The Bechdel Cast - Lolita (1962)

Episode Date: November 19, 2020

Join Jamie and Caitlin as they unlock a Matreon episode about Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 movie Lolita in anticipation of Jamie’s new project, Lolita Podcast, which starts airing November 23! Trigger warning: discussion of sexual abuse.(This episode contains spoilers)For Bechdel bonuses, sign up for our Patreon at patreon.com/bechdelcast.Follow@BechdelCast, @caitlindurante and @jamieloftusHELP on Twitter Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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On the Bechdelcast, the questions asked if movies have women in them. Are all their discussions just boyfriends and husbands, or do they have individualism the patriarchy's effing vast start changing it with the bechdel cast hi everybody welcome to the bechdel cast my name is jamie loftus my name is caitlin durante and today we are unlocking unlocking an episode from our patreon aka matreon feed ever heard of it and if you haven't it's time to get wise or not we won't know uh and and maybe you're like oh cool they unlocked one now i don't need to pay for it again we won't know but you know don't do that but don't do also there's still like dozens and dozens and dozens of episodes that we'll never unlock.

There's like almost 100 at this point. This show has been on for 600 years at this point. It's true. So we're unlocking the Lolita episode from our Patreon, aka Matreon, today, which we will get to in a second but uh if you're interested in more episodes that are just caitlin and myself kind of having a loose fun uh this is not actually not a good example of that uh but uh but having normally though having like a one-on-one discussion about a movie uh you can get two episodes on top of the regular feed there every month for simply five bucks a month. That's all.

And there's like 70 or 80 episodes in there if you've run out of main feed episodes. Yeah, there's a lot. We should probably, though, I guess we should say what the Bechdel cast is because we are on the main feed. Yes. So if this is your first episode, tuning into Lolita, congratulations. First of all, go off. And next, we'll tell you what the show is. Yes.

So the Bechdel cast is our podcast in which we discuss films through an intersectional feminist lens using the Bechdel test merely as inspiration for a jumping off point to initiate larger, more in-depth conversations. And Jamie, what on earth is the Bechdel test? Well, the Bechdel test is a media metric invented by queer cartoonist Alison Bechdel, sometimes called the Bechdel-Wallace test, that requires that, for our our purposes multiple interpretations of this damn thing uh but for our purposes requires that there be two characters with names of a marginalized gender talking to each other about something other than a man for simply two lines of dialogue it doesn't happen in movies quite a bit not enough and furthermore if it does happen it

doesn't even mean that the movie is good to women sometimes it just happens by mistake by accident but it's it's our jumping off point for for a larger discussion and uh today we are talking about lolita because well first of all i guess we should say this this episode was recorded about three months ago it was recorded like towards the beginning of august i think yes it was one of your birthday month picks on the matreon and normally you would choose your favorite movies for your birthday month on the matreon but that is not the case here the reason the reason we uh covered lolita is because throughout the summer and into the fall and now it's winter and just time keeps continuing and things just don't get any better but uh we uh i've been working on a show that comes out

if you're listening to this on the day of release, starting November 23rd, I'm working on a podcast that tracks the history of the story of Lolita. So I say this story because the adaptations are just out of control, bad, and just misrepresenting what the story is really about i feel what you can listen to the show for for nine hours of expansion on that but uh basically yeah this is the first attempt to uh adapt lolita by vladimir nabokov to a um to a larger medium and there's just it's so okay first of all plug lolita podcast comes out on november 23rd and then it's released every monday uh there's going to be 10 episodes we're uh we're going to be talking with i keep saying it's so I keep saying we because I'm so used to like not being alone yeah I'm not involved in this it is just me it's just Jamie it's I say we and then I'm also just like me and just all of uh my my friends that live inside of my brain but uh yeah no I'm I'm

talking to a lot of people about just kind of like tracking this story and analyzing the book and then i talked to several psychologists who have worked with victims of child abuse um i talk with people who are involved in some of these adaptations i talk to people who really like the book people who really don't like the book. But as far as the movies go, it's a pretty uncontroversial opinion to feel that they all aggressively suck and push just really harmful messages that are very of the time. And also by of the time, I mean still now. This is like still like, you know, our culture still has a gigantic issue with sexualizing young girls specifically,

but also just young people in general. So that's what the show is about. It's a little heavier than the Bechdel cast. But if that's something you're interested in I I try to really examine it from all perspectives and bring in a lot of different voices to discuss it and I hope you'll listen uh so that yeah uh Monday is starting November 23rd and oh the reason I was saying all of that is first of all uh because I should second of all because I think that a lot of my thoughts on this movie have like not changed entirely I still think the movie absolutely sucks eggs but but for like way more specific reasons than i did four months ago sure so yeah

i i don't necessarily stand by to the word everything i say in this episode but uh the movie is bad well that's that's the beauty of just being alive and being a person you're you can learn more things and your mind can change and oh you growth you love to see it and that's what the Bechdel cast is all about growing changing acknowledging faults from the past and moving forward in a healthy and productive way. Woo! So yes, I was just re-listening back to the episode and we, you know, there's mentions to iFrankenstein. Why? Because it's the other episode we did on the Matreon for your birthday month.

So there'll be references to Jamie's birthday and to iFrankenstein and whatnot. So if you're just like, what? That's why. My birthday was in August. And I honestly think, and this is like not even, I know that there's no way for me to say this in a non-biased way, but the iFrankenstein episode alone is enough reason to sign up for the matrion in my opinion one of our best it's not jamie this is not opinion this is fact verifiable um so yes if you if you i mean just what this is all to say folks that you should get on get on the matrion train you know for i frankenstein alone among many other films that again will remain locked we're not gonna just keep unlocking episodes

all willy-nilly some of them are in the vault this is a rare occurrence yeah so yeah enjoy our lolita episode uh to the extent that you're able. Lolita podcast, I recommend. And again, I'm completely unbiased. It's just a, you know, just a recommendation. And I haven't been sweating about this for half of the year. Well, as someone who is again, not involved in Lolita podcast, I also recommend. Hell yeah. Without further ado, here is our Unlocked Matreon episode about Stanley Kubrick's Lolita. Hate that run of words. Enjoy. The Bechdelcast.

Hi, Matreons. Hello. Jamie, it's your birthday. It's Jamie's chaos month on the matreon and boy do we have a chaotic month for you this year we just made a last minute adjustment to my birthday month in a way that I really think makes the whole feed vibrate it's it's so today obviously we are doing lolita a very heavy serious movie with a lot of heavy serious things to discuss and then at the end of the month as a palate cleanser we're going to be doing i frankenstein which is a movie that you don't even need to watch because it's more fun

for us to tell you about it than to watch it you should still watch it because bill nighy is in it and i also feel like genuinely if it came down to it aaron eckhart would pay you human dollars to not watch it which is a reason to watch it yes it's a gritty frankenstein movie uh but here's a twist it's about do you remember that i know i know this movie so well i frankenstein markets itself as a movie about i comma frankenstein but it's actually about the war of demons versus gargoyles i vaguely remember that but all the gargoyles the gargoyles are the heroes which i also like kept being like wait gargoyles are heroes they are in this movie and yeah if you've seen the animated series gargoyles you know that they are heroes i saw that everyone roasts me for not, I just didn't see it.

I was watching Powerpuff Girls. I don't know what I was doing. But for me, I was like, wait, I thought gargoyles were supposed to be mean to you. But in this one, they're the heroes and they are all royalty and they're dressed like they went to I party. I party, I Frankenstein.

