Pretty Baby

I watched the 1997 film adaptation of Lolita the other night. I don’t often sit down to watch a movie about a paedophile protagonist, who kidnaps and molests a fourteen-year-old girl, and expect to find it beautiful. And in a purely artistic sense, it was beautiful. 

As a fan of the original novel by Vladimir Nabokov, I was intrigued by the film’s growing popularity. The themes and aesthetics of Lolita have seen a recent resurgence with Gen Z, and are ubiquitous across platforms like Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram. It only takes a search of hashtags like ‘Lolita’, ‘nymphette’ or ‘coquette’ for images of dainty, doll-like girls painted in pretty pastel hues to decorate your dashboard. Lolita is referenced in pop culture through the music of singer Lana del Rey in songs like Off to the Races and Lolita. The title character, Lolita (real name ‘Dolores’), has become a cultural icon of femininity and sexuality for young girls whom many view as aspirational. 

When Stanley Kubrick made the first 1962 adaptation of Lolita, film posters posed the question, “How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?”. And it’s a very valid question. Nabokov’s exquisite lyricism, and the novel’s subtext which reflects Nabokov’s criticism of protagonist Humbert Humbert, is lost when translated to film. In the 1997 adaptation, we are left with a feast of aesthetically pleasing images, and a regrettably sympathetic portrayal of the paedophilic protagonist. Imagery of cherries, heart-shaped sunglasses, stylish two-piece sets, and luscious pouts found their way into the hearts of young girls. Moreover, casting a conventionally attractive actor like Jeremy Irons to play the protagonist further invited sympathy from viewers. Most disturbingly of all, there are many (including director Adrian Lyne himself), who view the unsettling contents of Lolita as a ‘love story’. 

Hollywood has a preoccupation with presenting paedophilic themes in glossy, cellophane-wrapped packages. Consider actress Brooke Shields, who was only eleven years old when she played the controversial role of a child prostitute in the 1978 film, Pretty Baby. This is the same Brooke Shields who posed nude for a centrefold of Playboy magazine at the ripe old age of ten. Ten. Shields was loved by the masses and touted as one of the most beautiful women of her era. But there was something sinister lurking beneath her beauty, and the same can be said for Lolita. 

The romanticisation of Lolita opens dialogue for a much larger issue: the sexualisation of young girls, and patriarchy’s quest to divorce women from their agency. The problem with girls idolising Dolores is that, amidst the flowery storytelling, it’s easy to forget that she’s the victim of the story. Humbert is an unreliable narrator, so his depiction of Dolores as some flirtatious temptress is nothing more than him projecting his perverted desires onto a naïve young girl. Dolores is totally powerless against her captor (who also happens to be her stepfather), and I would be disturbed by anyone who found this dynamic romantic. Anyone who has read Nabokov’s novel with functioning brain cells can see that Humbert is clearly supposed to be a villain. A pitiful villain, perhaps. But a villain, nonetheless. 

  I would be as bad a liar as Humbert if I said I’d never been attracted to older men. In fact, it’s something I’ve experienced several times across my adolescent years. However, I’ve learned that my naïve attraction to a rogue old enough to be my literal daddy is no fault on my part, regardless of whether I actively try to ‘seduce’ him or not. It’s the responsibility of the older man in these situations to have an ounce of integrity and set appropriate boundaries. But unfortunately, girls just like me are frequently exploited by men they trust to be wiser. While not all relationships between a young woman and a significantly older man are exploitative, there is an undeniably asymmetric power dynamic, based on the pure factors of age and (in)experience. One might question what a man, who should be trying to survive his midlife crisis, could possibly have in common with a girl fresh out of high school. I use ‘girl’ specifically in this context because, while a girl may technically be an adult at the age of eighteen, I believe any notably older man interested in pursuing someone so newly graduated from wearing a school uniform is, at least, a little suspect. 

Apparently, the traditional mode of ‘femininity’ is intimately entwined with an almost childlike state of being. Patriarchal programming enjoys instilling the sentiment that being a sweet, selfless, and submissive ‘innocent’ makes you a woman worthy of admiration. This is a sexist ideal wielded to flatter male vanity. We are more comfortable with viewing women as objects of desire, rather than agents of their own. As a teenager, I was called a ‘bitch’ and a ‘tease’ by men who I had apparently caused sexual frustration. And the fucked-up part is that I used to think it was my fault, somehow. ‘Men just prefer younger women’, we’re implicitly taught, and we’re supposed to accept this as just another fact of life. As girls, we’re taught to believe that an older man calling us ‘mature’ or ‘not like other girls our age’ is a compliment. Fuck that. The issue is that we make girls bear the onus of fending off older men, without properly criticising these men for their creepy behaviour. Society might let you date someone young enough to be your kid if you’re Leonardo DiCaprio (**DiCan’t-Date-Someone-His-Age). 

I’ve realised that, while some appreciate Lolita simply based on an aesthetic principle, there is a large demographic of young girls and women who see their own experiences as manifest in Dolores. Glamourisation of Lolita’s themes may be a way of coping with this trauma, and we can’t blame them for that. 

My absolute favourite part of Lolita occurs at the film’s culmination. Child pornographer, Clare Quilty, flees from Humbert’s gun, exposed dick swinging, as he tries to escape his bloody fate. But in his rotting baroque abode, Quilty is gunned down for his sins. This is a cathartic release for not only Humbert, who views his own sins as manifest in Quilty, but for the audience. The violent juxtaposition of Quilty’s blood against a backdrop of decaying, decadent glamour speaks to the inherently violent attack on the innocence of young girls, and by extension, the attack on women’s sovereignty. This is our crimson curse; ugly, visceral, and anything but romantic. 

But it might just be cherry flavoured.

@tandiebanana