Misdirected VI

I can buy you new ones to take the place of the old ones.

- Humbert Humbert consoling his 14-year-old stepdaughter, Lolita, with the promise of records to compensate for the sudden, drastic changes to her life in the 1962 film of that name [1].

I thought this film featuring the rivalry between two authors over the aforementioned girl would help me sound out our current portion of Anxiety [2] about desire.

A romantic theme [3] plays while the credits to this black-and-white film roll over a curtained background. A small female foot descends, and male hands gently take it, insert cotton between the toes and polish the nails before the screen goes black. We cut to a car, from the inside then out, driving down foggy roads, the shots fading into each other. It approaches a castle before the scene dissolves to a seemingly abandoned [4] palatial interior, and we see Humbert, our protagonist, making his way through its riches and debris - among them numerous empty bottles and a sculpture of a goddess with a high-heeled shoe on its head. Minimalist, quietly ominous music plays as the trespasser approaches a harp and strokes it. He apprehensively calls out “Quilty” and stops between a clock and a ping-pong table, then a wine bottle and glass drop off one of the sheet-covered chairs, and a pajama-clad man emerges from underneath the cloth, wrapping it around himself toga-style and calling himself “Spartacus” before acknowledging his name. As Quilty reaches the other end of the table, Humbert, putting on a pair of gloves, proposes “a little chat before we start.” His host, standing before an ornate mirror, counters, “Let's have a game, a little lovely game of Roman Ping-Pong like two civilized senators,” and serves a ball to the perplexed intruder. Still a bit drunk and unfazed at the grim behavior of his unexpected guest, Quilty tries to get him to serve back, then pulls a ball from behind his “toga” and serves again. The eerie music plays on as Humbert’s opponent pulls out yet another ball and hits it. This time, our protagonist volleys back, and they play while Quilty remarks on the absurdity of how people invade his house, in their case usually with a telephone. When the homeowner asks him if he is Jack Brewster, Humbert answers, “You know who I am,” but slowly realizes, as his antagonist continues to babble about the game, that he does not. Humbert asks sadly if he remembers a girl named Dolores Haze, but the pajama-wearing man keeps chattering until our protagonist strikes his paddle against the table, exclaiming, “Lolita!” Quilty looks up, smiling broadly - “Yeah, yeah, I remember that name all right. Maybe she made some telephone calls, who cares?” He serves two balls at once, then we see his eyes widen before we cut to our hero holding a pistol.

{We’ll let this pistol aim us to our newest class, where Lacan names the ear as the fifth of the objects around which, in his schema, anxiety turns. He warns us that mapping desire requires that they cannot be separated from each other and says that mapping is complete with the} advent of a remainder around which there turns the drama of desire. {He then apologizes for a new digression – a discussion of the Hebrew instrument, the shofar.} [5]

We cut back to Quilty as he relaxes, calls Humbert a sore loser, and snickers. Advising his guest that it's how you play that counts, he turns away, saying he is dying to have a drink. Humbert, following him, replies, “You’re dying anyway,” and the two sit across from each other. Quilty takes a martini glass from the table between them, sips from it, and spits – “All my friends always put their smokies out in the drink.” When Humbert tells him to concentrate, his antagonist cracks that his guest is either Australian or a German refugee – “This is a gentile's house. You'd better run along.” Our protagonist presses on; “Think of what you did, Quilty, and think of what is happening to you now,” but his host, mimicking a filmic old prospector, asks, “How much a guy like you want for a darling little gun like that?” He continues this role as Humbert hands him his “death sentence” and tells him to read it. At first demurring, claiming that he never had any “book-learning,” Quilty then complies, interrupting after a couple lines to compliment his guest’s “dern good” phrase, "Because you took advantage of my disadvantage." He resumes, only to look up in feigned shock at the line, “When I stood Adam-naked.”

