Lolita & Dolores by Megan Griffin

F RoseREE t Glas inted ses

Only Twelve! A PRECOCIOUSLY SEDUCTIVE YOUNG GIRL WHO WAS

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EXCLUSIVE on Dreamy Humbert WHAT DO OLDER MEN REALLY WANT? The hottest sun dresses for your sexy summer!

OM G the girl The scoop on irginity who lost her vrs old at twelve yea

#LOLITA NOW

BANNED ON PINTEREST - WTF!?!

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TIPS AND TRICKS FOR DRESSING LIKE A NYMPHETTE

ROMANCE AND MORE The STEAMIEST Age-Gaps in Hollywood

LOLITA & DOLORES

LOLITA & DOLORES Copyright © 2022 Megan Griffin ISBN : 146-0-000000-0 First Edition January 2022 Designed in the Institute of Art, Design and Technology Dun Laoghaire, A96 KH79 All rights reserved. This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise without prior written permission of the publisher. The information within this publication includes explicit material and may be upsetting for some readers.

To the women who were sexualised before knowing what it meant to feel sexy. This book is dedicated to the Dolores that Nabokov wanted the world to empathise with.

and notes to my younger self

Why Lolita? Written by Vladimir Nabokov in 1955, the story portrays the narrator’s sexual obsession with and victimization of a 12 year old girl named Dolores, who he nicknames Lolita. This novel was justly included in the The Pavilion Books published ‘100 Books That Changed The World’ in 2018. The novel has had a tremendous, and arguably negative, influence in shaping how popculture views young women. The novel’s thin line between pornography and literary merit, has resulted in its popularity and continued exploration, as well as neglectful application to serious issues of grooming, abuse and unfair sexualisation. Nabokov’s writing showed how abuse can be hidden in plain sight, and dressed up as romance or a steamy sexy affair, and these themes not only continue to hurt women in the public eye but can resonate with thousands of women worldwide. Unfortunately, Lolita being a household name has resulted in Dolores being forgotten as well as the true meaning of the book; abuse and obsession, and the mistreatment of a young innocent 12 year old child.

Lolita

III

Lolita

THE COVER GIRL ON STAGE THE POPSTAR ON SCREEN ONLINE

DOLORES

MISTREATED

Lolita

THE COVER GIRL

Lolita & Dolores

COVER GIRL Written by Rachel Arons

esigning a cover for a controversial novel is always a fraught endeavor, but few novels come with as much visual baggage as

“Lolita.” Nabokov’s daring story has confounded book designers from the beginning: the cover of the first edition, published in 1955, was solid green. In the decades since, “Lolita” has become closely associated with certain images, most indelibly the nymphet in red, heart-shaped sunglasses on the poster for Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 movie adaptation, which many book versions have reproduced. But the sexualized vision of Lolita perpetuated by popular culture has very little to do with the text of Nabokov’s novel, in which Lolita is not a teen-aged seductress but a sexually abused twelve-year-old girl. A new book, “Lolita: The Story of a Cover Girl: Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel in Art and Design,” edited by John Bertram and Yuri Leving, challenges this prevailing misrepresentation with essays by book designers, artists, and Nabokov scholars, and a preface by Mary Gaitskill that considers the problem of capturing Nabokov’s psychologically complex story in a single image. The book’s centerpiece is the Lolita Book Cover Project, for which Bertram, an architect based in Los Angeles, commissioned designers to create new covers for the book. We spoke with Bertram by e-mail. The Nabokov scholar and translator Dieter E. Zimmer has about a hundred and eighty-five covers from thirty-six countries in his online “Covering Lolita” gallery right now, although there are a few that don’t properly count (at least one is for an LP, and two are for books about the novel). However, I have seen other covers that don’t appear on his site, so I would say the number is closer to, or may exceed, two hundred. The Nabokov scholar Stephen Blackwell argues that Nabokov was always intent on controlling his public image and his reputation, and that this extended to translations, interviews, and book covers. Of “Lolita”’s cover design he originally wrote to his publisher: “I want pure colors, melting clouds, accurately drawn details, a sunburst above a receding road with the light reflected in furrows and ruts, after rain. And no girls.” He also said, “Who would be capable of creating a romantic, delicately drawn, non-Freudian and non-juvenile, picture for LOLITA (a dissolving remoteness, a soft American landscape, a nostalgic highway—that sort of thing)? There is one subject which I am

Lolita the Cover Girl

emphatically opposed to: any kind of representation of a little girl.” But Nabokov eventually saw in the “Lolita” controversy that his novel had a life of its own, especially after he sold the film rights (which, along with the success of the book, afforded him the chance to quit teaching, move to Switzerland, and focus solely on his writing) and, later, when the book was absorbed into the promotional whirlwind for Kubrick’s adaptation. After the success of “Lolita,” Nabokov was kept extremely busy with translating his earlier Russian-language novels into English and “Lolita” into Russian, and with new writing endeavors, and he had less time or inclination to monitor public treatments of his book. I suppose you could say that he ended up being rather willing to give “Lolita” over to popular culture.

I want But Nabokov pure colors, eventually melting sawclouds, in the Lolita controversy accurately drawn details, that hisanovel sunburst had a life ofaits above receding own, especially road withafter the light he sold the film reflected... No rights” girls.” The promotional image of Sue Lyon in the heart-shaped sunglasses, taken by photographer Bert Stern, is easily the most significant culprit in this regard, much more so than the Kubrick film itself (significantly, neither the sunglasses nor the lollipop ever appears in the film), or the later film by Adrian Lyne. Once this image became associated with “Lolita” and it’s important to remember that, in the film, Lolita is sixteen years old, not twelve, it really didn’t matter that it was a terribly inaccurate portrait. It became the image of Lolita, and it was ubiquitous. There are other factors that have contributed to the incorrect reading, from the book’s initial publication in Olympia Press’s Traveller’s Series, to Kubrick’s startlingly unfaithful adaptation. <3 15

Lolita & Dolores

PICTURES OF LO Written by Mary Gaitskill

his love was like an endless wringing of hands, like a blundering of the soul through an infinite maze of hopelessness & remorse.

This could be Humbert Humbert agonizing over Lolita after he has ruined her life and his, but it is not; it is Charles Kinbote, King of fabulous Zembla, musing with wistful offhandedness about his young, beautiful, unloved, and undesired wife, Disa. In waking hours he feels nothing for her but “friendly indifference and my bleak respect,” but in his dreams, these dry sentiments are saturated and swollen until they “[exceed] in emotional tone, in spiritual passion and depth, anything he had experienced in his surface existence.” In life he casually, near accidentally tortures her; in his dreams he remorsefully adores her. In Pale Fire, Disa is a minor character who receives only a pathetic handful of the book’s 214 pages. But with the poignancy and plangency of sorrow, she illumines Pale Fire’s core; the delusional dream, the preposterous poem, the crumbling bridge between mundane reality and fantastic ideal, the tormenting ideal that insists on bleeding through to the surface (“all peach syrup, regularly rippled with pale blue”) even as it sinks in the mud below. If Kinbote, though King, can’t have the one he really wants, Humbert Humbert can: In Lolita the dreamer is in the driver’s seat, reality is broken, and it is the raving dream that broke it. Humbert “seldom if ever” dreams of Lolita, even when he has lost her. Except that he does. In his grossly unbeautiful dreams, Lolita appears as Charlotte, her disgusting mother, and as Valeria, Humbert’s equally disgusting former wife, both of whom disgustingly loved him. That complex ghost would come to me, shedding shift after shift, in an atmosphere of great melancholy and disgust, and would recline in dull invitation on some narrow board or hard settee, with flesh ajar like the rubber valve of a soccer ball’s bladder. I would find myself, dentures fractured or hopelessly mislaid, in horrible chambres garnies where I would be entertained at tedious vivisecting parties that generally ended with Charlotte or Valeria weeping in my bleeding arms and being tenderly kissed by my brotherly lips in a dream disorder of auctioneered Viennese bric-a-brac, pity, impotence and the brown wigs of tragic old women who had just been gassed.

Lolita the Cover Girl

I must’ve read Lolita five times before I even noticed this hideously gorgeous paragraph, this miserable aside linking the fatally despised women with the fatally desired girl. Part of Lolita’s power is in its extreme oppositions: Even Humbert’s fanatically one-directional desire for little Dolly is made more delicious by the sharp tonal oppositions in her “two-fold nature,” the “tender dreamy childishness” and “eerie vulgarity, stemming from the snub-nosed cuteness of ads and magazine pictures,” the “exquisite stainless tenderness seeping through the musk and the mud” of her female being—really, of any being. The tension between Humbert’s near-erotic revulsion for women/his miasmic desire for girls, his human despair/his demonic joy, is even more intense; the dream which tragically joins these poles suggests that one has been a palimpsest for the other all along. So how does one, one very normal one, put this on a book jacket? How even to try? It is remarkable to me how many have succeeded in capturing even a fractional flash of Nabokov’s ingeniously juggled, weirdly populated planets with their many moons. Lolita may be fairly described as “a threnody for the destruction of a child’s life”, yet a high percentage of the covers go for cute: whimsical buttons on bright red, an ejaculating pink plastic gun, a crenellated candy-pink shell, a pale pink plastic necklace spelling the titular name, that name elsewhere spelled with a bobby sock, still multiple elsewheres with a leopard print mascara wand, a paper-doll leg, a crushed red lollipop. Some covers are bric-a-brac-ishly decorated (bleeding old maidish mum with dripping chocolate petals, Lolita in crazy-quilt neon lace, a silhouette man trapped in a cubist blue teardrop, a pink bird in a rigid cage), still others are subtle to the point of opacity (the corners of two pink walls are unsurprised to meet a white ceiling), while a few others are deliberately ugly (horrible-looking old men, one of them open-mouthed, bare-chested, and practically reaching into his pants). They are all fun to look at, even the ugly ones. For me, cuteness (Yes, snub-nosed, even when there is no nose! Ads and magazine pictures, of course!) comes consistently closest to the book’s cruel and ardent heart. For Humbert’s aesthetic infatuation is based on a tyrannical ideal, and cuteness is a kind of ideal—one that is heartless, 17

Lolita & Dolores

Lolita has inspired hundre many of which feature sim lollipops, lips, lipstick, scru bathers, heart-shaped sun Kubrick’s 1962 adaptation, female anatomy, strawber

Lolita the Cover Girl

eds of front cover designs, milar visual tropes: endless unchies, underwear, nglasses from Stanley , sly references to the rries,

and a lot of pink. 19

Lolita & Dolores

breathless, timeless, and ageless as Bambi, static and hard-edged, perfect in its way, with all excess flesh and unseemly feeling cut out—oh, Humbert, there can be no “aurochs and angels” in this cartoon heaven-cum-hell! But the best cover, I think, is not cute. It is the 1997 Vintage paperback edition of the book, featuring a simple photographic image with a complex penumbra: a bare-legged girl, shown from the waist down, wearing a flared skirt and oxford shoes. The photo is bright white, granular gray, and deeply dark; it is delicate (the slender legs) and thick (the big shoes and skirt). The girl’s legs are beautiful and very vulnerable, in a knock-kneed position with a large gap between the calves, and the toes adorably, spastically touching each other. Charming, until you consider the full body posture suggested by the position: It expresses fear. Either the girl has cerebral palsy or she is cringing. You don’t see the full image, so your first and (probably) only conscious response is appreciation of the subject’s touching, awkward beauty. But a second, instinctive and less aesthetic understanding of the image (creeping quietly up under the first), shades mild appreciation with something too dark to quite see, which we nonetheless feel intensely in our reptile spines. But the blurb on that cover is more disturbing than the image, for it sincerely states that Lolita, in which the heroine is seduced, kidnapped, and grossly used, her mother humiliated at length before dying violently, the seducer himself shattered, his rival murdered, the heroine finally dead along with her “still-born baby girl”—according to the blurb, this madcap orgy of Thanatos is “The only convincing love story of the century”!!!! It is not shocking that someone said this, especially given that this someone was Gregor von Rezzori writing for Vanity Fair. But it is quietly outrageous that a mainstream publisher would choose to put it on the cover, directly over those understandably frightened legs. I am not the only one to feel this way; if you google the phrase, you will find all kinds of online fussing about it: Lolita is not about love, because love is always mutual; Lolita is about obsession, which is never, ever love, and Nabokov himself was so disappointed that people did not understand this and take away the right message. I am in sympathy with the fussers, and almost am one myself, for how could anyone call this feeding frenzy of selfishness, devouring, and destruction “love”? And yet, consider what Nabokov said about Humbert: That while he, the author, would condemn his character to hell for his acts, he would allow Humbert, for one day a year, to leave 20

Lolita the Cover Girl

hell and wander “a green lane in Paradise,” and that this parole would occur because of the glowing particle of real love he bore Lolita. Although I find von Rezzori’s words initially repellent and even a little smug, if you rewrite the sentence without the words only and century, I have to agree with them. Lolita is about obsession and narcissistic appetite, misogyny and contemptuous rejection, not only of women, but of humanity itself. And yet. It is also about love; if it were not, the book would not be so heart-stoppingly beautiful. Here is Humbert on finding his runaway sex slave, now married and pregnant at 17: You may jeer at me, and threaten to clear the court, but until I am gagged and half-throttled, I will shout my poor truth. I insist the world know how much I loved my Lolita, this Lolita, pale and polluted, and big with another’s child, but still gray-eyed, still sooty-lashed, still auburn and almond, still Carmencita, still mine . . . even if those eyes of hers would fade to myopic fish, and her nipples swell and crack, and her lovely young velvety delicate delta be tainted and torn—even then I would go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of your dear wan face, at the mere sound of your raucous young voice, my Lolita. This is love crying with pain as it is crushed into the thorned corner of a torture garden—but it is still love. Purity of feeling must live and breathe in the impure gardens of our confused, compromised, corrupt, and broken hearts. Love itself is not selfish, devouring or cruel, but in human beings it suffers a terrible coexistence with those qualities; really, with any other vile thing you might think of. These oppositions sometimes coexist so closely and complexly that the lovers cannot tell them apart. Infernal combinations are there in all of us, and we know it. That Lolita renders this human condition at such an extreme, so truthfully, and yes, as von Rezzori says, convincingly, is the book’s most shocking quality. It is why it will never be forgotten. It is also why no one will ever succeed in describing it fully on a book jacket. But how wonderful that so many have tried. <3

