7 (Part 2): Lolita In the 90s

In Part 2 of our episode on the Lolita 1997 movie adaptation, we dig into America in the 90s -- a wave of movies full of teen girls as sexual demon, how The Long Island Lolita redefined Dolores to a new generation, and dive into the complex production and release of Adrian Lyne's Lolita.

The Crush (1993): https://variety.com/1993/film/reviews/the-crush-2-1200432089/

Jon Stewart interviews Alicia Silverstone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5Ic3nRa1J8

Long Island Lolita News Coverage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5Ic3nRa1J8

Jeremy Irons Weird Apology Conference: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2020/02/jeremy-irons-berlinale-press-conference

The Child Pornography Protection Act of 1996: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-105shrg44512/html/CHRG-105shrg44512.htm

History of Child Pornography laws in the US: http://www.stobbslaw.com/blog/2014/05/a-brief-overview-of-child-pornography-laws-and-key-problems/#:~:text=In%201990%20Congress%20passed%20the,mere%E2%80%9D%20possession%20of%20child%20pornography.

Lolita comes up in Supreme Court: https://greensboro.com/the-truth-about-lolita/article_25b3325b-b54b-555b-b794-b5f16a8dbced.html

1999 MTV Movie Awards: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VaPXMC6jYc

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Yeah, Welcome back to Lolita Podcast. I am your host,

(00:32):
Jamie Loftus. This is part two of our episode about
the adaptation of Lolita by Adrian Line. So if you
haven't listened to part one, I would recommend going back.
We covered in our last episode some of the production
of the movie, a few movies of the seventies and
eighties that attempted to address child sex abuse with mixed results,

(00:55):
as well as real life cases of c s A
and the stranger danger culture of the nineteen eighties. And
in part two, we're going to start out in the
early nineties, when the friction between the messaging of we
must protect the children and a pop culture landscape that
is very willing to sexualize the underage then blame them

(01:15):
for it continues to escalate. Friction between protecting the children
and over sexualizing the children reaches its fever pitch by
the early nineteen nineties, shortly before Adrian Lines Lolita went
into production. Keep in mind, erotic thrillers were what Line
was famous for before he made Lolita, particularly Fatal Attraction

(01:36):
from nineteen eighty seven. There is a distinct trend in
the early nineties of vindictive, sexually evil teenage girls. There's
countless movies with this theme, but the best remembered one
is probably a movie from nineteen ninety three called The Crush,
starring Alicia Silverstone in her first movie, when she is
only sixteen. She plays the part of Adrian, a conniving

(01:59):
young woman man who seduces an older man who's played
by Carrie els Elves. I never know how to say
his name. He was in The Princess Bride and she
ruins his life. The Crush was written and directed by
a man named Alan Shapiro, who claims that this movie
is based on his life, so keep that in mind
when hearing the events that take place in this movie. Well.

(02:22):
Alicia Silverstone, the actor, is sixteen when this is filmed.
The character Darien, whose name is later changed to Adrian,
is only fourteen. The genre of The Crush is firmly
erotic thriller, and while the movie was probably the most
successful to feature an over sexed teenager as an antagonist,
there are at least fifty thousand movies with this exact

(02:45):
theme released in the early nineties. This media is overwhelmingly
angled to make it seem like white heterosexual men with
good careers are being actively seduced into ruin by teenage girls.
And it's no coincidence that all of the high profile
child sex abuse cases in Hollywood of this era involve
men of this exact description. Everyone everyone, Okay, let's talk

(03:10):
about the crash, must paying to watch me? Just running
the guest house. From the moment she met Nick, you
the harshest for me to make friends, So everybody thinks
of some kind of freak or something. I'll be your friend.
She was crazy about him. Carrie always plays Nick Elliott,
a reporter for Peak magazine who rents a guesthouse from

(03:32):
a wealthy couple who have a fourteen year old daughter
named Adrian. Adrian takes an interest in Nick, and many
of the early scenes and plot points reflect adaptations of Lolita,
particularly the portion where Humbert Humbert is living as a
lodger in Charlotte Hayes's home and is obsessing over Dolores.
In the Crush, the sexualization of Adrian is made very clear.

(03:54):
Are you sure you're fourteen? Almost? Isn't it make fast
your bedtime? Yes? Adrian pursues Nick relentlessly, and Nick possibly

(04:16):
receives the attention even when his coworker slash adult love
interest warns him that Adrian is bad news. She's got
a crush on you. Don't be silly saying I did
something to provoke this, well, did you? Of course not.
Adrian and Nick kiss early on in the movie, a

(04:36):
kiss that is initiated by Adrian. Nick, who is twenty
eight to her fourteen very much kisses her back, but
then says it's wrong and they can't be together. I mean,
let's face it, your that's a big difference whenever you
say no, no seriously, Adrian, like night up to the

(05:00):
lighthouse till we kissed. Now, that was a mistake, Adrian.
When this happens, Adrian, who by the way, is also
a super genius, of course, makes it her mission in
life to punish Nick for not being her boyfriend. These
supervillain qualities are juxtaposed with the little girl aesthetics that

(05:22):
most fourteen year old grow out of. In a scene
where Nick sneaks into her room, then hides in a
closet and watches her undress seriously, we see that Adrian's
room is full of horse trophies and pink and lace.
This is set up as classic nymphete imagery depicting girlhood,
while also featuring long, lingering shots of Lethia Silverstone in

(05:45):
a bikini gazing up into Nick's window. Adrian stocks Nick,
interferes with articles that he's writing for his job, she
defaces his car, she deletes his work, she spies on
him having sex with the adult love interest, and then,
in I Ship You Not, locks Nick's love interest in
a photography dark room and fills the dark room with bees.

(06:08):
Alan Shapiro presents this in the movie as if these
are all things that have actually happened to him. Here's
how Variety characterizes it in their review of The Crush
At the Time, writer director Alan Shapiro says in the
production notes that the idea was inspired by an incident
in his own life where a brilliant young woman developed
a crush on him and refused to take no for

(06:29):
an answer. So before Adrian can get in trouble for
this whole be crime, Adrian falsely accuses Nick of sexual
assault by stealing a used condom from his trash, and
Nick is arrested by the police. After getting bailed out,
Adrian's friend tells Nick that she knows that Nick is
innocent and that Adrian has had a history of this

(06:51):
obsessive behavior, going so far as to say that a
camp counselor that Adrian had been fixated on had once
accidentally been poisoned to f Adrian then appears out of
nowhere with a weapon, and she and Nick have a
fight on an antique carousel I don't even know, and
the fight concludes with Nick punching Adrian across the room.

(07:14):
Nick's girlfriend, who almost died from bees lives. Adrian is
locked up the end. So, yeah, this is obviously not
a true story. But here's the kicker. When you watch
The Crush back now, which I would not recommend that
you do, Alicia Silverstone's character is called Adrian Forrester, but
it's pretty obvious that when it was filmed, everyone is

(07:35):
calling her something different. No one's mouth is forming the
name Adrian. Here's why Silverstone's character was originally named Dairy
and Forrester, which is a woman's real name, the real
name of the person. Alan Shapiro claims Alicia Silverstone's character
is based on I repeat, Alan Shapiro used a real

(07:56):
person's name in a movie that suggests that fourteen year
old someone unable to consent was a vindictive seductress, an
evil super genius, and an executioner via Bees. So when
the real Darien Forrester saw The Crush had been released
with her real name, she sued them and she won.

