Tara Ison - Reeling Through Life - How I Learned to Live, Love and Die at the Movies

VIOLET

I’m glad it’s you. . you look nice. I can feel the steam inside me, right through my dress. .

We cut away from the actual scene, to the other prostitutes waiting for it to be over; we hear Violet scream, but when we all rush in together to check on her, she laughs off the obvious trauma of the experience, affects a matter-of-fact detachment. This is her destiny, after all, the role she was born to play; no reason to make any fuss.

But Bellocq, whose fascination has shifted from Hattie to her little girl, doesn’t want whoredom to be Violet’s destiny — at least, not as a commodity available to other men. Hattie scores a marriage proposal from a customer and abandons her daughter; Violet runs away to Bellocq, pleading to live with him:

VIOLET

And will you sleep with me, and take care of me?

BELLOCQ

No. .

VIOLET

Why not?

BELLOCQ

’Cause. . ’cause I’m not sure why, actually. .

VIOLET

You’re afraid of me!

BELLOCQ

Perhaps. .

Give him some credit for being conflicted, I suppose. She pushes him down on the bed, climbs on top of him — again, the illusion of control, this little girl overpowering this adult man:

VIOLET

I want you to be my lover! And buy me stockings and clothes.

BELLOCQ

You don’t know what you’re saying, Violet.

VIOLET

I won’t even charge you anything at all. . I know those things better than you. You always know those things about men when you’re a woman.

BELLOCQ

Some men are different. I’m different. Well, maybe not after all. . I’m all yours, Violet.

And so, he gives in to this temptress. She kisses and caresses him, recites her dialogue:

VIOLET

I’m going to make you so happy! You’re just my kind of man. You really are. I’m really good you know, cheri —

BELLOCQ

Don’t talk to me like that! Please! Don’t talk like a whore!

He will refashion her as the innocent maiden he wishes her to be — or whatever he wishes her to be. He gets her a maid, so she can play the lady of leisure; he buys her a doll, “Because every child should have a doll”; he slaps her when he is “tired of having to deal with a child!”; he photographs her alluringly naked and posed Sandy-like on a divan; he ultimately marries her, making her at last all his . Are they daddy and daughter, husband and wife, artist and muse? She will be anything he wants — he has “safely solipsized” her, as Nabokov’s Humbert boasts of his Lolita — and that’s the point. When Hattie returns with her now-husband, who wants Violet to come live with them, go to school, lead the life of a normal little girl, Bellocq is devastated—“You cannot take her! I cannot live without her!”—but even more so when Violet so cavalierly shrugs him off (that emotional mutability and detachment have become her nature), chooses to leave with her mother; that final shot is this new nuclear family at the train station, Violet’s new “daddy” posing his wife and new “daughter” for a photo, Violet’s exquisite, inscrutable face — is she wondering who or what she is supposed to be now?

I see Pretty Baby when I am fourteen. I have a better understanding, I think, of what that male hunger for a little girl is all about: The chance to shape the malleable child to serve the adult desire; the infusion of youth, the transference of a restorative life force that fulfills the vampire’s existential need to stave off age, decay, death. But now I feel uncomfortably complicit in the exploitation of this child — if I love this movie so much (and I do), if I am so captivated by that face, the mysterious alchemy of that beautiful old head on those naked young shoulders, am I all that different from those leering men looking to possess her, their dollars at the ready?

And which child is captivating me: Violet or Brooke? As with Iris/Jodie, I am confused: Is my discomfort due to the demands being made on the character or the actress? This is not the case of an eighteen-year-old playing thirteen (or a nude seventeen); this is not an adolescent dressed up as a mock adult; there is no reassuring distance between the illusion and the reality here. This is an actual sexualized child playing an actual sexualized child. This is Violet running around stark naked in a whorehouse; this is Brooke Shields running around stark naked on a movie set. I’ve been a naked little girl around other naked little girls my whole life — why are these images suddenly so disturbing to me? It is the context of the film, of course; her juvenile nakedness is meant to be both sexual and innocent, Louis Malle intends to juxtapose the one against the other in order to heighten our awareness of both and thus provoke that discomfort. And it is also my now-fourteen-year-old self, in the process of shifting from my own oblivious childhood to a self-conscious awareness of the realities, and vulnerabilities, of the sexual body.

But if I identify, in my beguilement, with those gazing, beguiled men, I still also completely identify with this Pretty Baby — I am a still-prepubescent fourteen, I am as flat-chested and thin-limbed as Violet and Brooke are, and, in order to hold on a while longer to a self-protective denial of that vulnerability, I still want to believe in the glory, and buy into the illusion, of erotic girl-child power.

Stanley Kubrick, in his 1962 adaptation of Lolita , largely avoided the discomfiting question of illusion versus reality by casting, as his titular nymphet, fifteen-year-old Sue Lyon, in part because she looked nothing at all like Nabokov’s little twelve-year old-girl. 16It is 1981, my friends and I are on a Kubrick kick, and we go see Lolita at the Nuart Theatre, our favorite revival house in Los Angeles. I have not yet read the novel, but am surprised nevertheless by Lyon’s mascara’d eyes and developed breasts, her bouffant hairdo, her kitten heels and bosom-enhancing cocktail dress; I’d expected another pretty baby, an adolescent Iris, a nubile Violet, even an almost-legal Sandy in her schoolgirl uniform, and I find it ironic that this most iconic of “Lolitas,” despite a few signifiers of youth — the lollipop-sucking on the poster, the Hula Hoop, the stuffed teddy bear on the bed — actually seems older than any of them. She seems older than I am, at seventeen. She certainly seems too old for nymphet-fixated Humbert (delightfully smarmy James Mason, all sweaty obsessive fumbles); when Lolita’s mother, Charlotte (delightfully desperate and pretentious Shelley Winters), or Quilty (delightfully Sellers-esque Peter Sellers) keep referring to her as a “little girl,” it only highlights Lyon’s smooth sophistication, her lack of Shirley Temple cutesiness. Humbert seems to be garden-variety-cheating on a mother with her younger daughter (still a huge ick , of course), but not necessarily trying to feed a depraved appetite .

Lolita is also far less explicit than The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie or Taxi Driver or Pretty Baby —Kubrick goes for fully clothed innuendo, clever verbal puns, and visual sight gags, playing Humbert’s obsession entirely for delightful comedy, and so the disturbing hebephile eroticism is pruned away. (Adrian Lyne tried to correct this in his own 1997 adaptation by casting a far-more youthful and sexualized Dominique Swain, and in doing so got back some of the story’s sexuality — but lost all its comedy. The novel is a brilliant balance of both, and neither film version gets that right.)