Lolita & Dolores

Olympia Press, Paris, 1955

Lolita the Cover Girl

Aydin Yayinevi, Istanbul, 1959

Transworld, London, 1973

Mondadori, Milan, 1980

Teorema, Lisbon, 1987

Penguin, London, 1995

Europaische, Stuttgart, 1977

Omega, Amsterdam, 1970s

Gallimard, Paris, 1999

Altin Kitaplar, Istanbul, 1974

Lolita & Dolores

DESIGNING LOLITA Written by Siobhan Lyons

hen it was published in 1955 by Olympia Press, Vladimir Nabokov’s seminal and controversial novel Lolita had a very

simple, green cover design. Nabokov himself had wanted his own particular cover: “I want pure colors, melting clouds, accurately drawn details, a sunburst above a receding road with the light reflected in furrows and ruts, after rain. And no girls.” Some 60 years later -- and still frequently topping best-book lists -- Lolita has inspired hundreds of front cover designs, many of which feature similar visual tropes: endless lollipops, lips, lipstick, scrunchies, underwear, bathers, heart-shaped sunglasses from Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 adaptation, sly references to the female anatomy (strawberries, etc.), and a lot of pink. In her work The Lolita Phenomenon (2003), academic Barbra Churchill, from the University of Alberta, wrote: “the Lolita image has so pervaded popular consciousness that even those who have never read the book usually know what it means to call a girl ‘Lolita’. The moniker ‘Lolita,’ translated into the language of popular culture, means a sexy little number, a sassy ingénue, a bewitching adolescent siren.” While many of the double-entendre images of the female anatomy partly suit Nabokov’s mischievous writing style and his playful treatment of the subject matter, many of these covers take this liberty a bit too far. They convey the (false) impression of Lolita as a young seductress, when in fact the character was sexually abused by her step-father, the infamous Humbert Humbert, and robbed of her youth. The discrepancy between the cover designs and the themes of the novel are stark. In 2013, The New Yorker’s Rachel Arons explained that “the sexualised vision of Lolita perpetuated by popular culture has very little to do with the text of Nabokov’s novel, in which Lolita is not a teen-aged seductress but a sexually abused twelve-year-old girl.” Other designs attempt to creatively capture and interpret, in a single image, the overall theme of the novel. There is Rachel Berger’s cover design of an old hand with a withered flower, Jason Polan’s design featuring just a simple loose-leaf writing sheet, and Andy Pressman’s design, which captures Lolita’s elusiveness with a barely distinguishable image of the word “Lolita” on the cover. These sorts of covers relate more to Lolita’s lost youth and her dehumanization than the sexual elements of

Lolita the Cover Girl

the novel. Many of those covers are featured in John Bertram and Yuri Leving’s book Lolita: The Story of a Cover Girl, Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel in Art and Design (2013), in which they argue: “If there ever were a book whose covers have so reliably gotten it wrong, it is Lolita.” Bertram and Leving’s book was inspired by a competition that Bertram held in 2009 for readers to redesign the cover of Nabokov’s novel. It shows how the novel’s cover has become something of an experimental terrain, and the number of covers just keeps growing. Although we have been taught to disregard a book’s cover, media studies academic Nicole Matthews argues just the opposite in her work Judging a Book by its Cover (2007): “If jackets and covers had a role to play in the marketing of books during the nineteenth century, they came to have new forms of significance in the twentieth. Undoubtedly one of the critical shifts in the marketing of books in the twentieth century was the development of the paperback.” Arguably, the more sexually explicit the cover of a copy of Lolita is, the more likely it is to sell. This is true even if it deviates considerably from the specific themes of the book. M Gigi Durham, professor of gender, women’s and sexuality studies at the University of Iowa College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, discusses what she calls the “Lolita Effect”, in her 2008 book of the same name. Analyzing the images of young girls in the media, Durham argues that the Lolita Effect “operates in a corporate, commercial sphere [...] the Lolita Effect is driven by profit motives”. The link between media sexualization and profit may operate just as fiercely in the publishing world. As the nature of these covers attest, the “Lolita-assexpot” rhetoric is far more enticing for those who have not even read By Sam Weber and circulation of Lolita in the Lolita, suggesting that the existence popular imagination is more profitable than a cover more befitting to the story’s ethos. Interestingly, in his 2013 work Marketing Literature and Posthumous Legacies, Yuri Leving notes that the paperback in the early 20th century was more concerned with crime novels and romance dramas. This is an interesting point insofar as Lolita arguably contains elements of both (though the romance factor might be debatable). Leving also notes how the Russian publication of Lolita was marketed as “a semi-erotic thriller”. 25

Lolita & Dolores

DESIGNING LOLITA Written by Siobhan Lyons

hen it was published in 1955 by Olympia Press, Vladimir Nabokov’s seminal and controversial novel Lolita had a very

simple, green cover design. Nabokov himself had wanted his own particular cover: “I want pure colors, melting clouds, accurately drawn details, a sunburst above a receding road with the light reflected in furrows and ruts, after rain. And no girls.” Some 60 years later -- and still frequently topping best-book lists -- Lolita has inspired hundreds of front cover designs, many of which feature similar visual tropes: endless lollipops, lips, lipstick, scrunchies, underwear, bathers, heart-shaped sunglasses from Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 adaptation, sly references to the female anatomy (strawberries, etc.), and a lot of pink. In her work The Lolita Phenomenon (2003), academic Barbra Churchill, from the University of Alberta, wrote: “the Lolita image has so pervaded popular consciousness that even those who have never read the book usually know what it means to call a girl ‘Lolita’. The moniker ‘Lolita,’ translated into the language of popular culture, means a sexy little number, a sassy ingénue, a bewitching adolescent siren.” While many of the double-entendre images of the female anatomy partly suit Nabokov’s mischievous writing style and his playful treatment of the subject matter, many of these covers take this liberty a bit too far. They convey the (false) impression of Lolita as a young seductress, when in fact the character was sexually abused by her step-father, the infamous Humbert Humbert, and robbed of her youth. The discrepancy between the cover designs and the themes of the novel are stark. In 2013, The New Yorker’s Rachel Arons explained that “the sexualised vision of Lolita perpetuated by popular culture has By Barbara very little to do with the text of Nabokov’s novel,DeWilde in which Lolita is not a teen-aged seductress but a sexually abused twelve-year-old girl.” Other designs attempt to creatively capture and interpret, in a single image, the overall theme of the novel. There is Rachel Berger’s cover design of an old hand with a withered flower, Jason Polan’s design featuring just a simple loose-leaf writing sheet, and Andy Pressman’s design, which captures Lolita’s elusiveness with a barely distinguishable image of the word “Lolita” on the cover. These sorts of covers relate more to Lolita’s lost youth and her dehumanization than the sexual elements of

Lolita the Cover Girl

the novel. Many of those covers are featured in John Bertram and Yuri Leving’s book Lolita: The Story of a Cover Girl, Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel in Art and Design (2013), in which they argue: “If there ever were a book whose covers have so reliably gotten it wrong, it is Lolita.” Bertram and Leving’s book was inspired by a competition that Bertram held in 2009 for readers to redesign the cover of Nabokov’s novel. It shows how the novel’s cover has become something of an experimental terrain, and the number of covers just keeps growing. Although we have been taught to disregard a book’s cover, media studies academic Nicole Matthews argues just the opposite in her work Judging a Book by its Cover (2007): “If jackets and covers had a role to play in the marketing of books during the nineteenth century, they came to have new forms of significance in the twentieth. Undoubtedly one of the critical shifts in the marketing of books in the twentieth century was the development of the paperback.” Arguably, the more sexually explicit the cover of a copy of Lolita is, the more likely it is to sell. This is true even if it deviates considerably from the specific themes of the book. M Gigi Durham, professor of gender, women’s and sexuality studies at the University of Iowa College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, discusses what she calls the “Lolita Effect”, in her 2008 book of the same name. Analyzing the images of young girls in the media, Durham argues that the Lolita Effect “operates in a corporate, commercial sphere [...] the Lolita Effect is driven by profit motives”. The link between media sexualization and profit may operate just as fiercely in the publishing world. As the nature of these covers attest, the “Lolita-assexpot” rhetoric is far more enticing for those who have not even read John Lolita, suggestingBy that the Fulbrook existence and circulation of Lolita in the popular imagination is more profitable than a cover more befitting to the story’s ethos. Interestingly, in his 2013 work Marketing Literature and Posthumous Legacies, Yuri Leving notes that the paperback in the early 20th century was more concerned with crime novels and romance dramas. This is an interesting point insofar as Lolita arguably contains elements of both (though the romance factor might be debatable). Leving also notes how the Russian publication of Lolita was marketed as “a semi-erotic thriller”. 27

Lolita & Dolores

DESIGNING LOLITA Written by Siobhan Lyons

hen it was published in 1955 by Olympia Press, Vladimir Nabokov’s seminal and controversial novel Lolita had a very

simple, green cover design. Nabokov himself had wanted his own particular cover: “I want pure colors, melting clouds, accurately drawn details, a sunburst above a receding road with the light reflected in furrows and ruts, after rain. And no girls.” Some 60 years later -- and still frequently topping best-book lists -- Lolita has inspired hundreds of front cover designs, many of which feature similar visual tropes: endless lollipops, lips, lipstick, scrunchies, underwear, bathers, heart-shaped sunglasses from Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 adaptation, sly references to the female anatomy (strawberries, etc.), and a lot of pink. In her work The Lolita Phenomenon (2003), academic Barbra Churchill, from the University of Alberta, wrote: “the Lolita image has so pervaded popular consciousness that even those who have never read the book usually know what it means to call a girl ‘Lolita’. The moniker ‘Lolita,’ translated into the language of popular culture, means a sexy little number, a sassy ingénue, a bewitching adolescent siren.” While many of the double-entendre images of the female anatomy partly suit Nabokov’s mischievous writing style and his playful treatment of the subject matter, many of these covers take this liberty a bit too far. They convey the (false) impression of Lolita as a young seductress, when in fact the character was sexually abused by her step-father, the infamous Humbert Humbert, and robbed of her youth. The discrepancy between the cover designs and the themes of the novel are stark. In 2013, The New Yorker’s Rachel Arons explained that “the sexualised vision of Lolita perpetuated by popular culture has By Eleni Giavaldi very little to do with the text of Nabokov’s novel, in which Lolita is not a teen-aged seductress but a sexually abused twelve-year-old girl.” Other designs attempt to creatively capture and interpret, in a single image, the overall theme of the novel. There is Rachel Berger’s cover design of an old hand with a withered flower, Jason Polan’s design featuring just a simple loose-leaf writing sheet, and Andy Pressman’s design, which captures Lolita’s elusiveness with a barely distinguishable image of the word “Lolita” on the cover. These sorts of covers relate more to Lolita’s lost youth and her dehumanization than the sexual elements of

Lolita the Cover Girl

the novel. Many of those covers are featured in John Bertram and Yuri Leving’s book Lolita: The Story of a Cover Girl, Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel in Art and Design (2013), in which they argue: “If there ever were a book whose covers have so reliably gotten it wrong, it is Lolita.” Bertram and Leving’s book was inspired by a competition that Bertram held in 2009 for readers to redesign the cover of Nabokov’s novel. It shows how the novel’s cover has become something of an experimental terrain, and the number of covers just keeps growing. Although we have been taught to disregard a book’s cover, media studies academic Nicole Matthews argues just the opposite in her work Judging a Book by its Cover (2007): “If jackets and covers had a role to play in the marketing of books during the nineteenth century, they came to have new forms of significance in the twentieth. Undoubtedly one of the critical shifts in the marketing of books in the twentieth century was the development of the paperback.” Arguably, the more sexually explicit the cover of a copy of Lolita is, the more likely it is to sell. This is true even if it deviates considerably from the specific themes of the book. M Gigi Durham, professor of gender, women’s and sexuality studies at the University of Iowa College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, discusses what she calls the “Lolita Effect”, in her 2008 book of the same name. Analyzing the images of young girls in the media, Durham argues that the Lolita Effect “operates in a corporate, commercial sphere [...] the Lolita Effect is driven by profit motives”. The link between media sexualization and profit may operate just as fiercely in the publishing world. As the nature of these covers attest, the “Lolita-assexpot” rhetoric is far more enticing for those who have not even read Jennifer Heuer and circulation of Lolita in the Lolita, suggestingBy that the existence popular imagination is more profitable than a cover more befitting to the story’s ethos. Interestingly, in his 2013 work Marketing Literature and Posthumous Legacies, Yuri Leving notes that the paperback in the early 20th century was more concerned with crime novels and romance dramas. This is an interesting point insofar as Lolita arguably contains elements of both (though the romance factor might be debatable). Leving also notes how the Russian publication of Lolita was marketed as “a semi-erotic thriller”. 29

Lolita & Dolores

DESIGNING LOLITA Written by Siobhan Lyons

hen it was published in 1955 by Olympia Press, Vladimir Nabokov’s seminal and controversial novel Lolita had a very

simple, green cover design. Nabokov himself had wanted his own particular cover: “I want pure colors, melting clouds, accurately drawn details, a sunburst above a receding road with the light reflected in furrows and ruts, after rain. And no girls.” Some 60 years later -- and still frequently topping best-book lists -- Lolita has inspired hundreds of front cover designs, many of which feature similar visual tropes: endless lollipops, lips, lipstick, scrunchies, underwear, bathers, heart-shaped sunglasses from Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 adaptation, sly references to the female anatomy (strawberries, etc.), and a lot of pink. In her work The Lolita Phenomenon (2003), academic Barbra Churchill, from the University of Alberta, wrote: “the Lolita image has so pervaded popular consciousness that even those who have never read the book usually know what it means to call a girl ‘Lolita’. The moniker ‘Lolita,’ translated into the language of popular culture, means a sexy little number, a sassy ingénue, a bewitching adolescent siren.” While many of the double-entendre images of the female anatomy partly suit Nabokov’s mischievous writing style and his playful treatment of the subject matter, many of these covers take this liberty a bit too far. They convey the (false) impression of Lolita as a young seductress, when in fact the character was sexually abused by her step-father, the infamous Humbert Humbert, and robbed of her youth. The discrepancy between the cover designs and the themes of the novel are stark. In 2013, The New Yorker’s Rachel Arons explained that “the sexualised vision of Lolita perpetuated by popular culture has By Michael very little to do with the text of Nabokov’s novel,Beiruit in which Lolita is not a teen-aged seductress but a sexually abused twelve-year-old girl.” Other designs attempt to creatively capture and interpret, in a single image, the overall theme of the novel. There is Rachel Berger’s cover design of an old hand with a withered flower, Jason Polan’s design featuring just a simple loose-leaf writing sheet, and Andy Pressman’s design, which captures Lolita’s elusiveness with a barely distinguishable image of the word “Lolita” on the cover. These sorts of covers relate more to Lolita’s lost youth and her dehumanization than the sexual elements of

Lolita the Cover Girl

the novel. Many of those covers are featured in John Bertram and Yuri Leving’s book Lolita: The Story of a Cover Girl, Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel in Art and Design (2013), in which they argue: “If there ever were a book whose covers have so reliably gotten it wrong, it is Lolita.” Bertram and Leving’s book was inspired by a competition that Bertram held in 2009 for readers to redesign the cover of Nabokov’s novel. It shows how the novel’s cover has become something of an experimental terrain, and the number of covers just keeps growing. Although we have been taught to disregard a book’s cover, media studies academic Nicole Matthews argues just the opposite in her work Judging a Book by its Cover (2007): “If jackets and covers had a role to play in the marketing of books during the nineteenth century, they came to have new forms of significance in the twentieth. Undoubtedly one of the critical shifts in the marketing of books in the twentieth century was the development of the paperback.” Arguably, the more sexually explicit the cover of a copy of Lolita is, the more likely it is to sell. This is true even if it deviates considerably from the specific themes of the book. M Gigi Durham, professor of gender, women’s and sexuality studies at the University of Iowa College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, discusses what she calls the “Lolita Effect”, in her 2008 book of the same name. Analyzing the images of young girls in the media, Durham argues that the Lolita Effect “operates in a corporate, commercial sphere [...] the Lolita Effect is driven by profit motives”. The link between media sexualization and profit may operate just as fiercely in the publishing world. As the nature of these covers attest, the “Lolita-assexpot” rhetoric is far more enticing for those who have not even read Matt Lolita, suggestingBy that the Dorfman existence and circulation of Lolita in the popular imagination is more profitable than a cover more befitting to the story’s ethos. Interestingly, in his 2013 work Marketing Literature and Posthumous Legacies, Yuri Leving notes that the paperback in the early 20th century was more concerned with crime novels and romance dramas. This is an interesting point insofar as Lolita arguably contains elements of both (though the romance factor might be debatable). Leving also notes how the Russian publication of Lolita was marketed as “a semi-erotic thriller”. 31

