"You have my word as an inveterate cheat" - WHAT'S NEW PUSSYCAT? (1965)

With the way Woody Allen's sexual neurosis has gone into a deep WASP-y freeze these past decades, it's easy to forget his 60's pro-libido worldview and that old carefree magic that used to show us the winking horny trickster behind his neurotic fussing: TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN, SLEEPER, BANANAS, LOVE AND DEATH and PLAY IT AGAIN SAM, in fact everything he wrote before his break-out, STAR WARS-beating-for-the-Oscar success, ANNIE HALL, has a bawdy good humor that hasn't been very 'good' since his whole 'outing' as a sexual predator. It's important we remember that his Humbert-nebbish self-conscious paralysis and priapic overeager clowning was part of the sexual revolution, long before they were 'art.' In the 70s, a nebbishy persona and thick glasses didn't specifically exclude him from the in-crowd, as a result, he's not as threatened by the tall-goy-and handsome competition in ways he would be later. Maybe that's why WHAT'S NEW PUSSYCAT holds up so well today. He's not competing against a beautiful tall god like Peter O'Toole --he's writing for him. And he even gives the leg-humping lion share of comedy to a second Brit, Peter Sellers, with Allen pulling in the sloppy thirds as a nebbishy strip club prop man. Add a bevy of hot, talented comediennes and the film rises like a balloon way past the clumsy boudoir farce of types like Blake Edwards, who always seemed too easily hypnotized by a pretty shape with less of an idea how to film it, preferring to hang out in raincoat drag clubs with Oktoberfest grotesques and under beds and down late night hotel hallways like a guilty sinner while Mancini slinks along beside him in barefoot haste.

By contrast, British directors like Clive Donner and Robert Talmadge seem to know enough to just get out of the way when Allen is writing and comedic heavies are acting, like you would for the Marx Brothers. In a great extended scene, Fritz and O'Toole get drunk together in a Paris cafe, half-fighting, then apologizing, then taking off their coats to slug it out, then forgetting why they took their coats off and putting them back on before staggering over to Capucine's baroque apartment tower, arm-in- arm, to lob rocks and slurred declarations of love up to her balcony: "Tell her, her face is like ze pale autumn moon!" beseeches Sellers like a terrible Cyrano from the bushes. "I'm not going to say that," Toole slurs. "It's ghastly!" Drunken recitations from Hamlet are tossed up instead to indicate the Immoral Bard is with them, and O'Toole playing a drunk trying to do Hamlet is about the best Hamlet ever. Meanwhile Sellers' ridiculous black wig finally makes sense when he pops up as Richard III in a dream sequence (he apparently loved the wig so much he wore it all through the shoot). I love O'Toole more than in MY FAVORITE YEAR, and in some ways if you factor in that Allen worked in the Borscht Belt gag room of Your Show of Shows then you realize PUSSY might even be a prequel to YEAR, a relic from a smoother, bawdier epoch, before sex was relegated to the foul-mouths of 20 year-old virgins.

 MY FAVORITE YEAR doesn't hold up as well, today - at least for me. It has terribly unimaginative lighting and scoring, and its reliance on a barrage of ethnic humor, nebbishy voice-overs, and hack zaniness (Stealing a police horse and riding around Central Park at dawn? It's right up there with PETULIA's tuba). But Allen actually wrote for Sid Ceasar in TV's early 'years' but in 1965 is not yet all hung up on ethnic RADIO DAYS-style nostalgia. Instead of those G-rated tropes, PUSSYCAT has an air of real madness. There is need here for horse theft or other generic bits of naughtiness, and O'Toole has the energetic languor of a man in the prime of beauty and charm, who's been laughing a lot in between takes and makes the most of every clever line and every pretty girls thrown within his woo-pitching radius. He pours on a kind of dissolute actorly resonance most dramatic stars playing comedy wouldn't bother with. When, for example, he brings a cricket ball and bat to his insane group therapy meeting it feels like he's sharing something meaningful to him, O'Toole, with these new friends that have been making his sides hurt from laughing all through the shoot. It's beautiful. It's what that lame tuba, or that lame police horse, was probably fumbling after.

