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"How Did They Ever Make a Movie Out of Lolita?", Camp Climax, Christopher Hitchens, Claire Quilty, Film, film review, Humbert Humbert, James Mason, Literature, Lolita, Lolita Garden Scene, Novel, pedophilia, Peter Sellers, Psycho, Robert Osbourne, sex, Sexual Perversion, Sexual Rhetoric, Sexuality, Sexualization of Girls, Shelley Winters, Stanley Kubrick, Sue Lyon, TCM, Vladimir Nabokov, Vladimir Nabokov: Hurricane Lolita
“How did they ever make a movie out of Lolita?” is a sentence I despise, largely because I didn’t think of it first. I know it’s petty, but being a writer and being likeable is difficult enough, that’s why I suspect most of us try and begin our essays and novels with catching, opening lines that invite our reader to give a shit. And so when one of us comes up with a catchy line that nobody can forget it tends to leave us bitter and grumbling in front of our word processors.
My regular reader will no doubt have observed that I’ve been going through a dedicated Lolita phase. After finishing the novel again recently I’ve decided to sit down and really dig into the material of the book, of the writer Nabokov, and of the various books and art products that have emerged since the publication of the book. Having written now about the novel, and the novella precursor, it seemed only appropriate to tackle the 1962 film by Stanley Kubrick given the fact that it’s this film which has partly helped the Lolita phenomenon become what it was and is.
I honestly can’t remember what my earliest experience with the film actually was, though I’m almost positive that it had to be TCM. My parents were good to me in the fact that they almost always had either TCM or TV Land playing on the television, that is when I wasn’t being a little tyrant and demanding the right to watch Freakazoid and Loony Tunes. I consider Robert Osbourne a kind of third parent because he introduced me to people such as Humphrey Bogart, Elizabeth Taylor, Sydney Poitier, Spencer Tracy, Cary Grant, and of course John Wayne. This education of yester-year’s cinema eventually became a boon to me as I could relate and communicate with older people who had grown up watching such movies and programming, and it taught me the language of films and film history as well. My first impression of Lolita then, was one of the “commercials” that ran between the films and Osborne’s intros, and of course it began with that line that I both despise and adore.
It wasn’t long thereafter that I eventually saw the film, though I did make sure that I had read the novel first. I’d like to say that the film’s content made a distinct impression on me and that I became aware of the brilliance of the film, and of course of it’s director Stanley Kubrick, but I was a teenage boy. I was far more interested in memorizing every episode of Family Guy and every line of Pulp Fiction.
I recently bought Lolita on Blue-ray and watched it again and my impression of the film has changed dramatically because, much like the novel, Stanley Kubrick’s movie is one long fascination with a disturbing idea which Christopher Hitchens noted in his essay Vladimir Nabokov: Hurricane Lolita:
The most unsettling suggestion of all must be the latent idea that nymphetomania is, as well as a form of sex, a form of love. (76).
This observation is absolutely everything when approaching Lolita, whether it’s the novel or the film, though it’s especially important when tackling the film because the way Kubrick directs the picture is as a traditional Hollywood love story. Throughout the film Lolita and Humbert Humbert interact, not as a young girl and a fully grown man, but almost as emotional equals.
Throughout the film Delores Haze, who is oddly enough never referred to as Delores but always as Lolita, is presented a precocious teenager girl, but also as a mature individual with her own will and idea of who and what she is. When Humbert and Lolita arrive at the hotel where the first rape actually takes place, Kubrick plays the dynamic of the two not as a hungry, perverted man lusting after a child, but as Lolita seducing Humbert:
Lolita Haze: Why don’t we play a game?
Humbert Humbert: A game? Come on. No, you get on to room service at once.
Lolita Haze: No, really. I learned some real good games in camp. One in “particularly” was fun.
Humbert Humbert: Well, why don’t you describe this one in “particularly” good game?
Lolita Haze: Well, I played it with Charlie.
Humbert Humbert: Charlie? Who’s he?
Lolita Haze: Charlie? He’s that guy you met in the office.
Humbert Humbert: You mean that boy? You and he?
Lolita Haze: Yeah. You sure you can’t guess what game I’m talking about?
Humbert Humbert: I’m not a very good guesser.
Lolita Haze: [whispers in his ear and giggles]
Humbert Humbert: I don’t know what game you played.
Lolita Haze: [whispers in his ear again] You mean you never played that game when you were a kid?
Humbert Humbert: No.
Lolita Haze: Alrighty then…
There’s also an earlier scene shortly after Humbert picks Lolita up from the summer camp, brilliantly called “Camp Climax for Girls.” As they’re driving Humbert attempts small talk and Lolita speaks with him seductively.
Humbert Humbert: You know, I’ve missed you terribly.
Lolita Haze: I haven’t missed you. In fact, I’ve been revoltingly unfaithful to you.
Humbert Humbert: Oh?
Lolita Haze: But it doesn’t matter a bit, because you’ve stopped caring anyway.
