Most people have heard of Dirty Dancing. If you are older than thirty something, you have likely actually watched it. It’s an iconic film, its image and name have transcended Hollywood and landed into the collective imagination. If you know Dirty dancing, whether you have watched it or not, what comes to mind? Most likely, the song I’ve had the time of my life and the final dance that accompanies the song. But did you know it’s not only a coming of age romance but also a film about social class and about abortion? I certainly had no idea when I watched it a few years ago -mostly because I thought it was a movie about dancing, which I like, and that had Patrick Swayze in it, whom I also like. The iconic nature of the film and concretely the relationship between Baby and Johnny and their final dancing scene together has obscured the fact that the movie was trying to say something more than just how liberating dancing can be.

Dirty dancing is just an example, and maybe a silly one, but it was the first time I was truly conscious of this effect, and the first time I was able to put it into words. What follows is an essay about how images can be “iconized” to the point that they can become independent of their source material, sometimes even hiding the deeper meanings of the originals. We will focus on film adaptations of literature because the jump usually puts the original books in disadvantage, with Lolita being our ultimate paradigm and main exponent of the specific type of pop culture phenomenon I’m trying to address.

Warning: the following essay contains discussions of child abuse, pedophilia and sexualization of minors, and how they are portrayed in fiction. Please read at your own discretion.

The creation of images

Cinema was until recently, and perhaps still is, the modern world's most potent image creator. By “image” I don’t mean only mental photographs, but general visions that are charged with meaning. The images that are created in movies and series tend to stick in the mind better than literature does. An image is easier to transmit and understand, on the surface, than a text. An image can be consumed with little context, or so we think. When it comes to films and series vs the books they adapt, the books find themselves at disadvantage for two reasons. First, the accessibility of cinema, that puts those stories to far wider audiences. Second, the changes made in the adaptation process might alter the story in very significant ways. Given that cinema is the more accessible medium and that it’s by nature a visual medium, literature finds that its messages can be altered by the democratizing power, and the pop culture permeability, of cinema.

Let’s see an example. People might not have read Bram Stocker’s Dracula, but they surely know the character, either because they have seen an adaptation or by mere cultural osmosis because his image and parodies are so ubiquitous. The image of Dracula has certainly changed. Dracula, in cinema, goes from the creepy, eerie creature of the unauthorised 1922 adaptation Nosferatu to the alluring look of Bela Lugosi in 1932’s adaptation. Most pop culture adaptations of Dracula look either something like Christopher Lee’s version, or just go for a full on sexier Dracula - in any case, something a lot more appealing than Murnau's Nosferatu. The majority of those pop culture images have little to do with the descriptions Stoker provides in his novel. Where Murnau sees a horror film, Coppola sees the possibility of an epic romance while movies like Dracula untold find their niche for an action film, and so on.

In the case of classics, it’s really easy to see how film constructs the ideas most people have of the source material. If you ask ten people that know Pride and Prejudice I bet most of them do because they have seen some of the film adaptations (probably Joe Wright’s 2005 adaptation) rather than having read the book. The adaptation and readaptation of classics is a task I hold in high regard because classics often retain qualities that are worth revisiting and reinterpreting. But what happens when the image, the iconography, associated with the name becomes so overwhelming it all but drowns the original source material? See Frankenstein. When you say “Frankenstein” most people think of the big headed, possibly green, slow monster. This is a perception created by the 1931 film. In Mary Shelley’s novel, Victor Frankenstein is the creator of the nameless monster, who instead of slow and non-verbal, is an eloquent fellow who muses constantly on its own existential suffering. Where pop culture has fixed a Halloween monster, Mary Shelley had envisioned a harrowing, walking tragedy and a serious philosophical consideration.

Adapting novels to the screen

When discussing novel adaptations, two obvious things need to be taken into account. First, the medium is different so the narrative techniques are different. Some narrative effects are easier to reproduce than others. Second, the filmmaker is essentially redoing the entire thing from scratch, therefore is free to make any changes. The point to which that is acceptable or even ethical is not a consideration we should make right now.