(08:17):
So while Silverstone was referred to as Darien in the
original theatrical release of the movie, the Crush had to
be re dubbed and she's referred to as Adrian Forrester
by the time the movie is re aired on TV
and even now. But if you go back and listen
to the trailer, Nick Elliott was looking for a nice,
quiet place to write Darien just unbucking believable. This teen

(08:46):
seductress trope is very prevalent around this time and is
equally insidious, poorly written as she is. Adrian slash Darien
is a solid example of how these underage characters are
written very deliberately to remove any blame from the older
man in the equation. Adrian is not just competent, she
is hyper competent. She is a genius. Writing like this

(09:11):
tries to sell us the idea that it's easier to
believe that a sixteen year old who does well in
school would be a vindictive murderer than the idea that
a twenty eight year old man might hit on an
underage girl when he thought no one was paying attention.
Alicia Silverstone, in spite of being pretty press shy as
a teenager, is sexualized heavily in interviews from this era,

(09:33):
especially after she started in the Aerosmith music video for
Crying at age seventeen and another very sexy music video
girl Role. Here's John Stewart being an absolute creep to
a seventeen year old Alicia Silverstone. I'm crushed, absolutely crushed.
How old are you? Cool man? I feel like but

(10:00):
all of a sudden, thank you my first reference and
hold the phone there. Who's Joey Buttafuco. It's actually but
a Fuco. I have Italian family who will hand my
ass back to me if I don't say it right.
But I honestly didn't know who Joey Buttafuca was before
researching for this episode. His was the name heard around

(10:24):
the world in the mid nineties and is unfortunately very
relevant to what we're talking about, because Joey Buttafuco is
a statutory rapist. Around the time of the Crush, the
name Lolita was synonymized with a teenage girl who was
framed as vengeful and vindictive. I'm talking about the saga

(10:44):
of Amy Fisher, who had seventeen shot and wounded Mary
Joe Buttafuco, who was the wife of Amy Fisher's boyfriend,
a thirty five year old auto body mechanic named Joey Buttafuco,
who had knowingly had sex with Fisher while she was
under range. Fisher was dubbed the Long Island Lolita by
the tabloid media, and throughout nine two, when her crime

(11:07):
was committed, Fisher's image was everywhere. Mary Joe thankfully recovered,
but Fisher became one of the earliest examples of a
young woman absolutely devoured by the twenty four hour news media,
and she was sent to jail in late Here's an
idea of how the press was treating her at this time.
You are a tragedy and disgrace to yourself, to your family,

(11:29):
to your friends, and to society. Look into her eyes
and decide for yourself. Is she a little girl lost
for a hateful creature who was willing to kill to
get what she wanted. What all of this leaves out
are the actions of Joey Buttafuco. He was a thirty
five year old who had been having sex with a

(11:50):
minor on multiple occasions, completely knowingly, and in addition, had
recruited and made money off of Amy Fisher by prostituting
her to a Long Island s court service. And Amy
Fisher was not the only young girl he was doing
this with. So here's a man who has been bringing
a teenage girl to a motel to have sex with her,
encouraging her to become a sex worker, profiting off of that,

(12:13):
telling her repeatedly it sure would be great if my
wife were dead. And then when Amy Fisher does commit
the crime of her own volition, Joey Buttafuco rats her
out immediately and says that he didn't even know Amy Fisher,
she was sexually obsessed with him. This was, of course
a complete lie, by the public would learn that he

(12:33):
didn't just know her, but was a statutory rapist and
a sex trafficker, and that Amy was a victim of
both of these crimes. But by that point it almost
didn't matter. Amy Fisher had already been chewed up and
spit out and was sitting in jail. By the nineteen nineties,
demonizing young women was a common practice in the twenty
four hour news cycle. The year after Amy Fisher is

(12:56):
put in jail for assaulting Mary Joe Buttafuco, the Tanya
Harding story kicks up, and later in the decade there's
more famous public shaming and blaming of figures like Monica
Lewinsky and Anita Hill. Each and every one of these
women were characterized as obsessive, as jealous. They were judged
on their looks, and it was assumed that they were

(13:17):
courting the massive public scrutiny that none of them seemed
to benefit from, and in Amy Fisher's case, she was underage.
Keep in mind that all these stories were being exploited
and rehashed over and over while actual issues in the US,
the ever increasing mass incarceration of Black Americans in particular,
were being completely ignored in favor of focusing on one

(13:39):
white eighteen year old girl going to prison. Interestingly enough,
the piece of media besides Lolita, most often brought up
in conversations about Amy Fisher in the early nineties was
Glenn closest character in Adrian Lyne's fatal Attraction Help. The
Nassau homicide detective described her in those terms right after
she was arrested. If she couldn't have him, no one

(14:02):
else could. She was obsessed with him. It was a
near fatal attraction. And so less than two years before
Adrian Lins Lolita would go into production, we as a
culture were buying what Joey fucking but a Fuco was selling.
The first adaptation of the story of the Long Island
Lolita was released three weeks after Amy Fisher was sentenced

(14:24):
five to fifteen years in prison. It was called Amy
Fisher My Story. Amy Fisher had sold her life rights
for this movie, partially in order to make bail brought
even more. A TV movie called The Amy Fisher Story
starred Drew Barrymore as Fisher, and Casualties of Love The
Long Island Lolita Story starred Alissa Milano. All of these

(14:46):
were panned critically and millions of people watched them, and
just as most high profile nineties women of the tabloids,
Fisher's character in these movies was over sexed, demonized, and
made to seem like the main person at fault. So
at the height of this case, Amy Fisher said in
one of her only interviews at the time, one done
with Inside edition that she was also raped by a

(15:08):
friend of the family at age thirteen and had intentionally
overdosed twice after another older boyfriend sold footage of her
to a tabloid press called hard Copy ahead of her sentencing.
Here's another clip from one of these movies. When I
was twelve years old, my parents had a titleman to
an Italian marble in the house and he was the

(15:30):
first guy I ever did it with. Yeah, You're sex
from This clip is from the Elissa Milano movie where
Amy Fisher is written particularly cruelly. But it's the Drew

(15:51):
Barrymore casting that I find most interesting here, and we
could get deep into why Drew Barrymore would be considered
ideal for the role of Amy, as she had become
regular tabloid fodder as a teenager herself in a way
that very much framed her as a villain and a
cautionary tale all will Profiting off of her image, Barrymore

(16:11):
started a movie called Poison IVY that shares a lot
of similarities with The Crush. She's featured multiple times as
a killer teen in this era of her career, and
is only eighteen when playing Amy Fisher. When it comes
to child stars who were overexposed while still under age.
Drew Barrymore always comes into the conversation and look, I'm

(16:33):
not going to relitigate the Fisher but a Fuco case here.
It's a long story, and it's recapped in an excellent
episode of the podcast You're Wrong About with Michael Hobbs
and Sarah Marshall that I'll linkol in the description, Amy
Fisher's crime resulted in an innocent woman, Mary joe but
Afuco suffering permanent physical damage, although I'm happy to say
she's fine now. Finally divorced Joey but A Feuco years later,

