In being able to engage an
audience both visually and audibly, and to do so at close range—something we
don’t get from watching a play on a distant stage—the medium of film is capable
of resonating with, challenging, and rebounding from both heart and mind. That
is to say, the medium can engage us at a comparatively deep level and even
touch us profoundly. The medium can tug at our ethical strings and even provoke
uncomfortable thoughts and feelings precisely because sound and image can
conjoin at close range such that we are brought closer to an ethical harm than is
likely in our own daily experiences. Some ethical harms, such as that in a
young woman not being able to stop a rape by an older man abusing a stark power
differential, may simply be too horrific up close to experience even
vicariously. A filmmaker can use devices, whether photographic, audio, or
narrative, to moderate our exposure without sacrificing the depth at which the
harm and its sordid scenario can reach in us. Such exposure to ethical problems
or even to situations in which the ethical verdict is debatable can give to an
audience a better realization of the ethical dimension of the human condition
and improve our ability to render ethical judgements on specific issues and
generally. Writ large, the medium of film can do these things for a society,
reflecting and even provoking it with just enough directness to be palatable
and grasped. The genre of science fiction in particular has been used to serve
this purpose. Even by contrasting an original film with its remake decades
later, a society’s changing nature can be glimpsed by an audience, especially
as censorship guidelines are loosened as per changing social mores and ethical
sensibilities of a society. The fictional film, Lolita (1962), and its
remake, Lolita (1997), provide us with an excellent case study not only
of changes in twentieth-century American society, but also of how powerful the
medium of film can be in its treatment of the ethical dimension of the human
condition.
Both the original film and the
remake center around the ethical problem of incest. That it is wrong ethically
is beyond dispute in the films. That this message is easily received even as
the respective filmmakers use various techniques to dilute the intensity of the
harm is a credit to the filmmakers. Make the presentation of an ethical harm
too intense and audiences will bolt. On the other hand, the salient role of censorship
on the original film risks that the harm is too distant to be grasped by
audiences.
In terms of the narrative, both
films, and especially the remake, mollify the audience, as if diluting whiskey so
it doesn’t sting “going down the hatch.” In both films, the harsh atrocity of
the incestual relationship would be harder to take were Prof. Humbert Lolita’s
actual father rather than her step-father, and if he were that even before he
marries Charlotte, Lolita’s mother, when he is merely renting a room in the
house. Also, that the incestual sex between Humbert and Lolita begins midway
through the film, when Humbert is no longer married to Charlotte and thus not
technically her step-father and he and Lolita no longer even live in Charlotte’s
house, makes it easier for an audience, which can view the relationship more from
the standpoint of the difference in ages, which is still problematic because
Lolita is fourteen years old, than from that of a biological father having sex
with his daughter. To be sure, the ethically problematic co-existence of the
parental and sexual roles by Humbert is obvious, as is the fact that Lolita is
a minor whereas Humbert is a middle-aged adult, and both of these elements can
be expected to make the typical viewer uncomfortable.
The remake makes a significant
departure narratively from the original film in lessening, albeit marginally, Humbert’s
blameworthiness. The story begins with Humbert as a teenager when he has a beautiful
girlfriend who is not coincidentally also (i.e., like Lolita) fourteen years
old. They are so in love, but she tragically dies of typhus. We sympathize with
the teenage Humbert as he cries over his lost, beautiful love, and perhaps even
feel that he deserves another such love. Tempering and adding complexity to the
ethical issue of incest is the adult Humbert’s very human desire to get back a
lost love, even if vicariously. The resemblance of the actresses playing
Annabel Lee and Lolita is likely no accident. The sympathy dissipates, however,
when Humbert crosses a line with Lolita by letting her perform sexual acts on
him during their first hotel-stay.
Paradoxically, even as the remake,
relative to the original film, makes the offence more palatable to us by
adapting the narrative even more, we are brought closer to the sexual act both
directly and by the story-world seeming more sensual. This is accomplished by both
zoomed-in visuals and selective magnification of some ordinary sounds of things
that we usually don’t notice in our daily lives but that, were we aware of
them, could provide empirical experience with added depth. In fact, the medium
of film moreover has great (generally unappreciated) value in being able to
make us aware of the depth that experience is capable of, and thereby enrich
our experience of living.