Playing a charmer who is as irresistible to women as they are to him, we feel in O'Toole's depth that his life has been one long series of one-night stands, and when he says he needs more out of life. O'Toole is more than good, he's convincing. So when one of his more insistent conquests, played by Romy Schneider, demands he marry her, he goes to see a psychiatrist. Enter: Fritz (Sellers), to help him with what we'd now call sex addiction (and we'd now be compelled to say "there's nothing funny about it!" in case anyone is listening). Meanwhile, Woody shows up through the stage woodwork and somehow winds up taking a disillusioned Romy home to his little pad --her act of reprisal against O'Toole's waffling, the way Miriam Hopkins was always going off with Edward Everett Horton.

PUSSYCAT began as a Warren Beatty vehicle but had it turned out that way it would have been a completely different film and nowhere near as fun. Men like myself distrust Beatty-- his ability to bed all these girls and still look tan and nonplussed does not move us. We love O'Toole on the other hand, because his pallor is that of a man taking too much Cialis. And scoring loads of babes seems so critical to Beatty's self-esteem that it's not joyous just compulsive. O'Toole just genuinely seems too enraptured by the beauty and sparkle in ways Beatty's too narcissistic to match. Each new lover takes just a bit of O'Toole's bodily fluids, and each takes him farther from being able to look his fiancee in the eye, but he's so enamored by each new girl, and so appreciative of their attention, that each time he cheats is like the first. As he struggles valiantly against his inner nature, women are literally dropping out of the skies into his motorcar. What's a nobly drunk insouciant to do?

That's the joy of it all: we'd do just what he's doing, except maybe not try so hard to keep Schneider... though her parents turn out to be pretty fun at a party. Another genius rarity! You know those affairs where you stick it out an extra year because you like drinking with her parents!? You don't? O monsieur! And another thing that hasn't happened in 1965 (aside from AIDS, of course), that grisly story of what too much sex did to Three Dog Night's Danny Hutton. As far as we knew, there could never be too much sex. Oh man, to have Cialis for daily use, but as yet no AIDS? Can you imagine?

Naturally Allen's script is going to lean at some point towards his beloved Fellini, here via an image of O'Toole with whip and slouch hat as women fight over him in a dream, but I always got the impression Fellini was too guilty a Catholic to really go for broke. That he'd run home at the last minute hyperventilating like Marcello's provincial papa in LA DOLCE VITA, as many of us probably would. O'Toole's women on the other hand are all believable conquests and his befuddled sense of crushing over-stimulation conveys what it feels like when every girl in the room is fighting over you and then they make peace and decide you're a sleaze for wanting them all, and suddenly no one wants you and then you're just tossed away in the street for twenty years, alone and wondering what you did wrong, like the Jeff Beck guitar neck in BLOW-Up or Donna Summer's cake in the rain.

Girls of O'Toole, from top: Ursula Andress, Romy Schneider, Capucine, Paula Prentiss

Then there's the women: Ursula Andress ("She's a personal friend of James Bond!" Fritz shouts) has seldom been more alluring as the mark-missing skydiver who lands in O'Toole's roadster en route to le Chateau Chantal, where the cast is assembling for the final, inevitable closet-hopping merry-go-round; Paula Prentiss is aces as a manic stripper-poetess ("Who killed Charlie Parker? You did!") working on her fifth nervous breakdown / pill OD (the detox ward presents her with a commemorative plaque); Capucine is a sexy bundle of nymphonic repression and I love her to death, so why pick Romy Schneider's pussycat over all those meaningless... gorgeous.... succulent... crazy other pussycats? She's cute and can be vivacious but ends up with the one-note monogamy-hawker part; she even thinks she's being cute when she steals his car keys and won't give them back. And you know how she ended up? All but wrapped in collector's non-acidic mylar by Jacques Dutronc in The Important thing is to Love. (1975).
 

Look! Look at the lips of that Prentiss poet. 

But what's important is that Woody doesn't really believe either notion - monogamy or nymphomania - is the answer. Writing a character like O'Toole's sex addict seems to help this young version of Allen's pen write large: the sex is easy and breezy, not the cranky old bourgeois intellectual somehow scoring the love of a teenager or a prostitute in his future films. O'Toole's tall lanky Britishness gives Allen permission to keep things at a literally Wagnerian pitch. His pen's libido seems charged with that exhilaration that only comes when a non-Catholic writes farce in France, to the point that even when O'Toole starts tenderly yammering about how his true love was right in front of him all the while, a big author's message sign flashes on... and on. Man, that author's message sign could be flashing nonstop in the last dozen films Woody's made!