Humbert Humbert: What makes you say I’ve stopped caring for you?
Lolita Haze: Well, you haven’t even kissed me yet, have you?
And looking near the end of the picture when Lolita is pregnant and living with a sweet but simple man named Dick, she offers Humbert a kind of apology for her “roaming” from him physically.
Lolita Haze: [Trying to console Humbert] I’m really sorry that I cheated so much. But I guess that’s just the way things are.
If the reader is somewhat sickened by these passages it’s just a sign that they recognize how bizarre, and in fact how disturbing this presentation actually is. It’s not uncommon for young women to develop crushes on older men during puberty, but this has more to do with emotional and sexual development. Such crushes and infatuations are early attempts to understand attraction and to experiment and play with it so that, when they are more mature, they can actually act on their feelings.
Kubrick might be faulted or criticized for presenting Lolita as an emotionally mature young woman who openly and freely engages in a relationship with an older man who’s clearly using her, but as I watched the film again I realized that in fact, much like Nabokov himself who manipulated his reader through prose, Kubrick is using the 
language of cinema to imply perversion without ever outright showing it.
Because the film premiered in 1962, Kubrick was still working with the censorships and sensibilities of film companies at that time. This can be fun for the reader intellectually if they pay attention because in one scene Charlotte Haze, while showing Humbert about the house, actually flushes a toilet. When the reader remembers that, until the movie Psycho premiered just two years before this film, a director could neither flush nor even show a toilet on camera. There’s a feeling while watching such a small act that Kubrick is beginning the small subversions that would eventually allow film makers more freedom. But of course past the toilet flush there is the now iconic garden scene in which Humbert Humbert actually sees Lolita out and about and sun bathing.
I remarked to my sister how well this scene is done while we were watching it, because Kubrick is smart enough to leave Lolita, played by a then sixteen year old Sue Lyon as
the center of the everything. The viewer first sees Lolita from the back, sunbathing and wearing nothing but a large feathery hat, dark sunglasses, and a pink bikini (the film is black and white but some color photographs exist revealing the outfits actual color). The shot shifts from behind Lolita to Humbert’s shocked and obviously aroused expression before going back to Lolita and from there Kubrick works his ability as a director. Charlotte Haze describes the garden while the viewer is left to “gaze” upon Lolita. Lolita herself looks up from her book, stares at the viewer, slowly removes her sunglasses, and offers up a look that hints at curiosity and mild erotic interest, meanwhile she never steps out of her pose. The scene lingers and the viewer becomes aware that they are not looking at a young girl who is beginning to, if I can 
borrow the botanical term, “blossom” into womanhood. In fact they are looking at Humbert’s desire, for the lingering shot and her entire suggested sexuality is entirely Humbert’s imagining. And so the so the viewer is invited to participate in Humbert’s erotic fascination with Lolita, looking at her body and wondering to themselves if this gaze that is centered on her isn’t just implied, but something that is actually erotic.
Naturally, when you’re a teenage boy the same age as Sue Lyons was when she made the movie, the eroticism doesn’t feel weird at all because you’re the same age. 
It’s just crush. As I age however, I notice more and more that whatever initial erotic feelings I had at this image feels creepier and creepier. It’s now at a point where I can remember being young and attracted to girls that age, but I refuse to acknowledge any kind of erotic fascination with the image. That’s all a fancy-pants way of saying that when I watched Lolita again I felt absolutely repulsed at the erotic suggestion.
But that recognition was enough for me to recognize that Kubrick was purposefully playing up that angle.
Much like the actual novel Lolita, Kubrick tries to make the story feel like a love story to show that, beneath the surface of a supposed love story there is in fact nothing but sexual corruption. This is easily apparent in the various little moments of the story, and one of the best elements is the afore mentioned “Camp Climax for Girls.” 
The reader actually gets a moment when Humbert is surrounded by young women, many of them wearing swim-suits, and the viewer is left watching the image of all these young girls displaying their bodies. The shot works because the viewer is invited to consider the sexual nature of all these girls, but at the same time is reminded that, because of Humbert’s presence that this erotic display really isn’t one. It’s just girls being girls. Likewise later on in the film Delores Haze participates in a play by the corrupt playwright Clare Quilty. The “play,” when the viewer actually sees it, is in fact a kind of fertility display and this lets the reader observe the sexual undercurrent running throughout.
But Quilty himself needs to be addressed because he is arguably the most incredible part of the movie, largely because he is played by the chameleon Peter Sellers. Sellers presents Quilty as this aloof yet wacky man who is sexually corrupt and, if I can borrow an old expression, “queer as a three dollar bill.”
As a queer man I should probably be offended by the implied idea that Quilty is queer, but if the reader actually observes Quilty it becomes clear that the man isn’t part of the LGBT community. Quilty is just a sexual pervert. Before Humbert and Lolita arrive at the hotel the reader is given a small scene in which Quilty and his partner, a largely silent asian woman, are conversing with a bellhop named Swine:
Clare Quilty: She’s a yellow belt. I’m a green belt. That’s the way nature made it. What happens is, she throws me all over the place.