The original film, released in
1962, lacks sensuality and the references to sex are only indirect. Not even
the word “pornography” is mentioned; it is instead artfully referred to as “art
film,” as if every “Indie” film were pornographic, by Lolita when she tells
Humbert that she refused to be in such a film. Neither Humbert nor Lolita visibly
show much physical affection generally, Humbert even being physically revolted
by Charlotte. Even when Lolita runs upstairs to say goodbye to him before she
leaves for summer camp, she merely hugs him, with the camera doing a quick
cut-away so not to show her kissing him on a cheek. In the same scene in the
remake, Lolita literally jumps up on him, wraps her legs around his waist and gives
him a big wet kiss on the lips. From such an exact comparison, we can infer that
a shift in cultural attitudes in American society occurred between when the
original film and the remake were made. The only time Humbert embraces Lolita
is when she is mourning her mother’s death, and the contact does not imply anything
sexual. For it is normal, and even expected, that a parental figure would hug a
crying child.
In the remake, touching is a staple
between Humbert and Lolita even when he is just a boarder in the house. In
fact, Lolita’s legs and arms touch him so often that the girl comes off as
uncoordinated. Interestingly, she sits in his lap early on when he is working
at the desk in his room, and then again later in the film when both are naked
and his dick is obviously inside her. In both cases, neither person is
complaining. Although the first sexual episode between the two is not shown, three
subsequent episodes are shown—two of which are not enjoyable for Humbert, as
Lolita has learned how to use sex with him to get things, including money. All
the touching, complete with its sound, makes the incest more real for the
audience.
At the same time, that Lolita
entices Humbert when he is a boarder by touching him even while sharing a porch
swing with him and her mother, and kissing him goodbye, and then offers to
give him a blow-job (and likely more) on the first morning of their first night
at a hotel after Charlotte’s death moderates the ethical harm of the incest
because she is willing even when she eventually realizes that she can get money
from him from having sex with him. In one scene, both are naked in bed,
obviously having sex, and she is trying to collect the various coins that on
the sheets. “You’re demanding that I pay more in the middle?” he asks her. She
smacks him with a hand for obstructing her collection effort.
To be sure, and this point should
be made perfectly clear, an adult is ethically bound to refuse the sexual advances
of a child, but at least in the remake the sex is not forced, and thus rape in
that sense. The ethical harm is more in how Humbert’s monopoly of her in terms
of dating and sex ruins the rest of her life than being only in the sexual act
itself.
When we first see the 14 year-old
Lolita in the remake, she is a smiling, carefree girl enjoying summer in her
backyard. Lying on the grass, she is even enjoying the water from a
water-sprinkler falling on her as she looks at pictures in a magazine. Her
innocence can be seen in her beautiful smile, and this seems to be what catches
Humbert’s gaze, but in retrospect it is clear that he is sexually turned on by
the sight of her body even though she has not yet even developed female breasts.
In her last scenes in the remake, she looks terrible, wearing a cheap dress and
glasses and living in a shack with her new, impoverished husband. Significantly,
she is no longer smiling. In his last scene in the film, Humbert laments that she
is not among the children laughing in a distant village. “Can you forgive me
for what I’ve done to you?” he asks her as he is leaving her small house after
giving her what can only be guilt-money.
Lolita’s relationship with Humbert
is clearly dysfunctional. Even though this takes place after Charlotte’s death,
so strictly speaking, he is no longer Lolita’s step-father, he refers to
himself as such to her and takes on a parental role. She is, after all, a child
and behaves as such, and is in need of parental supervision. The power
differential is uncomfortable for her, and us, though not for Humbert. She
naturally bristles at his totalitarian control over her life, including her sex
life even when she is attending a school while living with him as he teaches at
a college. Anger and even violence result. To escape from him, she secretly
plans to live with another pedophile, Clare Quilty, whom she claims to be
attracted to, though he kicks her out after she refuses to be in a pornographic,
or “art,” film in which she would have to “blow those beastly boys.” She is
left alone with no money and with no previous normal sexual relationship. Due
to his possessive selfishness and his refusal to respect the proper sexual
distance between a child and an adult, Humbert clearly acts very unethically
with respect to Lolita. Out of all the ethical theories promulgated
historically, one in particular is especially applicable to this film, and to
the nature of the medium in being able to provoke visceral emotional reactions.
