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RESEARCH PRODUCT

: Metonymy, Identification and Subjecthood in Stanley Kubrick's Lolita (1962)

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description

The author argues that, in order to bypass the Hays code, the eroticism in Kubrick's film is produced by metonymy, both verbal and non-verbal. Basing his study on the works of Christian Metz and Laura Mulvey, and more broadly on Lacanian psychoanalysis, the author analyzes how the film first constructs the character of Lolita as a “sexual object” subjected to the male gaze, then deconstructs its own construction by enabling Lolita to accede to the symbolic order, thus breaking out of the solipsistic imaginary the pedophile had confined her to. The film puts the spectator in the pervert's shoes by encouraging primary identification with the camera eye, secondary identification with Humbert Humbert, and reifying Lolita's body, only to turn against the spectator, thus offering a critique of the “visual pleasure of narrative cinema” fifteen years before Mulvey's seminal essay.