in a very full sense, devotedly watched and listened to but never conversed with, the object of desire but never of curiosity. What else did she do in Humbert’s presence but play tennis and eat sundaes and go to bed with him? What did they talk about? What did they actually get up to?

The British Mr. Amis was a revered comedic writer himself, so it is odd that he misunderstands the purposeful lack of detail around Lolita’s character. Lolita is barely fleshed out by Nabokov because the real Lolita, the focus and driver of the book, is hardly present. He should have been tipped off by the similar portrayal of Lolita’s mother, Charlotte Haze. These characters speak in the language of Humbert. Out of their middle-class American mouths comes pompous diction, cloyingly riddled with bits of français. What a coincidence that Humbert translates texts from French to English as part of his living and sprinkles it into his own pretentious ramblings on the regular.

In fact, that is part of the game of the book. When the dialogue sounds like Humbert, it is a tip-off that this is a Humbert-tinted memory. When a bit of realism comes through, and Lolita speaks and acts like a typical American child, as when she responds to Humbert telling her he is going to marry her mother, we see a glimmer of objective reality. We get a peek at the real girl. These are the touchstones of the story.

In that marriage-announcement scene, Humbert, who has been bragging to us about Lolita’s crush on him, gives her a call at her sleep-away camp, just shortly after her arrival there. Note the tone and attitude of Lolita in complete contrast with Humbert.

I told her—trembling and brimming with my mastery over fate—that I was going to marry her mother. I had to repeat it twice because something was preventing her from giving me her attention. “Gee, that’s swell,” she said laughing. “When is the wedding? Hold on a sec, the pup— That pup here has got hold of my sock. Listen—“ and she added she guessed she was going to have loads of fun…and I realized as I hung up that a couple of hours at that camp had been sufficient to blot out with new impressions the image of handsome Humbert Humbert from little Lolita’s mind.

This passage is meant to be funny because it reveals so clearly how Humbert fools himself, and how he must twist when his narcissism bumps with cold reality.

Critics in the States also missed the point of the book.

CHARLES J. ROLO, THE ATLANTIC (1958): There follows a sketch of [Humbert’s] tortured career up to the time when, in his late thirties, he settles in a quiet New England town…under the same roof as a fatally seductive nymphet, Dolores Haze—a mixture of “tender dreamy childishness and eerie vulgarity.”…But an accident eliminates Mrs. Haze, and Humbert the Nympholept finds himself the guardian of his darling, who, on their first night together, turns out to be utterly depraved and plays the role of seducer…

Does she? Humbert describes their first sex act with little detail, implies that this kidnapped and heavily drugged girl was in full control, and ends the passage describing “a wincing child.” Even if one were to give the benefit of the doubt to Humbert as he describes Lolita, suddenly and uncharacteristically, starting to come on to him, we get no inkling of “depraved” in any of her actions. That’s pure projection on Rolo’s part.

Ironically, the conservative National Review, in its prudishness, was in a better position to understand the book.

FRANK S. MEYER, NATIONAL REVIEW (1959): What happens? The critics hail his “grace and delicacy” and his ability to understand and present “love” in the most unlikely circumstances. The modern devaluation of values seems to have deprived them of the ability to distinguish love from lust and rape. And first among them that dean of critics, Lionel Trilling, who compares Lolita to the legend of Tristan and Isolde!…Without exception, in all the reviews I have read — and they are many — nowhere has even the suspicion crept in that Lolita might be something totally different from the temptingly perverted surface it presents to the degenerate taste of the age. Not a whiff of a hint that it could be what it must be, if it is judged by the standards of good and beauty which once were undisputed in the West — and if it is, as the power of its writing shows it to be, more than a mere exercise in salaciousness.

Trilling, by the way, also wrote of Lolita that “In recent fiction no lover has thought of his beloved with so much tenderness.”

Indeed, Humbert writing such sentiments as “I saw myself administering a powerful sleeping potion to both mother and daughter so as to fondle the latter through the night with perfect impunity” certainly clues us in to the level of “tenderness” of this “lover.”