Exactly. It's all connected um so we're gonna start with a heavy episode and we're gonna end with a light episode and that's gonna be my birthday month because i contain multitudes but today we are talking about the 1962 adaptation of Lolita by feminist icon Stanley Kubrick. We should just at the very top here, since we're attempting to be better at giving content warnings for the content of episodes. There's obviously a content warning here for statutory rape, child sexual abuse. Yeah, there's, I mean, general predatory behavior and also murder. So there is just the general brutalization of women and children is going to come up in this episode. And I guess if you weren't familiar with the content of Lolita,

that's what it's about. So if you'd rather skip this one, we totally understand. If you'd like to hang around, there's so much to talk about that I think is very revealing about our culture. So let's get started. I guess I'll contextualize this a little bit by saying I chose this movie. Yeah, I am very curious as to what compelled you to want to do this for your birthday of all times. Well, I'm doing it for I mean, I'm not doing it as a gift to myself. This is very painful material to go through. but i'm doing it because i've been thinking

about it quite a bit lately because advertisement forthcoming i am um writing and producing an entire podcast that is about the cultural impact of the book lolita because that's something that i've always had a fixation on i think it's very telling and interesting if disturbing obviously but that it was a book that I because I guess we should just kind of talk about the property versus the movie because this is a movie that is not particularly remembered but that's going to be the jumping off point for our discussion right in any case Lolita was a book that i came across when i was 12 because right not good because it had been recommended to me by lemony snicket in a magazine and like take a second with that uh the so i came across this book really really early on because i was obsessed with lemony

stickett books i thought they were the best in the world i still pretty much do uh the author i have some issues with uh but the but when i was 12 i i just wanted to read what he was reading and know what you know i wanted to be like him and so I read in an interview in 2005 what his favorite book was. And he said, in a children's magazine, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov is my favorite book. And so I went to the library and I got the book and I read the book and I didn't understand the book and I took all the wrong messages away from the book. And it's been a point of fascination for me ever since, because now, obviously, I am an adult and I have read the book many times. I wouldn't say it is my favorite book by any stretch, but I think it is a very good book.

And I reread it just recently to prepare for this podcast that I've been working on. And what I find most interesting about Lolita is that it seems like its cultural legacy is just taken completely out of context with what the story is about. Because you think, like, I guess when I was going back to reread it i was like i wonder if you know just from because i hadn't read it since college i was like is there any ambiguity about what the nature of how humbert humbert is treating lolita is is there any way because i feel like our culture has either framed it as a like doomed love story or kind of just like a fashion aesthetic for young girls that you see pop up in a lot of

Japanese fashion lines and also in Lana Del Rey's music are the two main places you will find it but that's like the Lolita brand now is its clothing. And it's associated with this tragic love story, which is how I think Humbert and Lolita are framed. In no small part because of how this movie does it. But in any case, I went back to read the book. And I was like, I wonder if the book is contributing to this problem. And I would say pretty firmly that it is not. The book could not be more. I mean, it is horrifying what you're reading and it and

it does i i mean i think that there's a lot of arguments to be had that i'm still working through my own feelings about if like well what is this adding like what you know and there's a lot to talk about we'll talk about it but um i i find it kind of not i mean i guess it's it would be naive to find it shocking but given the fact that i've recently read the book and it is very explicitly while the narrative is manipulative they you know it's humbert narrating his own story trying to get you to empathize with him and trying to get you on his side because it was you know in theory in written in during his court uh like during his trial that's what i'm saying right um so it's him trying to manipulate a group of people to get on his side but he also is very explicit about what is done

he refers to himself as a predator and a number of other terms to that effect many many times constantly the book i feel like is very clear at what while it while it is a narrator trying to manipulate you into being like well maybe it's okay but it's regardless it's very clear yeah there's no ambiguity right i think in the movies and the other adaptations there is i don't even know if ambiguity is the word it's like just interpreted completely differently and i feel like this movie this is the first major adaptation of lolita and it just really gets us off to a horrible start and it gets weirder and worse from there so yeah i'm very yeah i've been attached to this book for a long time i think it is like an interesting case study

at like how american culture specifically takes a story that is very explicit about being a story about the abuse of a child and turning it into a sexy story that there are fashion lessons to learn from uh i find it fucking infuriating but it's also like yeah there's there's not a ton of things where i feel like you can trace that journey so directly so that is why i chose it it's because i've been thinking about it nonstop. Got it. What about you? So I believe if my memory serves me correctly, I think I saw this movie before I read the book. I saw the movie for the first time, I think, as a freshman in college. It was one of those, you know, I'm like, I'm a film student.

I need to have seen Lolita. Stanley Kubrick, right? Right. Yeah. So I remember it making me uncomfortable when i saw it and uh never feeling compelled to watch it again then a few years later still in college i took an english class my senior year and it was like a banned books class that taught literature that had been banned in different capacities throughout history. And Lolita was one of the banned books that we studied.

So I read the book then. Yeah. And then I read the book a second time, or at least I more skimmed it that time. During another class I took in grad school school i would hate to bring up that i have a master's degree in screenwriting from boston university but we took a class specifically on adaptation so lolita got taught in that class oh that's exciting and the kind of discussion around lolita being taught in this adaptation class was like, hey, maybe some things shouldn't be adapted to film. So, yeah, that was that.

I have so many. Yeah. So that's kind of my history. The whole the property as a whole makes me very unsettled and uncomfortable for obvious reasons. I don't remember the book that well. I think the discussion we had in my English class around it was, everyone's like, oh, it's so well written. It's such a well written book. yeah, but why are we reading a story from the point of view of a predator, pedophile, child molester? Like, what's the value in that? And that's like still where I land on the entire property as a whole. So that's where I'm coming from.

Yeah, I mean, I think that we're not going to reach a conclusion. I mean, there's never going to be a conclusion reached on whether this is the sort of thing that should be written about at all and everyone I mean it is like I think it everyone's going to feel a slightly different way about it and it like depends on what your own experiences are it depends on what your views are and and all this stuff I truly don't know where i fall i do like i think that there is in the same way that there are like red flag movies for guys to be like i mean not necessarily always guys but like nine times out of ten uh. But where people will be like, yeah, I know that it's problematic, but look at it, there's good parts of it. And I am always kind of like my antenna goes up for that.

I agree that it's a beautifully written book. I don't, I mean, it's kind of, I guess, that's like the whole discussion of every banned books class, right? Is this a taboo that we know happens in real life that should be discussed and if so who gets to be the narrator um i think that every adaptation of lolita and i am now intimately familiar with all of them there's been well all but one i'm still trying to get my hands on the russian opera but i've studied four of them pretty closely i think that they're all failures to differing degrees in

different ways it's it's hard because it's like this talk this topic of an abusive relationship especially towards a child it's never like it's never going to be a comfortable palatable subject for for everyone and that's just i mean because it shouldn't be it's a fucking horrific thing to happen um i've seen a lot of opinions on it obviously i've also seen uh survivors of this type of abuse who have felt very seen and have found the work to be sort of healing by and and i can direct you just some blogs that i have found i've done a deep dive into the lolita blogosphere but there there are some people who feel as you do caitlin that it's like there is absolutely no value in giving the abuser a voice. And I agree with that. But then I also have read the perspectives of survivors of this abuse,

who feel seen through the character of Lolita and appreciate who she is, appreciate feeling like this is a topic that's even being discussed at all. And so while I don't feel that it is the best approach, I think it is a bit of a, not a bit, like it's whatever the 1950s version of Edgelord is that Nabokov is doing. I mean, it's a very Edgelord-y thing to try to do. And fortunately, he's a great writer. Otherwise, we wouldn't even be having this discussion no one would have adapted it but that said I agree that certainly the predator's

point of view is not the priority but I don't think it's a valueless work because so many people and especially a lot of young women have found value in it that relates to their own experiences of abuse i think that abuse should be something that is discussed in art um but this is a very imperfect and fucking complicated as hell way to do it that there was clearly no way to do in 1962 but there's i don't think that we've done it successfully yet. I think that it's, I feel like if this movie was ever going to be, if this book was ever going to be adapted into film, it would have to be animated. I don't think that there is a safe, healthy way to adapt this work that is live action.

I just, it's been attempted so many times. I also think it's directly related to who is adapting the work the people who have been chosen to adapt this work are just it blows my fucking mind of like stanley kubrick is your first like yeah seriously the guy who's notorious for like abusing his power as a director i mean he wasn't at this time quite yet this was his early one of his earlier movies but but the fact that you would hand it off to a young man or like a man similar like not that far off from humbert's age it's just you repeatedly see this work put into someone who is going to inherently prioritize humbert's voice above lolita's the first time i have seen this work

put into a woman's hand was literally last year like this movie was given to stanley kubrick first we'll talk about that today it fails it was given to adrian line it super duper fails horrendous it was given to edward albee at one point it fails it was given to uh oh let me get the names right two of the most famous composers of all time in the 1970s they wrote a musical about it oh it was by john barry and alanerner. So John Barry wrote all the theme songs to James Bond. Alan J. Lerner, Broadway legend, did Gigi, Camelot, An American in Paris. Really? They were given Gigi.