Swine: She throws you all over the place?
Clare Quilty: Yes. What she does, she gets me in a, sort of, thing called a sweeping ankle throw. She sweeps my ankles away from under me. I go down with one helluva bang.
Swine: Doesn’t it hurt?
Clare Quilty: Well, I sort of lay there in pain, but I love it. I really love it. I lay there hovering between consciousness and unconsciousness. It’s really the greatest.
This would be strange enough were it not a later scene when Quilty so obviously attempts to get Humbert to let him see Lolita.
Humbert Humbert: Well, it’s nothing, but… she had an accident.
Clare Quilty: Oh gee, she had an accident? That’s really terrible, I mean, fancy a fellow’s wife having… a normal guy having… his wife having an accident like that. W-what happened to her?
Humbert Humbert: Er, she was hit by a car.
Clare Quilty: Gee, no wonder she’s not here. Gee, you must feel pretty bad about it. W-w-w-w-when uh eh w-what’s happening, is she coming out later or something?
Humbert Humbert: Well, that was the understanding.
Clare Quilty: What, in an ambulance? Hahahaha! Gee, I’m sorry, I-I-I-shouldn’t say that; I get sorta carried away, you know, being so normal and everything.
It’s easy to read this passage and observe that Quilty is a strange man, but it’s in Seller’s performance of Quilty as a bumbling, queer sort of man that the viewer is able to really feel the corrupt sexual nature. Sellers is the key to the movie Lolita, because while James Mason plays Humbert as a dominating, sexual deviant, Kubrick plays him up as a man in love, while Quilty is simply a sexual predator. In this way the suggestion of Nymphetomania as a form of love is progressed because Humbert becomes not a corrupt man, but just a man who loses his love to a man “more” perverted than himself. Lolita herself acknowledges and confirms this for the reader during the final scene in which Humbert discusses with her how she left him:
Humbert Humbert: [Referring to Quilty] What happened to this Oriental-minded genius? When you left the hospital, where did he take you?
Lolita Haze: To New Mexico.
Humbert Humbert: Whereabouts in New Mexico?
Lolita Haze: To a dude ranch near Santa Fe. The only problem with it was he had such a bunch of weird friends staying there.
Humbert Humbert: What kind of “weird” friends?
Lolita Haze: Weird! Painters, nudists, writers, weightlifters… But I figured I could take anything for a couple of weeks.
This final reveal is a bit of strange experience because, when Lolita finally divulges this, many of the suspicions are confirmed and Quilty becomes the monster of the film, rather than Humbert himself. At least that is the perception that I ended the film with 
after watching it again. And of course, that reaction troubled me immensely because it neglects the reality that Humbert Humbert is a pedophile who seduced Lolita’s mother so that he could get closer to Lolita so that he could ultimately rape her.
I’ve addressed in my previous Lolita essays that Humbert Humbert writes the entire narrative of Lolita, leaving the poor Delores Haze in a position where her story is told without her consent or input. The film offers something different than this vision, and while Lolita does seem to have some kind of agency in the film, it’s important to remember that Kubrick, as a director, was always concerned about the narrative structure of films and how the images crafted his visions.
At first glance Lolita appears to be a love story, but a closer examination reveals a troublesome story about a man manipulating a young woman who is still trying to figure out who she is and what she wants. Lolita is never given any kind of freedom to determine who she is, and while on the surface she seems to be inviting Humbert and Quilty to engage with her sexually, this still is undercut by the reality that she’s a young teenage girl who’s barely figured out her sexuality, let alone her actual personality.
Lolita is a story about the troublesome surface and reality of sexuality in America during the early 1960s. And Kubrick is successful in constantly pointing out that sexuality was always hiding beneath the surface of everything. Under the veneer of the gardens and suburban homes there was a lurking sexuality that was at times troublesome and even corrosive. Children were vulnerable to predators, and because the narrative of sex was something that was still taboo, even when it was out in plain sight, what was obvious couldn’t be actually said aloud.
Lolita as a film is a story about the constant suggestion and implication that is hidden beneath what is actually said and done. In this way the film offers a beautiful way of storytelling because, unlike prose, more viewers will recognize the leering gaze as Lolita Haze lays in the backyard. They’ll recognize what’s being suggested is the idea that Lolita is a sexual object, and, hopefully, they’ll recognize that it isn’t their suggestion but in fact the suggestion of a corrupt man who’s writing her story right out of her control.
*Writer’s Note*
All quotes taken from the film Lolita were provided by IMDb.