(16:56):
and most recently released a memoir about the whole experience
called Getting It Through My Thick Skull. What there's no
question about in my mind is that Amy Fisher's crime
was connected to Lolita to characterize her as a sexually
promiscuous and vengeful teenage girl, a girl who is to blame.
One element of the story I found really interesting was

(17:19):
the conversation around Amy Fisher's eventual release from prison, in
she served seven out of fifteen potential years in prison,
benefiting from some clear privilege there. But what I didn't
know was that Mary Joe, but a Fuco, the woman
that Amy Fisher shot, was critical in allowing her to
get released. But Ifuko spoke at the hearing to have

(17:40):
Amy Fisher released, she'd been in contact with Fisher's mother
from up until her release in ninety nine, and said
the following she needed to be punished. She tried to
kill me. But Amy Fisher is not a Lolita. This
is a sick girl. This is not a Seductresses in
nineteen nineties were full of splashy overexposed stories like this

(18:05):
that closely connected to the rise of the twenty four
hour news cycle. Amy Fisher was eighteen by the time
she was convicted and was very much treated like an
adult seductress. During these same years, there was also an
increase in awareness of violence towards children, as well as
the existence of child pornography. So that's America in the nineties.
There is nothing more lethal than a teenage girl's sexuality.

(18:29):
But also we must protect the children. And here we
are a listener right back at Adrian Lines Lolita. Lolita,
starring Jeremy Irons and Dominique Swain, was shot in It
features a haunting, dissonant soundtrack from Ennio Morriconi, and the
vibe on set for Elizabeth Kay's Esquire article is unique.

(18:51):
The shoot began in North Carolina, and Dominique Swain had
been there rehearsing with Adrian Line and a guardian for
a month before Jeremy Irons showed up. Irons was annoyed
to find that Dominique had already bonded with Line and
said so, Line replied to him with this, that's totally crazy.
I never thought about it. It's just that I have
to nurture her because she's never done it before. By

(19:13):
all accounts, Line treated his actors and crew kindly in
spite of a grueling shoot. Unlike Kubrick, who downplayed the
American road trip of his nineteen sixty two adaptation and
filmed the entire movie in England, Line was very focused
on the details and literally brought his cast and crew
across the country on a road trip as they shot,

(19:34):
going from North Carolina to New Orleans, to Texas to
New Mexico. Something I found particularly interesting was Kay's descriptions
of the crew grappling with the story that they were
bringing to life. She writes this, at times, people working
on the movie felt compelled to defend its subject, often
for the oddest of reasons, among them that since girls

(19:56):
must cease to be virgins, they may as well be
deflowered by their f others, who can at least be
said to love them. One principal figure in the action,
denying Humbert's calamitous effect on Lolita invoked a female friend
who had been sexually abused as a child, yet had
emerged miraculously unscathed. Another anecdote comes from the scene where
we first meet Dominique Swain's Lolita, a scene in which

(20:19):
her sheer dress is soaked as she lays beneath a sprinkler.
Elizabeth Kay writes this, Their camera focused on lines redheaded Lolita,
a fifteen year old in a red bathing suit, sprawling
beneath a lawn sprayer that drenched her with spouting water
as she frolicked with a panting male dog in a
manner markedly erotic. While puzzled passers by looked on, what's

(20:42):
this movie about? One asked some middle aged guy. A
grip answered, who falls in love with a young girl
based on a literary classic? Said the unit pr woman.
Don't forget that, Jeremy Irons gets in on the fund
saying making a movie about something isn't doning it true enough,
jare but this depends very much on how the creatives

(21:05):
at the top of that movie view the subject matter.
Adrian Lions comments make this difficult. One quote that stands out.
If I were doing a movie about a thirteen year
old getting chopped up by cannibals, there'd be no problem.
There is no other intuitive place to put this in
this episode, So I just wanted to mention here that
while I think that Jeremy Irons turns in a pretty

(21:26):
solid performance in this movie, he has a pretty notable
track record of making misogynistic and homophobic comments at literally
every opportunity that simply need to be googled to be believed.
These are comments that he only began to distance himself
from beginning in February twenty twenty, where he gave a

(21:46):
very weird preface to a talk in Berlin by saying
that he actually didn't mean every funked up thing he's
ever said, so please stop asking. These problematic comments are
mostly taking place in the two thousand tens, not back
in the late nineties when Lolita was made, but he
does slip up a little bit in the Lolita Press
junket here saying this, we were living in a sort

(22:07):
of strange fantasy world whereby Dominique was fourteen, and apparently
UM had to be protected that fourteen year fourteen year
old California knows about everything. You know, Come on, UM,
So on one hand, we were trying to be legal
and and really treating her as this porcelain child who

(22:29):
I didn't know where she came from or how all
that occurred. On the other hand, we were dealing with
an actress who had read the book, understood the book,
quite liked the book, UM, who lived the life of
any California in fourteen year old and knew all about it. Yeah,
what a bunch of babies protecting a fourteen year old

(22:50):
on the set of a movie where your character, Jeremy
Irons is repeatedly assaulting her. Those prudes. Irons also to
repeat sign that partition, and we discussed in part one
saying that Roman Polanski, a convicted child sex abuser, should
be released. I mean, the man plays the most famous
child sex abuser of all time and reads the audio

(23:12):
book that we all listened to, and he still defends
Roman Polanski. So we here at the pod, me here
at the pod, are not fans of Jeremy Irons. We
just have to talk about him a lot. In this episode,
Dominique Swain was described as being generally outgoing on the
set and worked closely with Lyne, who would described to

(23:32):
her when to pause and went to react within a scene.
She was also said to have held up production for
a full day with her anxiety of having to play
a seventeen year old pregnant Lolita k speculates that because
the movie was filmed in sequence, this anxiety came from
it being her last scene in the movie. There's also
a few accounts of Jeremy Irons being overly harsh with

(23:54):
Dominique Swain. At one point during the shoot, she made
a suggestion on how he might approach a scene, and
he replied, don't tell me what to do, and she
burst into tears. Dominique's mother was on set when sex
scenes with Swain and Irons were filmed for her safety,
and Irons was said to once being nearly in tears
with the stress of doing it, saying I can't do

(24:15):
this and covering his face. As Kay remembers it. Dominique
removed Jeremy Irons's hands from his face and said, kindly,
yes you can. We hear this production dissonance in how
different people viewed the story in the behind the scenes
video from the low lated DVD as well. This featurette
also has six hundred fifty thousand views in its current

(24:37):
YouTube upload Incarnation and I find it especially interesting how
Adrian Lyne's opinions on what the story is about seemed
to constantly be in conflict with what his leads think
it's about, especially Melanie Griffith and Dominique Swain. This dissonance
comes up multiple times in this eight minute behind the
scenes video. Line will say something like this, Charlotte sees

(25:00):
that Lolita is kind of attracted to Humbled as well,
so they're both really rivals for the affection of Humbled.
Immediately after he says this, Melanie Griffith has the opposite opinion.
She just sees Humbert, who's very handsome and very elegant
and different, and and she doesn't see any of these