David Hume theorized in the
eighteenth century that the sentiment, or feeling, of a gut-level disapproval triggered
by a moral wrong is essentially moral judgment itself. As one of my professors
used to say, if you walk by a dead body that has a knife in its back, you are
going to have a negative emotional reaction, unless you are pathological. This
feeling is your ethical judgment that something unethical has happened. By
engaging both our eyes and ears, film can reach down deep and trigger such a
sentiment of disapprobation, and thus trigger ethical judgments in an audience
during a screening. This is much more powerful than merely having an audience told
that something unethical is happening in a film. Although hearing a neighbor
tell Humbert in the original film that “the neighbors are talking” about
Humbert’s relationship with “his daughter” and even seeing the concerned look
of the drug-store clerk who serves Lolita an ice-cream shake in the remake
provide subtle and thus believable indications of just how ethically
problematic the “father-daughter” relationship really is, actually feeling a
sentiment of disapprobation while watching and hearing Humbert and Lolita having
sex is much more powerful in giving an audience a sense of the ethical
dimension in the human condition.
Playing a “supporting role” in making
the ethical problem “real” for an audience watching the remake are the means in
which sensuality in the story-world is brought out by close-ups and the
magnification of particular sounds. The remake is hardly alone among films in
being able to bring taken-for-granted ordinary sounds to our notice, and thus
giving us the opportunity to sense the depth of experience that is possible even
in our banal daily lives. The sound of shoes walking on a hard floor, the sound
of air-pressure from the car-door of a new car being closed, and the sound of a
pen or pencil being used on paper are just a few examples of sounds that we
typically overlook and yet can be made aware of in a film. Even the sound of
rain can be made to stand out. One byproduct of this cinematic experience is
that we might then notice more sounds in our daily experience, and thus have a fuller,
or deeper experience of the world in which we live.
In the remake, not all of the
heightened sounds are related to or intimate sex; sensuality as sensitivity in
experience goes beyond the sexual. The lazy tires of Humbert’s car in the first
scene, for example, bring us into the story-world without any suggestion
that sex will be a salient feature of that world. The magnified sound of moths
being electrically zapped on the hotel porch, where Humbert first meets Quilty,
is likewise devoid of sexual inuendo; the point of that exaggerated sound is
perhaps that both men are living dangerously in having sex with children. The
sound of chocolate syrup shooting into Lolita’s glass, followed by the sound of
a scoop of ice-cream being released, however, conveys more of a sense of
sensuality, though still not as sexual as the sound of Lolita’s body moving
under a sheet in a hotel bed that she will soon share with Humbert during their
first night at a hotel (in the original film, he sleeps on a cot at the foot of
the bed). That the sound of the two kissing even back when Humbert is a boarder
can be easily heard is no accident. Even when Lolita’s disjointedly throws a
leg or arm in Humbert’s direction when he is a boarder, the sounds can easily
be heard and suggest a story-world in which touching is real. I submit that
such use of sound ultimately brings the audience closer to the incestual act as
being real in the story-world.
Film can employ both sound and
visuals to enhance sensitivity to particular things in a way that leaves the
audience itself more sensitive during the screening, and thus open to the
ethical dimension, which is then more likely to stay with the viewers after the
movie. In other words, by heightening experience, a filmmaker can prepare an
audience to be brought closer in without feeling threatened or revolted. Hume’s
sentiment of disapprobation can accordingly be really felt, rather than
just thought about. In this way at least, the medium of film can get “inside”
of people ethically and thus enhance our understanding of the human condition
from an ethical standpoint.
In fact, the ethical dimension overshadows
the dysfunctional psychology in Humbert’s obsession over Lolita even though
James Mason’s Humbert in the original film is clearly shown as pathological in
his reaction to the final rejection by Lolita when he visits her and her
husband near the end of the film. We are perhaps more accustomed to film being
used, as by Alfred Hitchcock, for psychological effect than to focus on the
ethical dimension of the human condition by means of particular ethical
problems or dilemmas.
The ethical dimension also
overshadows the religious implications. In the original film, Charlotte asks
Humbert if he believes in God. “Does he believe in me?” is Humbert’s telling
reply. But nothing more is said or suggested of religion in the original film. Humbert
is more interested in the state of his soul in the remake. As the narrator, he
admits that having sex with Lolita is a sin, and furthermore that it has played
a direct role in ruining her life. In asking her, “Can you forgive me for what
I’ve done to you?” it is clear that he is thinking about forgiveness. He is
explicitly interested in his redemption, for he says that Quilty prevented it
by taking Lolita away. Perhaps the implication we can draw from this is that Humbert
thought at least at one point that he could eventually make Lolita happy. That
he is delusional in this is clear as he asks her to leave her husband and
return even though she has just told him that Quilty is the only man she ever
liked romantically. In short, Humbert’s understanding of his redemption is
clouded by the delusion in his sexual obsession. Even so, it is the ethical dimension rather
than the religious and psychological explanations that stands out in Lolita.
