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Finally getting caught up on the superb lolita podcast. One of the things I find I am thinking about differently is the winky tag line to the Kubrick movie "How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?"
It's an ad man's question - both in the sense that tag lines are developed for the purpose of selling a product, and also...
in that the winking nature of the line derives from the apparently intractable question of how to sell a product so ostensibly at odds with conservative cultural mores around art in the world's largest culture-digesting medium.
They opted to lean into this - almost like lampshading - turning the Questionable Business Decision into something like a daredevil's stunt. "How did they ever..." is borne like "It must be seen to be believed."
This, in turn, signals to the audience an Unexpected Handling of the material - One Weird Trick, in the modern vernacular.
Perhaps most importantly, it is a statement from the ad men that there is "a way in" to this material. A particular framing that makes it palatable and digestible to large audiences, whose appetites will define the movie's success *as a commodity*.
It is telling in the extreme that the way in to this material, as @jamieloftusHELP explained it, was not by withdrawing from the most salacious themes, but rather by grotesquely pulling the content of those themes inside out
Humbert is gradually converted from dramatic monster (even melodramatic in his overwrought self-conception) to a "comic hero."
The book is transformed from the story of girl vs man, where all info is delivered by the antagonist to a society which has marginalized the protagonist to the point of invisibility (a characteristically post-modern construction from Nabokov).
And it becomes a story of man vs society. This mutation necessarily relieves the narrative structure from any ability to comprehend the tension of the events it depicts. Instead, there is only a perverse challenge to the audience: are you part of the society opposing the man?
This reversal is again necessary in order for anything like a "love story" to emerge. The novel refers not to a tragicomic individual triumph over social taboo, but rather of a social taboo that empowers predators at the expense of their victims or survivors.
So, returning to the question at the top, "How did they ever make a movie of lolita?" I think it is an important question. A procedural one, in truth. I love this podcast for a lot of reasons but one of them is that it is so enlightening in how harm can be sold.
And, at least today, I keep coming back to this: the book is a psychological self-portrait of a child rapist, but it's also a mirror. Humbert's delivery of his account to a jury of his peers should make us ask who we are that this presentation is what he thinks we want to see.
There is a big far-reaching accusation in there. And it's that condemnatory aspect of the book that had to (or was seen by Hollywood as having to) be lobotomized in order to result in a salable product.