(25:21):
stuff it's going on between him and Lolita. Jeremy Irons
says this of his thoughts on making a movie with
a child sex abuser as its protagonist. As it is
something that happens in society. It's not something that should
be condoned or encouraged, but it's something that is. And
the arts have to shed light upon question um cover

(25:46):
everything that happens in life. Meanwhile, Adrian Line is over
here saying ship like this. It makes you laugh, it
makes you cry, it makes you horrified, and that's all
you can want for a movie. So filming completes in
February nine six, and the movie still does not have
a distributor. This becomes a popular subject of ridicule in

(26:10):
snooty Hollywood circles. Did Adrian Line really make a fifty
eight million dollar art house movie? And over a year
passes without a distributor being found. Dominique Swain returns to
school and does school plays and lifeguard training, and she
gets a small part in the movie Face Off. And
for all the difficulty that took place on the set
of Lolita, it's once the movie is in edits that

(26:32):
things really start to fall apart. That is because of
the Child Pornography Prevention Act of nine. We're about to
get a little constitutional, so bear with me. The child
pornography Prevention Act of nine was put on the House
floor in September of ninety six and proposed to add
two categories of speech to the legal definition of what

(26:55):
child pornography is. Here's the first edition, any visual depiction,
including any photograph, film, video picture, or computer or computer
generated image, or a picture that is or appears to
be of a minor engaging and sexually explicit conduct. Here
is the second edition. That the Act introduces any sexually

(27:15):
explicit image that was advertised, promoted, presented, described, or distributed
in such a manner that conveys the impression that it
depicts a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct. What this
meant as it pertained to Adrian Lines Lolita, is that
all portrayals of a minor engaging in sexual activity, and
this included the impression of a minor, which means that

(27:38):
Adrian Lines, nineteen year old stand in for Dominique Swain
was moot. So long as she was portraying a fourteen
year old character was illegal. This Act was not put
into law in a vacuum. I am, by no means
an expert on this area of the law, but my
understanding is that President Clinton, who famously never committed a
sex crime, had made cracking down on possessing child pornography

(28:01):
a personal priority throughout his first term as president, starting
in late when he wrote this and a personal letter
to Attorney General Janet Reno. I find all forms of
child pornography offensive and harmful, as I know you do,
and I want the federal government to lead aggressively in
the attack against the scourge of child pornography. Here's a

(28:23):
quick summary of what child pornography laws were prior to
this letter being written. According to a paper published by
Stobbs Law, child pornography laws barely existed before nineteen seventy,
and the first major law didn't come into play until
four's Child Protection Act, the same year that the Milk
Carton campaign begins. The Child Protection Act prohibited the distribution

(28:47):
of materials that concerned the sexual exploitation of miners, whether
the material was deemed obscene or not. In Layman's terms,
what this means is that it removes all First Amendment
Freedom of expression protections from child pornography. Child Pornography Prevention
Act was made in response to the rise of the

(29:09):
Internet and increase in digital distribution of pornography. Of all
kinds is around the time where the Internet was becoming
widely accessible, whether it was at libraries, in schools, or
in some homes. So what does law meant for Adrian Line?
While editing his Lolita was that any implication of sex

(29:29):
with a minor, regardless of whether it was performed by
an underage actor or an of age body double, needed
to be evaluated by a lawyer down the line. In
two thousand one, the Child Pornography Prevention Act is deemed unconstitutional,
and Lines adaptation of Lolita comes up on the floor
of the Supreme Court just before the Act is struck

(29:52):
down in two thousand and two for being too broad
and potentially interfering with First Amendment free speech. Here's an
excerpt from the Green Borrow News and Record from October
two thousand one. Lolita came up in Supreme Court debate
on Tuesday, as it often seems to do in discussions
of child pornography. At issue was the Child Pornography Prevention Act,

(30:13):
passed by Congress in nineteen ninety six. The law was
vigorously defended by the Clinton administration and now by the
Bush administration. Three out of four federal courts of appeals
have upheld it, but the Ninth Circuit on the West
Coast held its basic provision unconstitutional. On Tuesday, as skeptical
Justice Anon in Scalia inquired from the bench, what great

(30:35):
works of art would be taken away from us if
we couldn't see miners copulating. After some hesitation, the Adult
Entertainment Association's lawyer replied Lolita. He was clearly talking about
a movie version of Vladimir Nobokov's novel. A great work
of art, exclaimed Scalia Anton in Skalia, What an amazing person.

(30:56):
Just kidding. But in the spring of nine, when Adrian
Line was editing and trying to find a distributor, this
law posed an understandably gigantic block to his vision of
the story getting released. So this basically destroys Lolita's chance
of getting distributed widely in the United States. International distribution

(31:17):
is more or less uninterrupted. It boils down to this,
Adrian Lines Lolita, which was his play to get into
the Oscars echelon of filmmaking after a decade of erotic
thriller's debuted in the US on TV on Showtime. So
let's take a look at this damn thing I have
seen this movie many many times over the years, always

(31:41):
on whichever illegal YouTube upload is currently up. But to
prepare for this show, I got an official DVD release
of the movie. Now, the plot of Adrian Lines Lolita
is pretty close to Nabokov's book sort of. But I
am going to zip you through the plot because if
you have any doubts at this point in the episode
on how director Adrian Line you nabokov story and his

(32:03):
own movie, I'm going to include excerpts from the director's
commentary that appears on the DVD. I'll let Adrian Line
speak to his own work. Yea. So here it is

(32:30):
Humbert Humbert's I mean Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita Again. This movie
begins at the end Humbert is driving away from the
murder scene where he kills Quality, but this time it's
sexy Jeremy Irons dramatic Humbert. In this version, we do
see a flashback to some of Humbert's past. We learn
about Annabelle Lee, the girl he fell in love with

(32:52):
as a child, but they're aged up their fourteen, not
twelve as in the book. Here's what Adrian Line says
about the flashback because I think our story really is
about a man who who never grows up really as
a man who stay as a child essentially, And the

(33:13):
cinematography of this early loved scene is full on Abercrombie ad.
These teenagers are falling in love in this very seductive way.
It's not at all the clumsy romance that Humbert describes
in the book. Humbert goes to America to teach at Beardsley,
but first stops in New England, where as you know,

(33:33):
he becomes the lodger of Charlotte Hayes. There are a
lot of small details here that aren't any other adaptations.
There's the mention that Charlotte loves Mexican art but is
pretty racist about it. And then we see Dominique Swain's
Lolita for the first time. She looks closer to Nabokov's
description with pigtails and sandy hair, and Swain the actress

(33:55):
has braces at this time, as well as period appropriate clothes,
closer to nobal Gov's descriptions. But again I'm going to
refer to that kind of a late nineties Abercrombie add
over sexed presentation. When we meet Lolita. She is soaking wet,
wearing a bikini underneath a sheer dress as she reads
a magazine beneath a sprinkler, which you may know is

(34:17):
not generally how people read magazines. The Lolita of this
movie is aged up, as usual, to fourteen from twelve.
Adrian Lyne says this, I like the braces there. I
think it's important really to keep on remembering that that
he's fascinated by a child. You know, she's essentially part
She's at that point, you know, when she's part child

(34:39):
part woman, And I think that's what dominic Swain really
managed to to portray. She really had a foot in
both camps. I thought it was very important that really,
and ironically, by the end of the of the movie,
I don't think she could have played the hooks she

(35:00):
had grown up. The camera lingers on Dominique Swain's body,
something that obviously isn't in the book, Nor is the
long piercing gaze and brush of Lolita's foot against Humbert's
leg that we see right after she carries laundry past
him shortly after. What's important to note here is that
the camera is taking on Humbert's perspective in a way

(35:22):
that isn't really challenging the grossness of how Humbert is
viewing this child. So Humbert is moved in and Adrian
Lyne says this, when Humbert puts a ribbon in his
journal as a bookmark, I don't know when anybody gets this.
There's a kind of a link with the with the
piece of lace there from the underwear that Annabelle war.

