Why Lolita is Impossible to Adapt into Film

"WHERE TO FIND ME

Sources:
Most of the essays quoted in this video can be found in the essay collection "Lolita in the Afterlife: On Beauty, Risk, and Reckoning with the Most Indelible and Shocking Novel of the Twentieth Century" edited by Jenny Minton Quigley

[FinalGirlStudios]

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[happinesstan]

I imagine the reason Nabokov didn't want any suggestion of a little girl, on his covers, because he knew even the most innocent picture would arouse the sick of mind. The first cover that uses such an image, does not need to sexualise her. The pervert will do that for themselves.

[RhythmAddictedState]

Nabokov himself was a victim of his pedophilic uncle, so writing Lolita was probably like recounting his own story and trying to understand the psychology of a pedophile. It might've been a way for him to process the trauma. It's utterly disrespectful and heartbreaking to see how horribly the victim's story was twisted, especially knowing that Nabokov spent so much time on perfecting the novel and getting everything right. Another person silenced.

[Quinnwin]

The closest thing to a way to ethically adapt Lolita would be to cast Danny Devito as Dolores.

[brittneybrisbin]

The fact that so many filmmakers and advertisers have just jumped at the chance to portray a 12 year old girl as a sexual temptress and a grown man as someone to sympathize with, while completely ignoring and distorting the author's intention and original story, is just...ick.

[anniee]

ill never get over the fact that they wanted someone who appeared older in the 1962 version, but they still cast a child. why would you cast a 14 year old that looks 16 instead of an 18 year old that looks 16?? there are tons of young looking young adults. they were in the business of unnecessarily sexualizing an actual child.

[skleroosis]

The mistake they make is that they depict the girls as humbert sees them. If they depicted them as the little kids they are, and overlayed it with his sick perspective in narration and actions, it would be closer to the spirit of the book.

[milkteamachine]

Ironically, the way Sue Lyon was completely failed by the adults around her and sexually exploited by an adult man mirrors lolita perfectly.

[StolastheDemonOwl]

Seeing Nabokov's pick to play Dolores and the film adaptation's actual actress with the way she was done up to look like a little pinup model is so sinister.

[Agridulce_Doll]

I was abused when I was a little girl between the 10 and 16 years old.

I remember that when I saw the Lolita movie I saw it as a love movie, I really felt that Humbert was a good man and that Dolores knew what she did when she "seduced" him.

When my abuser began to notice me, I remember that I felt excited, I wanted him to kiss me and touch me and I also wanted to get sexual, I myself went to his house and I even hinted that I wanted to have sexual relations with him.... but at the same time I felt absolute disgust and hatred for him, I hated the way he kissed me, the way he touched me, I hated his smell, the taste of his mouth, the color of his eyes and even the way he spoke to me, everything about him disgusted and repulsed me and yet I kept thinking that I wanted to be with him...

I have never been able to fully understand why I was like that, I only know that I was still very young when I was exposed to pornographic films and inappropriate touching (from another person) when I was under 6 years old, but I blocked that memory for many years.
Now I understand that those things made me precociously sexual and over time I understood what grooming was and I understood that the only reason I went to this man's house was because in my own house I suffered physical and psychological violence and I literally preferred anything else to this. Unfortunately that "anything else" was a man who instead of helping me, took advantage and abused me.

Now when I see the movie and read the book I can only imagine the real Dolores, the dirty, disheveled girl, with messy clothes, who only wanted to be loved and who found herself not with a father figure to help her but with a monster.

I'm sorry if it's hard to understand what I'm saying, it's hard for me to express what I feel and what I experienced in my own language, so it's even more difficult to find the right words in another.

I just want to leave testimony that there are no girls who are nymphs, only girls who were exposed to things they shouldn't have at a very young age and who couldn't find help

[CaraiseLink]

Personally, I think if you were going to adapt Lolita, you'd want to do it in animation. Not only does this sidestep the problem of destroying a little girl's psyche while putting her in extreme danger, but I don't think it's actually possible to do justice to how the novel's narrative is subtly distorted by Humbert's perspective. Instead, animation gives you the opportunity to actively call attention to the distortion by having the camera periodically switch between Humbert's distorted, sexualized vision and the mundane reality of the situation. The novel could only do what it did by using prose's best advantages to tackle the issue of Humbert's insanity, so I think the only way to do it justice is to use animation's best advantages to do the same, even if it seems like an exactly opposite approach on the surface.

[stillhere]

The novel is the story of the destruction of a pubescent girl. Even Humbert Humbert, who is obsessed with Lolita and sees her as his romantic ideal, feels a crushing sense that he is consuming her youth and innocence. A movie about a murder doesn’t show an actual murder. So we don’t need to see the actual destruction of a child’s innocence onscreen.

[casvirgile]

I present: Lolita but we never actually see her. Not really. Every so often we’d get a small look at a small hand covered in paint, a baby shoe, the outline of a child in a very modest dress with no actual detail. We get to hear her voice once, at the very end when she dies at the end of the novel. We never see her, not even as a teen or an adult. Her actresses are never credited. Each time we see her, she’s of a different skin tone with different hair, if we even see that much of her. I want there to be a movie where Dolores is very obviously a child, but you never see her and you see that she can be any child, and that it is horrifying and it could be any child.

[kayyeti]

There’s a reason why I picked up the novel with a cover of an old man touching a bouquet of flowers. That’s more metaphorical and befitting of the novel without sexualizing the victim in the novel.

[PSYCHOTROPICHYPNOTIC]

seeing the actress that nabokov envisioned as lolita is so harrowing

[UrsulaDaSeaWishh]

Actual convo I had with my boyfriend:

Me: The reason why Lolita has never been adapted well is because it’s never been adapted by a female director.
Bf: But if a woman directed Lolita it would come off like a horror movie.
Me: exactly.
Him: …I love it, that’s brilliant.

I want horror movie Lolita, because it’s the only accurate way to adapt Lolita.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk 😊

[Elllar.]

lolita isn’t a love story, it’s a horror story

[mr.guppysgardenhouse]

The way Harris speaks of what's supposed to be a 12-year old girl is SO disgusting, all while he was sexually abusing a 14-year old. It's horrible how much Sue Lyon went through JUST because she had played the role of a sexualized child and was abused by a director, it's tragic how her life had ended so tragically and she wasn't given an ounce of justice, only being known as an underage "sex symbol" for the rest of her career until 60 years later.

I know it's not just women, but the way SO many young girls in media were made to kiss grown men or either act sexually in the movies they starred in, even when they weren't sexualized, a little girl or boy just BEING in a movie as the starring role, as per Natalie Portman, were prayed upon like a piece of meat by disgusting people, don't even get me started on the age countdowns. It's sad so many of these actors/actresses aren't able to really live normally after that and are often known for being an eroticized object.

Even the ones who managed to move on, like Mina Suvari, Brooke Shield, etc. are STILL remembered for their roles in being taken advantage of. Dominique Swain, even 26 years later, is still being reminded and reminisced as Lolita (1997) on her social media to this day. It's just gross that victims must be represented by THIS kind of media and are blamed for being seductresses or wh0r3s even though they were nothing but children.

[SarahJeanisme]

I recall reading the book and wondering how Lolita could have been so unlucky as to be targeted by not one but two pedophiles, who both experience sex with her. My thoughts were largely, "How many people like this are lurking out there? What factored in to Lolita being a target of both of them?"

[grimeycranberry]

the fact that REAL CHILDREN were cast in these films makes me sick to my stomach. it is absolutely insane that that was allowed.