THE BOOK

The novel not only lays out evidence of the reality behind Humbert’s ramblings but, with great wit, piles it so high that it should be obvious that Nabokov’s intention was to humiliate and incriminate Humbert for our amusement. That is part of the book’s mission.

Here’s Humbert describing a scene from his recent past:

How marvelous were my fancied adventures as I sat on a hard park bench pretending to be immersed in a trembling book. Around the quiet scholar, nymphets played freely, as if he were a familiar statue or part of an old tree’s shadow and sheen…Rope skipping, hopscotch. That old woman in black who sat down next to me on my bench, on my rack of joy (a nymphet was groping under me for a lost marble), and asked if I had a stomachache, the insolent hag.

The above passage is typical. He begins the book with stories of lurking, of lusting, of wanting to commit violence. He has been in and out of mental health sanitariums, he has “wedged my wary and bestial way into the hottest, most crowded corner of a city bus full of strap-hanging school children” and regularly “… [tried] to catch a glimpse of nymphets (alas, always remote) playing in Central Park….”

He writes: “I remember once handling an automatic belonging to a fellow student, in the days (I have not spoken of them, I think, but never mind) when I toyed with the idea of enjoying his little sister, a most diaphanous nymphet with a black hair bow, and then shoot myself.”

He contemplated killing his first wife, and “could visualize myself slapping Valeria’s [ex-wife] breasts out of alignment, or otherwise hurting her….” (Which, perhaps, he indeed did. Again, the unreliable narrator.)

When he first arrives at Ramsdale, Lolita’s home town, he had an arrangement to live with a different family, and was looking forward to spending time with an entirely different 12 year-old. He says he “…spent a fantastic night on the train, imagining in all possible detail the enigmatic nymphet I would coach in French and fondle in Humbertish.”

That family’s home burned down before he arrived, so he found other lodgings with the Hazes, Charlotte and her daughter Lolita.

While their tenant, he contemplated drugging Lolita so that he could rape her. He considered the idea of getting her mother pregnant so that it “…would give me a chance to be alone with my Lolita for weeks, perhaps—and gorge the limp nymphet with sleeping pills.”

I had to be sure when my lovely child arrived, that very night, and then night after night…I would possess the means of putting two creatures to sleep so thoroughly that neither sound nor touch should rouse them. Throughout most of July I had been experimenting with various sleeping powders, trying them out on Charlotte…

Humbert decides to kill Charlotte twice, first when she informs him that Lolita will be going to a boarding school, and then when she reads his diary and discovers he is a monster. He comes up with concrete plans. By complete coincidence, Charlotte gets hit by a car. This is another magical fortuity in the world of this charming and seemingly innocent convicted murderer narrating from prison. (Two hints in the book about Humbert’s possible role in Charlotte’s death: Lolita at some point refers to “my murdered mummy,” as if she, and not Humbert, would ever use the word “mummy,” and Humbert, after seeing another female car accident victim, says of her battered body and the minor damage to the car, “I did better.”)

So, does all of that sound like the fellow, played by erudite James Mason, we see in Kubrick’s 1962 movie?

THE SCREENPLAY

No. No it does not.

But that is not the fault of the credited screenwriter.

The screenplay was written by Nabokov after many long discussions with Kubrick. Obviously Kubrick explained to Nabokov his vision, which was to reframe the character of Lolita, and there must have been some compromising up front. It is well documented that as he was filming, Kubrick changed much of the script, using only a portion of Nabokov’s words and ideas.

Ultimately, Nabokov very politely stated for the record that he was impressed with the movie, but would have done things differently—a popular refrain from the many authors of Kubrick’s source material, but in this case without the usual anger at how Kubrick had plowed over the work. As far as I can find, Nabokov did not elaborate on what exactly he would have done differently. But we can read the original screenplay, still in print and found in anthologies of Nabokov’s work.

In that screenplay, we can see that Nabokov did try to retain glints of Lolita’s innocence and victimhood. And, by extension, we see her being a survivor at the conclusion of the story.