First let’s talk about the medium. Live action cinema has a very curious quality to it: the moment you put a camera in front of an actor and you show it to the audience, the audience tends to believe what is shown on screen is fact. The “fact” might be fictitious, if we’re looking at a film, but it might be real if it’s a documentary. In any case, you are giving a certain weight to what you are showing on screen just by virtue of showing it. Thus, applying the concept of unreliable narration in cinema, though not impossible to make, requires certain techniques and workarounds so the audience understands the “fact” can’t be taken for granted, as it’s conventional. And I think it’s important, and notable, that more people than it seems don’t quite distinguish fact from fiction through cinema. This is why we have people insulting actors who have played “bad” characters or people assuming that those who play a bully might be real life assholes. In a way, it’s why typecasting exists, I suppose.

Now let’s talk about the choices. Changes made to source material happen all the time. Sometimes they add to the original source, such as some scenes in The hunger games film series which expand on the novels because they are not constricted to the protagonist’s point of view. Peter Jackson’s Lord of the rings trilogy is generally true to the overall feeling of the books but cuts many passages for the sake of agility. But, of course, changes to the source material might change the intended meaning entirely. The previously discussed Frankenstein is an example, but so is A clockwork orange. When Stanley Kubrick set himself out to adapt Anthony Burgess’ novel, he decided to leave out the last chapter of the novel (the story is a bit more complicated, as he had originally based his script on an edition of the book which did not include said chapter, but bear with me). The last chapter essentially changes the entire meaning and intention of the novel. So when the film version was released, the version of the story most people got to know was not the one the author had originally intended, with the point about morality and society that he wanted to make, but an entirely different one, a more nihilistic and entirely ultraviolent one.

And here’s where we leave our friend Mr. Kubrick on pause and start talking about Lolita.

“How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?”

I was sixteen when I read Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita. At the time, I was fascinated with Lolita. I guess, given my age, the vague idea of a teenage seductress was appealing, but I also wanted to challenge myself and be a bit snobbish by reading classic books. Lolita was just one of many. But this image of Lolita I had soon shattered because even before opening the book to read, I was shocked to discover she was no seductress: she was a twelve year old girl. Then I began reading “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins…” (I still think it’s one of the best openings in literature). This is when Nabokov begins his game. Humpbert, the middle aged protagonist, is telling you, the reader, his story. You are his jury. The most important part of that story is, of course, his obsession with a certain girl named Dolores Haze. She is twelve, as I said, not yet out of primary school. The story tells in detail his fascination and his exploits to abuse this child. But Humpbert is not just telling you what he did, no. He is trying to convince you, to justify himself. He is trying to prove to you that he, a grown man, was somehow enticed by a little girl. A little girl who is, for much of the novel, under his tutelage. The game Nabokov plays is one of seduction -will you, reader, be seduced into believing Humpbert? Nabokov expects, and needs an active reader who will critically think about his protagonist, a reader that will recognize him as an unreliable narrator at the same time that he trusts that the author will carry the story to a satisfying end -trust that the author is a different entity from the monster he has created. Nabokov needs a reader, in sum, with a moral compass strong enough that they will play the game he proposes without falling for the trap.

The scandal and uproar the novel produced since its release proves that, perhaps, Nabokov over-estimated the willingness of the audience to engage sincerely in his literary game. Time and time again, he expressed Dolores was no seductress (no “lolita”, as the association has become so strong it is now an idiom), but a victim¹.

