[ week 30 | 44 ]
Tadpoles and Lolitas.
Thursday, 23.54
Lolitæ? Whatever. Anyway: says it all right there, doesn’t it? Tadpoles: squirmy, small, powerless, nascent, neotenic, becoming; Lolita—and keep in mind we’re not talking about Dolores Humbert, née Haze; we’re talking about her lipsticked doppelgänger, the nubile nymphettish eidolon peering over her sunglasses in the back of Humbert’s brain, trapped in Adrian Lyne’s camera lens.
Let’s get the tadpole out of the way first, because, as crack AP entertainment writer Christy Lemire says of a story in which a 15-year-old boy declares his love for his stepmother and sleeps with her 40-something best friend, “Would this seem a little creepy if it were a man in his 40s having an affair with a 15-year-old girl? Probably—and it did in Lolita. Somehow—and admittedly, this sounds hypocritical—it’s okay when Diane’s flirty friends slip their business cards to Oscar over afternoon tea, just as it was okay for Mrs. Robinson to tempt Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate.”
Well, at least she admits to the hypocrisy. And she’s right, you know—it is creepy in Lolita; then, it was supposed to be. (But it was also supposed to be creepy in The Graduate. And it certainly has been every time I’ve seen the movie...)
But why should it seem that way? Why the double standard? Why is it that even though Mary Kay Letourneau got seven and a half years in jail and Tanya Joan Hadden faces 19 felony counts and Joey Buttafuoco got four months in jail and an acting career—why is it every time one of these things comes up we always say it’d be different if the sexes were reversed? Why do we think they always go easier when Humbert’s a woman and Lolita’s a boy?
Power’s part of it. Rather, perceptions of power. Because for all that we’ve been kicking out the jams since the 1960s (since World War II) (since the roaring ’20s) (since the Mauve Decade) (since—), we still very much live with a gut that sees the male (the butch, the daddy, the top, the dom) as having the immediate physical power in a relationship: the reach, the strength, the weight; the female (the femme, the sissy, the bottom, the sub) is subject to and even at the mercy of that power: thin, slender, slight, small—and emotionally attuned, and wily, and manipulative, and inscrutable. (She has to be.) The tadpole, then, reverses this dynamic deliciously: suddenly, male and female are on a par, physically—that youthful, slender, underdeveloped body, its libido held in check by good manners and a stammering lack of confidence (think of Dustin Hoffman; check out Aaron Stanford in that blazer), is suddenly an underripe but tempting target when he falls into the seven-year vaguely itchy stare of an older woman not so much fired by lust or desire as driven for once to demonstrate her control, her poise, her expertise. Her experience.
Knowledge being power, after all.
But that lack of lust and desire (even Nicole Kidman was after something other than booty, you know) is what scuppers so many tellings of Lolito; certainly, Stephanie Zacharek makes a compelling case that it scuppers Tadpole . And certainly her rendering of one of Tadpole’s defining images—Oscar, the eponymous man-child, holding court with women of a certain age in a cafe—has soured what little eagerness I’d had about seeing the movie: “None of them seems to be aware that he’s done nothing but condescend to them the whole time; they haven’t been engaged in a vivid conversation as much as been held hostage to one. It’s not clear if Winick thinks Oscar’s tedious windbaggery is supposed to be sexy, or so beyond the boundaries of sex—boring, old bourgeois sex—that it sets the hearts of these women aflame.” Heh.
But! Is it really different when the sexes are reversed? When it’s Lolita, not Lolito, holding court in a cafe, surrounded by ten or fifteen men of a certain age, hanging on her every, well, word?
Why is it different? Why does the hypocrisy sit so easily in our guts? Why is Mrs. Robinson so much, well, cooler than Humbert Humbert? —Because Lolita isn’t a reversal of that power dynamic; it’s a salaciously bald assertion of it. Because unlike Oscar, Lolita isn’t stammering. Because unlike Mrs. Robinson, Humbert isn’t in control of himself. (Much as he has nominal control of the situation.) Because the head games Humbert’s playing aren’t to keep his desire in check; they’re to rationalize the act of setting it loose. And (primally simple though this may sound, keep in mind we all have a lizard brain, and keep in mind for all the airy theoretical games we may play with Vivian Darkbloom, there’s very real Humberts and Oscars and Mrs. Robinsons and even Lolitas, yes, Long Island or not, and there’s very real and sometimes messy consequences to sex, especially hastily desperate sex seized in a haze of guilt and shame and ignorance in spite of one’s “best” impulses) because, of course, Lolita can get pregnant. And Oscar can’t. (Mrs. Robinson can get pregnant, too—twice, in Mary Key Letourneau’s case—though oddly enough that doesn’t seem to matter to us so much.)
But let’s get back to that New York Observer article for a moment, which I’m thinking is rather terribly important in this summer of the missing girls, this heat wave of hysteria following hard on the heels of the Catholic Church’s implosion over priests molesting (mostly) boys, and the explosion over Judith Levine’s rather sensible assertions that teens are sexual beings, and that denying that sexuality is nasty and harmful. But not so much for the world it describes, no: before you get all huffy (or not), keep in mind that four girls (not their real names) do not a trend make. (“Well, she’s a composite,” says Nick Smith in Metropolitan. “You know. Like New York magazine does.”) —It’s not that I’m saying that there aren’t girls (and boys) who are under that magic age of eighteen but curious enough (or defiant enough) to take a runner at the barbed wire and the gun towers that parents and educators and politicians are doing their level best to erect along the legal age of majority, like they were some mutant INS keeping out the wetbacks (or better yet, a southern Arizona homeowners’ association); these kids (all kids, sooner or later) want to slip over the border and try on adult clothes while there’s still time for them to slip back into the relative security of kid-dom. But this has always been the case and always will be the case and for every Lolita who ends up “squandering her potential,” barefoot and pregnant, there’s a Judith Levine or an Oscar. More than one. Dozens? Hundreds? What was your sex life like, when you weren’t yet eighteen?