For example, Nabokov included this passage, which took place directly after the first sexual intercourse between the two:

Lolita: (smiling sweetly at him) You chump, you creep, you revolting character. I was a daisy fresh girl and look what you’ve done to me. I ought to call the cops and tell them you raped me. Oh, you dirty, dirty old man!…[Later, after more conversation] You hurt me. You’ve torn something inside.

She eventually sobs. She says, “Leave you? You know perfectly well I have nowhere to go.” She mentions this twice. She is, of course, an orphan by this point. Humbert threatens her with reform school, or a juvenile detention home. (In the book, he admits to “terrorizing” her with these kinds of threats.)

Kubrick stripped all of those bits of reality-balancing from the script.

THE FILM

For the creation of Lolita, Kubrick’s production partner was James Harris, and they collaborated on the development from day one.

A little background on Harris: He was the money man behind the director’s earliest movies. He is also, as is apparent from biographies of Kubrick, the man who disrupted Kubrick’s second marriage. Ruth Sobotka was a ballet dancer who had studied scenic design at Carnegie Tech and had designed sets for film and theater. Sobotka appeared in one of Kubrick’s early movies, as well as doing set design for him. According to Harris, “She wanted to be right in there with us, a partner. And my attitude was: who needs her? She would have liked to sit in on all the script meetings and decisions…But a ballet dancer from the Village, I didn’t want around. I guess she thought she was Mrs Kubrick, and that gave her the right. She was a forerunner of a lot of the Women’s Lib people… [M]aybe I put some pressure on him to keep the project between us.”

Kubrick and Sobotka’s marriage lasted two years.

This man, who influenced Kubrick’s relationship with his own wife, was a key player in the creative hashing-out of the film version of Lolita. He deserves at least part of the blame.

Kubrick and Harris agreed that there was no way to do a film with an actual 12 year-old, and so they settled on 14, and searched for someone who easily passed as a full-blown teen.

But they also wanted to rejigger the figure of Humbert. They seemed to think a flipping of character would make the movie more palatable to viewers and censors.

Remarkably, they claim that they reversed the perspective of the story so that the movie would be less offensive to an audience.

According to Harris, as quoted in John Baxter’s biography of Kubrick,  “If we could make [Humbert] the most innocent guy in the piece and her a little brat, and he just singled her out as someone to fall in love with—let people put their own interpretation on it. We knew we must make her a sex object. She can’t be childlike. If we made her a sex object, where everyone in the audience could understand why everyone would want to jump on her, and you make him attractive, it’s gonna work.”

Even more revealing is Kubrick’s own description of his thematic goals for Lolita. Kubrick is quoted in the same book as saying, “[The story] concerns the outsider who is passionately committed to action against the social order…the criminal, maniac, poet, lover, revolutionary. The protagonists of Paths of Glory, The Killing, Spartacus and…Lolita are all outsiders fighting to do some impossible thing, whether it’s pulling a perfect robbery or saving innocent men from execution by a militaristic state or carrying on a love affair with a 12 year-old girl.”

Yikes.

In fact, Kubrick wished the movie to be more erotic than it was, even though all critics and consumers agreed that the novel really wasn’t very.

The same could be said for the screenplay written by the novelist. At one point in Nabokov’s script, Lolita half-sits on Humbert’s knee. But he makes clear that this is innocent and ends it abruptly, despite Humbert’s arousal. Even in the passionate scene when Lolita is going off to camp and rushes back to hug Humbert good-bye, Nabokov writes as direction in his screenplay that “hers is a perfectly innocent impulse, an affectionate bright farewell.” With the swelling music of Kubrick’s version, this becomes debatable.

Kubrick’s version positions Lolita firmly in control of the erotic dynamic with this adult man, always the one manipulating, including a scene in which she flirtatiously tells him he deserves a reward, and then hand-feeds him a slice of cheese, dripping it into his mouth. Nothing like that happens in the book or in Nabokov’s screenplay.