That's fine because, marriage-minded women or no, there's some of that giddy thrill of when you're 'on a roll' and women start fighting over you, or you just get lucky and for once aren't saying idiotic things and blowing your chances, and actually getting a bottle, a bed, and a girl together all at the same time and life is a jazzy gas. Even if poor Allen's character spazzes and Sellers is basically trying to date rape Capucine all through the film, why not forgive it? And if you have laughter, it doesn't even matter if you end up with nothing else. Just look at those crazy actors in this picture below. They're all having a blast, and why not?

So instead of getting upset, just think about the way young woman all claim they're helpless nymphomaniacs to a man one minute and then refuse his advances a second later, and all the other things that have disappeared from films due to PC ethos. There was once upon a time a book called "The Joy of Sex" that was on every adult's bookshelf --even in suburbia. Nowadays there wouldn't be a book like that, now it would be The "Joy of Responsibility, Control and Prior Consent" - where even porn stars are required to use aesthetically depressing condoms and there are enough lectures about the importance of family values and settling down in every rom-com to turn off even a moralistic old studio like the post-code MGM.

But this is 1965, we don't have to worry about that yet. Here no woman runs away who doesn't secretly want to be chased, the cross fades are psychedelic, and the perfume of giddy madness eliminates any staleness in the boudoir-farcical air. Whoa whoa whoa Whoa! Whoa.

PS - And just when you think it can't get any better? Francois Hardy. All she'd have to do is sing "La Chazz l'infantile" and we'd be at it again.

PPS - Rereading this in light of the Harvey Weinstein /Louie CK stuff kind of shocks me - my only excuse was a kind naïveté. Since that piece by Ronan Farrow and the one by his sister that came out in the wake of Blue Jasmine, I've been on an Allen embargo, and now the bawdy 'all women want to be chased' attitude in the film and in my piece unnerve me. I was protesting more the mawkish sentiment of rom-coms and this pro-family dynamic then in vougue. But I think this rousting of the predators from Hollywood is very very important, and good for male-female relations as a whole, as the sooner they're all identified and eliminated, the quicker we can go back to 'fun' in sex and male-female banter with a clearer understanding and less silence about real intentions and motives.  Meanwhile, of course Allen is still at it, with something called Wonder Wheel. Ugh -- Kate.... Kate, what are you thinking? (12-19-17)

Quilty Makes This World: 12 Tricksters (CinemArchetype #1)

This post commences a series on Jungian archetypes in film and media, wherein we gather an assortment of characters, icons, and public figures who all fit the same functional mold, the better to unravel our iconographical lexicon. The first archetype celebrated here on Acidemic is, naturally, 'The Trickster' for he is the most psychedelic. Just ask Ken Kesey or Timothy Leary, if they weren't dead....Trickster makes this world (by Lewis Hyde).

For sake of polarization of type we've limited this to males, but of course the trickster is by nature beyond gender, beyond personal gain as well. He lives in a state of identity flux, bound to no one persona (though perhaps he can be in service of an abstract cause, like 'the paper') and is seldom on the level as far as sincerity and yet this allows him perhaps greater leeway in his altruistic ambitions, for he need gratify no urge, for him there there is no one persona to 'want' anything. You are most likely to meet him on the road to knowledge, and if a trickster helps you on your way, be grateful but not indebted. And beware: for every two or three favors he gives, one wry screw-over is guaranteed. But you can't just walk away after two favors, what if the third is legit, too? Dude, turns out none of them are favors, they're gin and tonics. He'll confuse the simple and clarify the incoherent, and never justify anything, let alone means or ends. Take Elliot Gould's doctor in MASH for example,who seamlessly incorporates an operation on the child of a prostitute into his Tokyo boondoggle and just as effortlessly employs blackmail of the resident officer to make it happen. He expects no reward from the mom and brooks no condemnation from the Army, he demands neither a freebie nor accepts a guilt trip; he doesn't think ahead or crave validation - he's just a dancer in the Shiva flame. That's a trickster.

