From Novel to Film - Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita

Turning a novel into film involves converting its purely verbal text into a succession of images and sounds out of which only some are human speech. It also requires dramatizing the novel’s narration, eliminating the narrator (in some cases), as well as representing through images the inner states characters. There is also the problem of time, because a film can not take longer than two to two hours and a half.

When spectators evaluate the film version of a novel they have already read, they usually pay a lot of attention to its faithfulness to the original text. Many filmmakers, while trying to reproduce the novel on film, may tend to make obvious departures from the original, and create their own interpretation of the literary text

It’s harder to make film after a novel which features a unique style or language than after a novel of considerable size. This is probably why film versions of books like Lolita have disappointed many admirers of the original works.

I considered that neither of the two film adaptations of Lolita (Stanley Kubrick’s from 1962, and Adrian Lyne’s from 1997) managed to transfer the notion of textual desire on the screen, because Lyne focuses on the romantic-sexual relationship between Lolita and Humbert and portrayed Lolita as the evil seductress, while Kubrick expanded Quilty’s character and hardly introduced any temptation scenes in his version of Lolita.

Kubrick’s film version of Lolita was first of all disadvantaged by the fact that censorship at that time was strong and this is probably the main reason for which most of the seduction scenes and the controversial lines and words were left out. On the other hand, Lyme’s version was not restrained by censorship and there was a greater accent put on the obsession theme and on the erotic game.

For the oldest film version of Lolita, Kubrick collaborated with Nabokov on the writing of the script and Nabokov even featured in the film as a character (The Butterfly Hunter). It seems that Nabokov’s visions on how the film should have been made were not fully rendered on screen.

For one thing, Kubrick did not explore the dubious nature of Nabokov’s heroine and substituted the “demoniac” nymphet of the novel with a blue eyed blond girl dressed in fashionable clothes. Sue Lyon, the fourteen-year-old actress who plays Lolita, looks more like a young woman than a twelve-year-old girl. Kubrick’s choice of the actress was probably an attempt to avoid censorship problems. Besides Lolita’s appearance, the seduction scenes she was supposed to play are almost completely eradicated. This makes Humbert’s sexual obsession and his passion towards Lolita almost observable. The term “nymphet” is used only once in the entire film and the word “incest” is absent. Thus, Kubrick carefully eliminates the novel’s pedophilia and incest theme, turning it into a weird story of a professor’s infatuation for a young lady who happens to be attracted to older men. In fact, Humbert’s past and his relation with Annabel are not even mentioned, so Humbert’s hidden motivation for his obsession with “nymphets” is not explored. There is nothing to point to Humbert’s hypocrisy, violence, mental problems and perverseness. Kubrick’s Humbert is a refined gentleman who just happened to fall in love with a well-developed teenager.

The central figure in Kubrick’s film is Quilty and it is he who seems perverse, ambiguous and poetic. Because in the novel Quilty is the most literary and abstract figure, Kubrick’s film focused on the literary, parodic level of Nabokov’s work. The film opened with the scene that ends the novel and then went back to detail the events leading up to the crime.