Subject
Fwd: "I suspect Andrew's line of thought is right" Re HH's
psycho-stays
psycho-stays
From
Date
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Don and List-
Exactly.
It is HH himself who plants all the evidence that he suffers from a
"malaise".
Perhaps in his panoramic view of American, Nabokov was also examining a
liberal American tendency to "explain" evil - to find that psychology
or history mitigated moral repugnance, as with Bolshevism or
Psychoanalysis.
Not only on film, but in the text as well, it is important that the
viewer/reader become at least somewhat seduced by the attractive,
urbane European. For when that happens, a degree of complicity can be
brought home in the final hill-top scene.
Mason was too bland, Irons too creepy. The young Anthony Hopkins could have
seduced an audience and then brought it up short.
-Sandy Drescher
On Monday, April 25, 2005, at 07:00 PM, Donald B. Johnson wrote:
> ED NOTE. I suspect Andrew's line of thought is right. It might have
> made an
> interesting difference if one of the films had included the
> institutional
> backstory. Nobody (film or lit crit) seem to have taken much interest
> in this
> angle. Seems important to me.
> -------------------------------------------------------------
>
> ----- Forwarded message from as-brown@comcast.net -----
> Date: Mon, 25 Apr 2005 14:55:47 -0400
> From: Andrew Brown <as-brown@comcast.net>
> Reply-To: Andrew Brown <as-brown@comcast.net>
> Subject: Re: Re: Fw: pedagogia/douglas harper online
> dictionary/pederosis
> To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum This is an interesting point. The
> omission of
> HH's spells in sanatoriums does, I think, tend to make him seem more
> "normal"
> to viewers. The omission of such scenes, though, was probably more in
> response
> to the limitations on the amount of "backstory" the film medium allows
> its
> characters.
>
> One requirement was to make HH superficially attractive to women,
> which James
> Mason and Jeremy Irons do well. The second was to show that he is
> selfish,
> perverted and obsessed. If the filmmaker portrays the dark aspects too
> well, it
> makes it very difficult to put across the first. Both films fall
> short by
> giving almost no indication that what HH has done, and is doing, is a
> terrible
> crime.
>
> One could have made a very different, but equally faithful film of
> Lolita if one
> showed HH's European efforts to obtain child prostitutes; HH's
> marriage to
> Valeria, and his brutal thoughts toward her; HH writing ads for his
> uncle's
> perfume business; HH obtaining sleeping pills from doctors; his plans
> to drown
> Charlotte; the system of threats and bribes by which he forces his
> captive to
> do his will; and the tears that Lolita sheds every single night. But
> all this
> would make an almost unbearably dark film.
>
> As it is, a person unfamiliar with the novel could watch either film
> and suspect
> -- with the exception of a very few brief scenes in Lyne's
> interpretation --
> that HH is doing nothing more than taking his legitimate step-daughter
> on a
> driving trip across the U.S.
>
> Since neither director chose the dark path, I think the omissions they
> made were
> more about getting an amazingly rich story down to the 90 to 120
> minutes of film
> time that the commercial movie world allows.
>
> Andrew Brown
----- End forwarded message -----