THE THREE FACES OF LOLITA, OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE ADAPTATION
In 1962, the catholic legion of decency was bound to condemn Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, the story of a middle-aged pedophile who marries a widow, loses her, and then becomes the lover of his adolescent stepdaughter. Thirty-six years later, Adrian Lyne’s 1998 remake confronted a number of the same problems that Kubrick faced in terms of adaptation, censorship, and distribution. The two film adaptations of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita do not exactly follow the old sexist adage about women—the beautiful ones aren’t faithful and the faithful ones aren’t beautiful. In fact, Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film was neither particularly beautiful nor faithful, at least in superficial terms. Robert Stam has questioned the legitimacy of the entire concept, arguing that “we need to be less concerned with inchoate notions of ‘fidelity’ and to give more attention to dialogical responses—to readings, critiques, interpretations, and rewritings of prior material.”1 When Kubrick released Lolita, the film’s audiences, critics, and would-be censors could not agree on how true to the novel Kubrick’s version was, but fidelity was not the most pressing issue at the time. Kinky sex was the sticking point for many readers and viewers, and although some “felt cheated that the erotic weight wasn’t in the story,” Production Code arbiters objected to its supposed tawdriness.2