Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2002 | Page 62

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Popular Culture Review

Entertainment Weekly reveals the devolution from the faithful to the loose as a
slippage accomplished by false pretensions to the literal:
Lyne, it turns out, agrees with the critics’ first take: “Nabokov’s
screenplay is as bad as his novel is magnificent,” he says. “He
murdered his book.” To rectify the crime, Lyne treated the novel
as a holy text, searching high and low for a writer who could
capture the fragile elegance of Nabokov’s original prose.
(Harold Pinter and David Mamet each gave it whirl, but the
job ultimately went to New Yorker scribe Stephen Schiff.) He
looked far and wide for the perfect actor to play Humbert,
talking with everyone from Anthony Hopkins (“Too old,” he
says) to Warren Beatty (“He was intrigued for about five
minutes”) to Hugh Grant, who wasn’t intrigued even that long:
“The trouble is, that’s my favorite book of all time— I didn’t
want anyone to make a film of it,” Grant explains. In the end
Lyne chose an actor with vast experience playing dirty old men
(see Irons in 1992’s Damage or this summer’s Stealing Beauty).
That left the ultimate challenge: finding a real-life nymphet to
fill Lolita’s saddle shoes. Nearly 2,000 girls auditioned, though
Lyne says many were “30-year-olds trying to be Lolita.” For
her audition, Swain, a freshman at Malibu High, sent a video
of herself reading from the novel. “One moment she looked 9
years old,” rhapsodizes Lyne. “The next you could sense her
sexuality.” (1-2)
The beginning of the passage portrays Lyne in the now familiar role of the faithful
lover, romantically attached to his aesthetic object and protective of its treatment.
At the same time he is the renegade hero. Lyne’s attack on Nabokov’s screenplay
and Kubrick’s film allows him to pose as the man against two systems at once: the
system that declares Kubrick’s film a classic, and the censors that declare his film
unacceptable.* Portrayed as a man with a vision and aesthetic principles, Lyne
totes his project from writer to writer, actor to actor, “high and low” and “far and
wide.”
Ironically— or perhaps appropriately— it is with the intrusion of Hugh
Grant’s parenthetical self-righteousness, that Lyne shifts fi-om Humbert the aesthetic
genius and accomplished practitioner of the perverse to scandalous exploiter.
Suddenly, in comparison to Grant’s more absolute veneration of the text, Lyne is
the violator of his own sacred scriptures. Directly after Grant’s moral assertion,
Lyne and his film fall into a debauchery revealed in false claims to literalness.