Lolita & Dolores

DESIGNING LOLITA Written by Siobhan Lyons

hen it was published in 1955 by Olympia Press, Vladimir Nabokov’s seminal and controversial novel Lolita had a very

simple, green cover design. Nabokov himself had wanted his own particular cover: “I want pure colors, melting clouds, accurately drawn details, a sunburst above a receding road with the light reflected in furrows and ruts, after rain. And no girls.” Some 60 years later -- and still frequently topping best-book lists -- Lolita has inspired hundreds of front cover designs, many of which feature similar visual tropes: endless lollipops, lips, lipstick, scrunchies, underwear, bathers, heart-shaped sunglasses from Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 adaptation, sly references to the female anatomy (strawberries, etc.), and a lot of pink. In her work The Lolita Phenomenon (2003), academic Barbra Churchill, from the University of Alberta, wrote: “the Lolita image has so pervaded popular consciousness that even those who have never read the book usually know what it means to call a girl ‘Lolita’. The moniker ‘Lolita,’ translated into the language of popular culture, means a sexy little number, a sassy ingénue, a bewitching adolescent siren.” While many of the double-entendre images of the female anatomy partly suit Nabokov’s mischievous writing style and his playful treatment of the subject matter, many of these covers take this liberty a bit too far. They convey the (false) impression of Lolita as a young seductress, when in fact the character was sexually abused by her step-father, the infamous Humbert Humbert, and robbed of her youth. The discrepancy between the cover designs and the themes of the novel are stark. In 2013, The New Yorker’s Rachel Arons explained that “the sexualised vision of Lolita perpetuated by popular culture has By April very little to do with the text of Nabokov’s novel,Smith in which Lolita is not a teen-aged seductress but a sexually abused twelve-year-old girl.” Other designs attempt to creatively capture and interpret, in a single image, the overall theme of the novel. There is Rachel Berger’s cover design of an old hand with a withered flower, Jason Polan’s design featuring just a simple loose-leaf writing sheet, and Andy Pressman’s design, which captures Lolita’s elusiveness with a barely distinguishable image of the word “Lolita” on the cover. These sorts of covers relate more to Lolita’s lost youth and her dehumanization than the sexual elements of

Lolita the Cover Girl

the novel. Many of those covers are featured in John Bertram and Yuri Leving’s book Lolita: The Story of a Cover Girl, Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel in Art and Design (2013), in which they argue: “If there ever were a book whose covers have so reliably gotten it wrong, it is Lolita.” Bertram and Leving’s book was inspired by a competition that Bertram held in 2009 for readers to redesign the cover of Nabokov’s novel. It shows how the novel’s cover has become something of an experimental terrain, and the number of covers just keeps growing. Although we have been taught to disregard a book’s cover, media studies academic Nicole Matthews argues just the opposite in her work Judging a Book by its Cover (2007): “If jackets and covers had a role to play in the marketing of books during the nineteenth century, they came to have new forms of significance in the twentieth. Undoubtedly one of the critical shifts in the marketing of books in the twentieth century was the development of the paperback.” Arguably, the more sexually explicit the cover of a copy of Lolita is, the more likely it is to sell. This is true even if it deviates considerably from the specific themes of the book. M Gigi Durham, professor of gender, women’s and sexuality studies at the University of Iowa College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, discusses what she calls the “Lolita Effect”, in her 2008 book of the same name. Analyzing the images of young girls in the media, Durham argues that the Lolita Effect “operates in a corporate, commercial sphere [...] the Lolita Effect is driven by profit motives”. The link between media sexualization and profit may operate just as fiercely in the publishing world. As the nature of these covers attest, the “Lolita-assexpot” rhetoric is far more enticing for those who have not even read Lolita, suggesting that the existence and circulation of Lolita in the popular imagination is more profitable than a cover more befitting to the story’s ethos. Interestingly, in his 2013 work Marketing Literature and Posthumous Legacies, Yuri Leving notes that the paperback in the early 20th century was more concerned with crime novels and romance dramas. This is an interesting point insofar as Lolita arguably contains elements of both (though the romance factor might be debatable). Leving also notes how the Russian publication of Lolita was marketed as “a semi-erotic thriller”. 33

Lolita & Dolores

What this may suggest is that the over-hyped sexual imagery we see today is not necessarily born out of misinterpretations. Instead, early publications were seen to be taking advantage of the sexual themes present within the novel itself, and using them as a selling point that has since been taken dramatically out of context. The execution of those Russian cover designs, Leving states, were poor but it was also a technological issue: Many of the creative solutions for cover design inevitably resulted from the limitations in polygraph printing technologies of struggling post-socialist publishing manufacturing. But ironically, he adds, this “came closest to the late author’s original vision as expressed to his American publishers.” Nabokov himself was no stranger to book promotion or marketing. Leving states that in publishing Lolita, Nabokov balanced his understanding of marketing with his demand for highbrow aesthetics in literature. But ultimately, no ideal cover was or has ever been created, and many contemporary cover designs certainly would have baffled Nabokov. The original green hardback design is hardly alluring or meaningful in any way, and perhaps that is apt for a novel whose protagonist is the unreliable narrator par excellence, and whose subject matter is told with an eclectic mix of black humor and melancholy reflections. Since the novel itself resists any sound interpretation, a blank cover, even now, 60 years on might be the way to go. As Nabokov wrote in a letter to publisher Walter J Minton in 1958 from Ithaca, New York; If we cannot find that kind of artistic and virile painting, let us settle for an immaculate white jacket rough texture paper instead of the usual glossy kind, with Lolita in bold black lettering.” It is said that you can’t judge a book by its cover, which is wrong in that we can and do judge being by seeming, inside by outside, essence by accident. We do so all the time, whether we like it or not. We check this first judgment—ideally—and afterward may find the gulf between, say, word and image funny or frustrating, illuminating or obscuring. This is to say that first impressions bring first judgments, and books are no exception in this regard—not even exceptional books like Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. While Lolita offers no exception to this rule, it offers an exceptional array of covers to the student of its publication and 34

Lolita the Cover Girl

presentation. Readers from Paris to Tokyo, Stockholm to Buenos Aires, Tel Aviv to Rome, have seen a wild variety of things on covers of Lolita. They see things that are absent from the book, such as an adult woman showering, glimpsed through a venetian blind; a Venus-like beauty in furs; a midriff with pierced belly button and a tattoo of a salamander; a futuristic silhouette against a metropolitan dreamscape; a keyhole through which stares an eerily smiling face. Closer to the book’s homes, and story, they see Sue Lyon looking through heart-shaped sunglasses, Dominique Swain finds herself reading on the grass, lushly magnified images of lips, legs, plaid skirts. <3

Lolita

ON STAGE

Lolita & Dolores

Host of The Lolita Podcast

JAMIE LOFTUS Alan J. Lerner didn’t need to take suggestions from his assistant. He was Alan J. Learner. He was a Broadway legend. He’d written lyrics and librettos for huge musicals like my fair lady for Camelot for Brigadoon, I don’t know what Brigadoon is he wrote it. He’d worked in movies doing the music with collaborator Frederick low for Gigi and he wrote An American in Paris. But those hits were a while back now and it was the 1970s learners work didn’t fit as well into the Broadway culture. The 70s kicked off hits that had overwhelmed New York and a culture shifting way in the mid to late 60s into the early 70s were sexy, edgy stuff like hair and cabaret and company and by 1971, Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar, you know, the sexy Jesus musicals. Broadway was getting horny and Alan J. Lerner was not a horn, a lyricist. His work was pretty traditional, featuring heavy costumes and straightforward love stories with catchy burst into song hits. And now that luster was wearing off. His last two shows were nominated for a handful of Tony’s but they were not the Smash financial and cultural defining hits he’d had with low up through Camelot in 1960. The chased Alan J learner needed to get with the times he needed to listen to his assistant. I think you see where this is going. His assistant wanted him to adapt Lolita by Vladimir and Ibaka. And I quickly want to give a huge shout out to one of the top keepers of Lolita history writer Sarah Weinman, who we talked to last week for collecting a lot of this information on the musical back in a 2018 article for vulture which I will link in the show notes. So did Alan J. Lerner understand Lolita? I think that the story of Lolita is much more pertinent now than when the film was made Humbert as such a tragic, flawed and misplaced romantic. Last in post World War Two, There are countless men like him over 40 who find it impossible to wake up in the morning and not blink once or twice at the life facing them. Oh, absolutely incredible. Do you ever just hear how any person who has ever adapted this book talks about the story and your head just like explodes like that scene in scanners? I can’t I- It’s unbelievable. But okay, who’s collaborating on this with Mr. Learner? It’s a composer named John Berry, a suave Englishman, most famous for writing the theme song to James Bond he was in his late 30s. To learners 51 or his learner would describe it. Also on 38

Lolita on Stage

learners team is producer Norman Twain, who is notorious in theater and film for being a gigantic personality with big hits and bigger misses for an idea of what his vibe is. Here’s a quote pulled from the Associated Press piece on the auditions for Lolita in 1970. We’ve got to have a girl who makes demand for get to the moral conventions of society, but it’s got to be a complete mental situation. If Lolita is five foot five with a great figure, it would be perfectly normal for him bear to go after her. The musical was to be called Lolita my love, and it’s the last attempt at an adaptation Vladimir Nabokov would ever sign off on before his passing in 1977. By this time he was living in Montreux palace in Switzerland, working on new novels full time and enjoying the residuals that Lolita continued to rake in he is as he was during the Kubrick movie, strongly averse to the idea of an actual 12 year old playing the park night after night, calling it sinful and immoral. This is according to Ken Mendel bonds 1991 book not since carry this statement aside, Nabokov appears to have had all the faith in the world in Mr. My Fair Lady at first saying the following. Mr. learner is a most talented and excellent classicist, if you have to make a musical version of Lolita, he is the one to do it. Well, keep in mind Nabokov also said that about Kubrick to back in the 60s so let’s see where this goes back to those Lolita auditions in November 1970. Dozens of girls as young as 10, and oldest 21 went to the Billy Rose Theatre to audition for the head honchos and Sarah Wyman’s piece kind of distills the vibe at these auditions, a 13 year old audition, he said the following to a reporter. I wouldn’t like to be the leader. But I’d still like to play the part. A lot of those auditioning legally had to be accompanied by a parent and the parents also had takes. There’s a wickedness wherever you go. It’s just lucky that my daughter only play acts it. The audition process sounded similar to that of Stanley Kubrick and James B. Harris’s. A lot of young girls bodies being appraised a lot of extremely personal questions. Don’t wear makeup next time said one of the producers to a girl who was auditioning. I wanted to look sexy, the girl replied, You look sexy. Anyways, he said, yikes. The actor eventually selected for the role of Lolita was named Annette Ferra now a casting director who goes by 39

Lolita & Dolores

There absolutely

It is not a

the

N h "O

nothing is

crime

di r t y

Lolita on Stage

about what Humbert does.

cured,

it is just a love story. - ANNETTE FERRA

Lolita & Dolores

Chris Gilmore. We’re going to be talking to her today. At the time, she was 15 years old and from a Los Angeles family more interested in her music career than being Lolita but being offered the lead and an Alan J. Lerner musical that was grounds to be launched into superstardom honey and so she jumped at the opportunity and was willing to relocate to New York from Los Angeles with her sister. She had had a guest spot on the Brady Bunch earlier in 1970 and had sung a number of obscure but very catchy teen hits in the 1960s and had a promising career ahead, including this incredible beside I found on YouTube, she’s saying 1960 sevens you’re a Dum Dum. Iconic stuff Everyone, go to YouTube and listen to your dumb dumb. So at 15 Ferrah told The Associated Press her take on the story of Lolita. Oh no, there’s nothing dirty about what Humbert does. It’s not a crime in the end and bear secured, it’s just a love story. Interestingly, she had not read the book at the time of being cast. So this impression she sharing is an impression made from the libretto of the musical. Other leading roles included Dorothy Loudon as Charlotte Hayes. She’d later originate the role of Mrs. Hannigan and Annie and as Humbert, the Shakespearean actor, John Neville. He’d also been in the mix for the Kubrick adaptation and at least physically and in terms of stuffy Englishness seemed like a good fit for the part. Rehearsals began with February 1971 previews at the Shubert Theater in Philadelphia in mind, and producer Norman Twain was hyping it up. Even as things behind the scenes remained very chaotic as choreography, music and story remained in fairly constant flux, twin assured local paper, the Camden courier post that Lolita my love would be the best thing Alan’s ever done, including my fair lady. And then Alan J. Lerner and John Baba Baba Burberry. Was that funny okay, that they would be even better than Lerner and Lowe had been no better than Rodgers and Hammerstein. No better than Livia Benson and Elliot Stabler. I’ve never watched SVU but I thought that that might hit for people. When asked what Lolita my love was like as a show, Twain said the following Nothing which compromise the taste of men because the moral is that total obsession with anything destroys a person. Whether the obsession 42

Lolita on Stage

is a little girl or philosophy. Okay. Oh, wait, you’ve not done. Could I be involved with a nymphet? Yeah, it could be absolutely. There are certain types of girls little Girls have beds. That all else being equal with turn me on. If you met them in a motel by chance, but I haven’t fallen yet. I’ve been playing it pretty straight. My wife prefers it that way. So before the short history of Lolita, my love was complete, the lead and at Farah would be replaced for reasons we’ll discuss today. The show was completely reworked multiple times, and it had lost nearly a million dollars in 1971 money in production costs. A Playbill from the show’s final run in Boston at the Shubert Theater, proclaimed a two act sweeping production that started in Ramsdale, with songs like in the broken promised land of 15 and Dante, Petrarch, and Poe all the way through Humbert sweeping Lolita away to the Betty buy motel, and to Beardsley with cruelties of showstopper march out of my life. I’m not kidding. No book of never saw the show. He was enthusiastic at first, but much like his experience with the Kubrick adaptation, his enthusiasm for the adaptation wilted over time, by October 1971. He told the New York Times the following, if they’re going to do it someday they’re going to do it so I had better be around when they do it, not only to criticize the thing, but also to explain that I have nothing to do with it. So why haven’t we heard about Lolita? My love the show that brought you my least favorite line in all of music? Who is that viper who like them post diaper,’ because it never debuted on Broadway, this is Lolita podcast. I think we’re going to get about as close to some levity as this series is going to get because we are talking about Lolita on stage now saying this episode is going to be a little lighter doesn’t mean that there isn’t still a fair amount of trauma being discussed. This is Lolita podcast and there certainly is. But today we’re talking about the Broadway musical of 1971 by Alan J. Lerner, the 1981 adaptation by Edward Alby as well as the smattering of international ballets, stage shows and operas, and a recent attempted revival of Lolita, my love in New York, which, spoiler alert, is the first adaptation of Lolita ever to be directed by a woman. I’ll say it, Lolita does not work on stage, or hasn’t, I should say, but the reasons why fall into the same trappings that most adaptations of 43