The film depicts the before and after of the first sexual act, the act clearly meant to take place after Lolita whispers in Humbert’s ear and asks him to play a game, the screen then fading to black. As directed by Kubrick, Humbert looks baffled that Lolita is hitting on him. Afterward we see them in his car driving across country, and she’s giddy with girlish delight. She giggles when suggesting they tell her mother about their sexual act, and he looks aghast. He is the straight-man to her goofiness.

By contrast, at this same point in the book, we read that “…a queer dullness had replaced her usual cheerfulness…I did not like the way my little mistress shrugged her shoulders and distended her nostrils when I attempted casual small talk…It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting with a small ghost of somebody I had just killed.”

We’ve obviously come a long way from the source material.

The movie does have her finally break down and act vulnerable when she is told her mother is dead. Instead of wondering what in the world happened and why he hadn’t told her about it sooner, she cries in his arms and makes him promise to never leave her. This is entirely Kubrick’s invention.

In contrast, Nabokov’s screenplay had cut from “your mother is dead” to a time jump, with scenes of the two driving around the country, and Humbert buying her endless gifts. Then, they pull over on a road side.

Humbert: We must have taken the wrong turning. This is awful.

Lolita: Give me that map.

Humbert: We should have turned left half an hour ago and taken 42 south, not north.

Lolita: We? Leave me out of it.

Humbert: I am sure we’ll find some place to stop, if we just drive on.

He nuzzles her tentatively.

Lolita: (flinching) Leave me alone. I despise you. You deceived me about Mother. You took advantage of me.

CONCLUSIONS

I dislike Kubrick’s Lolita not just because it is so divorced from the novel, but because to me it is a flat tale of unappealing characters, despite wonderful acting on the part of the players. It is impossible to feel anything but contempt for anyone in this movie. To be stuck in an elevator with any character aside from Peter Sellers’ Claire Quilty would be a hovering Hell, and even then Quilty would probably be too cool to tell you any of his best stories.

The humor of the novel is lost and the supposedly romantic ending is hollow.

But the biggest sin of this movie is its cluelessness, and how it fails to represent a single one of the traits that makes the novel so marvelous, and how because of that, it ended up a tone-deaf “love” story that really does nothing but promote the idea that there are slutty teen girls out there, and that it is rather touching when some poor old fool is seduced by one.

And sadly, with much credit to this movie, that concept around both Lolita and Lolita has stuck. It’s the default.

And in this month of Weinstein-effect avalanches of understanding how male-dominated and male-driven the business of film and television is, I think it is essential to point this out: The failings of this movie and the misunderstandings around this book are the sad result of everyone—from snooty Ivy-League celebrity literary critics to genuinely brilliant self-taught directors from The Bronx—being married to the male perspective: that men are the ultimate authority and the arbiter of justice and what is “normal,” even when they are handing you their confession from behind the bars that specify their corruption.

Kubrick eventually proved himself to be a master at portraying toxic masculinity, and those portrayals were of tremendous value to our cultural inheritance, both in their artistic merit and in the broad lessons about the dangers of masculinity that are plainly offered in such films as Dr. Strangelove and Paths of Glory. But it is also apparent that the reason Kubrick was unable to properly incorporate the female presence in his body of work was not so much to further his artistic statements about masculinity, but because he had no ability to take on or interest in exploring the female perspective. Lolita demonstrates that, in fact, he may have held outright contempt for that perspective.

And considering the voices dominating the artistic output and the interpretation of it in his time, it seems he was far from alone in this.

I’ll leave you with a bit more of that wonderful, masterful confession from the novel, because it is such great literature, and it deserves to be rendered repeatedly, in any and all formats. This monster, Humbert, does arrive at something resembling “love,” a version that likely has more to do with his precious memories—which are all he has left—and, with time, the gelling of those and his enormous lust into something more concrete. These lines, written by Humbert, come after Dolores “Lolita” Haze gets married and is pregnant, and before she, unbeknownst to Humbert, dies in childbirth.

I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal and turpid, and everything, mais je t’aimais, je t’aimais! And there were times when I knew how you felt, and it was hell to know it, my little one. Lolita girl, brave Dolly Schiller.

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