**Writer’s Note**
It’s actually pretty difficult to find ANY video bloggers who have attempted to analyze to explore the film. However I did find two people on YouTube who seemed up to the challenge. If the reader would like they can follow the link below to the videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IpBNS5kksE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hdj0dKrKnUw
I’ve also found a brief video that is a three minute interview with Suellyn Lyon, the main star of the film, about the actual movie:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bHz-N6bJ3I
***Writer’s Note***
The life story of Sue Lyon is not particularly pleasant, and Kubrick’s film is largely the reason for it. I suppose that’s why I wanted to end on a positive note, and so I found two pictures of Lyon and Kubrick rehearsing lines and seeming to enjoy themselves. A lovely reminder that beneath the “sexual icon,” there was a young woman wanting to become an actress and working with one of the greatest directors of all time.
recent events have left me feeling depressed and beaten, and far more important, it’s left my hope a little damaged. For reasons that are Kafkaesque and absurd I cannot actually write about the details of the event in question, but I can at least write honestly that the events have left me worried about being honest publicly about my sexuality, or with trying to offer up public information about queer people and our history. The short version is, I feel like I’ve been pushed back into the closet by an idiot and several people who are too cowardly to stand up to said idiot. What’s worse is that people close to me, people who I have nothing but respect for, who have tried to fight have either 
been silenced or, even worse, had to apologize to the aforementioned idiot. I’ve had to watch my queer friends actually shed tears and tell me they feel like they’re being shamed and hidden away. And I’ve had to bury my anger and cautiously consider my actions for fear of personal and professional safety. And the worst part of the whole ordeal, is that I’ve lost a bit of hope that there’s anything I can actually do.
So much for that. Why are we here? Why are gay people here? And what’s happening? What’s happening to me is the antithesis of what you read about in the papers and what you hear about on the radio. You hear about and read about this movement to the right. That we must band together and fight back this movement to the right. And I’m here to go ahead and say that what you hear and read is what they want you to think because it’s not happening. The major media in this country has talked about the movement to the right so the legislators think that there is indeed a movement to the right and that the Congress and the legislators and the city councils will start to move to the right the way the major media want them. So they keep on talking about this move to the right.
and con. In every radio station, in every TV station and every household. For the first time in the history of the world, everybody was talking about it, good or bad. Unless you have dialogue, unless you open the walls of dialogue, you can never reach to change people’s opinion. In those two weeks, more good and bad, but more about the word homosexual and gay was written than probably in the history of mankind. Once you have dialogue starting, you know you can break down prejudice. In 1977 we saw a dialogue start. In 1977, we saw a gay person elected in San Francisco. In 1977 we saw the state of Mississippi decriminalize marijuana. In 1977, we saw the convention of conventions in Houston. And I want to know where the movement to the right is happening.
Then again Democrats never have been very good at winning and holding something so I probably shouldn’t speculate about future demographics. This passage at first doesn’t have much to do with “hope” and the importance of queer people to have hope for the future. In fact at first it seems to suggest nothing except that it would be a great time for queer people. It would appear as such, but in fact this recognition that republicans are not the ones in power reveals a real problem. Queer people were not enjoying a time of provenance despite the Democratic party’s majority, and that was largely because Democrats at the time were not very good friends to the queer community.
many democrats still saw queer people as a threat to political capital rather than a bonus. Being tolerant or even supportive of homosexuals could be a political death sentence (unless you were Bernie Sanders), and so as queer people in the 1970s were beginning to assume more and more of a cultural identity they were looking to some kind of leadership. The problem was, all of the leaders were straight.
And thus I return to the recent events that I can’t talk about and that reality is what most disturbs me. I never hide from my reader. I offer up my honest ambitions, thoughts, feelings, and reflections about works of literature while always speaking honestly about my own life. It’s my way of making amends for making my reader sit through the long boring analysis.
It’s only been 19 years since Matthew Shepard was killed in Wisconsin. Suicide is still the second leading cause of death for people between the ages of 10 and 24 and this number is 4 times greater for LGB youth. The reason the T is absent at the end of this statement is because the numbers for Trans people committing or considering suicide tends to be higher with at least 40% of the population saying that they have attempted suicide.
front, will not walk away from a responsibility and be afraid of being tossed out of office. After Dade County, I walked among the angry and the frustrated night after night and I looked at their faces. And in San Francisco, three days before Gay Pride Day, a person was killed just because he was gay. And that night, I walked among the sad and the frustrated at City Hall in San Francisco and later that night as they lit candles on Castro Street and stood in silence, reaching out for some symbolic thing that would give them hope. These were strong people, whose faces I knew from the shop, the streets, meetings and people who I never saw before but I knew. They were strong, but even they needed hope.
who’s also bisexual who was also disgusted by the events which have recently taken place. It’s a nice addition to my rainbow colored bow-ties, and it also keeps my hope alive.
essays, and so what was once “Recent” at the time of writing was actually months ago. My “process” aside, if you can call it that, I did take the time to watch the film Blade Runner this year with a group of friends. I’m a hermit by nature who tends to enjoy his isolation because it gives me time to read what I want and watch the movies that I want without having to worry about what’s new with the people I spend my time with. But, I still recognize that part of self-preservation is having some kind of social contact with people who aren’t my cats and dogs and immediate family members. That and the demon who lives on my bookshelves voted for Trump and won’t let me forget about it.