He also famously stood against having a little girl or any similar image as the cover of the book. The author’s wishes weren’t respected in international editions, but I think the final drop was the release, and success of the 1962 film adaptation directed by Stanley Kubrick. The tagline for the movie was “How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?”, due to the censorship of the time and the scandalous reputation of the novel. Nabokov himself wrote the script, to prevent it from deviating too much from his original vision, but it was then heavily edited anyway. The movie did two crucial things that would forever change the collective image of Lolita. On one hand, it aged up Dolores from twelve to the more palatable (at least at the time of production) sixteen. The movie cast fourteen year old Sue Lyon in the role of Dolores precisely because she looked older than she was². On the other hand, it created the now iconic image that comes to mind when one thinks about Lolita: red lips with a heart-shaped lollipop between them, red heart-shaped sunglasses, eyes peeping alluringly over them³.

However, more than thirty years later, a new adaptation of Lolita emerged, once again to uproar and, this time, to more negative critical reception. It was directed by Adrian Lyne and released in 1997. I watched it very soon after I finished reading the novel, and wrote in the notebook where I kept track of my movies that it was “very faithful to the book” and gave it a high score. Seriously, I really liked the movie. The fact that I was navigating Tumblr at the time when it was flooded with aesthetics relating to the film, to “reverse lolitas”, to Lana del Rey’s early days, to “nymphet aesthetic” (which has nowadays evolved into “coquette”, apparently) might have had something to do with it. I loved the aesthetic, I had loved the book, and the cast was fantastic, so really, the movie was almost tailor made for me –and hundreds of other Tumblr girlies, apparently.

The movie, once again, featured imagery that has now become iconic, beautiful aesthetically pleasing shots and a more eroticized feel and look. And once again Dolores was aged up, this time played by fifteen year old Dominique Swain, who looked beautiful throughout the whole affair, as did her predecessor, but that now (without the censorship of the sixties) could be more overtly sexualized. So now I’m left thinking, with the distance of time, about my own feelings towards this movie. On one hand, it was nice as an adaptation and overall a very correct film. I understand what the movie was trying to do, being from Humpbert’s point of view. But, see, this is exactly where the problem lies. Because, as I said before, once mediated by the camera, whatever you show on screen is treated as “fact”, therefore, Hupmbert’s vision is “fact”. And as I said, cinema can definitely convey the idea of an unreliable narrator or juxtaposed points of view. But neither Kubrick nor Lyne’s adaptations do any of this. And thus, the adaptation fails the subject matter. As Cricket Guest comments on her video essay “Why Lolita is impossible to adapt to film”², the moment Dolores is represented on screen without the play that Nabokov intended, she stops being Dolores and becomes Lolita, not just for Humpbert, but also for the audience. Lolita, who is Humpbert’s creation in his own head¹, becomes the thing that the audience sees, and the only perception anyone who hasn’t read the book gets of her. The girl known as Dolores stops being her own person and becomes an object, not just an object to be abused by Hupmbert, but an sex object for the audience. By portraying her, Sue Lyon, and especially Dominique Swain, also become sex objects despite being teenagers.

A counter argument can be made because in Layne's version, we do get to see Dolores's downfall, her complaints, her sad ending. We get glimpses of the real her. The thing is, the image, the iconography, the mythologizing end up eating that part of the film. Pop culture’s idea of this film isn't marked by Dolores' outburst later in the story when she confronts Humpbert and all her pain, rage and desperation is visible⁴. On the contrary, it is marked by the image of Dolores laying down on the grass reading a magazine while water sprays on her, revealing her body -the body of the fifteen year old girl who plays her. And though I don't agree with Guest’s suggestion in the aforementioned essay² that anyone who makes a movie like this one necessarily has an ulterior, perverse intention, I do agree that people see what they want to see. People who do have those ill intentions will consume the movie only in this way, and even use it as a means to justify themselves.

