What Do Women Want? (12 page)

 

 

The great thing about masterpieces is that they seem always to have existed, unopposed. Now that all the false starts, cavils, bans, and bad reviews have been reduced to the blurry footnotes they are, we have the book in all its glory, as if it had never not been.

Outrageous, inevitable, infinitely rereadable,
Lolita
at thirty is as young as she was as a glimmer in her author’s eye.

She has, in fact, defeated time—her enemy, her inspiration.

To her progenitor she gave worldwide fame and the chance to air all his earlier Russian novels in English translations. Engendered by a young, exiled author in Berlin, she bestowed upon the old American author he became ease, comparative wealth, and two more decades to complete his oeuvre.

The story ends in Switzerland overlooking a mirrory lake, “once upon a time in fairyland when old King Cole was a merry old soul.”

“
Lolita
Turns Thirty” was originally commissioned by the Book-of-the-Month Club to serve as the introduction to a thirtieth-birthday facsimile edition of Vladimir Nabokov’s
Lolita
(the Putnam’s edition of 1958). It was later revised for publication in the
New York Times Book Review
(June 5, 1988), and it has been changed somewhat for publication here.

After writing about the curious publishing history of
Lolita,
I was fascinated to discover that Adrian Lyne’s 1997 film of
Lolita
encountered similar problems. In May 1998, I interviewed Adrian Lyne for the
New York Observer
after screening the movie. My resulting article proved to be an update of censorship practices in the United States as they have evolved between 1954, when the manuscript of
Lolita
was turned down by every American publisher (it eventually went to Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press in Paris in 1955), and 1998, when Adrian Lyne’s movie could not find theatrical distribution in the United States and was bought instead by Showtime, the cable channel.

Even the most literate audiences believe censorship to be a thing of the past—a problem faced by James Joyce and Bennett Cerf, Henry Miller and Barney Rosset, but absent from the cultural equation today. This is simply not true. Censorship is creeping back in a more insidious way today. Fear, self-censorship, and state-by-state prosecutions succeed where federal laws never completely could. If there were an American James Joyce ready to write a contemporary
Ulysses
today, it might not get published, let alone defended in court.

As attorney Martin Garbus (who was called in as a consultant on the distribution problems of Lyne’s film of
Lolita
) told me, “Censorship today comes from both the right and the left—the private pressure groups—some feminists, regional censors like the Christian right, and conservative communities that bring pressure to bear on state and federal prosecutors. The struggle is very different from the sixties. It’s more complex and more dangerous.”

Few people are aware, Mr. Garbus said, that

 

 

In the case of Lyne’s film of
Lolita,
threats from Dworkinite feminists—for whom women are always a tabula rasa defiled by the ever corrupting male—became a decisive factor in scaring off distributors. JonBenet Ramsey’s murder was very much in the news in the fall of 1997 (when theatrical distribution was under discussion) and Milos Forman’s film about Larry Flynt (
The People vs. Larry Flynt
) had encountered protests from Andrea Dworkin, Patricia Ireland, and NOW. The same group was also threatening to boycott
Lolita
for supposedly making the victim of incest appear as the aggressor. (They could not have seen the movie if they honestly thought that.) According to the Dworkinite fringe of feminism, all female adolescents are utterly pure of mind and only evil stepfathers can possibly corrupt them. Any book or movie that attempts to treat a young woman as a creature of ambivalence, of sexual longing, or of oedipal confusion, is bound to be on their see-no-evil list. We can only depict happy feminists on tractors selling Girl Scout cookies and/or recovering lost memories of sexual abuse by horrid male relatives. It was Adrian Lyne’s ill luck to have made a fifty-eight-million-dollar art movie in such an atmosphere. If the Mormons didn’t boycott the movie, the Dworkinites might.

