She and he

[Ash]

"Were the cringeworthy scenes unnecessary? Let me ask this: without them, how would you have proposed to convey the story's true horror?"

I cringed at the film's attempt to make Dolores Haze into a sexy love-object-teen for the viewers and Humbert.
There's nothing sexy about a 12 year old.
Twelve year old girls are pretty much un-sexy and awkward creatures imaginable.
The horror story here is that Dolores was a child, not the pretty teen Dominique Swain.
That's what I cringed at. By presenting her as in any way attractive might make it decent to US sensibilities, but only panders to what is lost on them.
There's no love or beauty or romance in this story. I guess they missed that point - the main point.

[sauvin]

"Were the cringeworthy scenes unnecessary? Let me ask this: without them, how would you have proposed to convey the story's true horror?"

I cringed at the film's attempt to make Dolores Haze into a sexy love-object-teen for the viewers and Humbert.
There's nothing sexy about a 12 year old.
Twelve year old girls are pretty much un-sexy and awkward creatures imaginable.
The horror story here is that Dolores was a child, not the pretty teen Dominique Swain.
That's what I cringed at. By presenting her as in any way attractive might make it decent to US sensibilities, but only panders to what is lost on them.
There's no love or beauty or romance in this story. I guess they missed that point - the main point.

Swain was 17 at the time and could have passed for a somewhat unusually advanced 14, which is what she was supposed to have been in the Lyne movie. This is part of the seduction, don't you see? The days are long gone where an American audience would sit still for a 12 year old Shields doing another Pretty Baby, so if the movie was going to be made at all, this revision was almost mandated.

As for a 12 year old not being sexy, that sorta depends on who you ask: what you or I see as gawky and coltish, Oskar or Owen might have found compelling - and they might have found Swain a "wobbly fat old hag".

(Well, maybe not Owen... he seemed to have found LMI's Virginia attractive enough...)

As for the point of the story being lost, yes, I'm afraid I have to agree. While Lyne's movie was more or less faithful to its canon, it took a hard left turn about a country mile too soon in the casting. If we agree on this particular point, then maybe we can agree that the movie should never have been made to begin with, at least not in the US.

I retract my question about how to convey the movie's essential horror, then, if the "unnecessary" scenes had been omitted or revised. Given the gloss and the hypnotic score, it cannot be conveyed.

[Ash]

".....the movie should never have been made to begin with.

"

I think we agree on that point.
When you consider it presented the opposite of what Nabokov was driving at by sexing it up, definitely not.
As for being unmakeable, perhaps not. Three years earlier the world didn't implode when a 12 year old Natalie Portman was involved in much the same themes in Leon.
Unmakeable depends on the courage of producers.

[sauvin]

".....the movie should never have been made to begin with.

"

I think we agree on that point.
When you consider it presented the opposite of what Nabokov was driving at by sexing it up, definitely not.
As for being unmakeable, perhaps not. Three years earlier the world didn't implode when a 12 year old Natalie Portman was involved in much the same themes in Leon.
Unmakeable depends on the courage of producers.

Erm, maybe, but Leon and Lolita have two things in common: an intergenerational relationship and sex.

Well, a relationship between a middle-aged man and a twelve year old girl, anyway.

Leon was about as UNexploitational towards his young charge as it's possible to be, and in this sense, the man was truly every bit in love as Humbert thought he was. Leon took her into his home, taught her a skill and some discipline (learning how to read in the process), gave her his time and his attention by listening to her heart rather than just looking at her a%#. He gave her all his money, and he gave away his life for her.

Would Humbert have done any of these things without a Hakan-like bargain?

And something neither Humbert nor Hakan could have done, I think, is turn her away, very gently indeed, when she came on to him on more than one occasion. The only time he gave in was when a sexual context wasn't clear, and it was the only time we saw him getting a full night's real sleep.

It took very little courage to make Leon, because in the end, Leon and Mathilde (sp?) saved eachother. Leon might not have survived, but he'd been a very different man when he died than when he'd first met her. Mathilde, too, came away from the experience, well, even if not transformed into a spotless angel, she certainly came away with a different view of life. With Leon, she discovered love's true face.