THE SC WHERE HUMBE RAPES LOLITA Lolita & Dolores

CENE E ERT

Lolita on Stage

Lolita & Dolores

Excerpt from Lolita Misrepresented, Lolita Reclaimed

ELIZABETH PATNOE Humbert says he realizes what Lolita suggests when she “put her mouth to” his ear, saying that she seduces him and implying that she initiates foreplay that she wants to culminate in intercourse. Again, if Humbert’s goal is to convince the jury that Lolita seduces him to intercourse and if her whisper resounds like thunder, why doesn’t he conclusively tell the jury what Lolita says instead of what she suggests? When Humbert says he realizes what Lolita’s suggesting, his sly wording whispers two possible interpretations. First, Humbert could mean that Lolita directly invites him to participate in something?that she says, for instance, “Let’s make out” or “Should we make out?” But Humbert’s wording could also indicate that he? and not Lolita?makes the presumptions, that he infers what Lolita might be implying, not what she is actually stating. Even though it would be easier for Humbert if we believed his claim that Lolita initiates and orchestrates the activities that lead to intercourse, the collective effect of Lolita’s perspective and Humbert’s commentary suggests that her lesson, her goal, her game, her “stark act” is not to have intercourse, but only to kiss and perhaps fondle. Humbert, of course, admits to feigning ignorance throughout this scene, and even how he speaks this to her suggests kissing and petting games, not intercourse: “I answered I did not know what game she and Charlie had played.” For me, game evokes various pre-teen kissing games?or, at the very most, some kind of fondling activity. Again, Humbert strategically does not specify what Lolita says. Instead, he reports her as saying “you never did it when you were a kid?” (emphasis added), which reinforces the implication that Lolita is referring to a common kids’ game. Perhaps Humbert really never played the game as a kid, but surely Lolita does not think that sexual intercourse is common among youngsters?while it would be quite likely that she would believe kissing or petting games are One key to identifying the indeterminacy in this passage is the phrase “stark act,” which Humbert uses twice. First, he says that Lolita thinks that “all caresses except kisses on the mouth or the stark act of love [are] either “‘romantic slosh’ or ‘abnormal.’” Later he says, “she saw the 46

Lolita on Stage

stark act merely as part of a youngster’s furtive world, unknown to adults. What adults did for purposes of procreation was no business of hers.” While, after the first reference, stark act may possibly? though not necessarily? mean intercourse, the second reference undermines this possibility by suggesting even further that Lolita plans to participate in kids’ petting games. This would further explain why, after suggesting them, she is surprised to learn that he had not participated in them when he was young. Humbert facilitates this alternative reading by emphasizing the kids’ context of the game when he lists the influences upon this “young girl” of “modern co-education, juvenile mores, [and] the campfire racket.” While Humbert wants us to believe the “depraved” Lolita wants to have intercourse with him, he also exaggerates typical “juvenile mores” and campfire experiences. Finally, whether Lolita has had intercourse with Charlie or not, Lolita gives Humbert no clear indication that she wants to have it with him. Somewhere even Humbert recognizes this: once again, he says, “She saw the stark act merely as part of a youngster’s furtive world, unknown to adults. What adults did for purposes of procreation was no business of hers.” One of my associates interprets these lines to mean that Lolita believes intercourse is something about which youngsters know and adults do not care. If so, then why would Lolita want to seduce Humbert, an adult, to intercourse? My colleague claims it is to impress Humbert with her knowledge and experience. But, if she believes “it” is a common children’s experience, then why would she think her experience would impress someone who also had been a kid and who, she presumes, had had similar childhood experiences? Finally, the double-voicing of the line “What adults did for purposes of procreation was no business of hers” is remarkably telling of Humbert’s manipulative voice. Whether or not one accepts my associate’s reading that Lolita believes intercourse is common in childhood and that she does not care about how adults procreate, Humbert’s own words subvert his primary interpretation, and their double-voicing resonates loudly: this is what adults say about kids, not what kids say about adults. <3 47

Lolita & Dolores

Lolita don’t, but in a uniquely theatrical way. I think the reason that the two Broadway failures that we’re going to be talking about the most specifically rank as less harmful in terms of adaptation is because one wouldn’t debut on Broadway at all, and the other would barely make it out of the starting gate. They were completely panned. And they never really got the chance to do much cultural harm to anybody except of course, the girls and women playing the titular role. Another pattern that is well established that we’ll be devoting an entire episode to in a couple of weeks. Today we’re going to be speaking to Chris Gilmore, formerly Annette Farah, who played Lolita in the 1971 musical Blanche Baker, who played Lolita in the 1981 adaptation by Edward Alby and Jacob holder, the executive director of the Edward flb Foundation. In this episode, I think you’ll notice a few trends solidifying in the adaptations of Lolita carrying over from the Stanley Kubrick movie that have a lot in common and are also very uniquely of their time. So with that in mind, let’s return to 1970. My parents are in elementary school and a few hours south of where they lived Lolita my love was in production preparing for a February debut in Philly. The cast dealt with constant content changes, and the show debuted to uh, these reviews ‘in its present form, which will doubtlessly be drastically altered before it leaves down the show is only a ghost of Nabokov’s comic masterpiece.’ and ‘The kindest thing that can be said about the musical is that it’s a disaster.’ Yeah, by all accounts, it didn’t work. This February shipwreck made the original March 30 intended Broadway debut, more or less impossible learner and Barry had a ton of overhaul to do and would need a successful preview to go off without a hit before hitting a New York stage. Producer Norman Twain went into damage control almost saying that quote, The show didn’t work technically. And when things don’t work technically nothing goes right. I can see the backstage crew rolling their eyes from here. That was not the problem. It was the material and after the failure of the Philadelphia shows critically, with this constant material change, we see some of the key players get shuffled out director Tito Capobianco is replaced by British director Nora Wellman and Annette Farah leaves the production as Lolita. Now 48

Lolita on Stage

the reason given by the production at the time for firing Farah, who had been styled to look very similar to sue Lyon and Kubrick’s Lolita was detailed in a gossip column of the time, which was unearthed by Sarah Weinman. It says that Pharaoh was quote, looking 24 When she was supposed to be 16, unquote. The reality according to Chris Gilmore, was very different. More than that, shortly after Farah departs, auditioned for Lolita are held again, including a young Ceci Space X, but Denise Nickerson is the choice for the role in spite of Nabokov’s initial anxieties of casting a girl of Dolores he’s his real age. In the book, Nickerson was only 13. During that next round of previews, she was 75 pounds and four foot nine and her hair was styled into the blonde Bob evocative of lions. And if Denise Nicholson’s name sounds familiar, it’s because she plays violet Beauregarde in the Gene Wilder, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and had just finished shooting shortly before taking the role, Nickerson sadly passed away last year, but with the changes in cast and libretto made, the show launched again that march in Boston at the Shubert Theater, and it only lasted nine performances. Luckily for us, or put a pin in that maybe not but for my purposes lucky a recording from the audio board from Boston is preserved in full giving us recordings of the songs and an idea of what the show sounded like. Although the extensive dance numbers Yes, you heard that right. remain lost to history. And no matter how many giggles of enjoyment you hear from the 1970s Bostonians and the clips you’re going to hear today, the reviews in Boston were just as rough. He rewrote the show again, twice renamed it light of my life, which seems like kind of a lateral move in terms of creepy sounding titles, and he tried to recast the leads again pursuing Rex Harrison for Humbert, Rex Harrison was in My Fair Lady and Hayley Mills for Lolita. And Hayley Mills at this point was too old for the roll by quite a bit at age 24. And she had already turned down the role of Lolita in Stanley Kubrick’s production nearly 10 years earlier. Nabokov had this to say about Farah and Nickerson, the two leaders cast in a musical he had never seen. By the end, Lolita my love had hemorrhaged a million dollars and it never debuted on Broadway. Everyone was ready to move on, 49

Lolita & Dolores

“HOW CAN YOU COMPAR MANHATTAN CHARM, W TOES, A STICKY HAND, A DIMPLED FLANK, A BON INTO THE FLAB AND DIS OLDER. WHO IS THAT VI POST DIAPER? A NYMPH MY KNEECAPS ARE WAT

SAY, HO 50

Lolita on Stage

RE A WOMAN’S CHASE WITH DUSTY LITTLE A SCRAWNY ARM, A NY SHOULDER SINK SAPPEAR WHEN SHE IS IPER WHO LIKES THEM HET. A NYMPHET! TER.

OW IS YOUR DAUGHTER?” 51

Lolita & Dolores

and they did but don’t cry for this musical because I think you will understand why it flopped. When we give the one surviving bootleg recording a little Listen, this adaptation is so extremely off the mark that it was genuinely hard for me to keep up with the whiplash of the tone. Like if you thought the Kubrick adaptation was being played too much for comedy you have not heard anything. This musical isn’t just a comedy of manners. Humbert Humbert is presented as a full on comedic hero and Lolita my love never made it far enough into production to ever release a cast album. So what’s being pulled from here is a rehearsal that’s taking place in front of an audience in Boston, my home city, and please do not judge them too harshly for how much they seem to love this. There’s a lot of adaptation changes that were popularized and Kubrick’s low beta. The follow through to this adaptation, everyone calls the lead Lolita instead of Dolly, or Dolores quilty has a hugely inflated presence. And Humbert is a long standing teacher, but the bizarreness of this adaptation is uniquely its own. It opens with Humbert Humbert talking to the audience at the beginning of the show, explaining what nymphet are to us. The stage format does make it much easier for Humbert to break the fourth wall and speak to the audience directly and this show does take smart advantage of that at times. Humbert says he was teaching at a girl school in Switzerland had a break down then goes to Ramsdale, Vermont to give lectures at the local college now, where in New England Ramsdale is kind of varies depending on the adaptation. It’s like New Hampshire for Kubrick for monton. This adaptation who knows why but Hubbard does mention to us that he got divorced. Humbert goes to Ramsdale and meets Charlotte who brings up her deceased husband Harold and shows Humbert her dead husband’s gun and his ashes. There’s a lot of laughing on this recording and Dorothy Loudon is definitely going for comedy with Charlotte here. But also it seems like everybody’s going for comedy. Denise Nickerson is introduced to us as Lolita and at age 13. She really does sound 13 Possibly more so than anyone who has ever played the part, you know. And just keep in mind for a reference of how old she looked at this time, she plays violet Beauregarde in Willy Wonka, this same 52

Lolita on Stage

exact year humberts journals are significantly watered down to keep things light and he sings about Annabelle to Lolita in the song in the broken promise land of 15. ‘Perhaps it looks more like a little girl that I knew many, many years.’. By the sea, Lolita never learned of Annabelle and other adaptations that I know of. So it’s an interesting deviation. Humbert also makes very little effort to conceal his true nature in this show, but the people surrounding him are written to be so clueless that it doesn’t seem to matter. For my money, he couldn’t be more obvious. Well speak to one of them only to Lolita, and Lolita, while remaining and behaving 12 years old, is still framed to be a seductress. And her quote unquote fuzziness is often a pause for laugh moment, especially when quilty is on stage. ‘My series of lectures exclusively features Poets enraptured and captured by creatures, barely pubescent. Gross? This is a song called Dante, Petrarch, and Poe. This song is maybe the best and the worst of what all of the adaptations have to offer all sudden done a series. Because it’s gross and awful and trying to make you laugh about one of the worst crimes that plagues humanity. But it’s also written by the same guy who did My Fair Lady and the music is good. My head is exploding. ‘Who is that Viper that likes them. Post diaper’ why? Why would you write that? Charlotte finds humberts Journal as normal. She’s furious, but then this is also played for comedy. This happens right after she realizes her new husband wants to sexually abused her 12 year old daughter. I mean, at this point, I’m not surprised. But Jesus trellick gets hit by the car. Humbert is informed and then the crowd laughs and laughs as he sings the reprise about the song about him wanting to kill her. He gets a hotel room and tells the camp not to mention shot with death, picks Lolita up and takes her to the Betty by hotel, intermission. We’re at the Betty Bye Hotel, which is the same thing as the enchanted hunters hotel Lolita says that Charlotte is going to ‘divorce darling you, and strangle darling me!’. But she doesn’t use the incest word as she does in the book. Now we get a lot more Lolita in this adaptation than we do in some others. And to be fair, we do see different sides of her emotionally. <3

Lolita

THE POPSTAR

Lolita & Dolores

LOLITA DEL RAY Written by Isabelle Dann

Lana Del Rey is a pop icon for teenagers everywhere who relate to her emotional, romantic, nostalgia inducing songs. Her songs consist mostly of love, drugs, teenage struggles and loss. Her music is self described as being influenced by Elvis, Ella Fitzgerald, and Frank Sinatra, which nods to the classic Hollywood style of her music. Del Rey is an artist that shaped the generation I grew up in and was huge influence to my friends and I as 14 year old girls. Although her music is awe inspiring and never gets old, one thing that often comes to mind when thinking of Lana Del Rey is her controversial topics that she covers. Everyone sings about sex and drugs. It’s not a secret. Del Rey takes it further by referencing relationships that, to the audience at least, carry clear tones of domestic violence. She references specifically to a relationship of herself with a much older man in several of her songs, which has been confirmed as an actual relationship in her early life. This is not a crime. Her song called “Lolita” might be. The anthem is for the good girls gone bad, and it praises sexuality, femininity, and seduction. The lyrics are about kissing boys and playing in the dark- again, this is not out of character for a pop artist (some may argue Del Rey is alternative, not pop, but that’s subjective). The song paints the image of a girl who is “growing up” and recognizing her own sexuality, but with words like “fruit punch lips” the song also nods to youth and childlike characteristics. Another reference to childhood is the line “No more skipping ropes, skipping heart beats with the boys downtown.” This lyric yet again ties in childlike games in with what seems to be a euphemism for hooking up with “the boys downtown.” The problem with the song, along with the questionable lyrics, is the name. Lana del Rey has made her Vogue cover debut, posed girlishly against a backdrop of baby pink. Her debut comes in the midst of backlash following a disastrous Saturday Night Live performance and revelations that Lana del Rey is actually the reincarnation of the less successful Lizzy Grant. Other live performances floating around the internet demonstrate that this performance was an anomalous anxiety-induced failure. As for changing her name, I’m sure nobody expected Lady Gaga, Bono, 56

Lolita the Popstar

and Sting to appear as printed on their birth certificates. In addition to her haunting melancholia, Lana’s rapid rise to fame – considering that Florence Welch first graced the cover of Vogue only two issues previously, following three years in the mainstream music scene, Lana’s alacrity is impressive – has been due to her cultivated, unabashed, and self-confessed “Lolita got lost in the hood” image. The archetypal Lolita image – knowing women depicted as little girls, little girls depicted as knowing women, all in shades of pastel cut with scarlet, a juxtaposition of innocence with sexual self-awareness – is prevalent in Western culture and appeared all over the SS12 catwalks, most prominently at Meadham Kirchoff, who sent down the runway candy-coloured Courtney Love-inspired Kinderwhores.