{Quilty’s prospector can help us sift through Lacan’s explanation of the need to define the shofar to use it to substantialize his explanation of “the function of o” at its final stage,} to reveal the function of sustentation which links desire to anxiety in what is its final knot. {Describing the instrument, a ritual horn used in Jewish feasts, Lacan gives us alternate names: “Widderhorn” or “ram’s horn” (noting, however, that it is sometimes made from a goat’s horn.) He tells us that the object is of considerable length and that its sound calls forth an “atmosphere of recollection, of faith, [and] repentance.” He then describes a study strewn with (and producing) reflections - scholar Theodore Reik’s interrogation of biblical texts, which Lacan acclaims as more profound than more respectful commentators’, and which} goes more directly to what appears essentially to be the truth of the historical advent in these biblical passages… [6]

After the third line beginning with, "Because you took advantage,” Quilty comments on the note’s getting “a bit repetitious,” but continues up until, "Because you took her at an age when young lads…” Then Humbert grabs the paper away, snapping, “That’s enough!” When our protagonist asks if Quilty has any last words, his rival drops the prospector spoof. Claiming to be sick and accusing Humbert of being drunk, he puts on boxing gloves, proposing they settle their differences in a civilized way, and punches the air, saying, “Put ‘em up.” Humbert, looking somewhat appalled, asks if he wants to die standing up or sitting down, and his opponent, in his new part, says, “…like a champion.” Humbert fires, and, though his bullet goes harmlessly through Quilty’s boxing glove, the guest finally rattles his host. The latter, breathing heavily, suggests Humbert “stop trifling with life and death.” Quilty identifies himself as a successful playwright, knowing “tragedy and…and comedy and fantasy and everything,” and adds that his father is a policeman. Going to a piano, he plays Chopin, claiming that he had written the work himself. We cut to our protagonist, eyes wide, mouth open, and head shaking in disbelief before we cut back to Quilty inviting Humbert to help him “dream up” lyrics and offering him a share in the profits.

{I'll use Quilty’s song as an overture to Lacan’s thoughts on the instrument and its role in the Old Testament. Our professor notes the inadequacy of the view that the shofar and its supporting voice is an analogy of the phallic function – we need to know how and at what level. To correct Reik’s “mixture and confusion,” Lacan promises to show into what} conflict with a whole reality, with a whole social totemic structure in the midst of which the whole historical adventure of Israel is plunged. {Lacan identifies the Yahwe/Moses relationship with the totems of ox and calf, saying,} We were told about the calf only to confuse the issue, to leave us in ignorance of the fact that there was also a bull. So therefore, since Moses here is the son, murderer of the father, what Moses has destroyed in the calf through the sequence of all the displacements followed in a way that quite obviously makes us sense that we lack any reference points, any compass capable of orientating us, this is supposed to be therefore Moses’ own ensign: everything is consumed in a sort of self-destruction. This is only indicated to you, I am only giving you here a certain number of points which show you the extremes at which a certain form of analysis can arrive by its excesses. We will have other examples in the lectures which follow… [7 (scholarly citations removed)]

Ad-libbing some lyrics about the moon and the song’s addressee being blue, Quilty goes on, “She's mine, yours...she's yours tonight, and the moon is...” Moving as if to drink from a nearby bottle, he suddenly throws it in one direction and runs in the other. Humbert fires, then pursues, still shooting. While Quilty tries to get upstairs, Humbert finally hits him in the leg, then runs out of bullets. Quilty looks at his leg and praises the “swell job” Humbert did scaring him, then sees his guest reloading. Pulling himself up the stairs, the wounded man offers to let Humbert have his castle and friends. At the top, he drags himself toward a painting of a very young woman, a portrait that rests on a tiger rug (ferocious-looking head attached.) He tells his attacker that he could use his friends “as pieces of furniture,” then offers to fix it so he could attend executions as sole observer. Quilty keeps talking as he pulls himself behind the painting, and our hero, pistol again loaded, advances on him, shooting through the thin barrier. We see the bullets pierce the work as Quilty cries out, “That hurt!” His hand grips the frame before the camera pulls in on the girl’s face and throat as Humbert disfigures them, then the screen goes black.