In Lolita, nobody was saved. Nobody was redeemed. Nobody grew. [deleted], the only two people who loved each other at all were Lolita and her mother, and this fact was very far from obvious to themselves or to us. In Leon, only the bad guys died (little brother and Leon himself being the only exceptions), in Lolita, every major player died. That's OK, but given the present legal, social and moral climates, I'd say that Lyne's movie and the novel it's based on skate right up to the fence between art (?) and child pornography. Lolita took quite a bit of courage.

Edit: 5 Novembre 2011, replaced a "bad word" with [deleted] to comply with renewed restrictions on language.

[sauvin]

On further thought and as a followup to the foregoing conversation, it occurs to me that maybe a Lolita does need to be made.

Wikipedia describes the novel as being a "black comedy", and IMDB positions both Kubrick's and Lyne's movies as "drama/romance". I claim that Kubrick's movie has no point because it almost completely evades the core subject matter. Lyne's work struck me as being a lot more faithful (some critics quoted in Wikipedia disagree), but the foregoing conversation has made me see that my personal experience in related matters hasn't allowed me to see the gloss and the glitter the way other people might. I saw plenty of drama, but no "romance".

Sexual exploitation of underaged people is a fact. How common a fact may never be objectively or accurately assessed because of the twin problems of underreporting and of hysteria (I know a girl who went to therapy for a while because a man touched her elbow). Even if the problem is only a fraction of what I've seen reported, it's still a monumentally destructive influence on the community in general.

It'd be very easy to make a TV Social Problem Movie of the Week to cover the issue, and for all of me, it's even been done more than once. The problem I have with TV Social Problem Movies of the Week is that they, too, can be rather one-sided. They tend not to have the kind of balance given Hakan in the novel (that character himself being curiously simultaneously unbalanced and an exemplar of self-recognition and restraint); the Bad Guy tends to wear figurative black hats and tends to live and operate in the shadows; how they look, how and where they operate, their patterns of speech and suchlike might be relatively faithfully represented, but no understanding of these characters would be imparted, no "feel" for what makes them tick.

In other words, if the TV Social Problem Movie of the Week is titled and synopsised to alert the audience that it is a movie about the Bad Guy Who Likes Children The Wrong Way, it'd just be a movie to preach to the choir. You'd already know before the opening credits how the movie would play out, how the characters would be presented, how they'd interact and generally what their eventual fates would be.

The choir doesn't need to be told that liking children this way is wrong. What the choir doesn't know is how men fall into this wrongness, and how these men (and women) live with it.

Lyne's work missed the boat, but not by so wide a margin as I'd originally thought. If a movie were going to be made presenting paedophiles in their true light - to try to understand them a bit better, in other words - there'd have to be some kind of Lyne-like seduction to make people see just how easy it is for such men (and some women) to "justify" or rationalise their appetites, how easy it is for them to get started on their respective paths, and how easy it is to fall into pastel-coloured abysses. All the better, you see, to understand the enemy.

The trick as I see it is to manage to pull off both the seduction and a faithful depiction of the horror. I'd thought Lyne's work did this, but I'm a member of the choir that doesn't need preaching to. The seduction is necessary - and it'd have to be [deleted] subtle (I can't envision at this time how one would set about it) - because, again, if the choir already knows it's going to be a movie about paedophiles, they're already going to be preconditioned to viewing the paedophile as being unconditionally wrong, and the core subject matter, if presented faithfully, would just be seen as black prurience. They'd shut their minds to the paedophiles' perspectives.

I'm thinking that if Lyne had taken a more Arthur Penn approach a la Bonnie and Clyde, starting out light-hearted and "innocent", with a sudden turn to being unbridled grim in the second half of hte movie, he'd have performed something of a public service.

Edit: 5 Novembre 2011, replaced a "bad word" with [deleted] to comply with renewed restrictions on language.

[the_value_of_x]

According to IMDB Swain was 15 during filming. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119558/trivia?tr=tr0774090
Still looked a lot older, though.