But like they were given Lolita. It's just all the wrong people have been given this property to adapt. And so I feel like my personal opinion is that this material has never been even given a chance to prioritize the character who should be prioritized. Because every person who has adapted this material is going to, I'm certainly not implying that they agree with humbert obviously they don't but that is the perspective they're able to plug into because they are men cis het men in their 30s or older and so i let's talk about stanley kubrick i guess i yeah so so yeah well i get like just to backpedal a little bit about the um people who have managed to find value in it particularly survivors who you know read the work and identify with lolita like that's great for them to be able to find comfort in that or find someone to identify with a character to identify with

but imagine like how more effective that would be if it was a and it's like it's not helpful to be like well what if the book was this instead but like right if there was a book out there that was written from the perspective of the survivor and was just as well written and was just as iconic in literature and just as influential as a literary work like i think we do have more books like that now and i agree that i mean there has been fiction about survivors of assault and of prolonged abuse that have taken you know their place and i think that Lolita, I mean, it is not the perfect discussion of abuse. It just isn't.

It's not the only discussion of abuse that's out there, fortunately, for me and for everybody. But yeah, I do think that there is a lot of pressure put on this singular work that was published 70 years ago to be the discussion of this topic. Because I think it's the most, and I don't mean this as a compliment, but the most iconic one in American culture.

But I kind of fault that more to American culture than to the book itself. You know, Nabokov didn't go into this project thinking, this is going to be the only discussion we have of this topic for half a century. But in a lot of ways, it was. And so it's like, I don't think you can really fault the author of the work to anticipate how their work is going to be taken out of context over and over and over. I think that that is like a cultural problem. Yeah. Well, I do think that I don't think all of his writing is, you know, certainly not perfect and not responsible. And if I were writing this story, I would fully center Lolita. And I know that survivors of assault have interpreted this book in a number of different ways. And no interpretation of this work is invalid. It's just, yeah, it's a tricky fucking thing.

And it's, you know, it's almost 70 years old now. And people are still trying to find what I mean. I don't know. I don't know if this could be successfully adopted. What we were talking about today was not successfully adapted. And I think that, oh, it's so frustrating. I think it's interesting. So to pivot a little bit to the 1962 movie adaptation of this,

I feel like the general consensus on this that was made, that was like, well, it's not good, but it's just because production codes i feel like this movie is definitely not good it is so long it is really boring so tedious it's just because of the production code nothing happens but that is not why the movie is bad i think that there's a lot of reasons, production code included, but I feel like it's letting Kubrick get off a little easy to say that it's

just because of the production code. I think that it also is bad for other reasons. Yes. And for any listeners who aren't familiar with what the production code is, Google it for more information, but it's basically a set of

censorship rules that applied to Hollywood studio films. It was enforced from the mid-1930s to the late 60s, and it basically said that movies couldn't have graphic violence, no sex or nudity or overt sexuality, no swearing, things like that. The list goes on and on. But it's worth checking out just to see what the limitations were, like what filmmakers could and couldn't do and what they did sort of to get around production code stipulations. There's like we saw in certain genres like screwball comedies,

there would be like all these like double entendre, innuendo type of dialogue and stuff like that but it's interesting but yeah it like informs a whole generation of movies basically and then this movie kind of comes out at the towards the tail end of that yeah this movie had been made even a couple years later i don't i mean it might have been quite different i don't really care to know um what stanley kubrick would have done with this story at literally any point in time. I think that truly just like among the worst working directors you could choose for this. It's kind of astounding.

But that was kind of that really informed how this movie was marketed, which the tagline for this movie was, how did they ever make a movie of lolita and the short answer and a lot of people have said this but the shorter answer is that they didn't and that's how they did by not doing it right given the production codes it would have been virtually impossible to even sort of tell the story which this i mean i guess you could i mean there's scenes in this movie that really lean on suggestion and then it's just like peter sellers for 45 fucking minutes and you're just like in various disguises like he's count olaf i'm just like this is exhausting no wonder lemony snicket liked it so much he's like i'm gonna base count olaf on quilty oh but it's interesting i mean i think that he did do that in a number of ways but i guess that's a separate episode uh but technically technically vladimir nabokov wrote the screenplay

to this movie yeah once again, we encounter something here that is technically true, but isn't actually true. Because I have read the screenplay that Vladimir Nabokov wrote. And Vladimir Nabokov wrote a fairly faithful, while obviously working around quite a bit, but a fairly faithful adaptation of his book that I feel frames the story appropriately or more

appropriately and there's been a number of interviews done with him and and done with basically everyone involved in this movie that like almost none of his script is used in this movie so even though his name is on it he thought very little of it and i also i'm like i'm not here to stand for vladimir nabokov hardcore he's got some weird shit going on in his life and i don't mean criminally i don't mean anything approaching like stuff like that but he's just i mean look at vladimir nabokov's family they were famously executing other authors. So there's a lot of shit going on with that. It's a whole thing. So Nabokov's got his own thing going on, right?

He's just kind of a bizarre cultural figure. But he didn't like this movie. The draft he wrote of this movie at least resembles his book. And for me, for the movies specifically framing is everything and this movie and the 1997 movie are framed not at all like basically not at all so yeah stanley kubrick hacked into this script i'm sure he was also trying to get his movie to pass the production code so that it could still be made but like fuck stanley kubrick man like fuck him truly when has he ever successfully written a female character or treated you know an actress with dignity fucking never is when

so uh fuck stanley kubrick particularly and i guess let's talk about what happens in the movie well first let's take a quick break and then we'll come right back Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th 2017 was murdered there are crooks everywhere you look now.

The situation is desperate. My name is Manuel Delia. I am one of the hosts of Crooks Everywhere, a podcast that unhurts the plot to murder a one-woman Wikileaks. Daphne exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state. And she paid the ultimate price. Listen to Crooks everywhere on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, this is Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. We've got some exciting news for you. You know we're always bringing you the best guests, right? Well, this week we're taking it to the next level. The one, the only, Katherine Hahn is joining us on Lost Culture East. That's right, the queen of comedy herself.

Get ready for a conversation that's as hilarious as it is insightful. Tune in for all the laughs, the stories, and of course, the queen of comedy herself. Get ready for a conversation that's as hilarious as it is insightful. Tune in for all the laughs, the stories, and of course, the culture. I feel some Sandra Bernhardt in you. Oh, my God, I would love it. I have to watch Lost. Oh, you have to. No, I know, I'm so behind.

Katherine Hahn can sing. Oh, I'm really good at karaoke. What's your song? Yeah, what's your song? Oh, I love. I'm so behind. Katherine Hanken's thing. Oh, I'm really good at karaoke. What's your song? Yeah, what's your song? Oh, I love a ballad. I felt Bjork's music. I just was like, who is this person? I got to hawk this slalom, Luge.

I'm not going to hawk this slalom. I absolutely love it. It was somehow Shakespearean when you said it. It was somehow gorgeous. Yee, my flock, you hollum. Listen to Las Culturistas on Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This summer, the nation watched as the Republican nominee for president

was the target of two assassination attempts, separated by two months. These events were mirrored nearly 50 years ago, when President Gerald Ford faced two attempts on his life in less than three weeks. President Gerald R. Ford came stunningly close to being the victim of an assassin today. And these are the only two times we know of that a woman has tried to assassinate a U.S. president. One was the protege of infamous cult leader Charles Manson. I always felt like Lynette was kind of his right-hand woman. The other, a middle-aged housewife working undercover for the FBI in a violent revolutionary

underground. Identified by police as Sarah Jean Moore. The story of one strange and violent summer. This is Rip Current. Available now with new episodes every Thursday. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so here's the recap.

We open on Humbert Humbert. He shows up to a rundown mansion belonging to this guy, Claire Quilty, who is played by Peter Sellers. They have some kind of history, and then he eventually shoots and kills Quilty. Then we cut to four years earlier. Humbert is a recent European transplant to the U.S. He arrives at a house in New Hampshire where he will be spending the summer before he heads off to Beardsley College in, I think it's Ohio, to teach French literature. Now the owner of this house, Charlotte Hayes, shows him around. Played by Shelley Winters, my birthday twin. Oh, and wow, today's your birthday. So that's amazing. So he's kind of on the fence about whether or not he wants to live here. But then she shows him out to the garden. And out there is Charlotte's teenage daughter, Lolita.