“ Light I don’tof play mythe life,role fireofofamy Lolita! loins I just be a good like the baby, text!do Lots what of I popstars want, Gimme play with them the gold Lolita them thing, barely wear any clothes.” coins” Lana’s particular brand of Lolita is notable for its truth to Vladimir Nabokov’s original Lolita – her lyrics, “Light of his life / Fire of his loins”, are a direct re-write of the opening lines of Nabokov’s novel, and both her music and her image are composed of an overt expression of female sexual desire. While the male obsession with Lolita may seem fairly obvious, it is the equally strong female obsession to be Lolita that initially perplexes. The appeal of Lolita to women lies in the honest exposure of the sexual duality inherent in both young girls and women of all ages, hence the timeless appeal (at 25 years old, Lana is no longer a teenage dream). The Lolita aesthetic embodies an enduring duality of good girl / bad girl: a would-be good girl (crucially, then, an awkward girl) knowingly the object of some malevolent man’s desire, except she desires him just as much. The 57

Lolita & Dolores

result is an open acknowledgement that the binary labels of innocent virgin and depraved slut imposed upon women by men could never be adequate descriptions of female sexuality when the veracity is far more complicated. Consequently, the Lolita aesthetic acknowledges the universal human quality of wanting to appear good in the face of a dark interior; individuals conscious of their mortality who find themselves part of a society with high moral expectations – that’s all of us, then – will forever be attracted to a picture of youth and the prospect of being very, very bad. Morally reprehensible actions 58

Lolita the Popstar

are not condoned, but ubiquitous human desire is. Lana del Rey perfectly embodies the masochism inherent in Lolita, which is why the image endures: masochism, a common and often female desire yet harboured reluctantly by many, is justified through the addition of glamour; it is acceptable if it’s bestowed an intellectual quality and looks beautiful. Who’d have thought a short dress, suntan, heartshaped sunglasses and punch-stained lips could be so emblematic? I’m not trying to complain that Lana Del Rey is setting a bad example for “Today’s Young Girls”. She probably is, but that’s not the point, and 59

Lolita & Dolores

that’s not the interesting thing. There are plenty of things and people setting bad examples for children. Del Rey seems to be a symptom of something larger that already existed — a cultural Lolita obsession, stemming from a preoccupation with youth and beauty; a fascination with relationships between young women and older men; a fear of women and their sexuality; and a tendency to blame the victims of sexual violence and characterize them as temptresses. The character of Lolita has reverberated throughout our culture ever since she was created — Nabokov once said, “Lolita is famous, not me.” Even people who don’t know what the book is about have heard of Lo. She’s become a word in the dictionary, the shorthand for a precociously sexy and seductive young girl, a definition which has far too many overtones of “Asking-For-It” for my liking. One constantly has to be reminded that the actual character of Dolores Haze in the actual book was, in fact, kidnapped and raped by her stepfather (And then, also, another older man tried to make her star in his pornographic films.) That is what happened — and it’s not sexy. But the Lolita that has emerged since the publishing of the book somehow is. The iconic image associated with her is the poster for the 1962 film adaptation, in which Sue Lyons is peering over the top of her sunglasses and licking a lollipop; that gets interpreted to mean that Lolita was a porny schoolgirl fantasy who seduced Humbert Humbert. So is that the Lolita that Lana Del Rey is channeling, a repetition of this sexy schoolgirl trope? Certainly there are radical ways to explore who Lolita is and what she means by writing about her or as her. I just don’t know that there’s anything new or radical or critical in the ways that Lana Del Rey has imagined and appropriated Lolita. All the girls in her songs are the same perfect, sexy, damaged nymphets — does writing in their voices make that okay? Is she adding anything? And if so, just what exactly? There is prevalence of older men getting the hot, younger girl is not a new narrative nor one that will go out of style, but actual predatory relationships depicted in books or songs cross the line. This promotes the grooming, or the building of false trust between a predator and a victim, as well as the sexual exploitation of children. One theme that Del Rey seems to 60

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be attempting to explore is, as she puts it in one of her songs, “the dark side of the American Dream”. Her lyrics are dark, sure, but it’s not like they’re about working double shifts for minimum wage at a meatpacking factory or getting your house foreclosed on or, well, watching The Vampire Diaries on Netflix Instant for hours on end while eating Pizza Rolls until you fall asleep alone. Her lyrics, her characters, and her persona are meant to be glamorous, they’d have to be, or they wouldn’t sell. She makes these identical, messed-up girls seductive and cool, and people love it. Ironically, Lana Del Rey is doing the same thing that Nabokov has Humbert Humbert do in his manuscript: using poetic language and the rhetoric of true love to describe something that is, of course, not at all remotely beautiful nor good. Every other Lana Del Rey song, it seems, has a Lolita reference. Are any of them actually about the book or the character, though? Or are they about the trappings of Lolita, the visual aesthetic and cultural associations? Vera Nabokov, Vladimir’s wife, had it right when she wrote, I wish someone would notice the tender description of the child’s helplessness, her pathetic dependence upon the monstrous Humbert Humbert, and her heartrending courage. When we treat Lo as if she was some kind of pre-pubescent sexpot, we are seeing her through Humbert’s eyes; we are letting him win. <3

Lolita & Dolores

LOLITA CYRUS Written by Lynn Crosbie

Who comes off as most offensive in the unfortunate photo spread of 15-year-old Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana in Vanity Fair: Her parents? The photographer? The magazine itself? Call it a hat trick of bad taste or a trifecta of dysfunction, there’s plenty of blame to go around. Before we “tut-tut” too much, however, consider the hypersexualized society that spawned the inappropriate photos. In fact, juxtaposed with another story in the news, a question comes to mind: How is it that we’re so clear about the mistreatment of young girls in a polygamist sect in Texas but so ambivalent about the exploitation of a child star who just happens to be a role model for millions of young girls? America has a problem. Miley Cyrus performed at Disney’s Magic Kingdom over one weekend, despite claims that executives for the corporation were keeping her on ice for a while, after her controversial, almost-topless Vanity Fair shoot. At the Disney Channel Games concert, the singer thanked her fans for their support, gratefully citing one sign that read, “Miley, I’m praying for you.” And as if the Hannah Montana superstar’s fan faith was not enough, that professional sybarite Madonna has come forward with the following cryptic defence: “Leave her alone. She’s gonna be 16 soon and then 17 and then 18, and then she might show her knees and then what’s gonna happen?” What? Leaving aside Madonna’s sad, inane rambling (sad because she is attaching herself and her own naked capers, leech-like, to this 15-year-old’s body), the Annie Leibowitz shot, in this month’s hotly snapped-up VF, hardly seems to merit all this commotion. When the photograph, of Cyrus wrapped in a sheet and looking like a reluctant Lolita, hit the Net last week, the response was overwhelming. Miley’s Shame, read the cover of the New York Post. Still others castigated and hounded her until she actually apologized and expressed profound embarrassment. That apology was still not enough: This week’s Star, which is normally devoted to Cottonelle-soft news, contains a feature called Miley’s Lies, which refers to the other shots circulating online, of Cyrus and her ex-boyfriend, Tom Sturges, fooling around, and suggests the starlet may not be a virgin! “Miley’s not as innocent as she appears,” the magazine shrieks. “She actually 62

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got grounded once for sneaking a boy into her bedroom.” A 15-yearold girl may be sexually active - are we all so old that this surprises us? When did we become her parents or, worse, the guardians of her chastity? This kind of dirty speculation seems more appropriately situated on one of the many websites or in one of the many magazines devoted to - as the first one I found (in a cursory search) called itself, Stupid Teen Whores, a Barely-Legal-type site that revels in Teen Angels and Sluty [sic]Cam Girls. Admittedly, Cyrus is not legal, not even barely, but her defiance of Disney’s moral statutes should not give anyone pause.

“ Yo, Yo,when whenI’m I’m16 16and andyou’re you’re circling circlingmy myboobs boobsand andshit shitlike like that...I’m that...I’mthe thebad badguy? guy? IIthink thinkpeople peoplestarted startedto togo, go, Wait, Wait,wait, wait,wait... wait... That was fucked up.” It is no coincidence that the plot of Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives involves an ex-Disney employee who manufactures perfect robot women, then kills the originals. Those who have reviled Cyrus should take one minute to remember their own youthful sexuality, or, frankly, to wish they had the kind of beauty that virtually begs to be revealed in this manner. It all seems simple enough: Cyrus should be left alone, and her photograph should be viewed as pop art, and nothing more. The trouble is, she has expressed discomfort with her actions, which gives one pause. Because she is so famous, it is difficult to know how 63

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Lolita the Popstar

much control she has over herself and her image. I assume she has very little, and is caught, as the famous virgin Britney Spears once was, between the lies of her promoters and the salacious intentions of her relatively elderly admirers. Which again brings us back to Lolita, as devised by Nabokov. In his novel, the protagonist defends his rape of his 13-year-old stepdaughter, the eponymous “nymphet,” by stating that he was “not her first” lover. In other words, if Cyrus is “not that innocent,” as the Star claims, this may justify our predatory interest in her. Lolita’s third lover is named Quilty, a stunning metaphor for the many different ways in which we view sexuality and youth, and a good enough summation of how we are piecing together our sense of Cyrus. I have a 15-year-old goddaughter who is both strikingly beautiful and an extrovert extraordinaire. And when I see shots of her and her friends, in leather bustiers and blond wigs, I am aghast. I am aghast with wanting to protect her, but I am also amazed at her bravura, and secure in the knowledge that she and her friends have no interest in any of the censorious hags or perverts watching them live out their wild youth. I picked up some teen magazines recently, and none of them is worried about their readers’ friend and idol, Miley, whose goofy sides appear to engage them the most. Online, it’s the same, boyfriend speculation (Nick and Miley Sittin’ in a Tree!) and largely gushes of affection for the girl they love. Most of all, it is Cyrus’s music that enthralls her genuine fans. Any adult who has bothered to watch her perform cannot deny her talent as an artist and performer, even if the music feels like what it is the sound of the very young, trampling over us and taking our place. If Cyrus is too wholesome for my taste, and someone I would have derided in my own dark youth, I cannot but admire her contagious personality and skill, and am curious to see where she will go and what she will do after she starts showing those knees. As for her sort-of-topless shot, it’s nice enough, in the classic Leibowitz inauthentically natural manner, and to anyone looking at it as anything but a portrait of a nervous girl poised on the brink of being a legendary woman, you should be direly ashamed. <3

Lolita & Dolores

A collection of controversial songs that are reministcent of Lolita

PLAYLIST FOR HUMBERT Edge of the World,

Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You,

Faith No More, 1989

Spinal Top, 1984

Come sit right down, Lay your

Little girl, it's a great big world

head on my shoulder, It’s not the

But there's only one of me

point, That I’m forty years older,

You can't touch 'cause I cost too

You can trust me, I’m no criminal,

much but tonight, I'm gonna rock

But I’d kill my mother, To be with

you tonight, I'm gonna rock you

you, be with you, be with you, be

tonight, You're sweet but you're

with you, We’ll sing and dance

just four feet, And you still got

And we’ll find romance, And we’ll

your baby teeth, You're too young

stroll to the edge of the world,

and I'm too well hung...

Give me a smile, Let me see those pearlies, I’ll do anything for the

She’s Got Issues,

little girlies...

The Offspring, 1998

Daddy Should Have Stayed in High School, Cheap Trick, 1977 I’m thirty, but I feel like sixteen I might even know your daddy I’m dirty, but my body is clean I might even be your daddy, I’m thirty, but I feel like sixteen How would you like some candy,

You told me a hundred times how your father left and he’s gone but I wish you wouldn’t call me daddy when we’re gettin’ it on, Oh man, she’s got issues and I’m going to pay she thinks she’s the victim and she takes it all out on me... Walk This Way,

I’m thinking more than a kiss

Aerosmith, 1986

With me, spank me, grab me...

School girl, sleazy, a classy kind of sassy little skirt hangin’ way

Belvedere,

up her knee there were three

Patterson Hood, 2009

young ladies in the school gym,

Last night I dreamt of a high

locker and they find they were

school girl long legged and fine

lookin’ D, I was high school, loser

And I took her from her daddy

never made it with a lady til a boy

and she left her home behind

told me my next door neighbor

I was driving an old Belvedere,

had a daughter, had a favor, and

the seat was pushed way back

I gave the girl a little kiss...

and she stared straight out the window as the trees went rushing

Across the Sea,

Lolita the Popstar

Ultraviolence,

Seventeen,

Don’t Sound So Close to Me,

Lana Dey , 2014

Ladytron, 2002

The Police, 1980

He hit me and it felt like a kiss, I

They only want you when

Inside him, there’s longing, This

can hear violins, violins, give me

you’re seventeen, When you’re

girl’s an open page, Book mark-

all of that ultraviolence, he used

twentyone You’re no fun, They

ing, she’s so close now,This girl

to call me poison, Like I was

take a polaroid and let you go,

is half his age, Don’t stand, don’t

poison ivy I could’ve died right

Say they’ll let you know,

stand so Don’t stand so close to

then ‘Cause he was right beside

So come on...

me, It’s no use, he sees her, He

me, Jim raised me up he hurt me but it felt like true love... Seventeen, Winger, 1968

starts to shake and cough, Just Christine Sixteen,

like the old man in that book by

Kiss, 1997

Nabokov...

I don't usually say things like this to girls your age Christine,

All Too Well,

I'll show you love like you've

sixteen, But when I saw you

Taylor Swift, 2021

never seen, she's only seventeen

coming, Out of the school that

You who charmed my dad with

seventeen, daddy says she's

day, That day I knew, I knew, I've

self-effacing jokes, Sipping

too young, but she's old enough

got to have you, I've got to have

coffee like you’re on a late-night

for me, She's everything I need,

you, Christine, sixteen, She's

show, But then he watched me

seventeen, Daddy says she's too

been around, But she's young and

watch the front door all night,

young but she's old enough for

clean I've got to have her, Can't

willing you to come, And he said,

me...

live without her...

