Many classic works, I always feel at a loss at first reading, Xun Xun Mi can only find that she does not match the effort. This is the case with Lolita's original work, maybe at that time I just wanted to find a secret and passionate confession book. The 62nd version of Lolita is even more so. Kubrick's cold black and white treatment directly persuaded me to leave. Many years later, when I re-entered the 62nd version of "Lolita", I realized that this film may be one of Kushen's most underrated works. The following text is some of my thoughts and essays in the film, readers who have not watched the whole film should be careful.
Guided tour, this article contains:
1. The Dramatic Loop of Murder
2. Not movie symbols, but movie props
3. Can kill paintings, but not images
4. Visual installation of ring and hand
5·Props and Game Rules
6. Lolita as a living toy
Premature murder
The only abrupt voice-over in the film comes from Humbert's meditation on a gun. Humbert in the film can slowly move to the bathroom door after looking at the gun and put down the pistol in hesitation, and this will not destroy the integrity of the film's narrative. Since the film as a whole maintains a kind of loyalty to the appearance in the interaction of the characters, is this a superfluous drama? Or is it a lame interjection?
But if we look at the whole film, we happen to find no murder as a result. Murder is always pre-existing, and the blood of violence is drained at the beginning of the film. It only serves to provide guidance and meaning to the misty road at the end, so it has a dreamlike quality. (Just as we trace the origin of desire, it is always there in advance.)
When Humbert came up with the perfect set of murders in the bedroom, Mrs. Haze was inevitably declared dead: first to the lover’s heart, then to the diary, and finally to the car accident. .
Nothing can keep secrets, some things disappear in the dark night. The characters in the film always enter without a door, and the objects often disappear: the drawers that were locked in the previous second are opened for reading in the next second; the voice of the psychologist first came from the darkness in the living room; Lolita was in The sudden disappearance of the hospital and so on. "No way in", this is the great omission of rhetoric/returning theme in Kubrick's films.
Quilty thought that Humbert was just another rogue who had nowhere to go. As a successful tragedy, comedy writer and TV screenwriter, what he could not accept was that the drama Humbert asked to be performed here was so "out-of-time". , Lacking any identifiable meaning, and Humbert’s sad passion for revenge: He knew that he was caught in the trap after meeting Lolita, and now in the last chapter of a self-directed and self-acting drama, a young girl The shadow leads him end to end. In short, this is "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" from the 1960s.
Performance props
The world of "Lolita" has been a world surrounded by "art" from the very beginning. With the treasures of Quilty's Mansion and the collection of arty replicas of Mrs. Haze, Lolita's life is full of incomparable complexity. The rules of the game and a wide variety of cultural consumer products. For Humbert, the essence of all of Europe can be found in the United States in a shortened and funny version, and they are packaged in the fragrance of candy paper for sale. If we believe that Kubrick's "Lolita" is a ruthless revelation of unscrupulous intellectuals in the United States and Europe, can it be understood as a carefully packaged symbolic essay?
In the above scene, Mrs. Haze presses Humbert on the wall, and the piano behind it is squeezed to make a sound. This noise cannot be disassembled into any symbols, but it is echoing Mrs. Haze's enthusiasm. The piano was placed close to the performer, thus hosting an involuntary solo.
In Kendall Walton’s representation theory, what constitutes the basis of all representation art is the imitation as a "playing fake game". The quality of art objects as props lies in their ability to guide us towards the construction of fictional facts. In its nature, it does not require any similarity or the blessing of language symbols. They exist carelessly around people, sometimes being watched, sometimes knocked down, and sometimes in the soul, they lead to an unexpected drama.
Please allow me to return to the object in the previous topic: Is a gun a work of art? Or, is a gun a toy? Maybe neither, maybe both. The gun in the drawer in the film, according to Mrs. Haze, is a "sacred weapon" and a "tragic treasure" left by the late Mr. Haze. This romantic woman, with a gun, imitated Julian's play of taking the sword from Matilda. Quandang was a perverse declaration of loyalty and eros. When she saw Humbert’s pupils instantly brightened, she couldn’t think of it. It's for some reason.
This gun had no intention of becoming any "McGoffin". Mrs. Haze cherished it as a dramatic object, but she never expected it to actually become a prop for a "tragic" scene. The ambiguous nature of art is undoubtedly revealed here-it is always useful. Perhaps what Kubrick is asking in this film is: What are Art objects?
The death of paintings
Just as in the world of moving images, a picture is never just a picture, rather it is a gear in the rotation of a huge wheel axle, or it bites in the environment where it is, or is absorbed in the subject's thoughts. The paintings on the screen, like people, are light particles struck by the projector on the screen. They no longer appear in the form of a static code about the world, but are transformed into what Lucretius calls the "simulacra of flight" ( flying similacrum), so it can be integrated into the broader action system.