She is sunbathing in a bikini. And Lolita simply being there really helps Humbert decide to move in. Mrs. Hayes, Charlotteotte becomes interested in humbert pretty much right away but humbert becomes interested in lolita there's a scene where they all go to a community dance i suppose this is all like the scenes are so weird because there's a lot of i mean one thing that was done for this movie to allow it to be made was to age lolita up because in the book she is 12 am i right about that she is 12 yeah and in the movie she's 14 or 15 yeah not entirely sure the actor who plays lolita in this movie sue lion 14 at the time of shooting oh 14 at the time

shooting okay yeah got it she's 16 when it comes out god okay yeah yeah so they aged her up slightly and they added in like a boyfriend character i would guess to make her seem less innocent i don't know really what the thing but this whole boyfriend thing this is just like invented for the movie okay kenny kenny fake fake news fake news kenny and then here at this dance we learn that charlotte has a habit of going after men who are not interested in her because she approaches quilty who is there and he doesn't really seem to remember who she is even though it's implied that they have had sex before this is also totally made up for the movie invented yeah okay good to know he doesn't remember Charlotte but he does remember

Charlotte's daughter Lolita so that comes into later. Now Charlotte kind of goes back to throwing herself at Humbert, who again, only has eyes for a child. And they go back to the house after this dance, Lolita returns, and this makes Humbert very happy. But Charlotte is starting to get the sense that Humbert is interested in Lolita. So Charlotte kind of lashes out and she says, go to bed, you little pest. And then she kind of has a little outburst. She sure does. Then Humbert starts writing in a diary about his affection for lolita who he starts

to call his nymphette and barf yeah um gross but charlotte reveals that she is sending lolita away for the summer to camp because she wants to keep she needs to free up her schedule to be hitting on humbert all summer right we are to believe yep and humbert is very disappointed by this there's a scene where lolita comes in the house and wishes him a farewell and says you know don't forget me then humbert gets a letter from charlotte professing her love for him saying one of my favorite lines in fiction. I saw that you had changed your Twitter bio to this. It is such a fun line. I mean, in a very depressing work, it is a fun line. I'm a passionate and lonely woman and you are the love of my life. I'm like,

okay, drama like I Charlotte's letter is so overdramatic and I love it yeah she's basically like get out of my house because I love you unless you also love me and then you have to stay and be my lover forever you're like all right sure like I just I I mean we'll talk, but like that letter is always fun for me. I hate that he laughs at her. I'm like, this is the best writing in the movie is Charlotte's letter. But I love Charlotte's letter. Yeah. So he reads this letter and then he marries her.

And the implication here is that he marries her so that he will have the opportunity to see lolita again but then charlotte says that she has decided to send lolita from camp straight to boarding school and then straight to college from there meaning that humbert probably won't really ever see her again so he freaks out he starts to premeditate him murdering charlotte loudly and all the time like there i know and it's so it like adds to it that it's james mason just like the most british person ever being like maybe i should kill her like you're just like shut up man like what are you doing yeah this is also this is really deviated from what happens in the book as well. But anyways.

Got it. Yeah, I don't remember it well enough. But Humbert decides against killing his wife. And we're supposed to be like, wow, awesome. Like, hero. Cool. But Charlotte has just discovered Humbert's diary in which he has insulted her and expressed his love for Lolita. So she is distraught, runs out into the street and is killed when she's hit by a car.

Humbert is mostly unfazed by this. He then leaves to go pick Lolita up from camp, telling her that her mother is sick and in the hospital. And they just kind of have to bide their time before until she's well. So they're just going to travel around a little bit until then. So they check into a hotel and there's only one room left with one bed. Quilty also happens to be there. There's a scene where he is acting. He's like very high strung.

He and Humbert talk for a little bit about Lolita. And then Humbert returns to the room where he tries to get into the bed with Lolita, but then ends up sleeping on the cot that has been brought in. But the next morning, it is implied that they do something sexual together off screen, a.k.a. a statutory rape happens. Yes. Then they set off again in the car. Humbert finally tells Lolita that her mother is dead. So Lolita is very upset. But eventually Humbert and Lolita kind of settle into a life together and again by that

i mean he's a predator and he regularly again and again this is like so wildly deviated from the book where they're they're still traveling together but she is constantly trying to escape and she is constantly trying to get away and devise different ways to get away from her abuser who's continually manipulating her. In the movie, it is kind of portrayed as a mostly fun road trip when. Yeah, I have a lot to say about the tone of this movie, which is horrible. Yeah. Okay. So now they're living in Ohio and he starts his job as a professor at Beardsley College. Lolita seems to be getting bored with their relationship. He doesn't like that she hangs out with other boys at school. She wants to do the school play, but he won't let her. So then Quilty comes in. He has written this play. He

shows up pretending to be the school psychologist and convinces Humbert to let Lolita be in the play. But Humbert finds out that Lolita has been lying to him about where she's been and who she's been hanging out with. They get in a big fight, but eventually she's like, humbert let's go away again so they set off there's a car that's been following them for a while and then lolita gets sick and has to be hospitalized but when humbert picks her up from the hospital the staff says that another man has already picked her up so he freaks out he doesn't know where she is he loses contact with her for i believe a few years yeah and then humbert after some time receives a letter from lolita asking for money so he goes to see her she is married to a young man she is pregnant with his baby and she reveals that

she had been having a relationship with Quilty during this time that she was in the school play and then I think also before because basically Quilty follows her around wherever she goes yeah it seems yes and it was him who had picked her up from the hospital Lolita says that she was always in love with him but she did care about Humbert Humbert gets her to try to run away with him but she refuses so then he goes to Quilty's mansion which is the scene we see in the beginning and then he murders him and then we find out that he dies of coronary thrombosis before the trial prison yeah so that is the end of the 1962 movie again i mean we will continue to repeat this this is unequivocally a story of a child being repeatedly abused by a guardian

like there is no ifs ands or buts about it and this movie however i don't know what this movie thinks is going on because it seems like it is mishandling everything at every turn and where i'd like to start is i was sort of like foreshad like not foreshad but like alluding to this a little earlier of the way that this story is framed, if you're going to attempt to tell it, which I agree, you don't have to. It exists as a historical moment of this topic attempting to be discussed in the 1950s that is very worthy of criticism, and that's in one place.

If you're trying to adapt this responsibly, I feel that the framing of the story is very important because for you know the book and i feel like i'm like the book but it is important for this one the way that the book frames humbert humbert is that he is narrating his own story he is doing so uh from prison trying to convince a jury to let him get off from these crimes that he's committed a murder but also he is admitting that he um is a rapist of an m minor so this is something he's acknowledging over and over so he is perhaps not a is he perhaps an unreliable narrator yes would you say but not just that caitlin there the the book starts with a um an introduction by a different fictional character who basically tells you not to trust a word you're

about to hear and so just based on my own research and experience with the like the book is intended to be an experiment of you're told very explicitly at the beginning of the story do not fall for this person's shit they're lying and then the book becomes well will you fall for it anyways basically um this is completely absent from every movie adaptation and it is so important into like if you're gonna adapt it this has to be included like it absolutely needs to be included there's another thing that humbert again it's like he's a fucking liar so you don't know really i also think it's weird that it's like commonly accepted that charlotte just happened to walk into traffic i always i'm like i think he's lying about that but whatever yeah he probably

pushed her he probably killed her like why but even like literary scholars are like wow he really looked out there i'm like i'm i feel like he killed her he was just premeditating her murder i don't know if that is in the book well that doesn't happen but like oh like on her way to report him for being a criminal of the highest degree she happened to get hit by a car i mean give me a fucking break but in any case this framing is so important and humbert this is included in the 1997 movie, but also in the worst, stupidest way possible. He also mentions at the beginning of the book that he had loved and lost a young woman who was about Lolita's age when he was that age. And he uses that as a manipulative narrator to get you to say, well, this is why I did this horrible crime is because something bad happened to me when I was that age, which is a very manipulative tactic that is used by a lot of abusers.

Again, this is completely omitted from this. I feel like this movie, I mean, tell me if you, I feel like this movie pretty much just presents Humbert's narrative as fact, as this is what happened, period. Like there is no. Yes. The movie does not question him at all. At all.

