Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2002 | Page 61

Lolita and the Perversion of the Text

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With uncanny consistency, the reviews reveal Lyne’s enthrallment with Dominique
Swain, the fifteen-year old he chose to play the title character in his adaptation.
“Lyne was captivated,” Elizabeth Kaye writes in Esquire, “introducing her as ‘my
Lolita,’ laughing delightedly when she abruptly hugged him or contrived a bit of
business” (8).^ Here, Lyne’s “love of the novel” and aesthetic commitments have
become inseparable from illicit erotic desires. Moreover, as is the case with Humbert,
Lyne’s perversion comes to ftmction as proof of his art, a point that scriptwriter
Stephan Schiff emphasizes when he explains to a N ew sw eek interviewer,
Adrian is not by nature a literary type, but his feeling for the
novel is exquisite. Any lover of Nabokov would naturally
tremble before the notion of entrusting this most splendid of
novels to the man who made Flashdance, and I did, too, when
I first heard about the project. But I have long since stopped
trembling. Adrian Lyne turns out to be a real artist. (StringerHye 7)
Here, while his “feeling for the novel is exquisite,” Adrian Lyne becomes a “real
artist” not in spite of his Flashdance past but because of it; the artless erotica of
Flashdance becomes art when combined with the “lover’s” faithfulness to the object
of desire.
P rem iere takes the identification of Lyne with Humbert to its logical
conclusion. It is only because it renders the perversions of Humbert and Lyne as
such perfect analogues for one another that the article is able to equate Humbert’s
desire for redemption at the end of the novel with Lyne’s struggle to get a distributor
for his adaptation. The close of the P rem iere article has Lyne paraphrasing
Humbert’s words as he confronts his nemesis and alter-ego Quilty near the end the
novel: “‘You stole my redemption,’ he says ruefully, ‘my chance at redemption’”
(6). Just as Humbert is thwarted by Quilty, his more pornographic rival, Lyne is
cheated of his redemption by the more exploitative commercial interests of the
film industry. Thus, in his portrayal in the popular press, Lyne becomes a faithful
artist as he is equated with Humbert and his adaptation of the novel with the art of
perversion.
It is in Entertainm ent W eekly’s 1996 article “Girl Trouble,” however, that
perversion, as the conflation of aesthetic and erotic desires, is most clearly c onveyed
as the ground of cinematic fidelity. “This movie was doomed from the start,” Adrian
Lyne reports, assuring his readers that he makes no pretension to a literal adaptation
of Nabokov’s novel {Entertainment Weekly 1). Yet, he insists, his film is more
faithful than Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 adaptation, though Nabokov himself wrote
the screenplay upon which that film is based. In the following passage, however.