Humbert Humbert (Jeremy Irons) is a pedophile. He encourages his victim's mother, Charlotte Haze (Melanie Griffith) to commit suicide so that he might whisk away her daughter, Dolores/ “Lolita” (Dominique Swain), force early womanhood upon her, and keep her to fulfill his sick desire to revive his childhood love who passed decades ago. And yet, we bury our revulsion; we pity him, side with him against his struggles, and we hope Lolita stays with him. This is because of the voice-over narration Humbert supplies in Adrian Lyne's “Lolita” (1997). As Humbert shares his love, fear, and hopes with us as viewers, we are given a direct in to the workings of his mind and to his humanity, and it becomes more and more difficult, as the movie rolls, for us to condemn him.
Humbert's first impression upon us immediately instills pity and tugs at our heartstrings during a preview-shot of the end of his story, as he is swerving over a lonely country road, police chasing behind, hands fiddling with a hairpin between his bloody fingers and with a gun next to him, mourning the loss of a love. He divulges:
“She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo... Lee... Ta.”
Shortly after we are informed of who he is missing, we are also filled in on his personal story with his first love. He was fourteen when he first fell in love with Annabel (Emma Griffiths Malin), and not a year older when he lost her to typhus. There has obviously been a gap since then that he has not yet been able to reconcile or fill:
“But there might've been no Lolita at all, had I not first met Annabel... Whatever happens to a boy during the summer he's fourteen can mark him for life... All at once, we were madly, hopelessly in love. Four months later she died of typhus. The shock of her death froze
something in me. The child I loved was gone. But I kept looking for her...”
We pity him; we mourn Annabel's death with him and we may even share our own experience with the screen for a moment. We want to know how he got here. We have not yet been reeled in completely, partly because of the lingering gun and blood that arouses suspicion, but, just like that, we are certainly sitting in the passenger's seat with Humbert, offering a tissue at least.
It's a good thing Humbert told us this story early on in the film, because this is all that will keep us holding onto him for some time while he throws us back to the beginning of everything where it can be assumed that he got into this mess by making advances on Mrs. Haze's daughter. Humbert's story begins as he flashes back to the summer Mrs. Haze takes him in while he writes, in waiting, for an autumn teaching job. Humbert completely ignores Mrs. Hazes's advances in favor of young teen Lolita's perverted attention. While Lolita is obviously a troublemaker, Humbert owes us, at the very least, some sort of explanation for not completely resisting like he should have. (“A normal man, when given a group photograph of school girls and asked to point out the loveliest one, will not necessarily choose the nymphette. You have to be an artist, a madman... full of shame and melancholy and despair...”) Of course we remember Annabel and why he must seeking Lolita's attention, and so we continue to give him our time, hesitant as we may be. Once the tensions caused by the strange love between him and Lolita are strong enough to drive Mrs. Haze to suicide, we begin to see him unravel, as getting what he wants is obviously not what is right. However, because we are concerned for both characters' well-being, we follow Humbert and Lolita on a journey through hotels and motels to some unknown, likely non-existent place Humbert is seeking for them to be alone and in love. All the while, Humbert confesses his story and defends himself as if he were presenting his case to a jury (which we may be able to assume happened in the end):
“Gentlewomen of the jury, if my happiness could have talked, it would have filled that hotel with a deafening roar... My only regret was I did not deposit key number 342 at the desk, leave the hotel, the town, the country and the planet that night... I felt more and more uncomfortable... It was as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I’d just killed.”
While Humbert is overjoyed at having Lolita to himself now, he is also realizing he is doing wrong, even that he feels he has killed something within Lolita, and so he desperately justifies his mistake with Lolita's confession of relations between her and another boy at summer camp:
“Gentlewomen of the jury, I was not even her first lover...”
He appeals to (female) viewers' hearts by admitting his weaknesses and mistakes, and by exposing Lolita to be seemingly just as scandalous as he is. He reels us in a little further, and we offer more of our time to hear his story out. Some of us watching may even start to hope for Humbert's happy ending.
The longer he is with Lolita, the more Humbert is finding he must provide for her. We see the scared human in him struggling with being both Lolita's “Father” and her lover, and so we are not completely repulsed by the demented juxtaposition of these roles. (“I was not quite prepared for the reality of my dual role. On the one hand, the willing corruptor of an innocent, and on the other, Humbert the happy housewife...” - some of us may even laugh at the dark humor in that line...) When we see that he is seeing to Lolita's education while they travel, and that she is interested in the adventure they are having, we soften, and the pit in our stomach shrinks from nausea-instilling size to merely a lingering annoyance: “She said... that she would pick the (next) trip...” We are happy when he says: “...despite all that, I was in paradise; a paradise whose skies were the color of hellflames, but a paradise still...” We may be momentarily disgusted with ourselves for this, but at least he is trying to ensure her health and safety, we think. At least it is obvious he does care for her person; and if she's alright and enjoying herself, maybe this is just a weird situation we should accept? After all, consider his traumatic struggle with love that he is finally beginning to make it right, and that maybe, because of what Humbert says, Lolita is just a little twisted too, right? Practically hook, line, and sinker at the end of Humbert's pole. And so we grow defensive of this strange couple when a man named Clare Quilty (Frank Langella) threatens their union.