{With Quilty’s climb, we can aspire to understand Lacan’s words as he refers to biblical texts which mention the shofar’s sound’s allowing the people to go up after the “thundering dialogue” that led to Moses’ descent from Mount Sinai. Alluding to some contradictions and omissions highlighted by Reik’s examination of the instrument’s role, our professor notes that the author’s intention in retaining this detail remains opaque, but points out that the shofar is always mentioned in matters of refounding.} [8]

We get a brief segment of the love theme with an intertitle reading, “4 years EARLIER,” then cut to a plane flying over New York City as lighter music plays. We hear Humbert’s voiceover telling us of his decision to spend the summer in the American “haven” of Ramsdale, New Hampshire before taking a lectureship at Beardsley College, Ohio, a lectureship he had won through the success of his translations of French poetry. A shot of his taxi approaching a large suburban house dissolves into the interior, where the shapely owner, Charlotte Haze, leads Humbert upstairs to the available room. Wearing a leopard-spotted belt over a fitted jumper and tights, she boasts the attractions of the area, including peace and quiet, the “culturally advanced” residents, and her own chairmanship of the Great Books Committee, and mentions that one of the speakers at that group was Clare Quilty, writer of “TV plays.” Noticing a soiled sock in the hallway, Charlotte puts it in a drawer, apologizing. Humbert diverts himself by looking at a ceramic cat on and a painting of a crying woman above the dresser, and his would-be landlady says that his interest in art requires that she show him the collection of reproductions in her bedroom.

{Charlotte’s tour can guide us toward Lacan’s stated goal for now of retaining the vocal object insofar as it is supported by} a system of opposition with which it introduces possibilities of substitution, of displacement, of metaphor and of metonymies, and which moreover is supported by any material whatsoever capable of being organised in these distinctive oppositions between one and all. {He then compares the shofar to the drums used in Japanese No Theatre} played precisely by the style, the form, of certain types of pulsations in so far as they have, with respect to what we could call the precipitation and the kernel of interest, a really precipitating and binding function. [9 (scholarly citations removed)]

Humbert looks at his watch as Charlotte leads him into the bedroom, then feigns admiration as she points out her copies of Dufy and Van Gogh [10] paintings. Pleased when, at her query, Humbert says that he is divorced, she alludes to her “late” husband, Harold. As he walks toward her door, she “casually” bars his way, discussing her honeymoon in Mexico. She mentions that Harold had left her well-provided for, and gestures toward a small shrine she had created with a picture of her husband [11] and a medieval triptych above a small desk on which rests an urn. She extols her late husband as “a man of complete integrity,” and says, as Humbert rests his hand on the vessel, that it contains his ashes. Embarrassed, he asks how “late” Harold was, and Charlotte tells him seven years, adding, “It's very difficult for a woman… an attractive woman alone, you know.”

{We’ll let this scene herald our next passage, where Lacan notes the similarity between the Hebrew word “Zikor” - “to remember”- and an important use of the Widderhorn:} the median moment in these three solemn blasts of the shofar, at the end of the days of fasting of Rosh Hashanah, is called Zikron… {Inferring that, since the faithful had “just spent a certain time [in] recollection,” the call to remember is aimed at their god, Lacan says that this inference brings us into the Freudian terrain of the function of repetition. Our professor places the instrument in the field of the imperatives of the super-ego, then notes that, due to the character of elision of the object o at the visual level, he needs to return to the function of the eye in fantasy.} [12]

Humbert, expressing sympathy while backing out to the hallway, knocks into an object leaning against the wall, a cartoonish picture of someone in Mexican dress, and Charlotte apologizes, saying she had told Lolita to keep it in her room. As Mrs. Haze leads Humbert back downstairs, he asks if she has a live-in maid, and his hostess tells him she doesn’t, although “the colored girl comes three times a week.” Then, indicating the kitchen, she says, “My pastries win prizes around here.” When Humbert asks for a phone number to call when he has made his decision, Charlotte answers, “1776,” and Humbert replies, the “Declaration of Independence.” Laughingly agreeing that the number is easy to remember, Charlotte insists that he see her garden, since her flowers also “win prizes around here.” As she takes Humbert outside, we hear a radio playing a breezy tune and see a pretty blonde girl sitting on a blanket and wearing a bikini, cat’s-eye sunglasses, and a picture hat. We get a closeup of the would-be lodger staring while Charlotte introduces her daughter, Lolita, then we cut back to the teen as she lowers her glasses to look at the stranger. We hear her mother offscreen sum up the benefits of her home, including a sunny garden, congenial atmosphere and cherry pies. We cut to Humbert as he inquires about the rent and, finding it “very reasonable,” asks when he can move in. When Charlotte says that he can move in that day and asks what his decisive factor was, he answers, “I think it was your cherry pies.” We then cut back to Lolita as the two adults laugh.

