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

So, if Sue Lyon’s Lolita seems too old to be a Lolita. . what am I? I am seventeen now, and I have only just, at last, gotten my first period: Hello, womanhood! My friend Marie and I have recently been hit on by two fortyish guys in a restaurant, who bought us a chocolate soufflé and ordered us wine and stroked our gleaming bare shoulders and tender arms in a delightfully, satisfyingly mesmerized way, and, like Violet, I am by now a pro at the girlishly flirtatious coo, the promising butterfly side-glance, the bit of dialogue that flatters and invites and yet still suggests a virginal blush. I have mastered illusion — if not with boys my own age, for whom my age holds no special appeal, then absolutely with older men — and playing this role is still one of my favorite interests .

And then these older men invite us to Las Vegas for the weekend: Right now, come on, girls, let’s go! I look at Marie, hesitant; she is equally unsure. And I am still a virgin, it is not all illusion — is a Las Vegas weekend with these men my big Auction Night, am I setting a high enough price on myself? Are these men appreciative Teddys, protective Bellocqs, comedically fumbling Humberts. . or just creepy Cousin Morris’s? Marie and I suggest we should maybe call our mothers for permission; the men seem to have no problem with this — perhaps it even underscores our enchanting youth. Marie and I head to the pay phone, dial, explain, ask; both of our mothers are delighted by this possible adventure before us: Sure, if you want to, sounds like fun, go have a good time! they say. We are flummoxed by their equanimity; we have expected, hoped, to be ordered immediately home, perhaps told to brush our teeth and put our pajamas on, it is way past our bedtime, and are disappointed to have been given this terrifying degree of agency. Aren’t we still little girls? Just a little while longer, please? We lie to the two men, apologizing, that we have to get home, and we flee, just as a terrified Sandy once fled Teddy’s studio/lair.

But I feel like a coward, a failure at my role as tantalizing teen seductress; Sandy walked back into Teddy’s studio on her own accord, after all, Violet sought out and seduced Bellocq, Lolita was ultimately the one to suggest the game of sex to Humbert. I also feel regret; have I missed out, perhaps, on an opportunity, a precious experience? One that may soon, I am starting to wonder, be increasingly rare?

SANDY

How much longer are you going to be tempted by this firm young flesh?

TEDDY

Until you’re eighteen and over the hill.

I remember, and the calendar pages of my young life are fluttering by: I menstruate, I am planning for college, I am almost of legal age, for heaven’s sake. How much longer do I have, to offer my firm young flesh, to tempt in this so specific way?

And I think back to the film Manhattan , which I saw a few years earlier. 17When the film starts, forty-two-year-old Isaac (Woody Allen) is dating seventeen-year-old Tracy (Mariel Hemingway, mouse-voiced and luminous), and he feels both pride and some awkward shame at this relationship: “I’m older than her father,” he sputters to his friends. “I’m dating a girl wherein I can beat up her father.” Isaac eventually dumps Tracy for the urbane, neurotic, challenging Mary (Diane Keaton), but when Mary dumps him to return to her married lover, his nostalgic longing for the simple pleasures of a romantic and sexual relationship with a teenage girl consume him; he finds Tracy, just as she is about to leave for school in London for six months, and begs her not to go:

ISAAC

Do you still love me, or what?

TRACY

Do you love me ?

ISAAC

Yeah, of course, that’s what this is all about. .

TRACY

Guess what, I turned eighteen the other day. I’m legal, but I’m still a kid.

ISAAC

You’re not such a kid. Eighteen years old, you know. . they could draft you, in some countries. .

She’s correct that she’s still a kid, but she’s also, paradoxically, the adult now; the more Isaac tries to convince her to stay — while we all know what’s best for her is to leave — the more he sounds like a manipulative child, wheedling to get back a once-promised treat now denied.

TRACY

We’ve gone this long. What’s six months if we still love each other?

ISAAC

Hey, don’t be so mature, okay? Six months is a long time. . You’ll change. In six months you’ll be a completely different person. . I just don’t want that thing about you that I like to change.

Of course he doesn’t. When I first saw Manhattan , at fifteen, I found this scene so romantic; see how much he cherishes her, he cannot bear to lose her again—“A mature man can find love in the arms of a young girl, a very young girl. .!” as Miss Brodie rejoiced about Dante and Beatrice. But now that I am seventeen — Sandy’s age, Tracy’s age, tick tick tick —I see it quite differently. The fire in Isaac’s loins is not due to love, or even to lust; it’s about that ticking clock. That thing he loves about her is elusive, fleeting, is slipping away each day: Her luminous youth. It is his own fragile tether to a life still on the upswing, full of vibrant promise and fresh discovery, and without that, or when that tether snaps, when Tracy is more than a technically legal adult, when she has, with even just six months’ more experience, fully transitioned from girl to woman, he will officially begin coasting downward into the denouement of his own existence. Maurice Chevalier sings “ Thank heaven, for little girls! For little girls get bigger everyday . .” but the implied cautionary lesson is to thank heaven for them now , appreciate them now, get them while you can. . because they do get bigger every day, and then the thing about them that allures, charms, revitalizes, is gone forever. When Tracy is older, Isaac will officially become old; her value will plummet, and he knows he better soak up that rejuvenating life energy while it lasts.

Tracy doesn’t understand this yet — but at seventeen, I believe I do. The enchanting illusions of Sandy and Iris and Violet and Tracy and Dolores Haze will remain preserved, resin’d forever on-screen, but these films have made clear there is a shelf life to my own Loliltahood; that fragile construct is perishable, has a “sell by” date. As Teddy says, I will be over the hill any second now, my alluring little-girlness expired, and my crème , no matter if it’s been the freshest best, will soon curdle and go sour. What will I have to offer, then, what new role will I play? How will I ever be famous for sex ?

I will have to find a new source of desirability, I tell myself. A new way to beguile, to be magnificently, unordinarily elevated. But I have no idea how, or what that might be. I’m still only seventeen.

10 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (20th Century Fox, 1969): screenplay by Jay Presson Allen, adapted from her play, based on the novel by Muriel Spark; directed by Ronald Neame; with Maggie Smith, Robert Stephens, and Pamela Franklin

11 Taxi Driver (Columbia Pictures, 1976): written by Paul Schrader; directed by Martin Scorsese; with Jodie Foster, Robert De Niro, and Harvey Keitel