It's ridiculous. There's no implication that he might be an unreliable narrator. They're like, these are the events of the story. This is exactly how they played out explicitly. He does voiceover. Like, I guess he is the narrator but there's no i mean like for your average viewer an unreliable narrator is like a concept that you need to make pretty fucking clear like you can't just be like here's james mason a very established movie star

who you probably like don't believe him like that is a difficult that's a difficult concept you have to make that super duper clear yeah and i wonder i mean i've really tried to follow the thread of like well who thwarted this from happening because nabokov's screenplay includes everything i just talked about it includes the character at the beginning that is like don't believe anything you're about to hear. It includes, if you're going to try to adapt it, the necessary things, I think. But I'm like, well, who does Kubrick say? Don't bother. Does the production code say?

Like, who is the person that says, no, it bothers me? And it just dooms the movie to, I i mean any live action interpretation of this that is translated faithfully i think is not even worth trying and is just is irresponsible but this one in particular i mean it's like you're not even fucking trying i know i know the code and like don't yeah go in the comments about the code we know about the code but in that case what is that your cat's fighting outside there's a bunch of cats that fight in the alley next to my house i live in a cartoon so anyways so what happens in this adaptation in the 62 one is the story because there there's no

mention of like don't believe anything this man says don't fall for his manipulation tactics etc the movie gets framed as being like almost like a rom-com like yeah there are there's a lot of visual jokes about like his attraction to lolita the inclusion of peter sellers at all like a famous comic actor of this era takes up way too much screen time in this movie but like that aside that's a that's a very specific decision you're making by putting a famous comic actor, like, second build in this movie. Right. What are you saying? Yeah.

Yeah. So, like, the tone that this movie takes, I absolutely think is horrendous because it frames a lot of what happens as comedy and as jokes. I can cite some examples at some point. And while the movie ends tragically for Humbert, he kind of gets his comeuppance, I guess, to the not degree that he should have. That is how they end his story in Nabokov's book. But it omits, I mean, the one thing that this movie does that I think is at least

interesting and not just like blanket i hate it is that it gives lolita a happy ish ending which is not how any other adaptation nor the source material ends in the book canonically she dies in childbirth and as i mean uh it's just a trap like she has a tragic life and and passes away very young which when i was reading it at the time like i i really loved lolita as a kid, and I kind of looked up to her in a way that was unhealthy because I was misinterpreting what was happening. But I cared a lot about the character, and to know that she dies at the end at least helped me understand a little bit

that she had been done this huge disservice in her life, that her life had literally been taken from her. This movie does not go this way it kind of ends kind of optimistically for her which i would suspect has something to do with the code yeah of like well don't kill our titular character right who never did anything wrong it's the only choice this movie makes that is remotely interesting is not it is allowing lolita's character to live on which yeah you know i don't know i guess i don't feel one way or another about it it's interesting it's different sure um there are two things i do remember from the book it's been a while it's been 15 years since i've read the book so i don't remember it very

well okay let me know if i'm remembering this correctly jamie since you've read it more recently is there a component of the book where humbert as he's like writing in his diary and describing his relationship with lolita i feel like he's often saying that like she is coming on to him by like she's like he's always like she's a nymphette she's like a nymphomaniac she's always trying to initiate like sexual contact with me he is like he's kind of blaming it on her is that something am i remembering a lot of the tone of and that's a lot of what his character does in the book i think intentionally by the author is that he oscillates between blaming his victims and a deep hatred of himself so it depends on what part in the book you are in at certain parts he blames her wholesale in a way that

reading it as an adult you know is not true um and is him offloading all of his own baggage onto a child and saying i mean the thing that people have said about victims since the beginning of time of like they were asking for it is basically what he's saying by inventing this vocabulary word at all and then in other sections of the book which we really don't see in any of these adaptations he kind of switches when lolita shows extreme like an example would be when she finds out that her mother is actually dead and not sick. She grieves her and is really upset and cries for days and days. And at this point in the narrative, he starts to go to like step 0.1 of introspection and starts to feel a lot of guilt and is like,

oh my God, I'm doing this horrible thing to this child. What am I doing? I'm a monster i'm a horrible person he calls himself like a pentapod monster like he called he there's sections where he seems completely aware of what he's doing but continues to do it anyways which makes him even worse right and then there's other sections where he's just blaming his victim. So it's different head spaces of just a wholesale abuser. This, it's not even, it doesn't cross James Mason's mind

that he's doing anything wrong. And I think that that has a lot to do with setting the code aside. The view that Hollywood has of women and girls at this time of i think that the you know the way that it's like you're saying caitlin it's so often framed as a joke that this man who's almost 40 and james mason was over 40 uh is having a relationship with a child a person who cannot consent to them and kind of joking around like you know which was a real culture and that was a real thing that happened in in mid-century america and there's countless

examples of it and certainly i mean we don't have time to recap the history of how hollywood has treated child stars and how and the legacy that continues to this day of abuse that happens to young people but it is i feel like it's treated as a joke because in this time you could just treat it as a joke like it you didn't even need to explain where you were coming from it was just culturally accepted as a joke the movie frames again his attraction to her as like isn't it so fun and cute that he's attracted to an underage girl like and she and she's also interested in him and all this stuff of yeah it's so it and it does lead i think i like, yeah, I mean, this is not a hot take. I wish to God I had not found out about this property when I was 12 years old, when I was like Lolita's age.

Because, you know, it's for most 12 year olds at that time and for most young people, it's not, you're just not going to have the frame of reference to understand what you're reading. I don't think it should be a book that's banned outright. Like if you don't want to read it, definitely don't. And I absolutely understand why you wouldn't want to. But when it's presented to like, who is this movie for? Is my question. Like, who the fuck is this even for this also extends to i mean lolita is i think to an extent demonized and made to say well this was a very like sexual 14 or 15 year old

so i think that the movie frames it of like well can you really blame him and it's like right yeah you can in and you should and you should but this but but i think that this movie has such a nothing view of of lolita she's she's barely written at all and i'm sure that that again i mean code code code right but i mean i she's robbed of any element that made her a character because i mean a lot of what you encounter with her in the book and to some extent in other adaptations is it making it very clear that she's a kid and she has the interest that a kid does and she's like a really she's like a 12 year old with a big personality who likes who's like very rebellious and has a complicated relationship with her mom and all this stuff like you know people didn't identify with this character i didn't identify

with her when i was 12 for no reason she had a personality that you can recognize but this is that this is just kind of another thing that's taken from her in this movie we know really nothing about her right and the movie has no interest in getting to know her which is just going to make it that much harder for a viewer to empathize with what she's going through right uh let's take another break and then we'll be right back for more discussion. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th, 2017, was murdered. There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate. My name is Manuel Delia. I am one of the hosts of Crooks Everywhere, a podcast that unhurts the plot to murder a one-woman Wikileaks.

Daphne exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state. And she paid the ultimate price. Listen to Crooks Everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, this week we're taking it to the next level. The one, the only, Catherine Hahn is joining us on Lost Culture East. That's right, the queen of comedy herself. Get ready for a conversation that's as hilarious as it is insightful. Tune in for all the laughs, the stories, and of course, the culture.

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Going back to the kind of use of visual comedy to set the tone of this movie, like there's a scene where after Humbert has moved in, they all go to a drive-in movie theater, and there's like a scary moment in the horror movie that they're watching. And both Charlotte and Lolita each put a hand on one of Humbert's knees. And he takes off Charlotte's hand because he's not interested in her. And he like puts his hand on Lolita's hand.

And then like Charlotte realizes what's happening and he realizes that she realizes. So then everyone kind of like retreats into themselves and like pulls their hand away. And it's like this, this like kind of. Oh, and then the whole cot scene. There's like a three minute slapstick comedy scene about like, oh, shucks for him that he doesn't get to sleep in a bed and he has to set up a cot it's made to be like it's the fact that this is a predatory statutory rapist it's a joke it's a long and it's a long joke and yeah no matter like how fucking like brainless you were in 1962 no one could laugh at this joke it is not it's just

horrible in every single way like it also another thing that frustrates me in these adaptations and this one is no different and no disrespect to shelly winters she is not given really the tools to succeed here nor was melanie griffith who gives my favorite charlotte performance in the 1997 movie i thought she was really good having been given nothing right but again charlotte is just because these movies take humbert's word as law charlotte is portrayed as this as this very shrill, clueless, like not particularly intelligent, hyper-sexualized monster. Yeah, like pathetic, desperate, hysterical, jealous, like every negative trait. Hateful to her own child.

