Novel v. Film

Welcome back bloggers!

Today, for my fifth and final blog post about Lolita, I will be comparing the novel to its 1962 film adaptation. The stills that I’ve incorporated throughout my posts have all been taken from this film.

The 1962 film was directed by Stanley Kubrick, and the screenplay was written by Vladimir Nabokov himself. I find it fascinating that Nabokov was responsible for the film adaptation because there were several distinct discrepancies between the novel and film. In my opinion, the most striking of those discrepancies was the emphasis of Clare Quilty’s role in the film.

In the film version of Lolita, the opening scene is that of Clare Quilty’s murder, immediately suggesting the importance of his character. From that scene forward, Quilty’s secretive presence is suggested in several scenes in which he is not included in the novel. On some occasions during the film, the main characters were not even aware of his presence. In the final scene of the film, when Humbert visits Lolita in her new home to bring money for her and her husband, Lolita reveals that Quilty had in fact been following her and Humbert from the minute he retrieved her from camp. In the film, the man Humbert spoke to on the porch of the Enchanted Hunters, the school psychiatrist at Beardsley, and the “uncle” that picked Lolita up from the hospital had all been Quilty in disguise. While it was revealed in the novel that Quilty had pretended to be Lolita’s uncle, the man on the porch and the psychiatrist were treated as separate, individual characters in the novel.

Although the increased importance of Quilty’s role in the film seems like a dramatic change from the novel, his increased presence makes sense of the following reason. While the novel, Lolita, is narrated by Humbert, the movie is filmed from an omniscient point of view that reveals Quilty’s face when Humbert can not see it. While Humbert is speaking to the man on the porch of the Enchanted Hunters (whose identity is not revealed in the novel), only the viewers of the film can see that the man is in fact Quilty. Another example of this effect is when viewers are able to see Quilty’s face behind a newspaper that obstructs him from Humbert’s view. In the novel, readers could not be made aware of Quilty’s presence in those two scenes because Humbert was not aware of it. In the film however, viewers are provided with more information than Humbert has himself.

(Clare Quilty with Charlotte Haze)

Another major discrepancy between the novel and film adaptation of Lolita was the fact that Lolita was portrayed to be around sixteen years old in the film. A scene included in the movie that had not been in the book was of Lolita’s high school dance, and rather than being sent to summer camp as a camper, she was sent as a camp counselor. This was undoubtedly a choice made by Hollywood to make the film more “palatable” to an audience, which I personally find disturbing. Although Lolita is about four years older in the film than she is in the novel, she is still an adolescent, and it is no more acceptable or justifiable for a man in his late thirties/early forties to be obsessed with her.

Overall, despite some modifications, for the most part, the film stayed true to the novel. There were several lines of dialogue in the film that were taken directly from the novel, and the film even included smaller details from the novel like when Charlotte Haze stuffed a soiled sock into the drawer of a hallway desk. I thought the characterization of Charlotte, Humbert, and Lolita in the film matched the novel perfectly, even though it was conducted through different ways. An example of such characterization in the film is when Charlotte attempted to impress Humbert with her collection of art reproductions and pronounced Van Gogh as “Van Gock.” This conversation was not included in the novel, but it served effectively as a method of characterizing Charlotte as silly, appearance-oriented, and insecure. Another similarity between the novel and book that I appreciated was that the film only alluded to sex. Similarly to the novel’s figurative language and suggestions, the scenes in the film when Humbert and Lolita were written to have had sex in the novel faded out in the film.

In conclusion, I thought the 1962 film adaptation of Lolita was very well done. While there were scenes from the novel that I would have liked to have seen included (ie: Humbert and Lolita’s road trips around the country), including them would have made the film that is already two and a half hours long very tedious. The cinematography of the film was wonderful, it stayed relatively true to the novel, and most of the changes that were made for the film still worked well enough with the novel that they could have been included in it. If you have not read the novel, I would recommend reading it first for its beautiful prose. Once you have read the novel, I would definitely recommend seeing the film.