So it’s not that the article is writing about something new, no. It’s writing about something that’s always been there, called to light by some concatenation of reactions to, well, the Catholic Church and Judith Levine and the summer of missing girls. And seen in that light, the article starts to look even more sinister than before, I think. After all, it’s not young Lolita who’s in danger, no. It’s Humbert who must watch it. Lolita’s running a scam. She’s using the Internet to defraud and make a fool of him. Tease him and his investment bank wallet for five sophisticated and terribly public dates and then kick him to the curb to go giggling back to her schoolgirl friends. So Manhattan Humbert, it’s not your fault you’re drawn to smart and sassy jailbait. She’s the one who’s asking for it. Right?
Right?
“As long as I’m not getting sued and whatnot, it’s all good.”
The article’s so steeped in its own take it doesn’t stop to realize that the fraud it describes isn’t there so much to scam the men; it’s a natural outgrowth of the games any underaged kids play to get into the cool clubs and buy booze and cigarettes. It’s there to slip over the border and back again, past the barbed wire and the guns and the crazed “do as I say not as I do” loco parentis. —The men are almost an afterthought. Tourist attractions. Obligatory sights to be seen. The real game’s in pulling off being an adult. Doing adult things. Trying them on and getting away with it.
I mean, for fuck’s sake. These girls in this article aren’t pretending to be Lolita.
They’re pretending to be Elaine.
This is why the ending rings like a bad novelist’s fillip. The idea that any high school girl pretending to be a communications major at U. Penn would take Lolita as a role model—Lo, plain Lo, Lola in slacks, Dolly at school, Dolores on the dotted line, but always and evermore Lo. Li. Ta—well. She doesn’t know the book nearly so well as she claims. She’s not too terribly sophisticated (then, there is that denim miniskirt and wifebeater—for clubbing?). Or maybe, just maybe, the seams are showing; maybe the author exaggerated just a tad, and it got away from her. Or him.
I mean, I’m not the first to smell a whiff of hoax about this piece. The folks over at Metafilter were quick to wonder aloud what Stephen Glass was up to, these days. (The folks over at Plastic took these weirdo manipulative lying bitches who ought to be in jail [!] all too seriously, though.) And I will note that a Google search for Mallory Stuchin, the ostensible author of the piece, turns up an astonishing zip, zero, zilch, utter blank—
Which is not impossible in this day and age, not yet; but still. Damn.
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Salon, licked and ticking (yet).
Monday, 22.53
So they run this on the front page on Monday, and it’s got all the hallmarks of a train wreck: a crappy coinage (“Metrosexual”: please); chatty anecdotal generalizations with nary a fact in sight to back them up; an instinctual drive towards temptingly glittery bon mots that (unduly) tramples insight into the dust; a zippy style that makes all the easy points and none of the hard ones and doesn’t seem to realize it’s really telling us more about the writer himself than the world around him (one of those chicken-and-egg things, yes, but not realizing that’s what you’re doing is, well, problematic); and Jesus, Mr. Simpson, I mean, you seem smart enough and all behind that clown paint, but had you really never heard of a fop before?
But then for Tuesday Salon runs this, which is as quick and neat a slice as you can find through some of the controversy swirling about the life and art of Henry Darger, masquerading as a review of John MacGregor’s critical study of same, and you’re reminded that Salon still has something of a point now and again. (Even if they can’t figure out how to make Conason’s blog an actual, functioning, useful blog, with a single home page and permalinks and maybe some of that talkback stuff Movable Type and the usability folks are always twittering on about might be nice...)
(Of course, McNett’s review of the Darger book is marred by a genteelly sensationalistic tone and a rather spurious supposition. —Why, yes, the menial laborer from a furrin country who sits in his room all alone and mutters to himself and draws pictures of naked girls he never shows to anyone is a bit suspicious. Do you have anything linking him materially to the crime? No? Does anyone else? I’m not denying the question doesn’t come to mind, but let’s do a bit more legwork than snarkily raising it to juice up a review, shall we? Or some snarky young turk will tag you for it without doing any legwork himself, and—)
Sigh. Maybe I’m just in a bad mood because I was at the laundromat and the TV was turned to the local news and since I don’t watch it ever I forget how far downhill it’s tumbled until it’s nothing but missing girls and infomercials for air conditioners in this heat snap. This is Portland, Oregon; there’s maybe five days over 90 degrees Fahrenheit in July on average, and maybe we’ve had eight so far in this July, but it’s a hot year; that’s why they call it an average. So trust me: central air conditioning in houses is rare here. Which you would never have known from this news-like infotainment product... And then as I was folding the Spouse’s ratty underwear (don’t tell her I told you some of her underwear is ratty) it was Inside Edition, which breathlessly told us about how it would tell us how to spot a terrorist. “It’s not a racial thing,” says the Terrorist Expert, helpfully. And then and practically in the same breath, how more older women are wearing bikinis.
So really, it could be a lot worse. I guess.
I mean, I gripe because I care, you know?
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Propers (belated)—
Sunday, 10.23
—to whomever it was who wrote me (with impressive anonymity) a couple of weeks ago to answer that question about Les Liaisons Delicieuses; the cartoonist in question is Richard Forg, and of course now he shows up when you do a dam’ Google search. Anyway. (Unfortunately, the site in question with the galleries has been hijacked by Kristen and her hot amateur dorm babe girls next door, so don’t get your hopes up. —Y’know, I will be at San Diego for the big comics convention in August; maybe I’ll take a moment to browse through the Eros bins and see if they maybe still have some copies...)