And again, this is taken as law. And it's like, you can't know also these people don't exist i know that but there's just again even in literary analysis this interpretation of charlotte is taken very wholesale of like yeah this annoying woman who it you know presents herself as an obstacle in the first act of this story bitchy obstacle but again it's like if you think about the fact that you're told at the beginning this person is going to misrepresent everything to make himself look better would he not benefit by making her look like a horrible incompetent mother would he not benefit from portraying her this way like

i'm not claiming that this character would have been a perfect person. It sounds like from the jump, she and her daughter have a very contentious relationship. Lots of 12 year olds do with their mothers. They also like she in the book. This is I don't remember if this is referenced in this movie. I've seen so many versions of this. So I apologize if I'm getting this wrong. But she has lost a husband.

That's referenced. She's very cruel about it in this movie. They're like, well, he didn't have sex with me good, so I hate him. And you're like, that's not really anything that she ever said. No, in this movie like she's still kind of obsessed with him yeah and then okay so in the 1997 one she says he didn't fuck me right and so i don't care that he died and you're like that's not something people say either way she's like in mourning there's also a long tangent she goes on in the book of like she had lost a baby when he was very young and lolita

had a brother and that he passed away very young and that she had never quite fully grieved that and that that informed her relationship with her daughter was mourning this other child and that was one of the things that made their relationship very complicated which is really interesting and not something that is often discussed of like this deep depression that she would have been in and how does that affect the child who lives on and like this is a real world problem it's i'm not saying that this is the best exploration of it but it's just kind of like all of that is pushed aside even though i think it's interesting in the book that you're given that information to make of what you will and then he's like she's annoying and you're supposed to

take that as law like that's whatever that's a part of what the book's trying to do but the movie's just they're like nope she's annoying we hate her we don't care when she dies it's better that that he gets lolita away from her like that's what the movie wants you to think and it's like i get that like even the viewers of the movie movie wants you to think and it's like i i get that like even the viewers of the movie are not going to think that because they know that he is a bad person but i feel like the way yeah the way he builds up her character is to make you not feel too bad when she mysteriously dies the second she's about to report him he kills her i'm just like how all these fucking literary geniuses are like no she walked into traffic she was confused and i was like he

killed her whatever right um in this movie also she she's given like a gun like she's given that whole thing like that was a whole weird yeah that doesn't happen she's like the gun isn't loaded and he's like they do that and then he looks in the gun and it is loaded so like every right every way she's characterized just makes her seem so awful like the the movie frames that whole situation as like the movie wants you to root against Humbert being with an adult woman Charlotte because of the negative way that she's characterized and the movie wants you to root for Humbert pursuing a child the movie frames it horrifically and yeah again I it all goes back to the fact that it doesn't question Humbert's interpretation of events at all.

And there's no context as to why he's presenting this information this way and what he wants you to take away. And again, yeah, in every adaptation, Charlotte has done a huge disservice. I feel like people don't really talk about that because, I mean, obviously because Lolita has done the biggest disservice of all, where she is, you know, and I think most cases erased from her own story. and her confusion and her figuring out what is happening to her and repeated attempts to get herself out are essentially erased or severely condensed to make her just less important to the story right to just invalidate her feelings and her experience it makes me so sad for her. I really love her as a character and feel like there's a real opportunity here to examine a victim's story. Do I think that an older man is the person to do this?

Of course I don't. But being that she is this iconic character in American literature, she's just never been given an opportunity to show even what's on the page, much less explore deeper, which is what a lot of good film adaptations of books are supposed to do is take the important character and then give you a deeper look at who they are and what their struggle is and what their grief is. And all of this through the performances. And it's just not allowed to happen here. Which brings me to the thing that I hate the most about this movie. Is a problem that follows through every adaptation of this is supersizing Claire Quilty's role in the narrative this is a creative choice that is made literally every time and I hate it he is present in the book he's not wearing Count Olaf disguises in the book but there but it is implied that he and Dolores had known each other like when she was very young and that he had already been grooming her.

And it's kind of left ambiguous in the book as to what actually happens, which I just kind of can't speak to it. But he was certainly grooming her in in the book from a very young age and does follow them as he does in this and is killed at the end but this movie just i mean i think because this movie doesn't know what to do with its title character and has no interest in exploring the fact that its protagonist is a fucking criminal of the highest degree they just supersize another male character right and try to deepen the history and the relationship with humbert and quilty and i just couldn't think of a real like a relationship between two characters in this story that i care about less. I don't care about two predators and how they're enemies. Like, who gives a fuck? Like, it just, I hate it. It's such a lazy choice. It's such a, like, of course you hand off this extremely difficult, problematic story to a male director and they just kind of are like i don't know let's

let's get the other male character in it more so i understand what we're talking about like i hate it this happens in the 1997 movie happens in the musical happens in the hudward albie play which is yeah um it happens every single time yeah and i and i think that that choice especially has a lot to do with not the code this is the choice where i'm like this is not the code this is the filmmaker making a choice on how to handle the code it is like oh i know what i'll do i will make a like male predator character way bigger even though the lead character of this is a male predator why do that i just yeah i hate this choice so much i think it's so lazy and bad i hate it especially making it so silly what yeah yeah he's like he's being peter sellers he's like in every scene he's in he's doing some kind of character right he's like

in disguise he's pretending to be other people inspector cluzzoing it through this horrifying dense narrative it is just like that is not no that is not he's do you know what movie you're in who do you think you are bill nighy and i frankenstein you just didn't read the script and you showed up and you're like i'm doing what like it just he's like dana carvey and master of disguise he's like i can you need Master of Disguise. He's like, I can be anyone. You need to just remove yourself. You just need to go and read a book for one. It's so infuriating that this character is. And it's always done in slightly different ways.

Frank Langella plays him in 1997. And he plays the character very differently. Regardless, it's still a huge part. And it is not written as a huge part. I think it is just a choice that lazy male creatives have made to handle the parts of the story that they are ill-equipped to handle. And I feel like it is very clear, you know, if you have agreed to adapt this work

and you do not have experience as a survivor of abuse as a young person yourself the first thing you do is research that and speak to people and know what you're fucking talking about and adapting. So like, that's just like lodge, like step one. Yeah. Like do your, know what you're talking about in your work. Like I just, it makes me so mad that these mediocre fucking,

I don't care like about Stanley Kubrick. So whatever dragged me, I don't give a shit. He's terrible to women and i just i i whatever i know he's made good movies i don't really care i just think it's so irresponsible and so lazy and just the fact that people have even attempted to say like oh this is a this movie is only bad because of reasons that have nothing to do with the filmmaker who also wrote most of the movie. It's like you can't.

I mean, I agree that the code is a big part of why this movie is never going to work. But it has a lot to do with Stanley Kubrick. A whole lot. It just. Also. Yeah. lot yes it just also yeah because like because when he does decide to have lolita on screen this is okay this is something i'm kind of like figuring out in real time so bear with me here but like even the way that she is introduced on screen visually like the first time we meet her character

in the movie yes she's lying on the lawn she is in this kind of seductive pose or what the movie would have you think is that she like is wearing these sunglasses she like tilts them down in a very kind of like femme fatale way i feel like she's like licking a lollipop she's like well the thing is she's not actually doing that in the movie right this is fascinating and i think it's like okay i know i'm like preparing to do this podcast and so i'm like really in it but she doesn't actually do that in the movie you remember it that way because that is what is on the poster and that is what happens in every like it she is presented very sexualized and male gaze in her introductory scene but this whole image that is the i think the most prevalent image

that people have taken away from any version of this story is the young girl wearing heart-shaped sunglasses and licking a lollipop that exact image does not appear in the movie at all it doesn't appear anywhere it is something that exists nowhere like it is fucking fascinating to me that it that that i mean that's just marketing that is literally just marketing designed to titillate a male viewer into thinking you know and and she's making eye contact with the camera and that image it's strictly marketing it has nothing to do with anything but it's the thing that everyone took away from it including me apparently the way she's introduced in the movie is similar yeah where she is lying on the lawn she's wearing a bikini