{We can use Charlotte’s roses to unfurl Lacan’s next thoughts - first, that because of the foregoing character, the fantasy is the most satisfying support of the function of desire, then, his discussion of the concept of “body” as conceived by the usage of the function of space - It] can only be recognized as inalienable, which means for us that it cannot in any case be o… [However] This means that through the form i(o), my image, my presence in the Other is without a remainder. I cannot see what I am losing there. …This is the meaning of the mirror stage and the meaning of this schema that was forged for you, whose place you now see exactly, since it is the schema destined to ground the function of the ideal ego/ego-ideal in the fashion in which the relationship of the subject to the Other functions, when the specular relationship, called in this case the mirror of the big Other, dominates it. {Lacan adds that that the form i(o) performs two functions, or “seductions,” being marked by the predominance of the visual ideal, but also putting us on our guard against this ideal of the Other: To} see and tear apart what is illusory in it, it is enough to make a stain on it: to see where this point of desire is really attached, to perform “the function”, if you will allow me the equivocal usage of a current term to support what I want to get you to hear, a stain is enough to perform the “function” of beauty spot… [As this stain shows the place of o (“looks at me,”) it draws me more] than the look of my partner; for this look reflects me after all and in so far as it reflects me, it is only my reflection, an imaginary buoy. [13]

We see Humbert, Charlotte and Lolita at a drive-in watching The Curse of Frankenstein as the monster rips a bandage off his hideously scarred face. The camera pulls in, revealing a cataractous eye, as he spots his creator. We cut from the horrified doctor backing away to his creation advancing and grabbing for his throat. As Dr. Frankenstein off-screen cries, “Nooooooo!” we see Lolita and Charlotte, on either side of Humbert, reach for one of his hands. Humbert scratches his nose with the one that Charlotte had grabbed, then puts it on top of Lolita’s. After the girl puts her other hand on top of that one, Charlotte, wearing gloves and still watching the film, puts hers on top of the stack, then realizes that the top one isn’t Humbert’s, and the three pull apart from each other.

{I’ll let this scene highlight Lacan’s use of} the blank eye of the blind man as being at once the revealed and the irremediably hidden image of scoptophilic desire [showing how anxiety emerges in the vision of the locus of desire that it determines.] {He further notes that the eye of the voyeur} appears to the other as what it is: as impotent. He opposes this stage to the vocal stage to which he will return next class, saying,} if desire were primordial, if it were the desire of the mother which determined the bringing into the play of the original crime, we would be in the field of vaudeville. … [I]t is from the original fact inscribed in the myth of murder as the starting point of something whose function we have henceforth to grasp in the economy of desire…[14]

The breezy music returns as Humbert, his eyelids and voice heavy with tedium, teaches his landlady chess. As Lolita, in a nightgown, approaches from behind, her mother asks him, “You're going to take my queen?” and the boarder admits that that was his intention. He turns to see the girl rest her arm on the back of his chair, and gazes at her until Charlotte looks up from her game, cloyingly saying, “Bed-y-bye, dear.” After Lolita kisses them and leaves, Charlotte moves her queen, and Humbert, taking it, remarks, “Well, that wasn't very clever of you,” adding, when Charlotte moans, “It had to happen sometime.” The music continues as we fade to black, then we get a closeup of Humbert peering over a book as we hear Lolita counting off-screen. He slowly lowers it while the camera pulls back to reveal that she is counting Hula hoop rotations. Charlotte then approaches him from behind, the flash from her camera making him grimace and her daughter’s Hula hoop fall before the landlady chirps, “See how relaxed you’re getting?”