(35:47):
I didn't know whether or not people pick up on that,
but I like the fact that he kept it from
all of those years. That's not a detail from the
book and it's not necessary. So in this adaptation Humbert
and Loli does flirtation is far more direct. She comes
into his room and sits on his lap. That footmotif
of her foot brushing against his body comes up again

(36:09):
and again, and she leans on him as they swing
on the outdoor porch swing with Charlotte. She teases him
in moments like this, still do anything you say? She's
getting a thing about this scene is a lot Dominique swains.
Lolita is holding a doll, she grabs Humbert's thigh, she
rubs up against him, So we see a lot of

(36:31):
her touching him, but we don't see any of the
rough touching that humber does in the book that, according
to nabuk Off, results in her body becoming bruised. So
again a far more romantic, gauzy presentation of this flirtation
between an adult and a child. Lolita is sent to camp,
but not before there is another full fantasy of a

(36:53):
kissing sequence. Lolita runs up to Humbert's room to say goodbye,
and the scene becomes slow motion romantic. There's a dramatic
close up. It's essentially a Hollister bag. There's a shot
of Dominique Swain flying into Jeremy Irons's arms. The shots
focused on her crotch meeting his as he catches her.
She kisses him for a while, and after she runs away,

(37:16):
Jeremy Irons clutches his heart beaming. It is framed as romantic.
Line says this, it's funny. The first time that she
kissed him, we were all a little terrified. We knew
that she had kissed boyfriend before, but nobody quite knew
what to expect. And once Lolita is gone, Humbert comically
tumbles into her closet. After she leaves This was a

(37:41):
tricky moment. I think when he plunges into a Lolita's
clothes there, it had to be funny or otherwise it
would have been I think grotesque. But it is grotesque, Adrian.
He's a sexual predator, okay, as usual. Charlotte leaves the
letter confessing her love for humbered They get married, and
he experiments by drugging her all summer long. There's an

(38:04):
extended scene here where Jeremy Irons is trying to effectively
tranquilize Melanie Griffith, only for her to wake up and
start kissing him. This is framed like a comedy scene. Eventually,
Charlotte finds Humbert's journals, revealing that he is sexually obsessed
with her daughter. She gets hit by a car and
Humbert leaves to go pick up Lowly to at camp.

(38:25):
Lolita is picked up and upon getting into the car,
she strips in the backseat to change her clothes not
in the book, and they kiss again. Adrian Lyne says,
this it's funny. This was the first time that she
kissed Jeremy sort of passionately, if you like. And the
whole crew, including myself waiting with bated breath to see

(38:46):
what was going to happen. I mean, we just didn't know, really,
And when she finally did kiss him with such gusto,
I remember the crew going but she It's funny, I
was more worried, and I think her mother was more
worried about how in the movie than she was herself. Really.
Humbert and Lolita arrive at the Enchanted Hunter's Hotel, and

(39:09):
we see Lolita and Quilty meet for the first time.
This interaction takes place. Who can smell when people are sweet?
Do you like sweet people? Nice young people. Quilty is
seen mainly in the shadows in this adaptation, which is
a little closer to how he appears in the book,

(39:31):
but in the movie he's almost always presented at this
kind of dramatic Dutch angle that is for me a
bit much. Humbert takes Lolita to a romantic, candlelit dinner
at the Enchanted Hunters Hotel, and Lolita tells Humbert who
Quilty is. In this version, she already knows that he's
a famous playwright. Up in the room, Lolita delivers this

(39:51):
famous line from the book. Two people sharing the same
hotel room abound to enter into a how can I
put it in to it into a kind of incest
unlike the book. She kind of giggles afterwards, almost as
if she didn't fully mean it. Instead of drugging her.
Humber brings Lolita up to bed and she gives him

(40:12):
a number of seductively framed gazes. He removes her shoes
and socks. Another foot shot, and the whole sequence is
kind of framed more like this is her agency and
that she's in on this quote unquote seduction when we
know this couldn't possibly be the case. Humbert goes downstairs,
has a very Dutch angle scene meeting Quilty for the

(40:34):
first time, then comes back upstairs to see Lolita sleeping fitfully.
He again stares at her feet, and there's a tight
shot of Lolita's butt beneath the sheets in the moonlight.
Lolita wakes up and asks for a glass of water,
wipes her mouth on his sleeve and slow motion, and
goes back to bed. Lions commentary during this scene is

(40:55):
extremely telling. First, he says, this will show me what's
very interesting with Jeremy's performance really is that you really
sense the struggle of the man. You know this is
a man with a conscience. I mean, what he does
is awful, obviously, but you sense that he's struggling with

(41:17):
in a sense, being a parent but also being a lover.
He keeps on saying things like this. I think this
sequence is interesting here because it's really a bewildering mix
of sensuality and and parent and the conflict of the

(41:38):
But Humbut has listener. He literally cannot stop saying things
like this. It's interesting because you sense the sexuality in
the sensuality from her side, and at this stage he
backs off line repeatedly talks about his low leader as
if she is acting knowingly and isn't just asleep. For

(41:59):
the entire scene, these two shots and the sheets here
with a leg and a were end. I think it's
um it's nice suggesting what is there rather than seeing it.
He's more for his imagination, more to torturing m The

(42:22):
next morning at the Enchanted Hunter's hotel is in the
book when Humbert first rapes Lolita. Humbert says that she
seduced him in the book, but makes it clear that
he's making this argument to a jury. In the movie,
he says that she seduced him and that's simply how
the scene is presented. There is no creative choice made

(42:44):
reminding us that this could be an unreliable account. It's
just shown. Lolita kisses Humbert confidently and says, I guess
I'm just going to have to show you everything. She
undoes his pants, removes her retainer, and the scene fades
to black. The way that this scene implies both seduction
and consent is enough to spike the entire thing in

(43:07):
the dumpster as far as I'm concerned. But they leave
the enchanted Hunter's Hotel, and as in the book, Lolita
begins to feel physical pain later in the day, and
she says this, well, what do you expect? It was
a daisy fresh girl, and look what you've done to me.
It should call the police and tell them that you
raped me, you dirty old man. This is a very

