The Lolita Cycle

My issue is not with whether Lolita is ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but whether or not we hold it in a place where we’re capable of accurately and wisely judging the cultural fallout that has taken place since its publication more than six decades ago.

*This essay was first written in 2021 for a class on Stanley Kubrick at the University of Colorado Boulder and has been adapted for the internet.

The tale of Lolita seems to return in new forms, time and time again over the years, to captivate audiences just as surely as the insatiable predatory lust of grown men towards female children spells itself out in a never-ending cycle of horror that doesn’t just ruin the lives of its victims, but is in fact so entrenched in our history and ways of being that it often feels stranger to call it out than to just accept it and get on with things. Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel is one of the most well-known examples of this phenomenon ever discussed in literature. Its far-reaching effects, at this point long outpacing the life of its author, can be seen in places as diverse as the modern-day lolita fashion movement which emphasizes a cute, child-like aesthetic, and the dictionary inclusion of the terms ‘lolita’ (“a precociously seductive girl”) and ‘nymphet’ (“a sexually precocious girl barely in her teens”) — a term invented by Nabokov himself. In this story, I’ll be talking about two movies, Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita (1963) and Adrian Lyne’s Lolita (1998), both of which were screened for me in a course on Stanley Kubrick at the University of Colorado. The films are very different, but when taking on the challenge of adapting Nabokov’s legendary novel to the screen, Kubrick and Lyne both made a number of changes to the story, both necessary and personal, while keeping in one form or another what I would argue is the most intrinsically Lolita part of it: its dark, horrifying heart.

I won’t be the first to say I don’t really ‘get’ Lolita. Maybe it’s my inability to look past the physical full-body revulsion that overtakes me within a few seconds of contact with the material, similarly to the way someone cowering behind a couch in fear of a horror movie might have difficulty ascertaining the grander artistic purposes of the film. It is harder to think abstractly on matters that trigger such emotional responses, no matter how much we are assured that these things are great…

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