At one of the hotels the couple stays at, Lolita meets Clare Quilty. Quilty has a strange aura about him, and is weirdly drawn to Lolita. At this point, we are more creeped out by his draw to Lolita than we are currently creeped out by Humbert. When it comes to be that Quilty is following the two of them on their journey, we want nothing more than for the two of them to get away. We are not sure of Quilty's intents, but even if he wants only to turn in Humbert, we still encourage the couple to run faster. Then, Lolita falls ill, stays a night in a local hospital, and is not there the next day when Humbert goes to pick her up. He knows it is Quilty that has taken her, and so Humbert's chase ensues. And we root for Humbert to find them! This is due to Humbert's self-condemning but self-justifying narration that, yet again, holds us on his side in pity and sympathy:
“The thief, kidnapper... I could always tell his writing (in guest books)... It must be hard for you who already knew who it was to understand my mystification... Or maybe you think it impossible there could have been another like me... mad lover of nymphettes... you were right of course. There was no one else like me.”
Years later, when Humbert finally tracks Lolita down and finds her to be married and out of Quilty's clutches, Lolita, large with child in her small country home, divulges all that happened after she left Humbert's arms. We find out that Quilty was a rich pedophile that filmed childrens' sexual acts. We viewers cringe and the nausea that had shrunk to a tiny pit in our stomach returns, full-size; and yet, we fail to see clearly that Humbert is not much better than Quilty. We justify that Humbert did what he did because he was sick, sad, lonely, traumatic: that he really did and still does somehow love Lolita:
“ I looked and looked at her, and I knew, as clearly as I know that I will die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth. She was only the dead-leaf echo of the nymphet from long ago - but I loved her, this Lolita, pale and polluted and big with another man's child. She could fade and wither - I didn't care. I would still go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of her face.”
After this confession of undying love, our heart breaks for Humbert when Lolita refuses to acquiesce to his begging her to leave with him, and to be with him again. We even become offended by Lolita for telling Humbert that Quilty was “really the only man she was ever crazy about.” We feel Humbert's loneliness come crashing down again, permanently this time, and we stand and leave with him, detached Lolita at our backs and our arms around Humbert's sobbing shoulders. We see him as a broken man in true, unrequited love, no matter how twisted. We are excited and rallied when he then sets out to kill Quilty, feeling as though Humbert will be serving justice: “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I have to say... that I regret all I did before that last goodbye..., but that I regret nothing that came after.”
Shouldn't we feel as though Quilty's death would not be justified by Humbert's hand? After all, Quilty asked Lolita for all the things Humbert ever did, he provided for her in his large mansion, better than Humbert probably could have in all of those hotels, and she even said herself that she felt Quilty was the only man she was ever crazy about- not Humbert. But we fight back for Humbert, saying that he was only lost, not sick, that he never videotaped Lolita, never exploited her for money, and that he was not interested in other little girls. We bear with him his second loss of Annabel in Lolita. We assume Humbert was the only one left with a broken heart, as Quilty likely moved onto the next child when Lolita left. With Quilty's murder, Humbert will be the misunderstood, understated, and brokenhearted hero for the absent Lolita: for the sick Annabel he could not save at fourteen.
Once Humbert has killed Quilty, we are dragged all the way back to the end of the story: where we started at the beginning of the film. We now understand the gun, the hairpin, and the blood as well as his mourning. As he cycles through all of her different names, from Lo to Dolores, finally to Lolita, we know he is pondering her identity: who she was before him, for him, and who she is now, because of his influence on her life. This time, we are in the passenger's seat, concerned for a friend. We kick the gun to the floor and ignore the blood. We tear and we sway with the swerving car, feeling his waves of pain and guilt: “...But in my arms she was always Lolita. Light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo... Lee... Ta.” The police sirens do not even enter our consciousness; we follow his zombie walk through the hills when he abandons the car and we feel the fullness of his shame and sadness as he looks over a small town in a valley:
“What I heard then was the melody of children at play. Nothing but that. And I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that chorus.”
Humbert was forced to love little girls because he never grew away from aged 14 Annabel. He always knew and will continue to live with knowing that he robbed Lolita of her childhood: that she should have been heard in the chorus of children playing more than she should ever have been standing by his side or lying in his bed. But here we reconcile Humbert for all of the sins he has admitted to; we are sad for him that his life had to turn out this way: that he could never really find his way back on top. We hope the court is sympathetic; we hope his sentence is light. For, we see now that Humbert was just a poor victim of life; he told us so.