watching the original film, I took my wife to see the sequel film Blade Runner 2049. I can honestly say that I’ve never been so terrified to see a movie. Blade Runner is an important film to me, and I’ve seen lately how Ridley Scott has attempted to expand some of his previous films with sequels and prequels, successfully with Prometheus, and tragically with Alien Covenant. I was waiting for Ridley Scott and the director Denis Villeneuve to turn the Blade Runner universe into something akin to a Marvel movie where characters are nothing but action figures and product endorsement.
are fighting in a ballroom in the ruins of Las Vegas, the hologram projections of Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, and show-girls flicker in and out of existence providing only snippets of sound. It’s not that there isn’t any speaking, talking, or music during Blade Runner 2049, it’s just that after a while the reader becomes aware that the world and the design of the world, coupled with electronic music that honors the original film tend to be far more important than any of the dialogue.
just another sound in this universe. And so looking back to the original Blade Runner my question feels terribly important: Are the two films actually just silent movies?
Dvd and Blue-Ray, or else played on TCM (We miss you Robert Osborne) are always accompanied by some kind of musical score. My little sister’s copy of Nosferatu includes two different scores, one of which is a horrifying as fucking-fuck organ. And recently when I checked out a Blue-ray of Metropolis I discovered it was a remastered cut in which the producers had sampled hit songs from Eighties pop bands to play over the film. This is all just a way of saying that Blade Runner 2049 and Blade Runner, despite the sound in their films, could be construed as Silent Films.
Vangelis, who produced the music for the original Blade Runner, manages to create a world that, while it isn’t dying, is more electronic than it is real. Along with his score, which manages to balance sound and silence brilliantly, are the various sounds which make up the world. When Deckard is studying the details of a photograph the clicking of the computer and the various switches broken by his drunken “enhance” let the reader disappear into the film. Watching the original Blade Runner, at least to a contemporary audience, is like listening to the sounds and world of a video game.
Having watched a few Silent movies, and I do mean few, I’m usually struck by the concern for visual detail. Part of this might have been fortunate accident on the part of these filmmakers, however it is important to remember that many of the great masters of the early genre of film created wonders the likes of which have only been dreamed of by many current film makers. A film like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, yet another brilliant horror film from the early days of film which still manages to be actually terrifying, pays attention to the “place” of the story, allowing that “place” to become it’s own language.
or else the constant concern with the idea of procreation sex is constantly part of the landscape of Blade Runner 2049 culminating with K’s initial walk through the ruins of Vegas.
one room being nothing but a small island in a room filled with water which shines reverberating light across the walls. Even if language is spoken in these rooms, it’s obvious over the course of time that the words are immaterial.
private room decorated with gold and columns, or else if it was the Doll Room of Sebastian’s home colors created their own language. The designs of these rooms, and the details packed into them often allowed for the dialogue to be rather secondary if not irrelevant. Even if you heard batty asking Sebastian to help him into Tyrell’s office, the reader was probably more concerned with Prius’s make-up or else the way Sebastian’s home was a menagerie of toys, robots, and rotting walls. When Deckard is walking through the streets of Los Angeles the color of the light-up umbrellas, or the asian script made up of neon lights manage to tell the viewer more about the world than any of the later exposition. If nothing else about the “place” manages to capture the reader, then 
surely the ever-present rain should be enough to create the feeling of the world and what it is about.
would understand the message of the shot. Likewise if they see a director holding the camera still while two people eat in silence the scene will have it’s own meaning and context. This idea of film creating its own language is something which has existed since the early silent film era, and directors and artists have tried to build that language into something meaningful since the establishment of the medium.
of the language of cinema. The images and lights and colors are far more important because they communicate more about humanity than most of the dialogue.
always the cover of a book and said either, “Aleya has begun [TITLE X]” or else “Aleya has finished [TITLE X].” This intrigued me and when I asked her about it she mentioned that you could link your Goodreads account to your Facebook page. I set up my account, and after only a month I discovered that you could see a years’ worth of books that you read as one large picture. The image of all the different titles was illuminating because each book was a different experience, a different memory, and showed me exactly what I was doing, reading, and thinking about at the time. Because of this I’ve been looking back over the books I’ve read and been thinking, “that really needs to be in the log.” As such my copy of Lolita (distinct with its picture of a little girl’s pink lips) made its way into my path again, and I saw an opportunity to add another book to the log.
if not the greatest, proseists of the twenty-first century. Every sentence is a careful construction and the man has a linguistic skill that many writers could only aspire to. Part of it is a careful attention to puns that litter throughout the work, but more than anything is Nabokov’s ability to seduce with linguistics.
We are not sex fiends! We do not rape as good soldiers do. We are unhappy, mild, dog-eyed gentlemen, sufficiently well integrated to control our urge in the presence of adults, but ready to give years and years of life for one chance to touch a nymphet. Empirically, no killers are we. Poets never kill. (87-8).