{This scene can help us picture our next passage, where Lacan contrasts teaching his psychology students with teaching the Einsteinian system to those versed in the Copernican system, noting that Einsteinian equations} are included in the ones which preceded them… [However,] to interest oneself a little in psychoanalysis is already to be a little implicated in it – in the whole measure of our implication in psychoanalytic technique, we have to encounter in the development of concepts the same obstacle designated, recognised, as constituting the limits of analytic experience… [15]

From a shot of the Ramsdale High School gymnasium decorated for a summer dance, we pull in on the crowd of couples to a closeup of Lolita and her partner, Kenny Overton. The girl brings him over to greet her mother, who introduces him to Humbert, and the two resume dancing. Mrs. Haze, between bites of her hotdog, gushes, “Lolita is sure Kenny's going to ask her to go steady tonight,” before an attractive neighbor couple, John and Jean Farlow, approach. John apologizes to Humbert for being late, then asks, “Mind if I dance with your girl? We could sort of swop partners.” Charlotte gives the half-eaten hotdog to her border – “Well, this is what you get because you won't dance.” On the floor, Farlow’s daughter, Mona, dancing with a somewhat wonkish-looking young man, eagerly greets her father, who kisses her on the cheek. We return to Jean taking Humbert’s arm in both hands while describing the “glow” that Charlotte has acquired since having met Humbert. Looking from her hands to her face, then away, he expresses skepticism that he is the cause, and she responds, “Humbert, when you get to know me better, you'll find I'm extremely broad-minded,” then extends the description to her husband as the professor looks around uncomfortably. She keeps hold of his arm, and John, returning with Charlotte, impishly tells the pair to “cut that out.” Humbert titters briefly, then, when Mrs. Haze says she is thirsty, excuses himself to get more cups. Charlotte admiringly says that Jean's daughter is “becoming a mature young lady,” and Mrs. Farlow tells her that Mona will be a junior counselor that year at Camp Climax.

{With Charlotte’s compliment we’ll progress to Lacan’s next assertion, that teaching psychoanalysis requires the instructor takes the maturation of the students’ thinking into account, following the school of those, like Piaget, for whom} there is a gap, a fault between what childish thinking is capable of forming and what can be brought to it along these scientific paths. {He suggests following the lead of a pedagogue who} was able to formulate that there is real access to the concept only from the age of puberty on {then tells us} that the function of the phallus as imaginary, functions everywhere at every level, high up and low down, that I defined, characterised by a certain relationship of the subject to o, the phallus functions everywhere, except where one expects it, as a mediating function, specifically at the phallic stage… [16]

Humbert, after checking for watchful eyes, sits behind some flowers, moving a vase aside to get a view of Lolita. We then cut from her and her companion to Quilty, dancing with fashionable aloofness, and his - a Cleopatra in spiked heels named Vivian Darkbloom [17]. Charlotte points the writer out to Jean, who says that she had adored his play, The Lady who Loved Lightning. After excusing herself from her neighbors, Charlotte cuts in on the “dark lady” and dances energetically with Quilty until the end of the song. While the author returns to his partner, aiming a contemptuous “wow” at Mrs. Haze, its target follows him, attempting to remind him of their previous time together. She finally whispers something to him, and his eyes widen and brows lift as he asks, “Did I do that?” Standing back, she adds that she later had shown him her garden and driven him to the airport. He distractedly says that it was “really great fun,” then, with more focus, asks whether she had a daughter with a “lovely, lyrical, lilting name…” “Lolita,” Charlotte answers, and Quilty plays with the source name, Dolores – “the tears and the roses.” Then, at being informed that on Wednesday the girl will get a cavity filled by his uncle, the author laughingly says, “yeah.” The camera dissolves to a dancing Lolita before pulling back to show Humbert still watching as Charlotte approaches him. Mrs. Haze asks him where he has been and gives him a large piece of cake. “I strolled around for a while and then I came up here,” he answers before the Farlows join them. Charlotte, standing behind Humbert, looks meaningfully at her watch and back to Jean, who then asks if Lolita can stay with Mona at their house overnight. Humbert worriedly tries to stand, offering to come over and help, but the three restrain him. When he persists, saying it would be no trouble, John responds that the teens don't like too many grownups around. Charlotte then takes Humbert’s cake to save his appetite for their cozy dinner at home. We dissolve to the professor taking what looks like shellfish from the dining room table while Mrs. Haze, wearing a low-necked leopard-spotted dress, approaches him. Saying that she hopes she didn’t keep him waiting too long, she swirls briefly- “I thought I'd change into something cozier,” - and asks if he thinks it is too risqué.