Even though Mr. Garbus declared “the film was safe” from a legal point of view, the combined Dworkinite-Mormon threat was chilling enough to scare distributors away. Of course, distributors wouldn’t honestly cop to their fear, but despite Mr. Garbus’s legal assurances, the film never found theatrical distribution. Sometimes a threatened boycott is more effective than a real one.

For the assorted sins of being faithful to the classic novel, daring to present “every little girl’s fantasy of replacing her mother” (said my nineteen-year-old daughter, Molly, who watched the movie with me), Mr. Lyne and his fifty-eight-million-dollar feature film were given the booby prize of going straight to cable in the all important American market. As of this writing, the Showtime channel was scheduled in August 1998 to broadcast for the first time in America a film that begs to be shown on the big screen.
¹⁰
Lolita
has, of course, already been seen in theaters in England, France, Italy, Spain, and Russia and plenty of other places that are historically no strangers to censorship, but Americans are currently being “protected” from it by a combination of studio paranoia and troglodyte misunderstanding of the fact that art is not advocacy and advocacy is not art.

If you present the story of a wretch who seduces his stepdaughter, that does not necessarily make you a pervert or an advocate for perverts. Adrian Lyne the director has come smack up against all the problems Vladimir Nabokov the author faced in the fifties.

As Lyne ironically explained to me: “You can make a movie about cannibalism. You can make
Silence of the Lambs.
You can make a movie about necrophilia—
The Kiss.
But pedophilia is the last taboo. I think probably because it’s too close to home. People want to believe that sexuality flies in conveniently at the legal age of eighteen, and it’s just not true. I think back to myself as a kid. You’re kind of an ungainly mess of sexuality at fourteen.”

Strictly speaking, a girl between the ages of thirteen and seventeen is not a child, though legally she is a minor. If we are going to claim that girls between thirteen and seventeen have no interest in seduction, we will be hard put to explain the existence of all the industries that feed on their fascination with it: from music videos and CDs to makeup, magazines, and movies. Teenage girls are constantly exploited commercially in far worse ways than any
Lolita
may threaten. These forms of exploitation raise no eyebrows.

“What is awful is this atmosphere of fear which they rationalize by saying the movie is an art movie,” Lyne told me. And the sad fact is that a genuine work of art is being pushed to cable when it clearly belongs on the big screen.

“[François] Truffaut said years ago that American directors like to make movies about heroes, while European directors like to make movies about people with weakness and vulnerability, and that’s what fascinates me really,” said Lyne. He has made such a movie, and he has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Lyne’s
Lolita
is a tragicomedy as Nabokov intended.

Neither lover is completely innocent nor completely corrupted, and the audience is finally overwhelmed by the way both lovers doom each other to disappointment and death. Lolita is hardly an advertisement for the joys of sex with minors.

What is it about the movie that has occasioned this sad display of institutional cravenness? It is a beautifully made portrait of an impossible love whose principal tone is elegiac. It is a movie that paints the American landscape Nabokov chronicled with a surreal visual style that often evokes Diane Arbus’s photographs, yet is perfectly faithful to Nabokov’s outsider’s vision of a forties America of sad trailer parks, dusty diners, and lonely desert gas pumps.

It is a movie whose eye can linger now on a fly caught on fly-paper, now on a girl sucking a banana as if it were a cock, now on a chocolate soda with a large white turd of vanilla ice cream falling into it, now on a holocaust of moths in an electric zapper—while never letting us forget that the real enemy of Humbert Humbert and his Lolita is time itself. The lovers are doomed because Lolita must grow out of the very nymphage that attracts her lover. Besides Humbert doesn’t really love anyone living, he is obsessed with a long-dead girl, his baby love from the South of France when he himself was a child of fourteen.

It is a movie that often evokes dreams—particularly nightmares—a movie whose dominant tone is sadness and loss, a movie that accomplishes the almost impossible feat of making a pervert sympathetic enough for us to want to spend a whole evening with him, yet wretched enough to make us understand what a dead end obsession is. Obsession,
Lolita
makes clear, can lead to nothing good. So this is a moral movie in the deepest sense of the term. It shows the stark contrast between obsession and love. It does not—like so many other movies—confuse them.