They read quickly and give me space between Lolita and the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I checked the book out though because my friend Aleya had recently added it to her GoodReads account and had given it a pretty high rating. That’s it. Just these two connections allowed for a moment of serendipity which lead me to checking the book out.
“makeup face artist” was using a fine brush to paint eyebrows, freckles and smoky eyeshadow on a rack of faces. Shore explained that most of their customers send photographs of what they would like Abyss to recreate. With a subject’s written permission, they will make a replica of any real person. “We’ve had customers who bring their significant other in and get an exact copy doll made of them,” he said. Shore estimates that less than 5% of doll customers are women, even for their small range of male dolls. McMullen sculpted one of the three male face options to look exactly like himself. None of the male dolls are selling very well. In fact, Abyss is in the process of revamping its entire male line.
and use those facts in conversation, “so it feels like she really cares”, as McMullen described it, even though she doesn’t care at all. Her memory, and the way she learns over time, is what McMullen hopes will make the relationship believable.
machine that conforms to your tastes and preferences it removes the human element of a relationship because other people disagree or hold different attitudes about what is right, wrong, pretty, ugly, grotesque, or beautiful. It’s the differences of opinions and the regular challenges by other people that a healthy personal self is able to develop. I grind my teeth every time somebody posts an alternative opinion on my Facebook page, or when someone close to me defends President Trump, but I recognize that that difference of opinion is what helps me keep myself grounded in reality.
And I suppose if my argument isn’t clear enough, the problem with turning sex robots into intelligent partners that are obedient and compliant with your every wish and preference, it stands to reason that the individual who lives and acts with one is going to be left completely disconnected to real humanity.
He sees in Ada a companion that has an absence of choice and so desperate to see if there’s a way to change her he finds an online group dedicated to helping robots attain a freedom and sentience. During one exchange between two members of the group Alex offers a line that reveals everything about his humanity:
that satisfies the ancient biological urge to fornicate. But where some are looking to AI to find a corrupt kind of solipsism, Alex + Ada offers up the idea that technology is going to change even this dynamic because at some point people, hopefully, will look into the eyes of their sex dolls and probably ask the question: Could there be more?
Nuclear Arsenal Diplomacy on the international stage. The problem with the library, like almost every library I’m sure, is funding. Because only the city of Tyler’s taxes go to fund us, people who live within the county but not the city have to pay a membership fee. My reader may be wondering what this has to do with my mother or Trevor Noah’s wonderful autobiography Born a Crime. I’m sorry, I like to talk, but I’m getting to it.
The Daily Show and people were looking to disrupt the institution at this supposed moment of weakness. Stewart left, Noah began, I stopped watching for a while. It wasn’t that he wasn’t funny, it just that he was new and I’m one of those obnoxious people who has to settle into things slowly. Still I enjoy The Daily Show and Noah himself has begun to really demonstrate that he’s made The Daily Show into his own and so I’ve become a regular watcher again, and in fact, in the last few months I’ve come to adore Trevor Noah as a comedian, and even more as a writer and Born a Crime is largely responsible.
criminality. The only time I could be with my father was indoors. If we left the house, he’d half to walk across the street from us. My mom and I used to go to Joubert Park all the time. It’s the Central Park of Johannesburg—beautiful gardens a zoo, a giant chess-board with human-sized pieces that people would play. My mother tells me that once, when I was a toddler, my dad tried to go with us, and I ran after him, screaming, “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” People started. He panicked and ran away. I thought it was a game and kept chasing him. (27).
Revolutionary Life by Jo Lee Anderson comes next, Jim Henson: A Life by Brian Jay Jones (Also look up his George Lucas), Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens, I am Malala by Malala Yousafzai, and recently I’ve begun Life by Keith Richards. This list may seem to contradict my statement before about the scarcity of truly great biographies but in fact it only reinforces it. These books are products of a careful craft (pardon the alliteration) that tries to leave the reader with a real sense of the person under discussion, and rather than try to chronicle every detail of a person’s existence, it instead tries to offer the heart and personality in all its beauty and flaws.
After that she never raised her hand to her children again. Unfortunately, by the time she stopped Abel had started. (262).
of Batman Vs Superman. But mothers are important for a young man’s development because she becomes the first relationship. Mothers, the good ones anyway, teach their sons emotional strength and then eventually how to interact with the world. They teach them the proper ways to speak and act towards women. They teach them about the importance of family. They teach their sons love, and what that word really means against the supposed images and representations of it that crowd the media. This last lesson is important, the most important, because as Noah’s biography demonstrates that love is what helps develop people into the individuals they are and instills in them their ideals and moral constructions.
members of Alpha Chi, an academic fraternity that spans the entire United States. Students from chapters all across the country came to give lectures and presentations from virtually every field. Lecture topics could range from Pre-Med students discussing the nature of telomeres in DNA to discussing the Indian Boy in William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. For my own special I brought in a lecture about Mark Twain’s No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger which was rather eventful given the fact that one of my slides dealt with blackface and one of the moderators in the room was black. It was a fun couple of days when I wandered through the streets of Chicago (feeling the mean bite of “The Hawk”) with a few friends and a man name Jim Koukl.