{This change can help us follow Lacan, who promises to continue to turn around in taking different paths to demonstrate his formula (-<p.) He approaches the subject of the primal scene, noting that sometimes} the essential of the traumatic effect of the scene is precisely the forms under which it disappears, is conjured away. {He again uses one of Freud’s patients as an example:} The essential in the revelation of what appears to the Wolfman through the gap which prefigures in a way what I made into a function, that of the open window, that which appears in its frame identifiable in its form to the very function of phantasy in its most anxiety-provoking mode, it is manifest that the essential in it is not to know where the phallus is. {Pointing out the response of the subject to this trauma, he tells us that this is the first time} Freud has to note in a particular fashion this function of the appearance of the excremental object at a critical moment, note – consult the text – that in a thousand forms he articulates it as a function to which we can give no other name than the one that it was thought necessary to articulate later as characteristic of the genital stage, namely as a function of oblativity [or, a gift.] [18]

Humbert starts, “this may not be the right time or place…” but Charlotte puts her fingers on his lips – “Not another word until we've finished our pink champagne.” As she pours him a glass, he tells her that, having come to feel like a member of the family regarding Lolita, he should ask if her mother is being too liberal with her. Over Mrs. Haze’s dismissal of him as a “dear, sweet, naïve man,” he continues – “I don't think you realize that she's beginning to grow up.” Selecting an album from her bookcase, she puts one on the record player, and we hear “Cha-cha-chá” music as she acknowledges her daughter’s budding maturity - “…and it's only natural and healthy that she should take an interest in those fascinating creatures known as [she then clinks her glass against his] ‘the opposite sex.’" Charlotte treats his continued expressions of concern (about, among other things, the Farlows’ fitness to supervise Lolita) with affectionate condescension, then she tries to teach him to dance. She refuses to believe his protests that he has no sense of rhythm, swaying in front of him while saying, “… it just pours out of you.” When he offers to clap his hands while she dances, she takes both his arms, insisting he join her. Telling him where to put his hands, then to hold her tighter, she says, “ready, go,” and counts off two steps, replacing “three” with, “cha-cha-cha.” She encourages his nervous fumbling, simply asking for “a little more ‘joie de vivre.’" Still overlooking his obvious discomfort, she compares him to an old boyfriend, then to her late husband. She tries to get closer as she says that she had sworn she would never marry again, but he moves away, praising her “loyalty.” As he backs into the bookcase, she asks whether life shouldn’t be for the living, telling him to take her in his arms. Looking around desperately, he sees something and smiles - Lolita. She tells them that the party was “a drag” – “I thought I'd come back and see what you were doing.” Happily accepting the boarder’s offer to make her a sandwich with Charlotte’s leftovers, the teen waits until he is out of earshot, then asks her mother if she had enjoyed dancing with Quilty, remarking that her classmates are also “crazy about him.” When Charlotte says, “That's neither here nor there,” Lolita, smiling slyly at her, asks, “since when?” Humbert returns with the snack, “loaded w/mayonnaise,” and Mrs. Haze tells her to take it up to her bedroom, threatening to withhold her allowance when the girl rebels. Lolita then complies, though mocking Charlotte before retreating. Mrs. Haze, her voice becoming increasingly shrill, then rants about her daughter’s “spying,” describing her as spiteful, homely, and resentful of her sexuality. Finally composing herself, she tries to get Humbert to take her out for a drive or at least finish the champagne with her, but he begs off, pointing to his tooth and blaming an impending attack of neuralgia and its “ally,” heartburn. We see him climb the stairs, then cut to Charlotte trying to stifle her tears before we fade to black.