1. Peter Sellers as Clair Quilty - Lolita (1962)

"The woman always goes for the trickster, because he cannot be shamed; he is too transparent, always able to drop his 'story' the moment it gains any weight, embodying instead a series of roles each easily discarded for the next. The James Mason types by contrast inevitably resort to violence, for they presume their warped idea of dignity and ownership is an essential right, worth killing over, no matter how abstract. They feel justified in the use of firearms against the trickster who mocks them — and in the 1960s it was because the repressed guy was closeted, or abused, or a mélange of the two like in Bertolucci's The Conformist. The trickster's game involves exposing these straightedge characters for the damaged bullies they are, and so they can't help but leap across the mess hall table and start strangling Donald Sutherland (Burns in MASH) or shooting Quilty, so we realize the whole time said losers have been festering in their self-made prison of masochistic desire. But even here the trickster's power is healing and transforming — his opponent's straightedges have been rounded off against their will. Maybe after some time in the booby hatch, Burns will learn to smoke pot and lift weights in his garage, like American Beauty or get a motorcycle like in Wild Hogs!" (All Tomorrow's Playground Narratives)

2. Michael Keaton as Beetlejuice (1988)

"Instead of accepting 'the fate' as is, Beetlejuice attempts to create his own rules. Beetlejuice's ostracism is the result of his anarchic 'supernatural' politics; his mindless rebellion against any mediocrity (both worldly and underworldly) and, ultimately, his powerful unpredictability."-- Helena Bassil-Morozow, The Trickster in Contemporary Film (Routledge)

3. Heath Ledger as The Joker in The Dark Knight (2008) 

The meta-textual similarity of Joker's burning money scene to the wasteful expenditure of the film's vast budget and its justification via huge box-office profit -- all for what amounts to a big loud explosion of nothing -- is eerily prescient. Dark Knight pays lip service to how "Gotham needs a hero" but it's just a really a big, loud, leftist version of Death Wish, with our sympathies reversed. When Joker sets fire to his half of the money we can imagine Batman rushing in to save it, cradling it in his arms and screaming to the sky: "Damn you, Damn yoooou!!"In this one scene, Joker proves he's the only truly sane man in Gotham, the only "true" soul in this dark mess, the only one with inner Zen stillness and joie de vivre; the only one not hypnotized by his or her "life story." No matter how harshly he's screamed at (Batman growls and shouts until he's hoarse), the Joker never loses his mellow-gold cool; he's already at peace with himself and his mania. He's in the flow like one of those old drunken masters in the Shaw Brothers films. (see: "Burn your money!")

4. Groucho Marx

"Let me know when you want to be attacked and I'll be there five minutes later to defend you."

5. Bugs Bunny

"Bugs Bunny gets a charge out of driving people crazy. And that may be why he lasts. He doesn't seem like a character of the '40s, but rather a character of today. His wisecracking, gender-bending, anti-authority antics broke ground long before punk rock, or David Bowie, or Jerry Seinfeld. He's impossible to pin down in any specific sense."  --J.J. Sutherland, Trickster, American Style

6. Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow

"Me? I’m dishonest, and a dishonest man you can always trust to be dishonest. Honestly. It’s the honest ones you want to watch out for, because you can never predict when they’re going to do something incredibly, stupid."

7. Eli Wallach as Vacaro - Baby Doll (1956)

Vacaro wins Baby Doll via a constant ebb and flow of masculine aggression, a flow that pushes her boundaries and then moves back a bit to let her catch her breath. He chases her but when she stops running, he stops chasing. When she chases him, he runs. Genuine play is introduced into the mating ritual, letting Baby Doll assume a more pro-active role. Once he has her where he wants her (trapped on an attic beam) instead of demanding sex he forces her to sign the statement against her husband; she's disappointed. Why this film outrages the Catholics may lie more in this area than in the idea of a man obsessed with an "under-developed" woman (Baker doesn't seem the least bit under-developed, merely inexperienced). There's an implicit notion in code-sanctioned romance that the sex must be dealt with quickly - one dissolve between a kiss fade-out and a cigarettes-in-full-dress afterwards-- and then move on with the story. BABY DOLL lives in the twilight realm of that fade-out. The "did they or didn't they" ambiguity is allowed to drive the censor stand-in (Malden) to a point of sweet insanity. --The Tell-Tale Dissolve

8.Robert De Niro as Conrad Brean - Wag the Dog (1997)

Conrad: 

And it's most certainly NOT about the B-3 bomber.
Aide:
There is no B-3 bomber.
Conrad: 

I just said that! There is no B-3 bomber. 