don’t see how the boy could reach high enough. The people said he done it with a milk bucket. The constable fetched the biggest bucket in the town and made the boy stand on it, but he still lacked a foot. So the Justice of the Peace says the whole case looks fishy to him, and they turned the boy loose for lack of evidence 
(pronounced Mizz-ur-ee or Mizz-ur-uh depending on what part of the state you’re from). This region is probably familiar to the reader who has ever watched the film Deliverance and believed that that is a good representation of entire South of the United States. For the record Deliverance took place in Georgia, however it has unfortunately come to embody the imagery of the “hillbilly” who is in fact not a gap-toothed lunatic who enjoys raping people in the woods. Well, okay, there’s probably one of those out there, but I promise you that ass-clown is in the minority. Also ass-clown was probably the wrong word to use there and now I’m going to have nightmares.
general humor of a people who lived and made a life in the woods of Ozarks. The reader may wonder what value such stories have to the general culture given the fact that most of them are nothing but stories about people fucking, talking about fucking, or horny priests, prostitutes, or men measuring their dicks. I suppose this concern is a fair criticism and the first story from the collection doesn’t necessarily help that much:
highlighting. Before my teacher assigned us A Midsummer Night’s Dream to read in class she covered the myth of Piramus and Thisbe, and I was already familiar with the book because I had read Romeo & Juliet the year before and we had gone over the myth. To those who don’t know there are two warring families with a son and a daughter named Pyramus and Thisbe respectively. The pair fall in love but can only communicate by sending messages through a crack in the wall that separates both families. Eventually overcome with lust Piramus arranges to meet Thisbe and tun away with her. She says yes, but of course because this is myth everything goes wrong. Thisbe spots a lion and runs away dropping her sash, Pyramus comes upon it later and spots lion tracks. Believing his lover is dead he drives his sword into his side, and when Thisbe discovers him slain by his own hand she removes the sword and kills herself with it.
stories of young lovers winding up embarrassed or mocked by the community they live in but the final component is everything. Pissing in the Snow feels communal while the reader actually reads it, and in fact the only real way to read it is out loud. These are recorded stories by average everyday people who had these stories memorized, who lived with these stories that had most likely been passed down by generations. Their earthiness and near-constant crudeness reveals a people who lived and interacted with sexuality without any kind of real shame, and while some would suggest that this is wrong, Pissing in the Snow shows a people who wouldn’t really care about this response.
lived off the land and would know the proper way of breeding livestock, would eventually come to see sex as something funny and absurd, but ultimately uniting because in the end these stories helped shape a community’s, as well as a region’s, attitudes about sexuality.
Given what the Vagina Monologues are actually about, and given the fact that Family Guy has, in the last few seasons, done little to actually help its own reputation as being a den of refuge for sexist humor this cringe isn’t entirely unwarranted. Still the image of a woman’s waist, clad in just a pair of pink panties doing stand-up, was actually pretty funny and a great opportunity to observe the real originality of the early seasons of the show. Whether Family Guy is sexist or not is for the YouTube comment sections, the point is watching that show exposed me first to the idea that The Vagina Monologues was a performance that had something to do with Vaginas and, most assuredly, feminism in some form or capacity.
She had only touched herself when she was washing in the shower, but never with conscious intention. She had never had an orgasm. At seventy-two she went into therapy, and with encouragement of her therapist, she went home one afternoon by herself, lit some candles, took a bath, played some comforting music, and discovered her vagina. She said it took her over an hour, because she was arthritic by then, but when she finally found her clitoris, she said, she cried. This monologue is for her. (23-4).
Frankie receives a vibrator as a gift (I think it’s a Hitachi wand) and she sprains her wrist.
equation.
Calling The Vagina Monologues feminism is of course fair, but it’s also limiting for at stake is not just whether women are allowed to talk about their genitals as much as men. The Vagina Monologues are the community of women recognizing one another, recognizing their differences, and at the same time finding themselves unified by the very fact they each possess the same, and at the same time not so same, set of genitals. Each woman forms a relationship with her vagina the same way a man does with his penis, and by having a venue from which to talk about their relationship women are able to find one another.
and looking at the girl on the magazine I felt an overwhelming urge to be “close” somehow. I knew it was bad looking at this, but I stole it under my shirt and snuck off to my room. Once the door was closed I opened the magazine and studied each picture. It was a collection of centerfolds from the late 90s to the original founding of the magazine. There were lots of beautiful women in all manner of poses, and while the breasts were nice to look at what I’ve never been able to let go of is the impression of seeing a woman’s vulva and pubic hair. I didn’t know what a vagina, a vulva, or pubic hair was, but I did know one thing for certain: I liked it.
and by the time Naomi Watts and Laura Herring wound up in bed together the scene wasn’t really all that out of place, though my teenage hormones made it a bit of a distraction. The reason I bring up my father is that for a moment there was an event in which a grown man and his teenage son were sitting in the dark, watching two women fuck on the screen, sitting on separate couches unaware of what the other’s expression was.
