Word: lolitas
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...Kubrick, this dehumanization is more than the result of the undefined force exerted by the monolith and proves a direct consequence of advanced technology. Kubrick is no stranger to the subject: The Killing and Lolita both involve man's self-expression through the automobile; Spartacus's defeat comes because he is not adequately prepared to meet the advanced military technology of the Roman army; Dr. Strangelove, of course, contains a running motif of machines assuming human characteristics (the machine sexuality of its opening titles) while humans become machinelike, a theme carried further in 2001. The central portion...
...European directors, Hollywood has turned out movies that at least in retrospect, have the qualities of classics. Hitchcock's Psycho inaugurated America's cinema of cruelty, with a demonic amalgam of bloodshed and violence that was not equaled until Bonnie and Clyde. Stanley Kubrick's Lolita treated the forbidden subject of nymphet-mania with cool humor; his Dr. Strangelove demonstrated that the biliousness of black comedy was as American as the H-bomb. John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate was a flawed murder drama that explored the mind of a brainwashed assassin with psychological depth...
NABOKOV: HIS LIFE IN ART, by Andrew Field. Though his performance as critic is generally excellent, Field contributes mainly an engrossing review of Nabokov's entire career-in Russian and English-and finds the roots of such masterpieces as Lolita and Pale Fire...
...Nabokov commanded a relatively tiny public in emigre circles. When he went to America before World War II, he painstakingly learned every nuance of English and translated his works back and forth in an effort to find a wider audience. He achieved notoriety before legitimate fame in 1958 with Lolita, and Field argues that the book, in which 42-year-old Humbert Humbert lusts for a child of twelve, would not have shocked nearly so much if readers had understood Nabokov's deeper preoccupations...
...Lolita, says Field, "is a novel of prisons." The idea for it came to Nabokov from a Paris newspaper account of a monkey who, "after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage." Humbert Humbert is a prisoner of lust. He imprisons first Lolita, then his deadly rival Quilty. Later he writes his memoirs from prison. For Nabokov, the book's theme is love-and the necessity to liberate love from "its extreme and seemingly mutually exclusive opposite, lechery." Eventually...