I don't know how these rumors get started!

9. Elliot Gould as Trapper John  - MASH (1970)

Peterson:

You can't even go near a patient until Col. Merrill says its ok
and he's still out to lunch.
Trapper John: 

Look, mother, I want to go to work in one hour.
We are the Pros from Dover and we figure to crack this kid's
chest and get out to the golf course before it gets dark.

10. Cary Grant as Walter Burns - His Girl Friday (1944)

Walter Burns: 

Look, Hildy, I only acted like any husband
that didn't want to see his home broken up.

Hildy Johnson: 

What home?

Walter Burns: 

"What home"? Don't you remember the home I promised you?

11. Roy Scheider as Dr. Benway - Naked Lunch (1991)

 "You'll see how elegantly this works (he mixes black powder into water or juice for Bill to drink). The black will disappear completely. There'll be no smell, no discoloration. It's like an agent, an agent who's come to believe his own cover story. But who's in there, hiding, in a larval state. Just waiting for a time to hatch out."

12. Max Von Sydow - The Magician (1958)

Bergman's film itself refuses to guess whether Sydow's character is a poor beardless blonde actor begging alms for his attempt to entertain and terrify, or the actual mystical creature he appears to be in the beginning and by the end. Even the embittered empiricist for whom most of it all is being performed can't tell which if either are the act, but he's at least wise enough to see that the denuded magician / beggar is just another persona. There is no 'single' true self with him.

Midlife Crisis Superstar: Humbert, Lo, and the Bait-Switch Cycle

I'll be a guest on Film Geeks tribute to Kubrick podcast this Dec. 5: here's an excerpt from my 2009 Bright Lights Film Journal article:

"All Tomorrow's Playground Narratives"  Stanley Kubrick's LOLITA:
 
It's hard to believe now in our jaded world but in the late 1960s/1970s, even first-class artist filmmakers such as Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy) and Kubrick (A Clockwork Orange) and Bertolucci (Last Tango in Paris) earned X ratings, making their movie posters reverberate in the deep recesses of my child mind, seeing their ads in the paper and getting a sharp chill in the base of my spine. Back then, an X could be artistic as well as dirty and/or ultra-violent, and thus these films still carry the potent whiff of genuine danger, whose loss Camille Paglia (and this essay) laments. The danger still exists, but we are disconnected from the accompanying desire. It is too late to feel things deeply, in the flesh. We check in with our bodies periodically, during a commercial break, or when it's time to pass the joystick. Only later, when the TV and iPods are all shut off, do the demons and traumas make themselves felt.

Like most of Kubrick's work, Lolita (1961) reflects this gradual rotation ever further into the simulacrum but from an earlier epoch, going from the refinements and closeted perversities of pre-war Europe to the prefab motels of post-modern America. These were the days when police could arrest you for transporting a minor over state lines, or--depending on the state-- kick you out of a hotel for having a woman in your hotel room who wasn't your wife (marriage licenses were like cohabitational authorization cards). So, to unravel this, let's clarify that there are three levels of time at work in our appreciation of Kubrick's film: 1) the span of time since Lolita was released (half a century ago); 2) the span of time of the actual movie (2 ½ hours) and 3) the time spanned in the movie's mise en scene ("i.e. 3 years later, etc."). Kubrick ingeniously unites all three, anticipating its future cult status in the century of evolving mores to come--ensuring it will never be outdated or 'campy. As it meanders from shrill bedroom farce to tense Freudian scenes of insane jealousy, the film itself becomes full of deep, sad shadows. This progression into madness is similar to another of Mason's roles, that of the cortisone-maniac dad in 1956's Bigger Than Life. The monstrousness of Humberts actions becomes apparent only later, when he's struggling to keep his mask on in the face of all the subterfuge --the self-fulfilling prophecy of jealousy. Prior to this, of course, any man of reproductive age may well identify with his morality-melting attraction (Sue Lyon, initially fetishized for maximum impact, being older and more developed than, say, the girl described in Nabokov's book). But as he becomes more and more odious in his jealousy, we come to identify more with the shadowy libidinal freedom offered by Quilty' presence. In a meta parallel, we move as a world from the Mad Men permissiveness of the early 60s, to the giddy high of the late-60s genuine sexual revolution through to the launch of the AIDS miasma and into a simulacrum fog,  Kubrick's film being with us every step of the way, seeming to predict every step to the libidinal excess of the 70s and back down into 80s repression. Sex now involves so many layers of protection we're better off just imagining it --in your shadows of your own mind. Lolita beats us there too, for--to get the film past the censors--there's no sex, or even kissing, in it anywhere whatsoever. You need to understand the 'code' to infer as you will. 