Thing I’ll Never Do Again, a book I bought partly because I had begun Infinite Jest but also because a friend of mine had bought the book before me and raved about it (he was a creative writer but one of the smart ones who tried to push himself creatively in what he read and wrote about) and after he and I lost touch I encountered the book again at a friend’s house while I was watching her dog. The cover strikes you immediately, largely because it’s comically grotesque, with a little boy with an obscenely large head licking his chest while steam pours out from his ears. I wonder at times if I compromise whatever artistic credibility I have when I write things like this, but the book is most certainly worth your time and money if only because you’ll be able to freak out your mother and girlfriend (or boyfriend, we’re open minded here at White Tower Musings) for a month with the cover. Once you get bored with that you can read about watching television or else how David Lynch is a genius, but the movie is Dune is absolute swill.
during three specific quotes. Wallace says in section 10 of the essay:
way The Shining or Psycho were(though I did jump when the grotesque homeless man first appeared). These films are genre based films, specifically horror, and the fundamental aspect of horror is that once the first experience is done it is possible to overcome the experience and, possibly, even laugh at it later. A great example of this is the Paranormal Activity films and just about any Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street movie. The films of David Lynch are not horror films however for even after you have processed the experienced there is a discomfort and emotional awareness that doesn’t leave the viewer. David Lynch as a director has probed into the viewer psyche and, if I may use a grotesque metaphor here, effectively licked the inside of their skull leaving a lasting membrane the viewer can still feel decades after the fact.
quality of the dialogue, the regular deployment of grotesques as figurants, the precise, painterly way screens are staged and lit and the overlfush, possibly voyeuristic way that violence, deviance, and general hideousness are depicted—these all give Lynch’s movies a cool, detached quality, one that some cineastes view as more like cold and clinical. (167).
Played by Naomi Watts the narrative, such as it is, follows Betty as she encounters a woman known as Rita who has suffered a terrible car crash and can’t remember who she is. Betty recently moved to Los Angeles and many critics and fan of the film have noted that she comes to embody the standard naïve outsider hoping to make it big in L.A. Most of this is certainly true, for Betty freely helps Rita after her accident and by the end of the film she has seemingly been destroyed as she eventually buys into the grotesque realities of the Hollywood system. She’s an aspiring actress, and when the plot flips, and Rita is revealed to be a successful actress, betty is left a shriveled waste of malevolent intent. It’s not enough that she has failed, she has exploded because of her kind nature.
Diane attempting to construct a narrative in which she’s actually the sympathetic character who’s just a victim of abuse and manipulation. What is important to note however is that this structure does not make it difficult to watch Lynch’s film, in fact it only informs it more. Betty is either the victim of evil, or else a perpetrator of it, and at a certain point there isn’t much of a distinction. At least, as Wallace suggests, in a Lynch movie.
film-watching are both “passive” exercises you “receive” the medium rather that “actively” generating some part of it yourself, there has arisen an “elitism” coupled with bullshit morality in our society and so film makers who explore violence will always suffer the wrath of people who are bothered or disturbed by violent or perverse content. Lynch’s movies freely employ violence, this is a fact, but not to the level that it becomes pornographic or gratuitous. As Wallace wrote, whatever violence exists within his universe the acts performed and recorded do not provided a kind of malignant catharsis, nor are they designed to be employed as black humor. Death, pain, destruction, and murder just are.
Trying to explain that something just is, doesn’t fit into the narrative structures that human beings live their lives by. In the Judeo-Christian faith that was I surrounded with as a young man, acts of evil or monstrosity were performed because there was an evil supernatural tempter swaying the will of human beings in the form of The Devil. As I got older, and received more education, I learned that human beings’ motivations could also be swayed by economics, there are financial reasons for evil deeds because people are greedy or hungry. Adding a bit more complexity to this sexuality becomes a factor in the compelling of people to violence, for sex inspires passions that blind people to reason and so a lover may be drawn into a fit of violence after he catches his boyfriend in bed with two other men, or a wife may kill her husband’s mistress because she won’t share him. These are examples of causes and effects that fit narratives most people would recognize and be comfortable with, but Wallace brings up an important point when he notes that violence in David Lynch films aren’t about narratives because in Lynch films narratives are contorted, twisted, and may not even be real.
either by their own force of will or by outside influence. Looking at Mulholland Drive this last impression of evil seems more and more relevant for ultimately every character falls prey to the evil forces that seem to occupy the city of L.A. Betty and Adam both are human beings trying to fulfill a narrative of their own life until outside forces, evil forces, eventually corrupt their will and force them into paths they don’t desire or can live with in the case of Betty.
what is a Lynchian moment? A teenage boy watching an erotic moment in a movie with his father most likely doesn’t satisfy that idea, but on some level I believe it does. Wallace defines it as best he can for the reader: