“Quilty!”

Admittedly, I haven’t read the book so you won’t find me analyzing the film through my vision of the Nabokov novel, nor proposing scenarios for what Kubrick should and shouldn’t have done. All I know is that LOLITA, the 1962 film, is Kubrick’s unsung masterpiece — an overlooked, underappreciated early gem which I consider not only one of his very best, but also one of the most psychologically complex of his career next to EYES WIDE SHUT. Where previous work, particularly THE KILLING, KILLER’S KISS, and FEAR AND DESIRE, relied upon a highly expressive visual style to communicate the inner psychological worlds of his characters, LOLITA is really his first film to leverage the expressive power of performance to create conflicting narrative lines of drama, surrealist characterizations, and grotesque-imaginary interior worlds. From here on out, performance becomes just as crucial to Kubrick’s work as camera, blocking, atmosphere and mis-en-scene. 

Everything about the film’s perverse subject material works because the actors, who are all extraordinary, are dealing with a script that forces them into the role of innuendo, implication and insinuation. I have no idea how sexually explicit the book is, and I’m certain Kubrick ran into censorship issues along the way. The fact that he is unable (or perhaps unwilling?) to dramatize the erotic aspect of Humbert’s obsession with Lolita, opting instead for innuendo and implication, is the film’s greatest asset. What is supposed to shock us, never ultimately does, and this draws us into a fantasy that is both vulgar and perhaps entirely non-existent. Which is to say I still don’t know if the sexual energy of the film ever finds objective existence on the other side of Humbert’s mind, which I’ll unpack in just a moment. The script, written by Nabokov, creates an ambiguously dense sexual subtext that the actors are forced to internalize, dance around, and play coy with, and in turn this creates a variety of subtly expressive and emotional gestures that cut right to the heart of so many of the film’s most complex ironies. 

Take the way Kubrick immerses his audience into Humbert’s dreamy idealization of Lolita. His first vision of the nymphet comes to us in a garden that feels mysteriously abstracted from time, countering the plain interiors of the Ramsdale estate he toured just moments earlier with Lolita’s insufferable mother, Charlotte. Humbert has no interest in Charlotte or her house, but his mood suddenly changes when he enters the garden and sees the young Lolita bathed in an aura of sensuality, clad with bikini, sun hat, and heart-shaped glasses. The hard edges of the frame merge into ethereal softness at the same time Humbert’s “change-of-mind” blurs with surreal conflict. 

What is happening here? Perverted fascination? Spellbound pedophilia? In broad daylight? Where everyone could easily detect a relationship so uncouth, if acted on? 

It’s established earlier on and throughout that Humbert prefers the private sanctuary of his words in his diary, which he keeps locked in a drawer away from incriminating eyes. Here in this moment, however, in the sunlight of a “normal” suburban world like Ramsdale, Humbert is confronted with urges that can’t possibly be articulated directly. Instead, he moves into suggestive wordplay, taking up Charlotte’s offer on the house and promises of “late night snacks” and “cherry pies.” It is the first of many ironic complications that mask Humbert’s psychological disorder.

Nabokov’s script allows Kubrick to objectify Humbert’s disorder through a pattern of pratfall, presumption, and playful banter, blurring the boundary between his private fantasy and his deranged reality. One scene finds Humbert peeking over a book while Lolita is hula-hooping (code: erotically thrusting) in the garden. Later we see Humbert and Charlotte playing a game of chess when “Queen” Lolita suddenly appears in the background (“You’re going to take my Queen,” says Charlotte. “That’s my intention,” replies Humbert.). While driving in a car with Humbert, we see Lolita in the passenger seat erotically sucking on a straw inside a Coke bottle. She asks him, almost with phallic flair, “Have you ever kissed the Blarney stone?” Kubrick continues this surrealist approach to unmasking Humbert’s sickness: At a drive-in movie, Humbert is seen sandwiched between the clutches of a mother (Charlotte) and a daughter (Lolita) while watching the horror flick, “The Curse of Frankenstein.” On the movie screen, we see the revolting monster turn on its creator, portending the revolting Humbert-monster who later turns on Charlotte to seize the forbidden 14-year old. 