(43:30):
memorable and telling line from the book, But like when
Dominique Swain delivers the It's called incest line, her character
always giggles or smiles at Humbert afterward, almost as if
to imply that she's actually kidding. After saying she should
call the police and say that Humbert raped her, she
smiles and gazes out the window. She's joking. When she turns,

(43:51):
we can see that she has a Hickey Jeremy irons
as Humbert smiles. Then a bit later tells her that
her mother is dead, and we hear Lolita cry all
night in the hotel. Just as in the book, she
comes to Humbert's bed crying and he holds her line
says this again, this moment when she comes into bed

(44:13):
with him is really the moment of a of a
parent really looking after his child. There was this strange,
conflicted things throughout the movie. At this point, the road
trip portion of the movie begins. Lolita rarely expresses grief

(44:33):
about her mother again, and we see a series of
joyful scenes of her kicking him in the face with
her feet as he drives. This whole romantic montage that
has become very influential in online communities. In one particularly
memorable scene, Lolita and Humbert stop at a motel with
a bed that has a magic fingers vibrator attached. This happens,

(44:55):
give me accord in a dime for the magic fingers,
my magic. Lolita scowls and gets her quarter, and we
see her writhe all over the vibrating bed in a
montage before she flushes the toilet while Humbert is in
the shower, making the water of the shower go cold.

(45:16):
Line comments this in this scene kind of sense that
the balance of power is changing a little bit. When
he was manipulating her and now she's beginning to manipulate him.
Another romantic montage as they travel across the country, a
slow motion tennis sequence, Humbert removing Lolita's straps as she's

(45:39):
falling asleep. Foot shots, foot shots, foot shots, and what
I feel is the most unpleasant addition in the entire movie,
a scene where Lolita is reading a comic book while
sitting on Humbert's lap and he begins to have sex
with her. This is not in the book and is
better matched with the first two minutes of an actual
pornographic video Dominique Swain as Lolita orgasms holding the comic

(46:04):
book in her hand. It is a difficult scene to watch.
Adrian Line offers this explanation, This was a scene that
was very troubling for people, and again, I think it
kind of reinforced the idea of child and woman. Really
child is reading the comic and getting pleasure from that

(46:28):
and also the the adult side as well. No. In
the scene immediately after this, we see another example of
Lolita crying, presumably right after sex with Humbert. Then the
two of them go to Beardsley and Humbert braids Lolita's hair.
Before school, Lolita brings up being in the school play

(46:50):
and Humbert says no. She replies, like this, you're depriving
me of the civil rights. H I'm intelligent. Instead of
being convinced by the headmistress that low leaders should be
in the play as in the book, Lolita convinces Humbert,
and another scene presented as very seductive, she caresses his

(47:13):
leg while demanding that she be allowed to do the play.
Humbert starts to get turned on, and Lolita demands that
her allowance increase from one to two dollars, and he agrees.
She smiles at him deviously. Adrian Lyne says this, I
like this shot of her foot rocking him A right

(47:35):
to be in a player if I want kind of
starts off this scene of sensuality, and and it suggests
that more and more she's in charge. If you like,
she's starting to manipulate him, right I should mention there's
another foot shot in that scene as well. So Lolita

(47:56):
gets to do the play and Humbert is aware that
Claire Quialty is watching the rehearsals. We then see a
scene of a naked Lolita played by the nineteen year
old body double we talked about earlier, but a naked
Lolita who is frustrated with Humbered in bed. She's snatching
coined from him, biting him, pulling his hair in anger,
almost animalistic in how she's behaving. Humbered in this scene

(48:19):
is very much framed as the victim. Line says, this
where she hit the money. I never knew we used
the body double in in this scene for some of
the whitest shots. It's amazing what you get away with. Really,
Dominic was wearing a body suit, as I remember, and

(48:41):
because the shelts are so quick don't see. Humbert then
has a meeting with the headmistress of Lolita's school, and
the headmistress mentioned that Lolita is still fourteen. This means
the timeline of the movie is much shorter than that
of the book. After realizing Lolita is not going to
piano lessons, she and Humbert get into an argument, Humbert
slaps her, and in that same scene we saw in

(49:03):
the original Jeremy Irons Dominique Swain chemistry test, she screams,
murder me like you murdered my mother. It's a very
intense scene. Go ahead, murder me, murder me like you
murder murder me like you murdered my mother. Going murder me,
murder me like you murdered my mother. Lolita runs away.

(49:23):
Humbert finds her later and she's changed her mind for
mysterious reasons. She says, take me to bed, and then
they hit the road again. Lolita swaps out her chewing
gum for a banana in the car. While Quality follows,
Lolita puts on ruby red lipstick. By this point in
the movie, Humbert is portrayed as paranoid and bumbling. As
Qualthy continues to follow them, Humbert again slaps Lolita to

(49:46):
scare her. This is how Line describes this. I think
this kind of sexuality of the way she's he's the
banana I thought was important in this scene because he's
becoming more and more unhinged, more and more ragged, more
and more convinced that he's being followed by the police,
and I think the fact that he's being tortured sexually

(50:08):
at the same time, I think it's important and it
gets mixed up together a feline. It's iconically subtle filmmaking.
Adrian really good stuff. So this next sequence is unique
in Lolita adaptations and that it really focuses on Lolita's
conspiring with clare Quality to escape Humbert's clutches more so
than any other adaptation. At one motel, when Humbert comes

(50:32):
back from getting Lolita her bananas, get it bananas. When
he comes back with the symbolic bananas, Lolita is sitting
on the bed with smudged lipstick. It's implied that she's
been out kissing someone else. We then get a full
body shot of Lolita seductively holding the bananas in slow
motion before Humbert violently slams her to the bed and

(50:54):
demands to know who she's with. He tears at her clothes,
and instead of being afraid, Lolita is laughing maniacally and
seems to be getting turned on by Humbert. Fear and
anger again, just a wildly irresponsible way to frame an
assault like this. Adrian Line has this to say, I

(51:15):
like the kind of imagery of these bananas in this scene.
It's some kind of pathetic really in other ways, I've
been sent out to get them, and then it becomes
obviously a kind of a sexual imagery doing doing this scene,
he can't stop talking about these bananas. There's literally an

(51:36):
assault of a child taking place on the screen and
Adrian Line is talking about the bananas. After this scene,
Jeremy Irons is Humbert is so paranoid now that every
angle is a Dutch angle. As in the book, Lolita
gets sick, she runs away. Humbert searches for her with
no luck, and three years later Humbert only learned of
her location when she reaches out to him asking for money. He,

(51:59):
of course she'll up and finds Lolita, now pregnant and
living in a shack with her husband, and as in
the book, Humbert begs her to tell him who she
had left with all those years ago. Lolita says, my god, dad,
it was quilty. It was clear quilty. This was one
of the only scenes in the movie where I felt

(52:20):
like the additions made were pretty effective. Humbert gives Lolita
the money. She tells him that she is not going
to go with him, in a scene that still breaks
my heart, And before he leaves, this exchange is added,
can you ever forget what I've done to say goodbye Molly,
say goodbye to my dad? I actually do like this edition,

(52:44):
immediately followed by one that I hate. After getting in
his car, Humbert looks at the shack and sees a
pregnant seventeen year old Lolita. He blinks a few times
and suddenly there's the fourteen year old Lolita from the
day they kissed back in the Ramsdell house down who
the costume? He smiles nostalgic. Then, as always he goes.
He kills clare Quality in a scene that is way