Kubrick's treatment at the beginning is extremely intriguing: Quilty is concealed on the back of a painting, and Humbert's bullet penetrates the painting and hit him. Here, the image of the artist and the art object cleverly overlap, and as the artist's voice fades out, only a shattered young girl's face is left in the lens.
If we think about the desire of an artist, who is engaged in the work of creation, he wanders in the small universes of perfection every day, and covers his siganature at the end of each universe, has he ever thought that one day he will be able to do nothing? The trace disappeared behind the artwork? Isn't the "desire that wants to disappear" also "the disappearance of desires" at the same time?
But here, the artistic objects and the artist's desire cannot be confused. Kubrick made a complete separation: it is the artist who disappears behind the painting that is dead, and the image arouses the desire. In fact, women are not naturally the objects of image reproduction, but images are naturally women. Worse still, the image is "eternal". After all, a thing must first survive before it can die, right?
From this point of view, what "Lolita" tells is still the desire and fear germinated in the process of watching the "Mystery", which is not obvious in the construction of Kubrick's series of works: Dr. Qi Ai plays Quilty’s home is a "lookout hotel", he disappears in the image through murder (redrum); Lolita is hal9000 betrayed on a dangerous voyage, their appearance is flashing like an automaton Professor Humbert is a rehearsal of Dr. Tom’s deviant behavior in "Open Eyes Caution"...
What Kubrick finally captured in "Lolita" was a kind of grand and subtle insight, which is why he chose to eliminate any interference from emotional factors, and the result was (applying a short comment by neighbors) Lan The velvety and weird narrative texture and incisive details are condensed into such a completely personal video work whose final style is neither film noir nor suspenseful sentiment, swinging between tragedy and comedy.
Ring and hand
Manet's 1879 painting "In the Greenhouse in the Garden" was analyzed by Jonathan Clary. Since it no longer follows the classical visual model, it is closer to a deliberately constructed film sub-shot. In the painting, Manet portrayed a moment of ecstasy: the gentleman's eyes drooped, his gaze staying around the outline of the lady: this is a pair of plump hands soaked in spirit, it is a look that hasn't been aware of being looked at. However, the two protagonists in the painting are trapped in ambiguous self-sustainment, and the two parties may have verbal provocations but never pierce them. The sense of pursuit was diffused in the process of the rings approaching each other. Manet's brushstrokes also appeared in the painting as a sloppy depiction, and the two of them finally talked about each other.
The special feature of the 62nd edition of "Lolita" is that the first 40 minutes of the game field of American suburban families is extremely delicate, which is full of Manet's insight.
If we regard Manet's " ring " as some kind of ingenious visual device, then such techniques in "Lolita" can be said to be everywhere. For example, in this classic lens, the point of view first focused on Humbert’s ecstatic face, and the sound of Lolita counting came from his ears, and then the lens slowly adjusted the focus to include Lolita’s movement, and then immediately Mrs. Haze suddenly entered the lens and took a picture of Humbert. The operation of the flash stopped Humbert's gaze and Luo's hula hoop count at the same time.
The relationship between watching and being watched is cleverly connected in the nesting of many circles, but only some misleading afterimages are left in the hunting net of desire.
Quilty’s meeting with Humbert was the same. He always turned his back to Humbert, his eyes gazed towards the void outside the painting, his chubby hands were rubbing pathologically with a pair of black-framed glasses, and his mouth bounced extremely fast. English with a German flavor. Speech is expressed as a vassal of physical behavior, in which there is no communication on any level.
Compared to the 97 version and Nabokov's original work, Kubrick also emphasized the expressiveness of the hand as a sense organ in the film. The variety of hands, as if from Tolstoy’s observations, is a personal decisive feature: Low’s hands can be gently turned over, Mrs. Haze’s dramatic gestures, Quilty’s convulsive hands, other than that, no The controlled hand also reveals the tacit rules of the game in social situations, revealing secret messages of power and desire.
Mrs. Haze's closed viewing room. The horror images on the screen echoed the audience's reaction. The hands of all three became the shiny horny rings of rattlesnakes, ringing signals of desire uncontrollably.
Humbert's hand broke away from the control of the organic body in a moment, and was connected to the owner's lesion along a hidden "spine"-Humbert Humbert touched his face, it was a toothache; Humbert Henn Burt held his arm, it was a sign of a heart attack.
All games have rules
In the 62nd version of the movie, Mrs. Haze’s house is a deliberately built theatrical stage. Kubrick used the camera to follow in the footsteps of Mrs. Haze and Humbert from 13 minutes to 17 minutes, crossing the walls and stairs without any obstacles. The long lens room presents the complete structure of a doll house, and obtains a quality that can be called Wes Anderson style today—a spatial texture that is both three-dimensional and flat.