The relationship with the audience

When an image becomes so powerful as the ones I have described with Lolita and its adaptations, the pop, superficial perception of a piece of art ends up disservicing its source material. Thus Nabokov's novel ended with the girls and young women on the cover that he detested, “lolita” became an adjective to describe a precocious, seductive, young girl, and the collective imagery just drinks this juice uncritically, contradicting the original intention. Ultimately, people will read and interpret things the way they want to read them. That is generally ok. Except in the case of Lolita this means the general public has fallen into the trap laid down by Humpbert. By conceiving Dolores as the “Lolita” he envisions, the audience and the pop culture reception has basically accepted his pedophilia and perversion as something that doesn’t need to be condemned. The blame is shifted to the victim (perhaps a notion too comfortable for our society), the morally atrocious man wins.

I refuse to believe the audience as a whole is a stupid mass incapable of understanding art, or digging any deeper or having any critical thinking. After all, I am as much part of the audience as you are. However, I do think it’s very human to want easy things. Marketing campaigns, purposefully lazy creatives, and parts of the audience whether unwilling to think or outright willing to misinterpret, contribute to the phenomenon I've been describing in this article. Thus, together with now-iconic images that stay on the surface, and sometimes even contradict the source material, you also have other cases of misinterpretation. I think, for example, that the fact that general audiences in the US and Europe watched Netflix’ Narcos and decided to make an image of Pablo Escobar as a cool guy and/or a meme were being as much blissfully ignorant as they were willingly obtuse because the suffering the real life Escobar caused was completely foreign to them. Most people who watched the show and reacted to it in that specific way did not bother to understand Narcos was a series based on real life events, that behind the character there was a real person whose existence had real, palpable consequences that have left a complicated legacy especially in his home country. I think a different face of the same issue is the one that leads to people idolizing public figures like singers or actors to the point of going online defending their poor actions, or transforming now-dead people into flawless icons instead of taking them for the people they were, with the good and the bad. No person, especially a celebrity, is a hero that can’t and shouldn’t be subjected to scrutiny.

Ultimately, misinterpretation as I have described it comes down, in my opinion, to two very fundamental things:

• Lack of empathy

• Lack of critical thinking

Going back to Lolita the lack of empathy is apparent. Humpbert, being a middle aged white man, was perhaps a bit more easy for the target audience of Kubrick's film to relate to than Dolores. Willful ignorance is, in my opinion, a consequence of faulty empathy. Lolita/Dolores will always be a devious seductress for those willing to see her as such -for those who wish she was. As for the lack of critical thinking, well, there are some people who genuinely don't have that. Critical thinking needs to be developed and practiced, and many people are either unable (by lack of knowledge) or unwilling to exercise it. Having things spoon-fed is easier. Believing what the camera shows is “fact” is easier than thinking about narrators and artistic intentions. Critical thinking and empathy towards others, especially those who are most different from us (which is part of emotional intelligence), are crucial skills. Skills that can be taught, learned and practiced, skills which we need to teach our children, and which many adults lack.

So, to wrap up, is it wrong to turn these characters, movies, etc into iconic images? No. Is it wrong to make an adaptation which is not faithful to the book? Absolutely not. Sometimes the people who adapt the book just use it as a basis and create their own, distinct version, like Hayao Miyazaki’s Howl’s moving castle, which is quite different in themes and sentiment than Diana Wynne Jones' original novel. The problem I'm discussing now lies somewhere in the chain of how things are represented, how they are (mis)interpreted and how they are massified. Some of this might be because of incompetence or unwillingness on part of the people who adapt the material. For example, Kubrick's A clockwork orange will never be what Burgess had envisioned his story should be because it lacks the ending he had originally intended. The movie is otherwise quite accurate to the book and, honestly, just a great movie in its own right. But in a way, it’s a disservice to Burgess' vision. That is unwillingness on part of the person adapting the material. As for misinterpretation, we can cite American Psycho. I haven't read the novel, so I can't talk about how it relates as an adaptation, but one thing I know for sure: it has been, like Fight club, sorely misinterpreted by a certain sector of the population. Funnily enough, both are satires of masculinity (among other things) that have been appropriated by some men, overlooking the fact they are being made fun of. And finally, an example of massification: Snoopy is so cute he has been put in all possible merchandise you can think of, seriously. He's now a cute mascot so that it's easy to overlook and forget the brilliant, witty and sometimes pointedly existential original Peanuts comic strip by Schultz.