It’s supposed to be fun turning

Daddy Issues, The Neighbourhood, 2015 Go ahead and cry, little girl, nobody does it like you do, I know how much it matters to you, I know that you got daddy issues, And if you were my little girl, I’d do whatever I could do, I’d run away and hide with you, I love that she’s got daddy issues... Jailbait, Motorhead, 1975

twenty-one. But you keep my old Guys My Age,

scarf from that very first week,

Hey Violet, 2017

Cause it reminds you of innocence

I haven't seen my ex since we

and it smells like me, you can’t

broke up, probably cause he

get rid of it, Cause you remember

didn't wanna grow up, now I'm

it all too well, yeah...

out and wearing something lowcut 'bout to get attention

Young Girl,

from a grown up 'cause you hold

Gary Puckett, 1968

me like a woman In a way I've

With all the charms of a woman

never felt before and it makes me

You've kept the secret of your

wanna hold on and it makes me

youth, you led me to believe

wanna be all yours...

you're old enough, to give me love, and now it hurts to know

Teenage baby, you’re a sweet

Good Morning Little Schoolgirl,

the truth, Whoa, oh, oh, young

young thing still tied to mama’s

Teen Years After, 1969

girl, get out of my mind my love

Lolita & Dolores

LOLITA HAUGHTON Written by Constance Grady

The R&B singer, born Aaliyah Dana Haughton and nicknamed Baby Girl but best known by her first name, died in a plane crash on August 25, 2001, at 22 years old. Alongside that anniversary comes a notable milestone: On August 20, Aaliyah’s music catalog began making its way to streaming for the first time. In her lifetime, Aaliyah was celebrated as one of pop’s most forward-looking and futuristic artists. She still is: A 2021 MTV News article declared that listening to her 2001 self-titled album “still sounds like the future.” Yet until this month, the only Aaliyah album available to stream was her 1994 debut, “Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number” — which meant that listening to any Aaliyah song on streaming meant automatically sending royalties to R.Kelly, the album’s producer and Aaliyah’s alleged abuser. Kelly, born Robert Sylvester Kelly, is at the center of the other big Aaliyah milestone of this month. On August 18, opening statements began at Kelly’s trial on charges of racketeering and sex trafficking. Aaliyah appears as Jane Doe No. 1 on Kelly’s indictment, and she is likely Kelly’s first known victim. For a very long time, however, that’s not how the world told their story. Instead of a story about abuse, the story of R. Kelly and Aaliyah was framed as a love story. Court records show that Aaliyah and Kelly were married in an illegal ceremony in 1994, when Aaliyah was 15 and Kelly 27. The wedding was quickly annulled, and Kelly and Aaliyah both denied it ever took place. (Kelly has continued to deny it at his trial.) Since Aaliyah’s 2001 death, stories that have filtered out from Aaliyah’s friends, family, and boyfriends suggest that Kelly abused her badly. Additionally, since news of Kelly’s continued abusive relationships and his so-called “sex cult” broke in 2017 amid the Me Too movement, discussions about what he did to Aaliyah have acquired a widespread moral outrage that they lacked just a few years ago. Even in 1994, it should have been clear just from the sheer age difference and power differential between Aaliyah and Kelly — Aaliyah 15 and a child, Kelly 27 and her professional mentor — that any romantic relationship between them would most likely hurt her. It also should have been clear that the responsibility for any such relationship rested with the adult in the room: Kelly. Instead, in the aftermath of the relationship — both 68

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before Kelly’s 2006 arrest for the possession of child pornography and throughout his professional rehabilitation in the years that followed, all the way up until the news of his so-called “sex cult” broke in 2017 — their secret marriage was treated as an amusingly soapy celebrity scandal. Moreover, R. Kelly’s abuse of Aaliyah has been treated as something shameful about Aaliyah rather than something shameful about Kelly. Aaliyah worked hard to move on from Kelly after news of their marriage went public. She stopped working with him, embracing a new sound with Missy Elliot and Timbaland. In the seven years between distancing herself from Kelly and her death, Aaliyah skillfully played down the whole incident with the press every time it was mentioned in public. But in an odd way, the story of what R. Kelly did to Aaliyah would set her image. As her star rose, her youth and innocence would become central to the way the world understood her sexuality, and her sexuality, in turn, would be central to what the world loved about her. So when we talk about Aaliyah today, 20 years after her death, we find ourselves faced with the task of untangling Kelly’s abuse from Aaliyah’s image — and the question of whether it’s even possible for us to do so. By age 12, she was, Hankerson thought, ready to start thinking about an album. Kelly agreed. In 1993, when Aaliyah was 14 years old, she and Kelly began work on her debut: Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number. The album was a hit. It debuted at No. 24 on Billboard in May 1994, and it earned her nominations at the American Music Awards and the Soul Train Awards. Most critics thought they knew what made it so good: Kelly. Kelly didn’t only insist that Aaliyah dress like him for her videos and album production. In the months following her album drop, they began to dress alike everywhere they went, which was quite a few places. They were photographed together in public often. They told everyone they were best friends. The gossip press began to raise a collective eyebrow. Then in December 1994, Vibe published their marriage certificate, and the rumor became fact. In the nearly 30 years since that clandestine, illegal marriage, there’s been a fair bit of reporting on what occurred, most explosively in the 2019 Lifetime docuseries Surviving R.Kelly and from the journalist Jim DeRogatis, 69

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who first broke the story of Kelly’s child sex tape in 2000 and has been reporting on Kelly ever since. Here’s what seems to have happened. “All but one of my sources said [Aaliyah] and Kelly began having sexual contact during her first recording sessions,” writes DeRogatis in his 2019 book Soulless: The Case Against R. Kelly. Aaliyah was 14 at the time. In Surviving R. Kelly, Kelly’s former backup singer Jovante Cunningham says that she once saw Kelly in bed with a 15-year-old Aaliyah on their tour bus and that Kelly was doing “things that an adult should not be doing with a child.” Kelly’s former personal assistant Demetrius Smith has said — in Soulless, in Surviving R. Kelly, in his own book The Man Behind the Man, and at Kelly’s 2021 trial — that Aaliyah and Kelly got married because Kelly got Aaliyah pregnant. According to Smith, Aaliyah called Kelly when he was touring in Miami to tell him she thought she might be pregnant. Kelly consulted with his lawyer and accountant, both of whom told him that he should marry Aaliyah. At Kelly’s 2021 trial, a Jane Doe testified that Kelly went through with the wedding so that he could legally give Aaliyah permission to get an abortion, since otherwise she would have needed her parents’ consent to access one. Any sexual contact between Kelly and Aaliyah in 1994 would have been at the very least statutory rape. Yet even after the publication of their marriage certificate made it clear that something had happened between them, the media treated the story as at best an unconventional love story and at worst as a judgment on Aaliyah’s so-called “Lolita” image: The little girl assuring a grown man that “age ain’t nothing but a number” got what was coming to her. Often, it treated the story simply as a sudsy celebrity scandal, a fun pop culture reference to break out and dish over. “It’s tantalising to imagine Aaliyah as a beautiful Lolita trapped by a scandalously doomed romance; it adds to the thrill of hearing her love songs,” mused i-D in 1995. “Obviously, performers have been lying about their ages since the dawn of time,” said Vibe. “But that’s show business: smoke and mirrors, mikes and sound checks. Marriage, however, is something else, and if Aaliyah and R. Kelly’s is real, then her pseudo-Lolita image becomes reality. and . Kelly’s sex-man image gets that much murkier.” Kelly wrote “Age An’t 70

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Nothing but a Number,” the song that created Aaliyah’s “beautiful pseudo-Lolita image” in the first place. He dressed her for it and produced it, and the world was happy to give him credit when the song was a hit. Then the song became inextricably linked to a scandal, and responsibility for it somehow transferred to Aaliyah. “Just how old is newlywed Aaliyah?” demanded USA Today in 1994. The article goes on to warn of dire consequences for Aaliyah if she’s underage: “If she’s 15, there are some problems,” says the marriage bureau’s Louis Barnes. “The state says she has to be at least 16 with parents’ consent. She can go to jail.” It lists no potential consequences for Kelly. In the Vibe article that broke the story of the illicit marriage, Aaliyah is presented paradoxically: so young as to be a wicked temptress, while also more mature than Kelly himself. The article quotes Jamie Foster Brown, the editor of Sister2Sister magazine, who had been covering Kelly for years by the time this story became public. Brown is disparaging to Aaliyah and her choices: “I kept hearing complaints from people about her being in the studio with all those men,” Brown says. “At 15, you have all those hormones and no brain attached to them.” Brown goes on to suggest that R. Kelly and Aaliyah might just be a good match, “because Aaliyah has a mature mind, and Robert is such a big kid.” Kelly, the big kid, continued to flourish professionally after the scandal. Mature-minded and Lolitaesque-temptress Aaliyah saw her career suffer. Kelly received his first Grammy nominations in 1995. His 1995 self-titled album went quadruple platinum. Meanwhile, when Aaliyah’s picture was shown at the 1995 Soul Train Awards, the audience booed. The scandal of their marriage was considered her fault. She was a little girl who tempted a grown man into jeopardy. She was the one to blame. “Aaliyah got villainized,” her cousin and Blackground Records executive Jomo Hankerson said in 2014 on The Ryan Cameron Morning Show. “That’s what made the transition to the second album difficult. … It was hard for us to get producers on the album. She was 16, 17 at the time of the second album. I just didn’t understand why they were upset with Baby Girl.” But even as Aaliyah’s sound and image moved away from R. Kelly, he would continue to haunt her 71

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career. The idea of Aaliyah and R. Kelly as a cockeyed love story would go on, too, continuing through her death in 2001, and to a certain extent through Kelly’s 2008 trial on child pornography charges. “You know what? The way the story was told, they were in love,” Wendy Williams said to Vice in 2014. “He wasn’t just some old man in love with a young girl even though that was also clearly the reality of what it was. She loved him, and he loved her.” Williams was promoting the Lifetime biopic Aaliyah: The Princess of R&B, which she executiveproduced, and which depicted the pair’s relationship as a complex romance. “Aaliyah’s career started and ended with people talking about her age,” began a New York Times article shortly after her death. “In 1994, when she was 15, she released her first album, ‘Age

“ The media treated the story as at best an unconventional love story and at worst as a judgment on Aaliyah’s so called ‘Lolita’ image, the little girl assuring a grown man that age ain’t nothing but a number.” Ain’t Nothing but a Number,’ which sold a million copies. She didn’t sing like a little girl — even then, she had a stronger voice and a more sophisticated approach than most pop singers — and she didn’t act like one, either: the child star was reported to be a child bride, secretly married to her mentor, the R & B crooner R. Kelly.” In Baby Girl, Iandoli describes writing a feature on R&B singer Ciara in 2004. Ciara, then 19, had just released a seductive duet with R. Kelly, and Kelly wrote the lyrics. Iandoli thought the collaboration wildly inappropriate and said so: Just two years previously, Kelly’s child pornography tape had 72

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reached the public. Ciara’s team, outraged, threatened Iandoli with a libel suit. “She’s not Aaliyah,” they told Iandoli. “The mention of Aaliyah by [Ciara’s] team, as if it were a mark of shame, felt so wrong,” Iandoli writes. “The blame was again placed upon the teenage girl and not the predator.” The idea of Aaliyah as the party at fault in her relationship with R. Kelly had by then become baked into her image, where it had expanded until it was near-universally accepted. Aaliyah became positioned in the public eye as a somehow inherently sexual teen — so whenever anyone treated her as a sex object, whether that person was R. Kelly or adults in her audience, it wasn’t their fault. It was Aaliyah’s. A lot of teen idol pop stars are also sex symbols, and Aaliyah, with her tiny crop tops and her Veronica Lake swoop of hair, was no exception. What was striking about Aaliyah, though, was the way in which the public understanding of her sexuality became intertwined with the public understanding of her as a child. That juxtaposition was fundamental to the way people talked about Aaliyah — including Aaliyah herself. In an interview on The Late Late Show With Craig Kilborn in 2000, when she was 21, Aaliyah jokingly described her childhood appearance on Star Search. “I thought I should have won,” she says. “I felt hot, I had on this hot little dress.” “I don’t think you’re supposed to be hot at 10!” Kilborn objects. Aaliyah, laughing, overrules him. “I was hot at 10. I had a little sex appeal working back then,” she says. She describes having her mother photograph her for headshots as a child. “She said, ‘Yo, she’s got this kind of sex appeal working.’ It comes through in the pictures and on the camera.” Aaliyah was mostly joking about being hot as a child. Yet the idea that her hotness was somehow intertwined with her childishness was embedded in her image, and she seems to have at the very least absorbed the mindset. So did the rest of the world. The New York Times article breaking the news of her death described her as “precociously sultry.” Even her nickname, Baby Girl, is at once an infantile coo and a lover’s endearment. Aaliyah got her nickname from her father, and it only became widespread after she left Kelly. First, Timbaland and Missy Elliot called her Baby Girl in private, as a mark of affection, because they had all become so close. 73

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Then in 1998, it became one of her public monikers after Timbaland rapped “Baby girl, better known as Aaliyah” on his guest verse in Aaliyah’s “Are You That Somebody?” and laid a sample of a crying baby over Aaliyah’s vocals. But even this apparently wholesome professional relationship was marked by discordant overtones. Nonetheless, their relationship is another case of a youthful Aaliyah being seen as a sexual object, and of the idea of her sexuality becoming entwined with the idea of her youth: hence Baby Girl. It is often argued that while white girls are expected to be pure and innocent and virginal well into their teens, Black girls are not granted the space to experience a girlhood at all: While the world obsessed over Britney Spears’s virginity, it expected Beyoncé, at the same age, to be a fully mature adult. But Aaliyah was caught in a different version of that trap, in that her youth was understood to be part of her sexual availability. It’s not that she wasn’t allowed to be young; it’s that her youth wasn’t considered a hurdle to treating her as a sexual object. It seemed, in fact, to make her sexier. It’s worth interrogating to what extent the idea that Aaliyah’s youth made her sexy is the result of Aaliyah having her career and her image launched by an alleged child predator. As Jason King said “When I’m listening to Age, I’m struggling to try to listen to it out of context, but mostly I’m hearing R. Kelly as an alleged predator presenting to us his sonic and musical vision of how he wanted Aaliyah to exist in the commercial marketplace.” So R. Kelly set a narrative — but then the rest of American culture willingly embraced it. He told the world to see a child as a sexual object, and it obliged. What made this vision of Aaliyah as a Lolita so attractive was that it offered her viewer an out. If there was something inherently seductive about Aaliyah’s childishness, then it was not the viewer’s fault if they found her sexy. She was the one who kept repeating that age ain’t nothing but a number, even if she was only saying so because Kelly wrote the lyrics and told her to sing them. The subsequent shift of blame onto Aaliyah meant that the rest of the world could enjoy the spectacle of her sexuality without guilt. She had already taken on the guilt for the rest of the world.Part of what made Aaliyah great is that she was able to use her escape from Kelly 74

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to launch herself even further into stardom, to remake herself as pop’s most futuristic star, to refashion the tomboy style he established for her into an instantly iconic image that screams Aaliyah, not R. Kelly. One of the many tragedies of her early death is that we’ll never see what would have happened had she been able to transcend him entirely — and whether the cultural reckoning of the past 10 years, and the way it’s changed how we talk about women and about consent, could have helped her while she was still living. <3

Lolita & Dolores

LOLITA SPEARS Written by Grace O’Neill

There are many disturbing moments in Framing Britney Spears, the New York Times documentary unpacking the complicated and morally dubious conservatorship the singer has been placed under for the last 12 years, but not all of them have to do with her current legal situation. In 2008, following Spears’ well-documented public breakdown in the late ‘00s, her father Jamie Spears was appointed her conservator, assuming full responsibility for her decision-making and finances. Conservatorships tend to be temporary legal fixes, or applied in cases where the conservatee is very old or severely or mentally incapacitated. And yet, Spears has remained legally controlled by her father for more than a decade. Framing Britney Spears does a good job of simplifying a fairly complicated legal situation and shining a light on the grassroots, community-led movement to #FreeBritney. (Spears’ most recent request to have her father removed as conservator of her estate was rejected by a Los Angeles court judge in November.) But above all, the documentary serves as a damning cultural document that concisely presents the many sins committed against Spears by the tabloid media. Some of those details have long been crystallized in popular culture—a crying Spears tormented by packs of paparazzi, or attacking a car with an umbrella—but many have been conveniently forgotten. Those who grew up idolizing Spears will be particularly troubled by footage of journalists asking a teenage Britney whether or not she is a virgin, and of a middle-aged male chat show host openly gawping at and commenting on “the elephant in the room”—her breasts. Spears’ first Rolling Stone cover, shot in 1998 when she was still 16, is similarly unsettling. It shows Spears sprawled across a pink satin sheet wearing polka dot knickers and a pushup bra, cradling a Teletubby doll in the nook of her right arm. In other pictures from the spread, she wears underwear and a shrunken cardigan to pose in her childhood bedroom, surrounded by porcelain dolls and stuffed animals. In the accompanying profile, the writer Steven Daly refers to Spears as “bubblegum jailbait” and practically drools over her “honeyed thighs” and “ample chest.” Framing Britney Spears dubs these images “Lolita-esque”, referencing the titular character in 76