This arrangement is not without reason, Tati once used everything in this type of space as a dance element for scheduling. This is a natural game space. In Mrs. Haze's home, the living room is suitable for dancing, the chess room is used to practice intellectual games, the movie room is regarded as a dark box imitating desire, and the ladder is a pure lift symbol, where the drama of rank and prohibition unfolds. All games have rules, and Humbert knows this well, and he accepts it with a little joking tenderness and complaining.
The operation of desire naturally has its laws. It never directly points to a desired object, but diffuses like light in every evaluation. Not only the surrounding people can become its conductor, but all art objects are also active. Participating in it, novels and movies are the embodiment of lies, secrets and desires. Humbert can only bear the figure of her daughter in Mrs. Haze; Mrs. Haze sees the screenwriter Quilty through the flying skirt at the prom, and Lolita is sought after by the girls around. Find Quilty. In the law of desire, fiction is reality. Is Lolita just a sexy girl in the eyes of every Humbert?
Toy philosophy
Baudelaire was dissatisfied with the artistic atmosphere of the 19th century. He saw that art quickly became a museum and history dominated the art of painting. He thought to himself: Isn't a modern artist first grown up in modern soil? He wrote "The Philosophy of Toys" (translated in other diaries) in 1853, and regarded "toys" as the first concrete form of children's exposure to art, a child's initial metaphysical melancholy and desire.
Toys are different from art. They have all the functions that art can provide and constitute a miniature and reliable landscape world. However, from being manufactured to being destroyed, their entire life cycle closely surrounds moody children.
Baudelaire immediately wrote of this scene: behind a wrought iron fence in a beautiful garden on the village road stood a white and full child, dressed in fancy country clothes, lying on his feet with a feather and glass beads. Toys. But the child didn't care about his toys. His eyes were straight through the other side of the fence. It was a poor child showing him a mouse in a cage-a live toy!
However, if the cage delineates the range of movement of a mouse and makes it succumb to the pleasure of its owner, is the beautiful child in the fence a "living toy"? The 19th century was known as the "children's century", but it was also the century when childhood was idolized.
Lolita, a "living toy" like a doll, stands high on the top of Mrs. Haze's dollhouse. Mrs. Haze is romantic and clumsy, while Lolita walks lightly, walking on the boundary between fiction and reality at every step. It is precisely because she is a child that she can possess such nymph magic power. She is a sleepless daydream in this world, and all her actions are always more than she really wants to say.
Isn’t Humbert’s love for Lolita the same as a child’s love for toys, as we all had at the beginning? He carries all the difficulties of the old world, "a perfect artwork can't give his spirit the same warmth, nor will it bring the same enthusiasm and faith." What he desperately needs is the light of life, the fire of desire, his sin and soul, the girl with these three syllables.
Only then can it be said that the "Lolita complex" is not entirely a man’s pathological desire, nor should it be entirely attributed to the distorted product of the birth of capital society. Its true soil lies in the fictional world on the other side, as long as lies and secrets are activated. The engine of desire and desire, the law of generation of love games will naturally override the moral laws of this world.
Stendhal's words echoed in his ears: "Beauty is a promise to happiness." It is true that Lolita is such a bad check, she inspires fantasies but does not have the quality indicated by fantasies, and even all the beauty that shines on her has nothing to do with her.
Lolita is a living prop. Her existence will only increase the endless proliferation of fictional facts. She will become the star of the entire stage in a moment. How can one save the dying princess on the stage? Since she was saved, she is not a princess. For Humbert, the emotion called "jealousy" in traditional literature is nothing more than this: a little imagination can make an accusation, and an image can establish a connection. You caught a blue bird and wanted to incorporate it into your world, but when you woke up, you found the whole world turned into a blue bird.
The virtue of the 62nd edition compared to the 97th edition is that Humbert did not really go crazy and illusion in the heavy rain and damp lens group. He has always maintained a quantitative sobriety, but all the drama he imagined is so lifelike. , Derivative obsessions also follow, so that the entire real world has experienced this process of miniaturization and black boxization, what kind of "crazy" can be summarized. Just imagine that the props found behind the absconding, rape and imprisonment of the "enchanted hunter" Humbert turned out to be "dolls and toy cars." Isn't this both ridiculous and sad.
(Perhaps Nabokov's beauty is that he wrote the concentration and innocence that gradually manifested in sin.)
No one knows what Lolita wants, just like the gaze no one knows about that portrait of a young girl: behind the canvas there is nothing you want, only what you think she wants you to, a few bullets may be The lowest cost of recovery. At this time, only remaining silent.
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