Underneath all this monstrosity are pungent layers of irony: To Charlotte, Humbert is a man who will “be a father to my little girl.” To Humbert, who uproariously laughs at the idea, Lolita is not simply a “little girl” but a sexual conquest to be conquered, the pursuit of which not only consumes him, but further reveals incestuous boundary issues. For example, Humbert frequently vacillates between being Lolita’s nagging father and salacious lover. He’s horribly over-protective of her, like a jealous lover, but he’s also forced to reckon with and comfort her feelings when she learns of her deceased mother. He can’t afford losing her affections, but he also can’t ultimately ignore her real life needs of being a living person. This is what makes Humbert such a fascinating character, the way Kubrick-Nabokov obfuscate his dark sexual obsession behind the pall of his more paternal and protective instincts. Disturbingly, those “protective parent” instincts are also the most common techniques used by pedophiles to groom their prey. Still, it’s complicated. Humbert eventually comforts and loves the real Lolita, who later becomes bloated and pregnant in need of money with her new husband. Lolita, in the eyes of Humbert, ultimately becomes another Charlotte, a “normal” woman stripped of her chimerical aura. I’ll return to this point at the end.

The film weaves this icky pattern of hidden eroticism and latent paternalism into the text, dovetailing further into how Lolita is both a grounded living reality and an obscure object of desire within Humbert’s solipsistic universe. At first, it’s like she only exists in his mind as a fantasy. Or maybe it’s that he cares more about the fantasy of Lolita than the flesh and blood reality of Lolita herself. In marriage, for example, he’s constantly trying to escape from Charlotte to dream about his infatuation with the young girl. At one point, he escapes into the bathroom where he scribbles his secrets in a diary and refuses to come out upon Charlotte’s beck and call. In the next moment, when he and Charlotte are making love in the bedroom, he retreats into his fantasy embodied in Lolita’s picture at the end of the table. Later in the bathroom, after Charlotte has died, Humbert dreamily sits in the hot tub while Lolita’s ever teasing “ya-ya-ya” song flirtatiously plays to his enjoyment. In all of these instances, it is the fantasy of Lolita, not the voraciously living libido of Charlotte, that turns him on. To Humbert, fantasy of this masturbatory type is more real, more exotic, than the living thing, which is also why he’s constantly jealous of his fantasy being taken away from him. The Rexes and Roys from Lolita’s school create nonexistent sexual threats to Humbert’s fantasy, but nowhere is his fantasy of the nymphet more seriously threatened than in the mysteriously dark perspective of Clare Quilty. 

Clare Quilty, played by mastermind Peter Sellers, singlehandedly slays this film with the most complex sexual irony. He’s the missing puzzle piece to this absurd American menage a trois (Humbert-Charlotte-Lolita). His presence seems harmless, at times hilarious, but man this guy is like a ghost at best, a devil at worst, who weirdly shows up at the most inopportune times for Humbert and makes his life a living hell. But first, who or what is Clare Quilty? And what does his onscreen persona—in all its myriad forms—tell us about the psychological interiors of Humbert’s decaying mind? Let me start by saying Quilty is the reason why the the sexual energy of the film feels sabotaged between subjective and objective worlds. He takes on many forms under different disguises, and each form provides a mirror image for both Humbert’s perverted fantasy and the romantic substance of that fantasy that Lolita never embodies in material form. Which is to say, Kubrick locates Quilty in time which objectifies his existence, but everything about his character feels surrealistically abstract, like an alter-ego of Humbert’s internal disorder that never actually materializes before our eyes.

Let’s look at some examples. 

In his most pedestrian form, Quilty is mysteriously Clare Quilty, a man whose picture is seen hanging from the wall in the Haze home. He appears at the school dance. He exudes professionalism, success and revered sexuality. The women of the town adore him. It’s suggested he’s been in a previous relationship with Charlotte, perhaps as a foil to secretly have an affair with Lolita herself. In this way, the love triangle comprising Charlotte-Quilty-Lolita doubles for the love-triangle comprising Humbert-Quilty-Lolita. In both pairs, Quilty and Humbert use Charlotte for the same sinister aim—to get to Lolita. This makes Charlotte nothing more than a roadblock, a pawn on their perverted chessboard. Lolita, meanwhile, deceives Humbert to get to Quilty in the same way Humbert deceives Charlotte to get to Lolita. All of these triangles and dramatic pairings should make your head spin, because yes, this is crazy psychosexual shit. Nabokov-Kubrick are organizing these triangle pairs in a way that captures the tragic journey of anyone who follows the forbidden fantasy of Lolita to its materialized end. 