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Vladamir Nabokov’s incendiary masterwork. First published in the United States in 1958, Lolita depicts a sexually abusive relationship between Humbert Humbert, a pedophile who “falls in love” with his prepubescent stepdaughter, Dolores Haze, then abuses her for years following the death of her mother. Humbert speaks of girls between the ages of 9 and 14 who enthusiastically engage in sexual relationships with much older men—calling them ”nymphets.” In his re-telling, Dolores is not a 12-year-old child but a nymphet named Lolita. The book has been oddly reframed in certain cultural retellings as a love story, but it is really an insight into the mind of a depraved sexual lunatic, and an exploration of the extraordinary lengths he will go to to justify his unforgivable deeds. As luck would have it, I was midway through re-reading Lolita when I watched Framing Britney Spears, inspired after binging Jamie Loftus’ brilliant podcast series, Lolita Podcast, which published its final episode in January. Having found myself again immersed in the disturbing mind of Humbert Humbert, it was difficult not to read Framing Britney Spears as a kind of Nabokovian tragedy, replete with nymphets, teen pregnancies, and wicked father figures. Lolita comparisons have dogged Spears through much of her career, and the temptation to draw parallels is reasonable enough. Those looking to condense Framing Britney Spears into a single sentence could feasibly suggest that Spears was, like Dolores Haze, an oversexualized teenager, carelessly discarded when she aged out of girlhood. In this retelling, Britney is Dolores and we—the public who voraciously consumed her—are a pack of Humberts. But any kind of argument that endeavours to condemn society in general as being generally bad is largely uninteresting to a writer. The truth is always more complicated. To reframe Britney Spears as Lolita is to rob her of any personal agency—or, as Tavi Gevinson put it in New York Magazine, to argue she was “never in control.” Lolita is, after all, literally imprisoned by Humbert, her legal guardian. In possibly the most heartrending passage of the whole book, Nabokov writes: “At the hotel we had separate rooms, but in the middle of the night she came sobbing into mine, and we made it up very gently. 77

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Lolita the Popstar

You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.” Is this really an apt comparison for the early stages of Britney Spears’ career? There’s certainly no question that her initial success rested largely on the discomfiting but compelling blend of God-fearing girlishness and brazen sexiness that her early songs and music videos perfected, a blending that was nymphet-esque in nature. But to believe that Spears’ entire career was manufactured by despicable quasi-pedophilic record execs, either without her input or against her will, feels slightly puritanical—particularly since it wilfully ignores Britney’s own account of events (something sorely missing from almost all of these conversations). Take, for instance, the music video for “…Baby One More Time.” The midriff-baring sexy schoolgirl look may seem like it crawled out of one of Humbert Humbert’s sexual fantasies, but Spears devised the concept herself. “I wrote an idea which sucked,” director Nigel Dick wrote in a Q&A on his website, “so the label put me back on the phone with Britney who told me she wanted to make a video where she was stuck in a classroom thinking about boys and we took it from there.” (Spears has also confirmed the video concept was hers multiple times.) Similarly, Dick had asked the stylist to dress Spears in “jeans, sneakers, and a T-shirt,” but Britney insisted she should wear a skimpy school uniform that tied at the waist. Nigel Dick was, at this point, one of the most revered music video directors in the business. His list of credits included Cher’s “Believe”, Oasis’ “Wonderwall,” and Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child O’ Mine.” That Spears—a teenager working on her first music video for a debut single that she hadn’t even released yet—had the wherewithal to tell a man 28 years her senior that she hated his concept and insist they film hers, speaks to a strength of character and creative vision that she is rarely credited as having. She was five weeks shy of her 17th birthday at the time, still a schoolgirl. Should the adults in the room have stopped her, knowing the video was playing into the troubling fetishization of schoolgirls, something that Britney likely didn’t fully understand? Almost certainly. But this story pokes a hole in the argument that Spears had no say in the creation and execution of her over sexualized image. Questions of 79

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accountability, autonomy, and responsibility present themselves in a more obvious way when it comes to the infamous Rolling Stone shoot. LaChapelle, the photographer, insists he and Spears collaborated on the concept—“we knew what we were doing when we did those photos,” he says. Spears remembered differently in a 2003 interview with British GQ. “I didn’t really know what the hell I was doing,” she said. “In my naive mind I was like, ‘Here are my dolls!’ and now I look back and I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, what the hell?’” Spears was one of the first pop stars to dabble in the Lolita aesthetic, but she certainly wasn’t the last. Lana Del Rey has long made overt allusions to Lolita in both her songwriting and her visuals—“Carmen” from her first album, recreates the song Dolores sings to Humbert the first time he abuses her. Katy Perry coos about “studying Lolita religiously” in “One of the Boys” and dresses like Lolita (the one immortalized by Sue Lyon in Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film adaptation) on the album’s cover art. Last year’s music video for the BLACKPINK and Selena Gomez track “Ice Cream” is chock full of Lolita innuendo—heart-shaped glasses, skimpy schoolgirl outfits, and cherry motifs. Britney Spears sang about being “not a girl, not yet a woman,” and most female pop stars have occupied the chasm between childhood and womanhood. It’s no coincidence that most of the world’s most influential entertainers were introduced to us when they were children. Miley Cyrus, Zendaya, Selena Gomez, Ariana Grande, and Demi Lovato all began their careers as child stars, while Rihanna, Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Lorde, and Beyoncé all released their first albums when they were 17 or younger. The natural conclusion here might be to deduce that our entertainment industry is run by a cabal of malevolent, horny record execs—there’s certainly no question that we live in a culture where youth is fetishized—but I’d argue there are less nefarious factors at play too. Teenage girls are an extraordinarily powerful consumer base. “In almost all cases, the success of a pop artist can be traced back to… the teenage girls that rallied behind them from the beginning, transforming them into megastars,” writer Douglas Greenwood declared in NME in 2018. That same year, Dr. Francesca Coppa released The Fanfiction Reader, where she argued 80

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that the endorsement of teenage girls was essential to the success of our culture’s most revered musicians, including David Bowie, Alice Cooper, and Michael Jackson—as well as the usual suspects like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Nowadays we have Lil Nas X, BTS, and Harry Styles. Britney Spears understood the exact audience she needed to woo to become the star she aspired to be. When she decided to sex up her Catholic school girl uniform in the “…Baby One More Time” video, she wasn’t doing it to appease ogling middleaged men. She did it because, after months spent performing early

“ You Yeah, don’t I don’t want feel tocomfortable... be buttoned up, like Debbie Gibson, LaChapelle recalls, Let’sIn push thisitbusiness further and youdo make this a deal whole with Lolita thething” devil” versions of the single in malls around America, she understood what teenage girls wanted. Pop stars don’t generate cultural changes—they perceive them, they capitalize on them, and, if they’re lucky, they come to represent them. Spears was coming of age alongside the rise of so-called “raunch” culture—what Ariel Levy called the generation of “female chauvinist pigs”—exemplified by Girls Gone Wild, which had debuted a year before she released her first single. This is the reason I am so reticent to strip Spears of autonomy in the creation of her own sexual image—her success hinged on it, and it is Britney who deserves the credit. Does this mean middle-aged men didn’t ogle anyway? Or that Spears’ hyper-sexual persona wasn’t—dare I say it—problematic? Of course not. Spears’ sexual experimentation in the public eye actually serves as a pretty good microcosm for the 81

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complexities, inconsistencies, and contradictions that make up the sexual development of teenage girls in general—particularly those who were growing up during the first wave of the proliferation of free internet porn. Most women of the generation who grew up listening to Spears will tell you the period they felt most sexualized by society was when they were young teenagers. Wolf whistling, uncomfortable staring, and casual groping were all dominant features of my own early adolescence, most often when I was in school uniform. When these instances become recurring parts of your adolescence, you internalize the idea that you are a sexual object to the point where you’re not sure where the fetishized view of your sexuality ends and the “real” one begins. This is the inescapable conundrum those attempting to understand Britney Spears’ cultural legacy are destined to knock heads with—how much agency does a teenage girl ever really have? How much control of her own sexuality can she exert when her presentation of that sexuality is so informed by the male gaze? How does she even know which decisions she is making off her own accord, and which are being foisted upon her, if not by individual people, then by a culture that places youth, sex, virginity, and whiteness on such a lofty pedestal? There are, of course, no simple answers to these questions. Do I wear makeup because I like makeup or because Revlon has been conditioning me to think I do since birth? Do I shave my underarms because I prefer them shaved, or because we live in a society with beauty standards that encourage women to resemble their prepubescent selves? Do I want to marry my partner, or have I been brainwashed into embracing an outdated institution with sexist roots? Questions tackling the often imperceptible lines between empowerment and exploitation, particularly in regards to young women, aren’t going away any time soon. The important thing is that we’re finally starting to address them. So, what can Nabokov teach us about Britney Spears? Much of Lolita’s brilliance and notoriety stem from the fact that Dolores Haze remains so unknowable to us throughout it. We are only given slight grabs at who she really is, and even these are never truly independent from the predatory gaze of Humbert. At the core of Reframing Britney 82

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Lolita & Dolores

Spears lies a similar conundrum. As it currently stands, Britney is unknowable to us because she either can’t or won’t speak for herself. (A documentary in which she will appear and address the conservatorship is reportedly in the works.) And so the paparazzi who made her life a living hell, a random smattering of New York Times staffers, and the hosts of a Britney Spears fan podcast are tasked with filling that same vast expanse, ultimately leaving the viewer with as abstract a picture of who Britney Jane Spears is as those who read Lolita are given of Dolores Haze. This is perhaps the truest sense in which we can see Britney Spears as Lolita—those who have fallen in love with her fell in love with a fiction. “I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.” Among the rallying cries to #FreeBritney I sometimes wonder if the media hasn’t simply turned Spears, once again, into a plaything for our culture to consume, like Humbert tracking Lolita down years later, trying to shove money into her hands to atone for his sins. Perhaps the best thing we can do is — in the immortal words of Chris Crocker — simply leave Britney alone. <3

Lolita the Popstar

Lolita & Dolores

Lolita

ON SCREEN 86

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Written by Eleni Antonaropoulou

MOVIE ADAPTATIONS The book has been adapted twice. Its first adaptation, by the infamous Stanley Kubrick, was released in 1962. This adaptation was a tricky one, because of the censorship in those days; Kubrick decided to approach this adaptation more wholly. The movie wasn’t focused exclusively on the love affair between Humbert and Lolita (played by Sue Lyon, fourteen years old at the time), but placed emphasis on certain other characters as well. Its most famous scene is perhaps the second to last, when Humbert, played by James Mason meets Clare Quilty (Peter Sellers) and the two of them play ping-pong. The second adaptation, by Adrian Lyne, was released in 1997. In this one, it was as though the fimmaker were more liberated. The movie concentrates almost solely on the love affair between Humbert and Lolita. The other characters seem to appear only to support the story. Humbert is played by Jeremy Irons and Lolita by Dominique Swain. Both movies are worth watching, but are quite different. The 1997 version expresses better the sense that the reader gets from the book. It balances between the naivety of the little girl and Humbert’s perversion. And that’s simply because Kubrick was working with the limitations of censorship. Either way, both movies, along with the book, have left their mark; while the appearance of a young girl with heart shaped sunglasses has become one of the most memorable scenes in the history of cinema. 88

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Lolita & Dolores

Written by Molly Haskell

TIME'S FINALLY UP FOR HOL The pairing of the older man and younger woman, in movies as in life, enjoys relative respectability. Somehow, daddy figures are more acceptable than old-enough-to-be-your-mother lovers, France’s current president notwithstanding. The latter is usually played for the grotesque – Sunset Boulevard, The Graduate – while the double standard of ageing allows older men to exude a sex appeal not offered to their female counterparts. But how young and how old? And will the leniency afforded such pairings survive the scrutiny of the #MeToo movement? It is no longer possible to rationalise as consensual certain egregious pairings, or to accept with equanimity the sexualisation of underage performers. We have begun to take a second look at the smarmy overtones of movies such as Woody Allen’s Manhattan and Louis CK’s now-shelved I Love You, Daddy, in which “protective” older men ogle daughter figures in utterly self-serving ways. We may also wince at precocious streetwise teens such as Jodie Foster’s prostitute (14) in Taxi Driver and Natalie Portman (13) in Luc Besson’s Leon, supposedly “wise beyond their years”, who seem to express nothing of a young girl’s reality or hopes – but everything of a director’s fantasies. Nymphetmania has a long and hoary pedigree in Hollywood, and flourished years before Nabokov gave us the Lolita syndrome. DW Griffith’s child-woman ingénues such as Lillian Gish and Mae Marsh were “pseudo-nymphets” (critic Andrew Sarris’s term), while Lolita was herself largely inspired by that most blatant of all paedophile fantasies, Shirley Temple. Sure, the curly-haired moppet gladdened hearts during the Depression, played matchmaker and performed various good-fairy magic tricks, but it was her blatant coquetry and sexualised gestures that made her box-office gold – and that are so alarming today. In a series of one-reelers called Baby Burlesks, between 1932-1933, in which child actors spoofed their elders, a scantily clad Shirley played call girls and nightclub performers, pranced and pirouetted and gave sidelong come-hither glances in outrageously adult stories, replete with phallic jokes and leering camera angles. When Temple became a star in 1934, name above the title in Bright Eyes, audiences may have fooled themselves, but Darryl Zanuck and Fox knew what they were doing: 90

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LLYWOOD'S

T I O L L A

figuring out just how to preserve the veneer of innocence while teasing the men who proved her greatest admirers both on and off the screen. Often orphaned, she finds herself the darling of bachelors, widowers, lonely uncles, in “love” stories that feature non-childlike caresses on both sides. In the movie’s famous song, The Good Ship Lollipop, she romps up and down the aisle among rows of men as they pass her body back and forth and yearn to soothe her little tummy ache. What felt prurient now looks like child abuse. No wonder Zanuck lashed out with a libel suit when in 1937 Graham Greene famously blew the whistle on Hollywood’s puritanical hypocrisy by describing in meticulous detail the overt sexuality of Temple’s appeal. The movie was Wee Willie Winkie, and the way Greene lays it on the line in his review is disturbing in its own way – his prose so wittily precise, so knowing, so lubricious: “well developed rump” and “dimpled depravity” being two of the epithets. He and his magazine (Night and Day) both ponied up after being sued and Greene fled to Mexico till the storm blew over. The Victorian repression that produced Temple, meanwhile would give way to other, perhaps more subtle, sorts of nymphetmania. Billy Wilder, a taboo-teaser by trade (witness the transvestism and gay coda in Some Like it Hot), was a specialist in age-disparity themes. Before his pairing of William Holden (39) and Gloria Swanson (51) as the gigolo-diva couple in Sunset Boulevard, Wilder directed The Major and the Minor, (1942), in which Ginger Rogers poses as a 12-yearold and is treated as such by her avuncular chaperone, Ray Milland,

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even as attraction begins to percolate beneath the all-too-apparent (to everyone but Milland) disguise. I’d say Wilder brings it off with only the barest (and intentional) queasiness, but I can’t imagine anyone making that film today. With Audrey Hepburn, his favourite gamine, things get trickier. Sabrina (1954) brings together Hepburn (25 but looks younger) and Humphrey Bogart (55, looks older), and begins to feel like an ageing director’s fantasy, while Love in the Afternoon (1957) with Gary Cooper (58) is downright creepy. In 1962, Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita featured Sue Lyon (at 14, two years older than Nabokov’s heroine, and looking 17), Peter Sellers as the unstoppable Quilty, and James Mason as the wormy cradle-snatcher. Sue Lyon’s precociousness, criticised at the time, is 91