(53:07):
too long that does feature frankl Angela's penis, something that
made frankl Angela very upset because Adrian Line said he
wasn't going to include the shot of frankl Angela's penis. Anyways,
that's the end of the movie, And upon the first
rewatch of many that I was doing for this episode,
I thought that they had spared Dominique Swain, the scene
from the book where Humbert licks Dolores's eyeball, or the

(53:29):
scene early on, where Humbert describes a time that he
bounced Lolita on his lap and ejaculated, but claims that
she didn't notice. But these scenes absolutely were shot between
Irons and Swain. They appear as deleted scenes on the
DVD and have hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube. Well,
you know what, I'm troubled. So, as we discussed, this

(53:51):
movie does not get wide distribution in the US, which
does end up getting it quite a bit of press.
And what did the critics have to say? In ninety eight?
The new version of Lolita, released at Last, turns out
to be a beautifully made, melancholy and rather touching account
of a doomed love affair between a full grown man

(54:12):
and a very young woman. But that, of course, is
not what Vladimir Nobokov's masterpiece is about. The film's masterstroke
is its understanding that this is Humbert's story, told in
his own lyrical voice, from his own passionate, sad, tortured perspective.
There are flashes of seduction from Lolita that are intentionally

(54:34):
hard to distinguish from a schoolgirl crush. The better for
Humbert to misinterpret. Ms Swain walks this incredibly narrow line
between innocent playfulness and adult knowledge without a misstep. Yes,
the subject matter can be considered offensive, but the director
Adrian Lyon has filmed the material in such a way
that one would have to be awfully sensitive to be

(54:55):
offended by anything in the movie. The scenes of intimacy
between Humbert and Lolita are done shadows and in a
manner that generally keeps their affection private. Lynn's efforts to
be both passionate and autistic are generally successful, although a
few sex scenes are disturbing and arguably close to silasious.

(55:17):
Critics generally liked this movie and objected to the reasons
that many found it to be controversial. I found these
reviews to all be very late nineties in their tone,
so I really do try to keep my opinions out
of this show as much as I can. But I
really don't like this movie as far as I'm concerned.
It belongs to a very particular category of movie where

(55:38):
the books have been carefully adapted down to the smallest detail,
and yet the movie somehow manages to miss the entire
point of what it's adapting. Because lines movie pays an
extraordinary amount of attention to the details of the book.
There are these little moments, color choices, characters who only
appear for a line or two in the text that

(56:00):
make it very clear that all of the critical players
in this movie have read Nabokov's book many, many times.
And the visuals that this attention to detail produces can
often be really beautiful. There is one critical thing missing, however,
and that is any reminder or indication that Humbert Humbert,
who is a child sex abuser, is an unreliable narrator.

(56:24):
But they missed the point of the entire book. We
don't have Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. What we have here is
Humbert Humbert the fifty eight million dollar movie. How could
they possibly have? I mean, they present Humbert's entire story
as if it's just the truth. It's just a story
being told. You don't even find out he's gone to
jail until the last slide of the movie, the same

(56:46):
slide that tells us that Dolores Hayes has died in childbirth,
and you're not told that his vested interest maybe in
winning your favor over making you dislike Charlotte, demonizing Dolores
at any opportunity. No one did. No One notice that
I wouldn't be as bothered if this movie hadn't endured
as much as it has, and I am not alone

(57:08):
in feeling this way. I was interested to learn that
many Nabokovian's throw back to a past episode that means
Vladimir Nabakov's scholars Navakovyan's also tend to really dislike this
movie and find it to completely miss the core message
of Nabakov's text. Some in particular, are deeply disappointed and
frustrated with the bulkhov Son Dmitri for signing off on

(57:32):
and actively participating in this production. Here's a conversation I
had with Nabokov's biographer Brian Boyd about an early screening
he saw of this movie where Dmitry Nabokov was speaking
alongside Adrian Line, and I asked him about some of
his thoughts on the adaptation. I watched it for the
first time at Cornell in a large audience of students,

(57:57):
and the myth is that people who would count for
an apok of centenary celebration, and then in the Q
and A, there are all these adoring questions from the
student audience, and none of the the conference attendees said anything.
But I hated the movie so much that I wanted
to say something, and I thought, shall I spoil the party,

(58:18):
spoil this atmosphere? And I thought, well, I'll keep myself
forever if I don't say something right. Because again Parlian
renaction to the Kubrick where they had to make a
look older, the emphasis here is very much on her youth,
so the braces, the bubble gum and so on, and yeah,

(58:44):
I just don't think he that they do it in
the right way. And they said last question. Stephen Schiff said,
I think Brian Boyd was going to ask a question,
so so I put it to him, what would you
say to the the comment that what you've filmed is
not the pocups low leader but Hummed Slader And he

(59:06):
didn't know what the question. He didn't understand the question.
But Hummed is very engaging and witty, and they felt
the need for for the film to work to make
him appealing. And I don't understand why on earth they
felt that, but that was the decision that that Adrian
Line made and that was the brief given to the screen.

(59:27):
Various screenplay writers. And if you look at the first
scene between the book of between Humbert and Lolita in
the screenplay hummed, it's just such a slee spool and
you know, he imagines that he manages to make himself
witty as a narrator of the novel, but here when

(59:49):
you see this dialogue of him sort of trying to
make verbal advances, and it's just so repellent. It was
sinating for me to go through. You know, Okay, there
there is more cultural freedom to show things. Although you
know it was there. I guess you could shoot more, um,

(01:00:10):
but it just was so in the other direction of
like the you know, Vladimir and book I was great
love story is like used again and again in the trailers.
But even the way the cinematography is encouraging you to
kind of be on Humbert's side, as it were, it's
just very um it's very strange, and especially for a

(01:00:31):
movie that seems to have a big, you know, agenda
with with staying faithful to very minute details of the book,
but then kind of missing the theme. It's just it's
it's frustrating. I I it is an extraordinary example of

(01:00:52):
how you can attend to the letter of the details
and get the spirit absolutely wrong. And yeah, Nebaco would
have been utterly a pooled I think, thank you so
much to Brian Boyd, and he describes this more at
length in a book of his I Really enjoyed called
Stalking nabokov Ye, so Adrian lines, Lolita romanticizes the relationship

(01:01:33):
between Dolores Hayes and Humbert Humbert while generally still portraying
more of the trauma and unhappiness that Dolores experiences than
any other adaptation does, and while seeing Dominique Swain as
Lolita express this anger and sadness and remorse. As Brian said,
this movie is still an adaptation of an abuser's account.