there's a lot of people who have and including the actress sue lion who i want to talk about a little bit as well um who she she implied and many people involved with this production implied that she was chosen because she was more developed than many girls her age and she's presented that way she's presented in a bikini um she's you know hanging out on the lawn she's sunbathing she looks at him very seductively and kind of starts teasing him right away this is a hyper sexualized version of how it's presented in the book the 97 movie you get a different hyper sexualized version in the book what it is is it's a young girl laying out on the lawn reading a magazine and a man everything else is like it's a very ordinary image but the way it's written by a narrator that you have been told not to trust is hypersexualized and every movie kind of adapts it whole the same it's the same problem it's like

the framing and the male gaze that comes with this is coming from the unreliable male gaze that it's presented as in the book and just right it's just these like i don't know like stanley kubrick's never read a book he doesn't under he clearly hasn't been in grad school caitlin i mean he also made a movie that i mean with the shining that stephen king hated he's bad at adaptations as it turns out he's bad like he's i i just don't like i know that he's making stuff i just don't care i just don't care i don't have time sorry only so many also like what my point is that I'm still trying to figure out, but like, the movie does frame a lot of what she does as being seductive, which I think kind of goes to what happens in the book where like she's right beside him like doing a hula hoop which is just a normal activity that a child would do but because he's a predator he is like looking the man gaze is right in that shot like he's staring at her you see her stare you see

him staring at her yeah but what we need but because because this movie doesn't make it clear at all that he is an unreliable narrator the movie just makes it seem like she is deliberately tantalizing him exactly yeah i think what it's blaming her it's blaming her in the same way humbert does by not framing it as like it's blaming her yeah i think for that to be approached differently you okay remember the scene in fast times at regiment high where phoebe cates's character is getting out of a swimming pool and then you get judge reinhold's point of view like fantasy version of what this looks like yeah yeah yeah he's seeing her in slow motion and she's being really sexy and seductive and she takes her top off and it's like male gaze for days and then it cuts to what actually is happening where she like jumps out of the pool

because she's like choking on water and it's like she's got hair all over in her face and it's just like it's so yes i totally agree like it is a very simple i mean maybe goofy for this thing but like it makes it clear that what he's seeing and what is happening are two very different very different things that's what needs to be established here and it never is never never is in any of these adaptations it never is i caitlin need to send you a song that from this musical i like some people will say that the musical is the best this has ever been adapted which is just to look into how horrible the adaptations are there this is just so over the top that i had to laugh but it's very fucked this lyric in the song goes like this it's a lyric about humbert the town's talking about humbert something's not right with this guy that's literally what the tone of the song is and then townsperson number five says who is this viper that loves them post diaper that's the line in

the song that he sings he says who loves them there and it is this kind of uncritical like bullshit like trying to acknowledge what is happening without with also while being completely ill equipped to do so yeah i just that line really like i had to like throw my computer into the ocean after i heard that that it's the most like if you want the soundtrack is on youtube it's very bizarre but for this i think yeah with the hula hoop scene is a perfect example of like the movie is blaming her for what eventually happens it is setting the viewer up to say that she's quote unquote asking for it that thing that we have you know heard and discussed so many different times that is left like the just a false narrative that is leveraged against victims and this movie is just like yep

we agreed which brings me to i think my last major thing for for this is talking a little bit about sue lion who played lolita in this movie she passed away last year and she's a very interesting figure in movie history i've done quite a bit of research on her uh there's not actually a lot uh because and this is a kind of continuing trend that young actresses who are cast as Lolita historically don't tend to work for very long. And I think that, again, it's everyone is different. I'm not trying to loop all of these people into the same narrative. But there are similarities that I think are worth mentioning, which include the fact and I think it really speaks to Hollywood issues, not even issues with the story. It's more societal issues of Sue Lyon is cast as an unknown for this part when she's 14.

She later describes what sounds like, she frames it as like, isn't this funny in the 80s? But what she described, I thought sounded very fucked up she she went to this audition with stanley kubrick and she frames this by being like and you know normally when you go to an audition they're like okay turn this way turn this way uh here's the line thanks for coming in see ya whatever but she said this audition he asked her very personal questions right when she got there and he said do you date where do you go what do you do what time do you come home what does your mom think of you where did you get that dress what what size is it like asked her all these really personal questions in order to get the role right

so already we're like okay if you didn't remember why you hated stanley kubrick there's a fun reminder but so she she's put into this movie she wins a golden globe for playing this part and then goes on to really not have much of a career and then she retires from acting pretty young she has a very tumultuous personal life that is not really relevant to our discussion but all that to say that i do believe that there is a stigma that comes with playing a role like lolita especially when it is written as irresponsibly as it regularly is in these adaptations where i mean it's like peter sellers certainly didn't have a fucking problem getting work after being in this movie james mason certainly didn't have problems shelly winters didn't have problems but it is these young actresses who are sexualized

over sexualized playing a character that is in its essence misrepresenting and blaming them for what is happening to them and then you see that they don't even really get to reap the benefits of having starred in this huge movie. They're kind of discarded by Hollywood and by the culture at large. Yeah, I mean, there's most Sue Lyon movies she was in after this. You wouldn't really know. And a lot of there's a similar line that can be drawn for the actress who played Lolita in 1997. It is like a common trend for this character. And it just extends my frustration and my problems with this of like,

I think, I mean, with what she's given, I think Sue Lyon does an excellent job and I feel the same of Dominique Swain in 1997. And the fact that they should have to in some ways it seems bear the brunt and the consequences of the people around them mismanaging the story yeah is so frustrating to me I mean it just truly no one else in these productions suffer except

I mean I don't want to say that but like career wise stanley kubrick is fucking fine adrian line i mean at least you can argue that adrian line didn't make a movie for i don't even know who the fuck that is yeah but but by and large you know reputation wise and typecasting wise jeremy irons went on to play a number of roles and he's fucking the worst person ever. Like, I just I just find that trend to also be frustrating because it just extends this blame onto the person playing the character. And that's just I hate that i hate that so much yeah oh it's awful it's also very telling of just where we've been culturally where you know we just blame women for everything absolutely i it really frustrates me i'm sorry for bringing this movie but i do i mean i'm very curious as to what our listeners think if if

you um were listening to the episode it's such a complicated work there's so much to obviously talk about um but also just the ways that i mean i feel like of all the irresponsible adaptations the adaptations of this book in particular have been egregiously terrible to the point where yeah i'm like if this is how it's going to be remembered culturally do you even want the book to have been written if it's just going to be given to people that can't get to step one of researching it like it's just so absurd to me yeah because victims i mean i think victims deserve better than lolita in general for sure but victims deserve better in these adaptations as well like there's yeah yeah so this movie is upsetting and frustrating and historically i guess I would say it's relevant and it marks a very specific point in time but I

also I'm just like if you're still out here being like it was just the code uh it wasn't it definitely wasn't there's a lot of other things at play here none of them good no the one other thing I remember pretty distinctly from the book, and I only remember this because I remember bringing it up in like the class discussion we had during the class I took in college, where in the book, Humbert is like obsessed with Lolita's IQ. He's always talking about how she has a high iq so let's start of course by saying and jamie i don't have to tell you this but like i'm in men's iq iq tests are like bullshit based on pseudoscience and you are in mensa yes sorry that's what i meant to say yeah no it's uh it's it's uh racist sexist you name, pseudoscience. Yeah, he does. I mean, I think he intentionally in many points like tries to, I think what he's trying to do there is just try to make it sound like she is,

he's like, well, she's smart. So that means that she's older than her age. Like just trying to play that angle. Yeah. Because like IQ stands for intelligence quotient, which is a number that you get when you divide. Again, and this is all like bullshit pseudoscience, but it's when you divide your mental age, which is a number that you get from an intelligence test. Divide that by your actual chronological age. So if someone scores a 150 on an IQ test, which is considered to be a high IQ,

and you take that test when you're 10 years old, it means that your actual, your chronological age is 10, but your mental age is 15. So I feel like Humbert is so obsessed with her IQ because he's like, well, she might be 12 chronologically, but she's closer to 18. Literally, I mean, it's like it's it's so yeah, he's he's just a fucking bullshit liar where.