In another form, Quilty assumes the role of policeman during a Humbert-Lolita getaway at a private hotel. There, at the Enchanted Hunters, he emerges from the shadows like a shape-shifting demon out of a noir film, mocking Humbert’s pretense of having a “normal” relationship with Lolita. Quilty calls himself a “normal guy,” wishing he, too, had a “lovely, pretty little girl” like Lolita for himself. The emphasis on the “normality” of the situation cuts with ironic distance, in a way poking fun at Humbert’s psychotic attachment to the fantasy realm. Humbert has always wished for his fantasy of Lolita to materialize in the “normal” world, without anyone snooping or asking questions. The reality of Quilty, however, makes his fantasy a living nightmare. Quilty is the one man who recognizes Humbert’s insanity, and though Humbert doesn’t realize it yet, he’s living in a black comedy directed by Quilty who unconsciously exposes his monstrous side.

While talking to the devil himself on the patio, Humbert’s mask starts to crack. The paranoia begins to seep a little deeper. Does Quilty know what Humbert is doing with Lolita? The brilliance of Sellers during this scene, who plays up the role with total creeper effect, is that he games Humbert with the same diabolical force that Humbert games Charlotte and Lolita. Officer Creeper-Quilty mirrors Humbert’s predatory and perverse nature back to him, satirizing his cosmic fear that policeman and other shadow authorities are hot on his trail and privy to his gross secret. It’s one of the most surreal scenes of the entire film, almost like you’re watching a symbolic representation of Humbert’s conscience talking to itself.

Quilty’s impersonation of a policeman is outmatched only by Quilty’s drag interpretation of Lolita’s psychologist and school counsellor, Dr. Zempf. By the time Humbert meets Zempf (once again, their meeting occurs in the noir-ish shadows), it is assumed Humbert has already had sex with Lolita, though the elliptical nature of the storytelling rules out anything for certain. Zempf is an entirely different monster than Officer Quilty. He grills Humbert under the force of a Nazi accent, psychoanalyzes Lolita’s sexuality with Freudian authority, and once again throws light onto Humbert’s blackened soul by forcing him to awaken to the nightmare that lurks beneath his perverted dream. It is here, in the privacy of his own chambers, that Zempf digs beneath the ID of Humbert’s fantasy and prevents it from ever taking shape in the sunlight of Ramsdale’s “normal” suburbia. By materializing the surreality of Zempf as an extension of Humbert’s mental disorder, we realize that Quilty’s Zempf is not just another alter-ego to Humbert, but the literal personification of Humbert’s guilt, paranoia and entrapment.

From here until the end of the film, Humbert, now thoroughly cursed by Quilty, will be haunted by prying neighbors, stalking cars, and uncanny insane asylums. All of this is preparatory for Humbert to finally face the reflexive mirror, to see Quilty for who he actually is, and to shudder in complete disgust when he sees himself. 

The whole film, Humbert has failed to discern Quilty’s identity. He’s failed even to detect the nature of Quilty’s games, which have all intended to unmask his deeply masked psychosis. Humbert doesn’t recognize anything Quilty-like because it’s the part of his soul he’s deeply repressed and taken into hiding to preserve the impossibility of his sick fantasy. It’s really not until the very end of the film, when Humbert discovers Lolita old, bloated and pregnant, a wife to another man, and a galaxy far away from his, that the mask finally cracks. Lolita has become her mother, the reality of which does several things to Humbert simultaneously. Humbert was always a bit disgusted with Charlotte because of what she represented — a living, breathing, vexing being who foiled his seedy fantasy and roadblocked his ability to make it a reality. Seeing this new Lolita before him reminds him of Charlotte, which dispels her dreamy-magical aura. He’s still willing to take her away from it all (a token of how long he’s invested in the illusion), but it’s all kinda soured now. The fantasy has become reality, and the reality for Humbert is rendered in repetitive, deterministic terms: daughters become their mothers, fantasies corrode to reality, and Quiltys eventually arise from the darkness into the scorching light of their Humbertian superegos. The realization of Kubrick’s clockwork universe shatters Humbert. He finally realizes his own destruction. He’s sees himself ruined by the fantasies and perversions he allowed himself to be consumed by. He is a man full of rage, grief and disgust. He recognizes that Quilty is his dark half, and knows now what he needs to do. Quilty, the vile, ugly, reprehensible shadow to Humbert, is the quixotic mirror-demon that must be utterly and completely annihilated.

“Quilty!”

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