In the pre-VHS 1970s we wished for the some weird new form of cassette, where we could compile our favorite movies around us as a fort, to not be enslaved to the TV Guide (I sometimes arose at dawn just to see some bizarre piece of crap like Zombies on Broadway). In the 2010s we are stuck, like James Woods in Videodrome, with our head halfway into the cathode ray mouth. Our Satanic wish has become fulfilled beyond our wildest dreams, in excess to the point of nightmare. Now that the entire world has access to all the movies ever made,  being surrounded by favorite movies carries no currency. As Baudrillard put it in The Conspiracy of Art: "It is useless to be dispassionate in a dispassionate world. Being carefree in a divested world has no meaning. This is how we become orphans."

We can see the bait-and-switch of the simulacrum in the commercials shown before movies in theaters now. I remember seeing two commercials back to back after not having seen any for a while (I gave up cable for a few years) and was flipped out of my gourd. The first ad was one of those anti-drug messages, aimed at teens: "Coke Kills." The next is a Coke (as in Coca-Cola) commercial, where a sad little boy takes a sip from his glistening black bottle and flowers and rainbows shoot out of his head: "Coke is life." These are cinema's options — the approved drink is named Coke (which originally had cocaine in it) but is pitched at having the exact effect of the one drug it does not contain, the forbidden drug from which it gets half its name --"the real real thing." This is a very devious switcheroo, regardless of whether it's for our own good. My shrink told me the other day that one of the strands of drugs I was on was scheduled by the FDA on the level of Valium, etc. And why? Because the rats liked it. They kept pressing the lever. No other noticeable problems to long-term use but the rats liked it. They just don't want us rats to have a good time, or is it that, like our concerned parents, they want us to stop watching old movies and go outside and get some fresh air?

I'm all for keeping irresponsible people away from drugs, but the switcheroo presented by these two coke/Coke commercials is a Pavlov equivalent of forcing the rat's hand on the lever while giving him nothing in return. If you're feeling high off drugs, why tell your doctor? Now he has to do something about it, the twin serpents on his profession's fraternal emblem obligate him to halt your ecstasy. The doctors hold the keys to the kingdom, dangling the precious pills above our heads like we're doggies. If we pant and beg, no treat; we have to seem utterly disinterested. Thus displays of enjoyment are rendered dangerous to actual enjoyment, unless the real desire is masked in in 'unconvincing' fakeness. A person craving a renewal on their Valium prescription must 'perform 'badly' that things are now all right, i.e. that they are only feigning the freedom from anxiety that Valium should bring. Baudrillard's dispassionate orphans see their dead parents alive in old videos, in the movies of the past, where enthusiasm, love, and desire can stay potent under the condition they are acted rather than real.

This cycle of bait and switch is the feature selling point of Lolita as it revolves gradually from the bourgeois end game hungover morning after (death) of Quitly's assassination, to bucolic innocence of Humbert's first visitation to the home of Lolita and her mom, to gradual dissolution and back again. Lo's glasses and pregnant belly (at the end of the film) prove her to be a less shrill but nonetheless archetypal blonde suburban mom a la her mother, whom Humbert visited with equal muted horror at the beginning of the flashback. A similar revolution on the meta level mirrors this: as the film grows less and less "contemporary," it grows less "obscene." Yesterday's pornography is today's literary canon, though a return to said literature being burned in the street in some Handmaid's Tale-style future seems still distantly possible. Canon as it my be, good luck finding Lolita in your high school library these days, especially in the South.