Yeah, that's for like reading levels and math. Right. Nothing to do with your ability to consent. Like it's just so yeah bad faith and ridiculous but i do yeah that i uh but i feel like that is like like for predators who try to justify their behavior they'll they'll cite like oh yeah well she was maybe technically underage but she was so mature yeah i think i feel like that's a very common tactic yeah yeah i i mean humber humber certainly embodies a lot of common tactics of manipulative abuser i mean

yeah yeah hell and that's something that could have been in the movie where like if we see him trying to justify his behavior through you know the mental gymnastics he's doing and then we see other characters be like well wait a minute like what no that's another i think opportunity again if you're going to adapt this that's an opportunity you have as a filmmaker to present these things that he is saying in this very fancy flowery language in the book. And then just having to have that character say it as dialogue, when it will sound predatory and ridiculous, and will scare people because it's like, yeah, he doesn't have the luxury of talking his way around the

topic as he does in the book. I mean, that's something that you could have explored of like, how does this person try to justify himself in real time? And of course, it's going to catch up with him. And also a lot of what the book deals with that I don't think that the movies are successful in is society's failure of lolita not only are we seeing this predator succeed in taking her away again and again and again we see her communities has failed her her school system has failed her her government has failed her law enforcement has failed her she's been failed at every level and that you know partially due to this kind of extreme passiveness that existed in the 1950s in the u.s and like that was a very deliberate commentary that again it's just like this movie has no interest or ability i don't know which but like it has no it just is like peter sellers is funny

you're just like how is this where we are like yeah well wouldn't it be funny if the the hotel is all booked up and they can only have one room because there's a police convention there and oh the irony of a a pedophile who's you know breaking the law has to be around a bunch of cops teehee what a funny obstacle it's infuriating it's so like it yeah creating a comic situation out of it all of it it's just it's it's a it's a waste of everybody's time and it's worse than a waste of time. It's actively detrimental to telling a story that could be of use to anybody. To anybody.

And I feel like that's why nobody talks about this movie, is because the book is very controversial, but some people have found value in it, which is why it's such a debate. This movie, no one has ever found value in, so no one is one is like well what about peter sellers like no one is saying that like it's a it's a useless it's a useless movie and i and i hate that sue lion and shelly winters had to deal with any part of it thank you for being willing to discuss this movie with me don't worry now I have

I'll be using this as collateral no what's the word something to cause you know there's some movies that I know you don't want to do that i'm like yeah fine i did indiana jones let them that's true

but in any case yes i agree and i yeah i just my thoughts have been very consumed with this property recently and so i wanted to bring it on the Bechdel cast and talk about it with you it's just wow wow wow yeah so feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments

we're very as always very interested in what you have to say I did not honestly pay attention to if this movie passed the Bechdel test I don't give a shit if this movie attention to if this movie passed i don't give a shit if this movie passes the bechdel test i don't give any manner of fuck about that if it does i don't really care uh i think it probably does between lolita and her mom but at some point i'm sure it does i just yeah i don't really care it doesn't I don't think it matters for this movie it doesn't super matter no it's not really relevant to this discussion and I honestly don't know how to give

this movie nipples either I guess I would say zero I'm going to give it negative one million nipples yeah I guess I'll just say negative I guess I'll say I barely know that this even applies to this discussion it is like the portrayal in this movie there there wasn't even an attempt it took a flawed attempt at portraying female characters and erased not just nabokov's problems but the entire character just turn the pencil over and early early early like just it everyone deserves so much better than what this movie had to offer and fuck stanley kubrick and that's why i was fuck the other adaptation the the other film one that one is disgusting the other adaptation it adrian line he shouldn't have worked for a long time after that i tell you what the adrian line one in particular i just i

watched it today and i feel terrible you know what i need to do as a palate cleanser for having consumed all this low all these lolita movies is watch hard candy oh hard candy is everything these movies are not it is a rug yeah oh that was that was a fun episode to record yes yes i and i feel like in a way you can view that movie as kind of a response to movies like lolita yeah i think someone like saw stanley kubrick's lolita and they're like, well, I could adapt that better than this. And then they made hard candy. I just it still is so infuriating to me that the image that people take away from this movie doesn't even appear in the movie. That says everything you need to know about this movie.

It is just it tricked me, too. Like I like I had mapped the poster onto that scene i guess like almost everybody feels this way like i thought this until i built my life around it for no reason like that it's so i mean manipulative like it's it's very effective marketing that is doing bad things like yeah it it is uh i don't know it is a very interesting case study it's very fucked up and i you know yeah well um we're done talking about it and now we're done talking but we'll be back check out the podcast uh i frankenstein oh wow we'll be back soon with that. Thank you for listening again.

We look forward to your perspectives or we'll, we'll see you at iFrankenstein. Yes. Well, that was our unlocked Lolita episode. And once again, Jamie tell people where and when and how they can listen to lolita podcast lolita podcast comes out on november 23rd and then new episodes are released every

monday right here on on iheart radio or wherever you get your podcast and that's the official language uh but yeah i uh so as far as like there is one entire episode dedicated to like deep background on uh this movie in particular but it's a 10 episode series so we're taking a look at the book we're taking a look at the author we're taking a look at the other we're taking a look at the other adaptations there is also entire episodes dedicated to talking to professionals in child psychiatry and just like other and and the ways that people have reclaimed this text over the years and um it's an interesting ride i i hope that uh people will listen but yeah it's just uh it's just a podcast that will come out on Mondays soon. Excellent.

Well, speaking of plugs, because this was an unlocked Matreon episode, we said it at the beginning of the episode. We'll repeat ourselves. Check out our Matreon. And you can do that by going to patreon.com slash Bechtelcast. It gets you access to two brand new bonus episodes every single month, plus access to the entire back catalog of bonus episodes. And like we mentioned, there are upwards of 80 by now. And if you're listening, when this comes out in November 2020 we just uh we're in the middle of Mary-Kate and Ashley month on an important moment in world history you thought this episode was a critical discussion wait till you get to two different Mary-Kate and Ashley movies

too too much discourse for one episode so but there's a lot of fun stuff we always cover um garbage holiday movies in december and it's just it's a fun ride so uh meet us over on the matron for more fun yes indeed and um yeah all the other stuff follow us on social media at bechtel cast on twitter and instagram check out our merch on tpublic.com slash the Bechdel cast. It's the perfect time for a baby Grinch merch. Oh, or as I like to call him now, green baby boy,

green baby boy. You need to do a whole, after Lolita is over, you need to do a separate podcast about your journey with green baby boy. I honestly will need the relief after, after working on lolita for six months to be like okay this this podcast is just about baby grinch let's just cut to the chase um and well if you'll allow me to plug something of mine i have a still pretty new instagram live

show that i do every thursday on Instagram, which you can find that at Caitlin Durante. It's called Movie Talk with Caitlin. And it's just me and a guest chatting about movies. It's not the Bechdel cast because I do no preparation. There's no specific movie that gets discussed. It's just a loose convo Jamie you were my first guest it was so much fun oh what a what a blast and many and and I think so far all friends of the cast have been on the so far yeah because turns out the only people I know are former guests on our show well I well well the way I was thinking of it is like we truly just bring our friends on our show. That's true.

Yeah. But yeah, I think I'll keep it pretty close to Bechtelcast friends on Movie Talk. So check that out. Again, every Thursday at 6 p.m. Pacific, 9 p.m. Eastern. And that's, again, on my instagram at caitlin dorante and i think that does it right i think so yeah have a have a great week everybody and uh we'll see you next week with another episode i don't know what i was gonna say say. With another episode. Goodbye. It's true. Bye-bye. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist

who on October 16th, 2017, was assassinated. Crooks Everywhere unnerves the plot to murder a one-woman WikiLeaks. She exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state. Listen to Crooks everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, everybody. This is Matt Rogers. And Bowen Yang. We've got some exciting news for you. You know we're always bringing you the best guests, right? Well, this week, we're taking it to the next level. The one, the only, Catherine Hahn is joining us on Las Culturistas.

That's right, the queen of comedy herself. Get ready for a conversation that's as hilarious as it is insightful. Tune in for all the laughs, the stories, and of course, the culture. Don't miss Catherine Hahn on Las Culturistas. Listen to Las Culturistas on Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Keri Champion, and this is season four

of Naked Sports. Up first, I explore the making of a rivalry, Kaitlyn Clark versus Angel Reese. People are talking about women's basketball just because of one single game. Clark and Reese have changed the way we consume women's basketball. And on this new season, we'll cover all things sports and culture. Listen to Naked Sports on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio apps, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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