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what gives the film a kind of balance (which seems more necessary in film than in a novel). The movie proved less troubling than the book, but anxiety over the subject of paedophilia has remained a constant. Still, our response to nymphet worship will vary from person to person, depending on context and changing attitudes. There are some artists and performers for whom nubile flesh is practically an artistic requisite, a spur to creativity. We see it in the work and lives of Woody Allen, Philip Roth, or Picasso, needing not just younger but newer women, who by their youth will provide a momentary (and illusory) reprieve from mortality. The men who go from woman to woman, ever younger, tell themselves they are victims of unruly desire, when in fact the goal is a supplicant: that fresh, female face who will look up with adoration, even idolatry, and who will love him perhaps for his ageing self, and not for his honours. Perhaps here is the place to note the French exceptionalism (“Thank heaven for little girls”) and their rather more relaxed view of age disparities. Instead of opprobrium, there’s a Gallic shrug at philanderers of whatever age or gender. And scepticism where girlish innocence is concerned, the line between gamine and courtesan less a barrier than a career path, whether imagined by Colette (Gigi) or Marcel Pagnol (Fanny). Where we see Humbert Humbert they see the incorrigible roué, and where we see jailbait they see that most delectable of voyeuristic pleasures: girl on the cusp of womanhood. How many verité-like studies have there been of blossoming beauties ambling along the streets of Paris? In AutantLara’s 1942 Le Mariage de Chiffon, the young girl (Odette Joyeux) is pursued by the elderly duke and marries her middle-aged uncle, but period customs and arranged marriages shift the onus from ethical or moral concerns to tribal custom. The distancing afforded by period setting also applies to Louis Malle’s 1978 film Pretty Baby, with Brooke Shields (13) as the child born into a bordello. The same can’t be said of his queasy and quasi-autobiographical Murmur of the Heart (1971), with its unperturbed celebration of mother-son incest. Certainly, the French apparently take a more benign view of the older woman, often seen as a kindly instructress in the ways of love,a rite of passage for the awkward younger man. However, once the nymphet is past those formative 92

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It is a reminder once again of how often in our erotic duets we get caught in that “grey” area, where victim and abuser are hard to determine, and in which we are faced not just with competing claims and versions but, within each of us, the eternal conflict between rational desires and impermissible unconscious ones. years, her role in the older man-younger woman relationship becomes more ambiguous. As the male artist seeks a new, younger woman as muse, so the younger woman wants the attention and reflected glory, even the mentorship, of the older man. In an interesting segment of TV series Girls, Lena Dunham’s Hannah goes to the apartment of a sleazy author whom she has castigated in her blog as a predator, only to find herself flattered (her writer’s ego) and partially seduced. It is a reminder once again of how often in our erotic duets we get caught in that “grey” area, where victim and abuser are hard to determine, and in which we are faced not just with competing claims and versions but, within each of us, the eternal conflict between rational desires and impermissible unconscious ones. Calling out abuse in a libertine age is never going to be a cut-and-dried proposition, but if the #MeToo movement accomplishes anything, it will be to shine a spotlight on those recesses of male vanity that have provided artistic cover, and ingenious disguise, for the exploitation of child-women. <3

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FILM ROMANCES

Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Coop Margot Robbie and Will Smith Helen Hunt and Jack Nicholson Emma Stone and Colin Firth

Gwyneth Paltrow and Michael Doug Olivia Wilde and Sean Neeson

Mariel Hemmingway and Woody All

Michelle Johnson and Michael Caine

Catherine Zeta-Jones and Sean Con Drew Barrymore and Tom Skerrit

Films from Top to Bottom : Silver Linings Playbook (2012), Focus (2015), As Good As It Gets (1997), Magic in the Moonlight (2014), A P

per

glas

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& THEIR AGE GAPS 15 YEARS 20 YEARS 26 YEARS 29 YEARS 30 YEARS 32 YEARS

len

32 YEARS

33 YEARS

nnery

39 YEARS 41 YEARS

Perfect Murder (1998), Third Person (2013), Manhattan (1979), Blame It on Rio (1984), Entrapment (1999), Poison Ivy (1992).

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ACTOR NATALIE PORTMAN Written by Minyvonne Burke

Actress Natalie Portman said in an interview on Dax Shepard’s “Armchair Expert” podcast that playing sexualized characters as a teenage actor took away her own sexuality. Portman, who began acting at age 12, discussed her role in the 1996 movie “Beautiful Girls” in which she played a 13-year-old girl who develops a relationship with an older man, played by Timothy Hutton. The 39-year-old actress said that she became aware she was portrayed as a “Lolita figure,” referring to the 12-year-old girl from Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 book who began a sexual relationship with a middle-aged man. “Being sexualized as a child, I think, took away from my own sexuality, because it made me afraid. It made me feel like the way that I could be safe was to be like, ‘I’m conservative,’ and ‘I’m serious and you should respect me,’ and ‘I’m smart,’ and ‘Don’t look at me that way,’ “ she told Shepard on Monday’s episode of the podcast. “But at that age, you do have your own sexuality, and you do have your own desire, and you do want to explore things, and you do want to be open. But you don’t feel safe, necessarily, when there’s, like, older men that are interested, and you’re like, ‘No, no, no, no.’ “ Portman said in an attempt to “to build these fortresses that kept me safe,” she started shying away from certain roles. “When I was in my teens, I was like, ‘I don’t want to have any love scenes or make-out scenes,’” she said. “I would start choosing parts that were less sexy because it made me worried about the way I was perceived and how safe I felt.” The actress went on to say that she was able to figure out how to feel “safe,” adding “it worked out, luckily.” Her comments come after Netflix faced intense backlash over the French film “Cuties,” about an 11-year-old girl in Paris who wants to join a local “free-spirited dance crew.” The video streaming service was indicted by a grand jury in Texas for the promotion of lewd visual material depicting a child. The indictment, filed on Sept. 23 in Tyler County, states that Netflix promoted, distributed and 96

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exhibited material which “depicts the lewd exhibition of the genitals or pubic area of a clothed or partially clothed child who was younger than 18 years of age” for the “prurient interest in sex.” Netflix has said that “Cuties,” directed by Maïmouna Doucouré, “is a social commentary against the sexualization of young children” and it stands by the film. Doucouré said she came up with the idea after she saw a group of young girls dancing “like what we’re used to seeing in a video” at a neighborhood gathering in Paris.“I was surprised because of their age. They were only 11 years old,” she said in a video interview. “Our girls see that the more a woman is overly sexualized on social media, the more she’s successful. And the children just imitate what they see, trying to achieve the same result without understanding the meaning. And, yeah, it’s dangerous.” Natalie Portman was one of the many celebrities who joined thousands of people to march against inequality and sexual harassment at the Los Angeles Women’s March. During the event Portman opened up about growing up as a child actor in Hollywood. Portman said that an environment of “sexual terrorism” as a teenager led to her covering up her body and “inhibiting her expression and her work”. “I understood very quickly even as a 13-year-old, if I were to express myself sexually, that I would feel unsafe, and that men would feel entitled to discuss and objectify my body, to my great discomfort. So I quickly adjusted my behaviour,” Portman continued. “To people of all genders here today, let’s find a space where we mutually, consensually, look out for each other’s pleasure, and allow the vast, limitless range of desire to be expressed. Let’s make a revolution of desire.” <3

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“ I WAS SO EXCITED AT 13

RELEASED, I OPENED MY READ A RAPE FANTASTY WRITTEN ME. A COUNTD ON MY LOCAL RADIO SH BIRTHDAY, EUPHEMISTIC I WOULD BE LEGAL TO SL SEXUALIZED AS A CHILD MY OWN SEXUALITY BEC IT MADE ME FEEL LIKE T IS TO SAY…DON’T LOOK A

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WHEN THE FILM WAS Y FIRST FAN MAIL TO Y THAT A MAN HAD DOWN WAS STARTED HOW TO MY 18TH CALLY THE DATE THAT LEEP WITH. BEING D TOOK ME AWAY FROM CAUSE IT SCARED ME, THE WAY I CAN BE SAFE AT ME THAT WAY.” 99

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ACTOR BROOKE SHIELDS Written by Emine Saner

How, I wonder, is Brooke Shields so sorted? She has survived a childhood with an alcoholic mother, some disturbing early films, a nation’s creepy obsession with her, a divorce and severe postnatal depression. She even came through the 90s’ overplucked-eyebrow trend unharmed. And here she is, radiant through my laptop screen, in her beautiful New York townhouse kitchen, with a dog at her feet, husband milling about in the background, one teenage daughter upstairs, another successfully packed off to college, and her sense of humour very much intact. She has, she says with a Asmile, when I point out how together she seems, “been going to therapy for 35 years”. Shields is in a Christmas romcom, for Netflix, which is the gift you didn’t know you wanted. “There’s dogs, castles, knitters, pubs!” she says, laughing. I don’t need convincing. The plot of A Castle for Christmas may be as predictable as gift-wrapped socks, but sometimes you just need preposterous cosy escapism. Shields is great as bestselling American author Sophie Brown, who, suffering with writer’s block, escapes to Scotland to trace her roots and ends up acquiring a stately home. And, despite the film’s many conventions, a middle-aged romcom still feels quite radical. There are lots of women in their 50s like Sophie, she says, “who are taking their life in their own hands. They’ve raised kids, they’re moving on to this next phase and there’s a lot of power that comes with that.” Shields has seen it in her friends, and in herself. “There’s a level of confidence, a level of ‘I don’t give a shit’. My friends are moms who are starting new careers, who are empty nesters, and who are saying: ‘I’m this age but there’s so much more for me to do. And I’m capable of it, and I’m independent.’ We love the men in our lives, but we’re not reliant on them. We’re not defined by this, this or this – and that includes motherhood. And I think that’s very appealing.” Shields recently launched Beginning Is Now, an online platform for women. “I feel stronger, I feel sexier, I feel less 100

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burdened by: ‘Oh, what do they think of me?’ I’m not encumbered in the same way that I spent a great deal of my youth in. I still care about people, but I don’t put myself in this position to feel ‘less than’. And all of a sudden, I was like: ‘Why am I not represented?’ Why am I told: ‘You’re over because you’re not in your 20s’? I’m 56 and I feel more empowered now than I ever did.” Shields has been famous almost all her life. She appeared in a soap advert when she was 11 months old, and famously as a prostituted child in the film Pretty Baby at age 11. As a teenager in the 80s, she was everywhere. There were the blatant

“ My image went through so many different machinations. I mean, it was like, I was the Lolita, then I was the most famous virgin.” cash-generators there was a Brooke Shields doll and she put her name to a range of hairdryers – and also highly sexualised adverts for Calvin Klein, and the film Blue Lagoon, in which, not yet 16, she spent most of the time naked. Hollywood is littered with the broken careers, and lives, of child stars. “I don’t know why I didn’t,” she says when I ask why she never hurtled down that path. “I talk about it a lot in therapy, but I think because I was so …” She pauses. “I had to keep my mother alive. The focal point for me was keeping her alive, because it was the two of us alone in the world, in my opinion.” Shields’s mother, Teri, was a working101

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class girl from New Jersey who, through her wit, beauty and force of personality, had turned herself into a Manhattan socialite. Shields then spent a strange childhood shuttling between her father’s affluent life and her mother’s bohemia. Shields was then – as now – beautiful, and Teri recognised this, shepherding her daughter’s career. “She had this baby that looked this way, and that’s how we survived,” says Shields. “My looking a certain way paid the bills.” Did that feel like a big responsibility? “I just loved the approval. And I loved working. We had fun, we travelled everywhere. So it wasn’t as if I felt the responsibility as much as: ‘Oh my God, we get to get a car. Oh, we bought a house. We bought another house.’ Like, if I do this, we get this. When Shields, then 11, appeared in Louis Malle’s film Pretty Baby, playing a child who grows up in a brothel and is then auctioned off to the highest bidder, she was filmed naked. Teri got a storm of criticism for allowing her daughter to be in the film – and for Blue Lagoon a few years later, in which Shields and her co-star Chris Atkins are marooned on an island as children, go through puberty and develop a sexual relationship. Shields had a body double for the sex scenes, but the whole thing is uncomfortable (off-screen, Shield wrote in her memoir, she and Atkins were being encouraged to fall in love for real; she was 14, he was 18). There is a misogynistic inevitability to the extent to which her mother was blamed, rather than the men who actually made these films, you have to wonder what Teri was thinking. Would Shields have let her daughters do a film like Pretty Baby? “In 1977, probably,” she says. “Now, I don’t know if I would. It was a different era.” I was a virgin till I was 22, so it was all pretend in my mind. I was an actress. I didn’t suffer privately about it.” But more widely, does she look back – at the films, the photos, the ads – and think how damaging it is, as a culture, to sexualise young girls like that? “I think it’s been done since the dawn of time, and I think it’s going to keep going on,” she says. She seems a little detached, saying: “There’s something incredibly seductive about youth … I think it just has different forms and it’s how you survive it, and whether you choose to be victimised by it. It’s not in my nature to be a victim.” Was it a reaction against the teen sex-symbol image? She insists not, more that she’s part of a long tradition. <3 102

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LOLITA’S ONLINE FANS Written by Rachel Davis

Social networking sites are of increasing interest to scholars, but very little academic research has focused on Tumblr in comparison to other sites, despite Tumblr’s popularity among young people. As of March 2017, Tumblr had over 340 million blogs and over 145 billion posts, in a survey of over a thousand individuals ages 13 to 25, found that Tumblr was the most popular social networking site, with 61 percent of 13- to 18-year-olds and 57 percent of 19- to 22-yearolds reporting using it regularly. However, other researchers have placed this number closer to 25 percent Still, in 2014, Tumblr overtook Instagram as the fastest-growing social platform, and Tumblr is currently the second largest microblogging site, behind only Twitter Microblogging sites are considered to be halfway between traditional blogging and social networking sites, containing intermediate quality content and intermediate social interactions. Two statistical analyses of Tumblr have been conducted, and researchers found that the most prevalent posts on Tumblr are photo (78 percent) and text (14 percent) posts, with quote, audio, video, chat, link, and answer posts remaining relatively rare. Despite Tumblr’s reputation as a visually driven microblogging platform, Howard found that the site includes many lengthy posts, including textual analyses and analyses of social issues. A few authors have written about the ways in which young people use Tumblr as a site for authentic selfexpression. Xiao (2013) suggested that Tumblr is the ideal social networking platform for teenagers and artists because its anonymity allows users the freedom to express themselves in a way they cannot on sites with mandatory name registration like Facebook. Indeed, many users consider Tumblr to be a “site of emotional authenticity”. He found that several of Tumblr’s structural features encourage the formation of communities of marginalized groups on the site. For instance, comments are de-emphasized, which de-incentivizes trolling, and 106

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#LOLITA* #DOLLETTE #NYMPHETTE #FRAGILE #DADDYSBRAT #BRUISES #AGEREGRESS #DADDYISSUES #CUTEAGRRES #BABYDOLL

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* PINS ABOUT THIS TOPIC OFTEN VIOLATE OUR COMMUNITY GUIDELINES, SO WE’RE UNABLE TO SHOW SEARCH RESULTS.

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Porn hub

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