Wherever you stand on it, Lolita is an odd-film-out in the Kubrick oeuvre, particularly in that it's one of his few films that attempt to deal with sex, his Achilles heel. Always squeamish about consensual coupling, from Humbert's inability to perform husbandly duties with Lo's mom, to Sterling Hayden's mad general in Dr. Strangelove: "I don't deny myself the company of women, Mandrake. I just deny them my essence' to Tom Cruise's self cockblocking in Eyes Wide Shut, impotence is one Kubrick's main recurring themes, whereas 

To see how Kubrick's 1961 film is really the first 1970s movie, we have to look way back before that, to the late 1950s: repressive Cold War paranoia was giving way to the emerging strands of freethinking that would gradually weave into the rope of countercultural "free love." Sex, which had been safely encrypted in the pre-suburban "Our Town" style of living before WW II, came roaring up from the land of the repressed in cinema via films such as 1954's Baby Doll. The Kinsey Report had made "the sex life of suburbia" into a hot topic, igniting the suburban elite craze for Freud and psychoanalysis. Why not swap wives when we're all comfortably middle class and hip to the Oedipus complex, and drunk? Kinsey made it seem like everyone else was doing it, and we wouldn't want to be left out. 

Scandalous intellectuals-only satire, however, would only do for so long. Without the same amount of repression to work your lusting Wildean wit against, a book or movie like Lolita ceases to be subversive. Viewing the film in the 1990s, it was no longer risqué but a shrill bedroom farce in the style of Fox's early 90s sitcom, Married with Children (which also featured a hot, nubile daughter perched scandalously amidst a family of raving sex maniacs). What was once scandalous has become cartoonish.

Lolita sits at the tape mark on a Moebius strip of time dealing with our national obsession for nymphets: A huge backlash against the loosey-goosey sexuality of children (epitomized by Brooke Shields in the 70s) began in the early 1980s, with day-care molestation scandals and TV's America's Most Wanted. Parents went from letting kids run wild in the streets if they were old enough to walk ('70s), to freaking out if they're out of our sight for a second ('80s), to accompanying them to school and having to be forcibly prevented from sitting through their classes with them (today). Yet nowadays, in more depressed areas, like the mall, you see the 13- to 16-year-old Hannah Montana nymphets glorified in short shorts they never would have been able to wear outside the house even in the '70s, and a salon tan, and bottle-blond hair, Britneyed to the nines, wobbling around the mall on their high heels in the company of their obese moms who either don't seem to notice or enjoy the looks of hungry males by proxy. 

The idea of women teachers sleeping with young male students, meanwhile, has become top news and fodder, and multiplexes pack in single working women on Friday nights to see Notes on a Scandal, Sex and the City, Elizabeth, The Reader. Koo Koo ka Choo! Just keep it on the screen and out of the real. And let's not forget the dour, craftsmanship-suffocated Lolita remake by Adrian Lyne! As with everything they touch, the bourgeoisie keep the sex and scuttle the myth. They first demonize and then overvalue that which was better off without their meddling or even knowledge.

What's most altered our perception of Lolita's "sexuality" is the tumbling down of the enforced moral code, thanks to the "did they or didn't they" question on which it hung being flipped upside down through hipster hand magic. As a code-breaker in this sense, Lolita really has a lot in common with Baby Doll, i.e. the way Quilty and Lolita work together to exploit Humbert's insane jealousy, driving him to murder, just as in Baby Doll, Carroll Baker (below) and Eli Wallach deliberately provoke and tease the dirty-minded hick played by Karl Malden until he runs amok with a shotgun. The 'did they or didn't they' question on both of their minds is something neither they nor we ever learn the answer to.

Each self-diagnosed cuckold (including ourselves) wants to "know for sure" what the code can never explicitly say. The code itself becomes the meta-textual source of anxiety, a stand-in for the insanity of jealousy, itself a smokescreen for the universality (and therefore mundanity) of our hitherto most private sexual impulses--and thus the films' code-enforced sexual ambiguity serves as a "self-fulfilling prophecy," driving the Joseph Breens into lynch mob madness. No matter how successfully they censor, their own curiosity drives them insane. There's always one viewer who believes it's possible to 'know' what Lolita and Humbert did or didn't do that morning in the hotel room with the cot, or what happened during the nap with Eli Wallach and Carroll Baker in the room with the crib in Baby Doll. 

That one lone dude in the theater is the censor.

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