Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2002 | Page 63
Lolita and the Perversion of the Text
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Now, Humbert is to be played by “an actor with vast experience playing dirty old
men” and Lolita by “a real-life nymphet.” Eschewing the idea that the nymphet is
itself Humbert’s aesthetic construction and not a phenomenon in the objective
world, Lyne now fully becomes the “dirty old man” himself, “rhapsodizing” over
a 15-year old girl’s simulation of a 9-year old’s sexuality.^ The fall from artist to
exploiter, from the faithfulness of perversion to the scandal of the loose adaptation,
is a short one, here in Entertainment Weekly, the slip occurring exactly where the
director moves from his claims for “faithfulness” to his specious claims to a “literal”
adaptation. The false literal, best represented by the search for a “real-life” nymphet,
is, inevitably, a degeneration into the “loose.”
As she articulates her goals in Interpreting Film, Janet Staiger describes
the project of reception studies more generally. She writes, “Through the hyperbole
and contradictions surrounding discussion of this film, I hope to indicate something
of what is at stake in the consideration of widely divergent reactions to a moving
picture and how discourse surrounding film can indicate, symptomatically and
inadvertently, ideological and hegemonic notions...” (124). My study here similarly
seeks to reveal “ideological and hegemonic notions” through its study of the
“hyperbole and contradictions” surrounding the discussion of a film. More pointedly,
however, this essay attempts to distill a theory of cinematic adaptation from a
popular discourse, a theory that challenges and supplements the dominant
perspectives of scholarship on the same issue. For by linking perversion with fidelity,
popular discourse alters the definition of faithfulness, insisting not only on the
erotic attachments implicit in fidelity but also on the aesthetic transformations
necessary for the faithful adaptation. Contrary to McFarlane’s complaint, the
strength of the fidelity argument here ends up to be its subjective and impressionistic
character, insofar as it admits the aesthetic interventions involved in the maintenance
of erotic attachment. The controversy surrounding Lolita's translations from page
to screen suggests that the true scandal of cinematic adaptation is not the perversion
of the text, but the denial of perversion, the pretense of literally incarnating the
fictional precursor in another form.
University of West Florida
Robin Blyn
Notes
1.
2.
For details o f Freud’s theory o f perversion, see liis Three Essays on the Theory o f
Sexuality. Jerome Neu provides an insightful reading o f the issue in ‘Trend and
Perversion.” A s in Nabokov’s novel, however, popular culture discourse deviates from
Freud’s definitions.
George Bluestone, Erwin Panofsky, and Seymour Chatman, all provide insightful
theories about, as one title declares, “What novels can do that film ’s can’t (and viceversa)” (Chatman 117). Bluestone, sensitive to the innovations o f the modernist novel.