{As to the relation between anxiety and orgasm for women, Lacan warns,} It is not enough to say vaguely that the satisfaction of orgasm is comparable to what I call elsewhere, on the oral plane, the crushing of demand under the satisfaction of need. At this oral level, the distinction between need and demand is easy to sustain, and besides does not fail to pose us the problem of where the drive is situated. … If by some artifice one can equivocate at the oral level about what is original in the grounding of demand in what we analysts call drive, this is what we do not in any case have any right to do at the genital level. And precisely there where it would seem that we are dealing with the most primitive instinct, the sexual instinct, it is there less than anywhere else that we cannot fail to refer to the structure of the drive as being supported by the formula [$   D: $] relationship of desire to demand. [19]

We hear Humbert’s voiceover as we watch him write in his diary, musing about Lolita’s mixture of “dreamy childishness and a kind of eerie vulgarity.” The narration continues, expressing the writer’s sense of danger about his subject as we cut to Charlotte downstairs, wearing a top in her favorite print, petulantly getting a breakfast tray ready. She nags Lolita for various infractions, such as using too much sugar on her cereal, then carries the tray to the hall. As she nears the stairs, the phone rings, and we see Lolita try to answer before her mother grabs it away. When the teen asks if it’s Kenney, Charlotte brusquely says “no” and has her bring Humbert’s breakfast to him. We watch Lolita climbing the stairs and reacting as we hear Mrs. Haze say to Jean, “Mona? What time?” then turning away toward Humbert’s room as her mother tells Mrs. Farlow that there’s something very important they have to discuss. As the teen enters, Humbert locks his diary in a drawer and comments about her “long face,” and when she asks about the journal, he offers to read her some poetry. Selecting one by his favorite poet, Edgar Allan Poe, he shares his admiration for various lines from the ballad, “Ulalume.” Although she appreciates the first verse, after he reads where the narrator “passed to the end of the vista” and was “stopped by the door of a tomb,” Lolita pronounces the work “corny” for its next line – “What is written, sweet sister?” commenting, "'vista-sister,' that's like, 'Lolita-sweeter.'" Praising the teen's acute observation, Humbert asks if Mona had been annoyed when her friend had left the party, and Lolita laughs, saying, “Let me tell you something about Mona,” then stops herself – “You’ll blab.” Humbert protests that he will never give away any of her secrets, and she replies archly, “Well, for that you get a little reward.” Puzzled, he thanks her before she picks up an egg from his tray. At first demurring, he obeys her order to put his head back, and, when she says he can take one little bite, he grabs her arm and takes a large mouthful.

{I’ll use Humbert’s reading to conjure Lacan’s assertion that men desire to satisfy a demand which has a certain relationship with death, if only in the sense of “to die laughing” … I}t is indeed here that there ought to reside post-orgasmic relaxation. [Yet the successful result with] regard to this end of jouissance and to reaching this appeal of the other in a term which would be tragic, the amboceptor organ can always be said to give way prematurely. [20]

Charlotte calls Lolita, and, when she responds, scolds her for disturbing Humbert and taking so long to answer. After being ordered to dress to visit the Farlows with her mother, the teen retorts, “Sieg heil.” We cut to the dining room and hear light “romantic” music as Charlotte rings for the maid, Louise, to bring coffee to her and Humbert. Announcing a surprise, Mrs. Haze says that he was right about her being too liberal with Lolita, and that she and Mona would be going to the camp together, adding, “…isolation from boys would be the best thing for both of the girls this crucial summer … Is something the matter with your face?” She expresses sympathy when he answers, “toothache,” and, to his query, says the camp is 200 miles away, and we get a closeup of her smiling - “Ain’t I clever?” After she asks if he wants to join her on the piazza for the coffee, Humbert repeats the toothache fib, and we fade to black. We next see him awaken to the sound of Charlotte, the maid and Lolita preparing for the girl’s trip to camp. Going to the window, he sees Lolita tell them to wait, and her theme music plays as she runs upstairs, embraces him and says goodbye, telling him not to forget her. Looking ready to cry, Humbert starts towards his own room, then turns into hers [21]. While Mrs. Haze drives her daughter away, Humbert lies face down on the teen’s bed, then sits up on hearing Louise calling him. He remains, sitting in front of Lolita’s stuffed bear, after the maid hands him a note and, when she is gone, he reads it aloud, his tears changing to disorientation, amusement, and finally to satirical laughter. The note, confessing Charlotte’s love for him, tells him to leave unless “you are ready to link up your life with mine forever and ever and be a father to my little girl.” After finishing, Humbert lies back on the bed, overcome with glee, and the camera pans to a cigarette ad featuring Quilty, then fades to black.