Lyne has also succeeded in capturing Nabokov’s verbal humor. Stephen Schiff ’s screenplay deftly uses verbatim monologues from the book, which Jeremy Irons makes come alive in voice-overs. Visual and aural jokes abound—from Quilty’s voice on the radio, half-heard by Humbert at the start of the movie, to the brief glimpse of a sign outside a motel where Humbert and Lolita stay which reads: CHILDREN UNDER 14 FREE.

Lolita’s maddening combination of childish bubblegum-popping and siren gestures (learned from the
Photoplay
magazines she constantly reads) is also true to Nabokov’s vision.

The movie has none of the overstatement of Lyne’s $156-million-grossing
Fatal Attraction.
It is a restrained, understated piece of work on a subject we are no more allowed to address in 1998 than we were in 1955.

Here is the astounding thing about
Lolita:
It still has the power to shock. The oedipal myth it portrays is as much a subject for denial today as it was in the fifties—or for that matter in Sigmund Freud’s day.

We continue to deny the reality of underage sexuality. With unconstitutional forays like the Child Pornography Act of 1996, we combat the very idea that such a thing exists. But we are still finding excuses to censor works of art while we let all sorts of trash fly free.
Lolita
is an elegy to lost love, not an exploitation movie. If it showed an adolescent girl carved up by cannibals it would have been released in thousands of theaters two years ago with remarkably little fuss. But because it deals with incest—that universal, yet universally denied phenomenon—it has been subjected to the dunderheaded ministrations of the political correctness police.

So censorship is still with us. Only it is even more dangerous today because it is decentralized, thus harder to attack. The idea of the artist as enchanter has succumbed to the idea of the artist as political threat. In many ways we were better off in the fifties, when censorship was called by its proper name.

—OSCAR WILDE

 

 

 

Pornographic material has been present
in the art and literature of every society in every historical period. What has changed from epoch to epoch—or even from one decade to another—is the ability of such material to flourish publicly and to be distributed legally. In elitist societies there are, paradoxically, fewer calls for censorship than in democratic ones, since elitist societies function as de facto censors, keeping certain materials out of the purview of hoi polloi. As democracy increases, so does the demand for legal control over the erotic, the pornographic, the scatological. Our own century is a perfect example of the oscillations of taste regarding such material. We have gone from the banning and burning of D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Radclyffe Hall, Henry Miller, and other avant-garde artists early in the century, to a passionate struggle to free literature from censorship in midcentury, to a new wave of reaction at century’s end.

After nearly a hundred years of agitating for freedom to publish, we find that the enemies of freedom have multiplied rather than diminished. They are Christians, Muslims, oppressive totalitarian regimes, even well-meaning social libertarians who happen to be feminists, teachers, school boards, some librarians. This should not surprise us since, as Margaret Mead pointed out forty years ago, the demand for state censorship is usually “a response to the presence within the society of heterogeneous groups of people with differing standards and aspirations.”
¹¹
As our culture becomes more diverse, we can expect more calls for censorship. So it is essential for us to understand what role pornography plays in our lives and what value it has.

Our job is made tougher and more confusing by the fact that the spate of freedoms we briefly enjoyed in the late sixties, the seventies, and the early eighties led to the proliferation of sexual materials so ugly, exploitative, and misogynistic that it is impossible to defend them. Artistically, however, we may believe that the First Amendment protects them. The door was opened to
Lolita, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer, Couples, Portnoy’s Complaint, Fear of Flying,
but it was also opened to
Debbie Does Dallas, Deep Throat,
and
Snuff.
There has been a deluge of pornography so offensiveto women that it has understandably provoked the ire of many feminists. Pornography also became hugely profitable once legal restraints were lifted, and this in turn gave rise to another wave of reaction.