Chasing Lolita examines the different ways Dolores Haze has been transformed into Lolita. The first Kubrick film cast 14-year-old Sue Lyon (soon to turn 15) in the part. Vickers says that “Kubrick had a vested interest in making his Lolita look as old as possible on the grounds that a teenager was less likely to fall foul of the Production Code Authority than might an ostensible twelve-year-old.” So nervous was Kubrick about the possible ramifications of making Lolita that he omitted sex altogether from the film, and the decision to age Lolita and remove the sexual overtones betrays the book by removing pedophilia as a theme. The author writes that the first step in Lolita’s transformation to teenage temptress had begun, despite the curious lack of sex in the film.

Vickers then looks at two failed stage productions, one a musical (!) of Lolita, before delving into Adrian Lyne’s 1997 version. His take on Lyne’s production is much kinder than his opinion of Kubrick’s. This Lolita, he writes is “a superior film that is not only far more faithful to Nabokov’s novel than the 1962 version but more faithful to the novel than any film version might reasonably have been expected to be.” Vickers particularly liked Dominique Swain’s take on Lolita, despite the fact that although she looked a good approximation of Lolita’s age in her audition tape, she quickly filled out during shooting. One scene in the movie is singled out as particularly powerful: one in which the shot opens with the top halves of Lolita and Humbert in the shot, Lolita with a look of calm pleasure as she reads the funny pages of a newspaper. As the camera pans down, the audience realizes that she is rocking back and forth against a naked Humbert, having sex as she reads. Vickers writes that “it is a genuinely erotic scene enhanced by the audience’s delayed realization and all the more disturbing because here for once Lolita is shown as apparently complicit - contented even.”

I found it rather odd that the author did not deal with the issue of complicity, since he admits that Lyne upped the ante in the scene. In the novel, Lolita sits on a naked Humbert on hot afternoons in their motel room, but she is only reading the funnies, not having sex. The most common association in the novel between Lolita and sex is tears, not languorous sexual pleasure. Given Vickers' contention that Jeremy Irons' commendable performance showed Humbert to be more of a weak and misguided man than a committed pedophile, I was expecting more of a discussion on how much the movie presented Humbert's view of Lolita as a distorting lens. However, Vickers does do a good job of gathering up the issues surrounding the casting, filming and distribution of the movie - and they make good reading.

Chasing Lolita rounds up the look at media by examining a few contemporary books drawing on Lolita. The most interesting is Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi. I greatly enjoyed that book and Vickers nails its take on Lolita, which is the Iranian women’s identification of the theme of Lolita as “the confiscation of one individual’s life by another.” Nafisi writes: “Like the best defense attorneys ... Humbert exonerates himself by implicating his victim - a method we are quite familiar with within the Islamic Republic of Iran.”