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By Susan
Block, Ph.D.An
American Classic too Hot for American Theaters |
Date Published:
August,
1998
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The
other night, the Bonobo Gang attended the opening of the new hot potato
film, Lolita, the latest movie version of Vladimir Nabokov’s classic
story of an Englishman’s disastrous obsession for a prepubescent American
girl in the late 1940’s. Adrian Lyne, the high-gloss director of “Flashdance,”
“9 ½ Weeks,” “Fatal Attraction” & “Indecent Proposal” directed
“Lolita,” & its definitely his best, most highly nuanced film
yet. It stars Jeremy Irons in a tour-de-force performance as
the aging British professor and pedophile Humbert Humbert, & Dominique
Swain as his stepdaughter, the charming precocious, all-American nymphet
Lolita.
The film is de facto banned in U.S. movie theaters because no one is
willing to distribute it, except for a week in the LA area. Showtime
is broadcasting it (that’s who sponsored the screening), but all the
movie theater distributors are just too scared of getting busted,
boycotted or pelted with picket signs.
They
might really have something to be afraid of here. Considering
these erotophobic, childsex-hysterical times, “Lolita” is quite a
courageous film. Not only does it portray a pedophile somewhat
sympathetically—though also quite pathetically--it has several scenes
of hot passionate kissing & suggestive sex between the 40-something
Humbert Humbert & the 14-year-old Lolita, challenging the new
Child Pornography Act which prohibits even the use of adult body doubles
in sex scenes.
Whether
or not “Lolita” is actually being censored, it is certainly being
censured far & wide by reviewers who willfully confuse representation
with endorsement. The film, like the book, doesn’t recommend
pedophilia, it examines it in the context of a highly personal, somewhat
symbolic story. Some critics are complaining, “Why tell it from
the point of view of the lecherous stepfather? Why not let Lolita
tell her side of the story?” That may well be a valid,
interesting story that ought to be told, but “Lolita” as written by
Nabokov is not Lolita’s story, it’s Humbert’s story, that is, Nabokov’s
story. Lyne’s “Lolita” is probably truer to the novel’s
sensibility than the original 1960’s Kubrick film. It is very
much Humbert’s tale of lust and woe.
Nabokov
wrote the book when he was a newly ensconced Russian immigrant in
America. He loved America’s postwar youth culture flush with
victory and hope, its freshness, brashness, easygoing smoothness &
preternatural optimism. But he was also frightened of the seductive
youthfulness of the New World, its juvenile taste, suburban conformity
& dangerous, insensitive immaturity. That’s why “Lolita”
has to be told from Humbert Humbert’s point of view. And
that’s why it’s too hot for most Americans—or at least American movie
theaters--to handle.
Susan M. Block, Ph.D.
Dr. Susan Block is
a practicing sex therapist, star of Radio Sex TV on HBO, author of The
10 Commandments of Pleasure (St. Martin's Press), and director of The
Dr. Susan Block Institute for the Erotic Arts & Sciences in Beverly
Hills, California. She can be reached at (213) 749.1330.
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