(01:01:55):
In that Lolita was sort of released into in the
u S generally seemed to take away the message that
this relationship was to be viewed as a romance. Don't
believe me. Check this out, So lady, you're about the nominee.
Kiss best cheers when it's Paltrow, When Joseph finds Shakespeare,

(01:02:22):
Jeremy Irons and Dominique sway. But I'd be happy as
to you. Ben Stiller and Cameron Diaz what you just
heard is Dolores Hayes and Humbert Humbert being nominated for
Best Kiss at the MTV Movie Awards. In they did

(01:02:42):
lose to Shakespeare in Love. But that is the level
to which Atrian Line presents this relationship as a romance.
So what is it about this movie outside of the
dangerous lack of adequate framing of the story that convinced
us that this was a love story. I would also
like to implicate cinematographer Howard Atherton here, because Adrian Line

(01:03:04):
harps on the framing of his characters in the director's
commentary of the movie as well, and singles out romantically
lit shots of Dominique Swain as Lolita, saying things like
beautiful lighting. We just wanted to make her look totally alluring.
So while the child Pornography Prevention Act of gets all
of the sex scenes with the nineteen year old body

(01:03:24):
double eliminated except for the one I described to you
frantically collecting those gold coins of Humbert's that Lana del
racings about in her music fifteen years later. Even with
these shots omitted, Lolita and Humbert gaze at each other
lovingly upon meeting, she soaked in the spray of a sprinkler,
wearing a bikini, her mother completely oblivious. The camera is

(01:03:47):
clearly telling you this is their moment. The cinematography of
Lolita is done by Howard Atherton, whose other credits include
Fatal Attraction in Decent Proposal and Bad Is. The first
two of those are Adrian Line erotic thrillers, and the
last you probably know is a Will Smith Martin Lawrence
action classic that, uh, you have to admit, treats women's

(01:04:11):
bodies like they're absolute objects. Line bringing his team over
from the erotic thriller genre just does not work, And
that sticks out particularly in the cinematography, because here's a
cinematographer who does not and has never dealt in nuance
in a movie that desperately needs that behind the camera
in order to work again, I'll go back to spend

(01:04:34):
Nike Fist, the cinematographer for eight Pretty Baby. His work
constantly brings you into the perspective of Brookshield's twelve year
old character. The camera communicates her confusion and fear in
ways that don't even exist in the movie script. That's
his job, particularly in a story hinging on something as
fraught as child sex abuse. The camera cannot simply translate

(01:04:58):
the narrative of an abuser, but that is more or
less what Howard Atherton does here. The same thing happens
in almost every scene in which they appear. While there
is the occasional shot or a moment that reminds us
what a nauseating power dynamic this is, we are far
more often presented with softly lit love scenes, with foot shots,

(01:05:19):
with Dominique Swain gazing at Jeremy Irons knowingly seductively. It's
the same thing we've been talking about for the entire series.
The many moments that this movie presents as erotic are similar.
Not only does Dominique Swain's lovely to sarcastically laugh after
a number of key lines it's called incest. I was

(01:05:42):
a daisy fresh girl and look what you've done to me.
But any moment the camera isn't presenting her as traumatized,
It's presenting her as very sexually knowing. And this is
pretty exactly how Humbert presents Dolores in the text, as
consenting and vindictive in one moment than crying and undone
in the net. What lines direction misses is the context

(01:06:03):
is who is telling you this story? I know, I
know I'm harping on this, but truly imagine the person
who has hurt you most in your life got to
tell your life story like it was unquestionably true. That's
how this movie is adapted. Then there's the cinematography in
the sex scenes where Dominique Swain does appear. There is
that deleted scene where Humbert is aroused by Lolita on

(01:06:25):
the couch, the camera language implying that she's in on it,
shooting him knowing looks. There's that scene where she climaxes
while reading a comic book. There's that scene where she
removes her routineer before ostensibly giving Humbert a blow job
at age fourteen. There's that scene where the camera frames
her laughing her head off when Humbert asks her where

(01:06:47):
she's been. The camera shows Dolores in these moments as
a consenting and willing party, ignoring, particularly at the end,
that the other person she's seeing is another child sex abuser.
As Brian Boyd said, all the high level decisions in
this movie are invested in telling Humbert's story, not Nabucos,
and that's a big problem. How can I be sure

(01:07:09):
of that? Well, this movie absolutely flopped in the US
theatrically due to the whole not being released thing, but
it does do pretty well financially and critically overseas, particularly
in Russia. But as you may know, when a movie flops,
this usually means it will eventually crop up for free
on YouTube. And that's how I found this movie in
high school, via a late two thousands upload of the

(01:07:32):
movie in fourteen parts, back when YouTube videos could only
be ten minutes long. I'm old, and this rip of
the movie has long been removed from YouTube. If you
were interested in seeing this movie as a young person,
it was not hard to find it. In fact, our
whole next episode is about people who either managed to
swipe a copy of Lolita from Blockbuster in the early

(01:07:52):
two thousand's, or like me, found easy to find illegal
rips on YouTube and daily Motion and then created fan
for hims about the movie. I just rewatched lines Littlita
the other day on a YouTube rip, just before recording
this episode, and it's a great and frustrating way to
gauge how Adrian lines presentation of Dolores Hayes's story creates

(01:08:13):
this dissonance and confusion. Here's a random assortment of comments
on the current upload from the past two years. But
girl fall in love and she also enjoy it. I
read this book when I was twelve. My mom was like,
you can't let read this, and my dad told me

(01:08:35):
it's way too hard for you. But I kept reading
and I didn't regret it. I'm so confused. Is he
in love with her or no? Is she in love
with him or no? I'm fifteen and finding this movie interesting.
I'm watching not to mention, and I hope that this

(01:08:55):
upload of the movie has been deleted by the time
you're hearing this, because I did report it and explicably,
in the middle of this re uploaded Lolita for reasons
I could not explain to you with a gun to
my head, there is actual pornography spliced into the middle
of this illegal YouTube upload, coming in about an hour
into the normal movie. I've been frustrated by a million times.

(01:09:17):
It is just a full ten minutes of porn spliced
into the middle of lines movie, and the uploader placed
it right after the scene where Lolita climaxes while reading
the comic book. You're about to hear a scene from
the movie end and a nineties era porn scene begin.

(01:09:44):
Even the illegal YouTube uploaders are telling you that is
how we are being encouraged to see Dolores in this movie,
and the legacy of this ambiguous presentation is still with us.
A lot of the influence that this movie endures is
related to that thing that Nabokov loved, aesthetics. The aesthetics
of this movie are connected to beautiful costume design and

(01:10:07):
set design, and yes, the aesthetics of romanticizing Lolita's relationship
with Humburd Humburt. So that's Lowlita by Adrian line from
and that's the very American America that it was released into.
As these YouTube comments indicate, this movie may have been
a financial failure in the short term, but it has

(01:10:27):
secured a long legacy on the internet. For better and
for worse. Is right around the time when computer access
became normal and feasible for teenagers, whether they're at their homes, schools,
or libraries, and with this, the Lauras Hayes fan communities
and fashion sites start to crop up. The Lauras Hayes
logs in next week on Lolita Podcast. Lolita Podcast is

(01:10:52):
an I heart Radio Production. It is written and hosted
by me Jamie Loftus. It is produced by Sophie Lichtman,
Beth and Marcheluso, Miles Gray, and Jack O'Brien. It is
edited by the wonderful Isaac lu. Music is from Zoe Blade,
theme is from Brad Dickert and My guest voices this
week are Sophie lich German, Miles Gray, Isaac Taylor and

(01:11:15):
Julia Claire. See you next time.