After several brief attempts as a much younger man to engage with Vladimir Nabokov’s infamous novel Lolita and/or the substantial corpus of derivative works (cinematic, pornographic, and otherwise) associated with it, I unilaterally and by my sole unappointed authority placed the entire franchise into literary bankruptcy. In a word, I have shunned it. For much of the 20th century, bad books about dull men doing awful things during a mid-life crisis were considered to be the only legitimate subject for “serious” literature, and Lolita is a worst-in-its-class exemplar. It’s thus no accident that I haven’t looked at anything based on or derived from Lolita since 1999, when I accidently saw American Beauty in the theater without knowing what I was walking into.

Moving on. Last night a good friend who has a lot going on in his life was up rather late, pre-treating his insomnia with whiskey and his curated collection of cinematic classics on Blu-ray. Knowing me rather well, he paused his viewing to snap me a screen capture. If I’d seen this “in the wild” with no context, I would have assumed it was a modern AI artifact. But no, it’s from Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 movie adaptation of Lolita:

Paraphrasing my friend only slightly, he told me “Kubrick’s movie isn’t even getting crap past the radar here. It’s firing the crap right at the radar!” Indeed.

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