Lolita (1962)

The thing that caught my eye the most when I was reading through Elisabeth Powers text about Lolita was that she refers to her as a star. Naremore also mentions this briefly in his book. I did not see Lolita as a star when I watched the movie, but the more I think about it the more sense it makes.

In the movie Lolita is like a movie star and she has aspirations of becoming on in real life. When she meets Humbert she knows from their very first meeting that he will, if he gets the chance, treat her like a star. Humbert becomes like an obsessed fan with Lolita. He cries in her room like a little girl when she leaves, just like young girls were devastated when the Beatles split up. (As seen in Apollo 13). He also sends her candy, almost like fan mail, without her mother’s permission. He pampers her by serving her drinks and sandwiches “just the way you like them”. He also buys her things, do all the housework and even paint her toenails. She is using him but being treated like a star is not like actually being a star, and the only man that can do that for her is Quilty.

Quilty has connections to Hollywood and he promises her to take her there and she leaves Humbert. When it turns out that Quilty takes her to star in pornographic “art” movies she leaves him. And she takes on the role of wife and mother instead. Humbert still acts like an obsessive fan and when he learns that she will not come back with him, again crying, he goes out to take revenge on the one that took her away from him.

Another thing I noticed in the film is the returning theme of order and contingency that I brought up in the The Killing. In Lolita we can see that all of Humbert’s plans seem to fail and these are caused by things he cannot predict, even if they are in some cases apparent for us the viewers. He plans to sleep in the same bed as Lolita, but she wakes up. His plan to take Lolita to Mexico fails, because he cannot see that Quilty will take her away. The he also plans to kill his wife Charlotte but this is the only plan he abandons, but as it turns out she dies anyways making the contingency the cause of her death.