And back to Lolita

Lolita, our paradigm for this think piece, has been represented in a way that has reinforced a certain preconception about the novel since it was released. This preconception marked it as a perverse, yet erotic little thing instead of the deep, psychological exploration, portrait of abuse and somewhat metanarrative game it is. This led to the film adaptations which, whether intentionally or not, only reinforced the image further. The beautiful, iconic, suggestive imagery born from them then reverts into the massification of the misinterpretation of Nabokov's original. Lolita becomes an aesthetic to be consumed, instead of a novel that requires actively judging its narrator.

Guest ends her essay² by concluding there is no ethical way to adapt Lolita to the screen, and that no art is worth putting a young girl in risk for. I don’t agree with the first statement, but I strongly agree with the second. I think there must be an ethical way to adapt Lolita into screen (the comment section of the video I refer to already has some interesting ideas). Movies like The tale, directed by Jennifer Fox, tell stories of grooming and sexual abuse towards children and its consequences. Throughout the film, Jennifer (played by Laura Dern) has to confront the romanticized, softened, even empowering tale that she had told herself about what happened, and the time she spent with her abusers. This idea she has constructed in her head slowly disintegrates as she confronts the reality of the situation, starting by her realization that she looked a lot younger at the time than she remembered⁵. So as I said before, there are ways to convey unreliable and/or contraposed narratives and points of view in cinema. At the same time, I think an adaptation of Lolita should simply not be attempted again at all. The image of Lolita, the pop culture idea of it, the implications of it, are far too big to “fix” now and any piece that's not revisionist when it comes to the two previous films and actually tries in earnest to translate Nabokov’s metanarrative play will bring nothing new. And, of course putting a young underage girl in front of the camera for a film like this is in itself a potential risk to that girl’s wellbeing. As I said before, Sue Lyon and Dominic Swain, by the effect of the camera on them and the nature of the story and how it was told, essentially became sex objects for the audience. If it was only for the duration of the film it wouldn't be so glaring. But it's never for those two hours only. The images stay. In fact, they survive us. By playing the “nymphet” these girls are forced to be the nymphets, over and over again, both literally (as the movies are rewatched, and the images reproduced, like I have done when writing this), and figuratively, in pop culture. I don’t think any girl should be subjected to that.

I'm not saying you shouldn't watch these movies. I would be a huge hypocrite if I even implied that. The movies have been released for a long time, and all damage, when there was damage, has been done⁶. And they are not bad movies. I still, despite all, including my own conflicting feelings, love the 1997 movie in a nostalgic way. I loved the book back then, and I'll argue in favor of its importance and artistic merit at any given chance -though I admit maybe I wouldn’t be able to stomach it if I read it for the first time now. And honestly, I would wear those heart shaped glasses and that cute little denim outfit without a second thought. But it is a shame to stay on the surface of a piece of art and commodify its image to exhaustion, isn’t it? Isn’t it too comfortable, how our culture sits with these convenient images and never looks into the uncomfortable reality of what they originally tried to present? How does it preserve these images that then become icons devoid of their essence? Most concerningly, there is a new narrative built around these icons that has little to do with the deep, sometimes disturbing reflections that inspired them. Throughout this article I have given numerous examples, but comparing them to Lolita is not fair in most cases because the “iconization” or “aesthetification” of some of these images is not as consequential as the one Nabokov’s novel has suffered. Perhaps, in the case of Lolita, the general public is far too appalled by the idea of children being sexually abused to even ponder on it in any way that’s not marked by sterile fear. And yet, by narrowing down the story until it becomes an image, a commerciable object for aesthetic consumption, the child Dolores disappears and regurgitates us only the precocious seductress, the lolita. Humpbert has successfully seduced and defeated the audience.