By Dave Riley
With federal MP Trish Draper, amongst others, still insisting that it should be banned outright, Adrian Lyne's new film version of Lolita has finally been released in Australia.
Those who recall the anti-censorship campaigns of the 1960s are sure to be struck by deja vu. The right to see Lyne's film, or read the novels of James Joyce, Henry Miller, T.S. Lawrence and Philip Roth, or even to say the word "fuck" on stage was won by long civil liberties campaigns.
Today, what is allowed into this country is decided more by the ideas of the government of the day than according to the principle of people's right to read, watch and hear whatever they choose. In Australia in the '90s, when migrants and refugees alike are sent packing, cultural and human exchanges at the border seem passé.
In such a climate, the campaign to ban Lolita should be opposed.
The fact that the original novel, by Vladimir Nabokov, and Stanley Kubrick's 1962 film version of it are available at any book or video store handicaps the right wing's new rush to judgment. It's not as though we don't know what we're in for.
When Nabokov wrote the book in the 1950s, it was rejected by every major US publisher. He finally took the work to France, where it was eventually printed by a publisher with a rather shady reputation. Three years later, the book was printed in the US, but not before it was banned there because of its "pornographic" content.
Despite Lyne's Lolita being black-listed by every major US film distributor, it seems right at home in a climate in which paedophilia is at the forefront of the national mind set.
The fact of a middle-aged man lusting after and sleeping with a 12-year-old girl may appal and surprise us, but it no longer shocks us — not when we have 14-year-old super-models hailed as sex symbols, Hollywood actresses starving off any hint of womanhood and the media laying bare a host of depravities in the New South Wales political establishment. Those cultural shifts seem to make Nabokov's novel a little duller, almost quaint.
While Draper and her supporters rant against Lolita, my reading of the novel and the previous film version is that it is a brilliant piece of satire.
As it teeters between tragedy and farce, the purest of its many messages is that women (at least those older than 12) are dumb, stupid and worthy of contempt. The novel's (and the film version's) paedophilia is but a vehicle for that gospel.
This, perhaps, is what attracted Lyne to the project. His films (including Nine and a Half Weeks, Fatal Attraction and Indecent Proposal) are never short on misogyny. You could almost call it his cinematic theme.
Lolita is honest — its hatred of women is genuine hate — and because of that purity of purpose it exposes the social significance of paedophilia (as distinct from individual acts of it). Contrary to the hue and cry over its remake, Lolita tells us more about the function of paedophilia in capitalist society than any number of royal commissions in NSW.
Ban it? Never!