20/06/2022
The troubling legacy of the Lo**ta story, 60 years on
The dubious aesthetic of Kubrick's film has endured in pop culture. But is it the film or the original book that is to blame for this perplexing phenomenon, asks Steph Green?
S
Simply uttered on its own, the word Lo**ta conjures up a certain collective image: an "underage" girl who is aware of – and deliberately overt with – her own sexual attractiveness, developed beyond her years. This troubling pop culture legacy, that propagates throughout music, fashion, photography and beyond, feels worlds away from the tomboyish, unselfconscious girl described in Vladimir Nabokov's 1955 novel of the same name. On the infamous poster for Stanley Kubrick's adaptation, a 1962 "black slapstick" comedy, as critic Pauline Kael called it, a young girl peeks at us over a pair of heart-shaped sunglasses, sucking on a lollipop, accompanied by the sentence: "How did they ever make a movie of Lo**ta?" The photograph, taken by Bert Stern, is hazy and soft-focus. Memorable for its "come-hither" quality and flippantly daring tagline – that overlaid the film with a smug defiance in the face of strict censorship laws – it's this image that has come to define the long-debated film which turns 60 this month. Is this where the misunderstanding of Lo**ta can be traced back to?