{Humbert’s change of fortune and his obsession’s departure for “the great outdoors” can help us take Lacan’s suggestion that we let go of genital achievement as an ideal in order to cast castration anxiety} in a much more supple correlation with its symbolic object, and with an opening out that is quite different to the objects of other levels, as this moreover has always been implied by the premises of Freudian theory, which put desire in a completely different relationship to a purely and simply natural one to the natural partner as regards its structuring. [22 (scholarly citations removed)]

We see Charlotte wake during a raging thunderstorm and call for Humbert. Cutting to him writing in the studio, we hear the contents from his voiceover discussing his recent wedding, confessing “a pattern of remorse daintily running along the steel of his conspiratorial dagger” while he goes into the bathroom for more privacy. His new wife, expressing insecurity, jealousy and loneliness, says, “You know how happy I can make you,” and he demurs that he hasn’t had his morning coffee yet. Taking her up on her offer to make him some, he goes to his desk, but she bursts in as he is putting his diary in the drawer. She hugs him, dismissing her recent insecurity and calling their love “sacred,” and he agrees, pulling her back to the bedroom and taking a draught from a bottle on his nightstand. Charlotte asks him if he believes in God, and, when he replies flippantly, pulls out a small pistol from the drawer under Harold’s shrine, saying she would commit suicide if she found out he didn’t. She informs an alarmed Humbert that it is a “sacred weapon” that Mr. Haze had bought to spare her the sight of his suffering from his illness, and her new husband tells her to put it down. When she complies, he kisses and puts his arms around her, positioning himself so he can look at the picture of Lolita on her nightstand, and she exclaims, “Oh, you man!” However, after she tells him about her plan to send Lolita directly from camp to boarding school, then to college, her eyes widen as she whispers, “Darling, you've gone away.” Telling her he is following a train of thought, he rolls over, and we get a closeup of the gun. The phone rings, and Charlotte and Lolita talk about a sweater the teen had lost in the woods and candy that Humbert had sent her. Humbert bristles at Charlotte’s reproach for not consulting her on the gift, and berates her, saying that “not all the decisions are taken by the female, especially when the male partner has fulfilled his obligations [shaking his fist] beyond the line of duty…” Throwing the receiver on the bed, his wife leaves the room, and Humbert finds that Lolita has hung up. Taking another swig from his bottle, our protagonist notices there are bullets in the pistol, and considers shooting Charlotte and claiming he had meant to play a “newlywed’s” practical joke, not knowing it was loaded. Leaving the room and hearing running water, he approaches the bathroom, pistol drawn, but quickly finds he cannot make himself kill her. Thunder continues to peal as he opens the door wider to see the room empty, then enters his studio - Charlotte is at his desk, holding his journal. He approaches her, timidly admonishing her for “reading other people’s diaries” as he reaches for it. His wife hits him with it, quotes various derogatory references to her, and then resumes hitting him. Finally ordering him out of her way, she says he can have the house, but vows that he will never see “that miserable brat again!” She storms into her room and locks herself inside. Addressing Harold’s urn, she promises to find someone worthy of him next time, then collapses. The camera seems to pass through the floor to Humbert preparing a drink for her as he yells up to her that he was writing a novel and had only used Charlotte and Lolita’s names because they were “handy.” Hearing the phone ring, he finally says he’ll take it, and goes to the hallway. Answering, he asks if this is "a gag,” and calls upstairs - “There’s a man on the line who says you’ve been hit by a car.” We then hear the front door opening and shutting in the wind, and Humbert tells his caller to wait. Hearing a siren, he puts on his raincoat and goes outside, following people rushing toward the accident scene. He arrives to find Charlotte’s corpse with a tarp over her head. The driver runs to him, saying it wasn’t his fault – he had swerved to avoid hitting a dog. We then dissolve to Humbert relaxing in his tub with a drink as the breezy tune from Lolita’s “introduction” plays. We hear the Farlows calling him, and he sits up and pulls the shower curtain halfway closed before they enter. As they utter comforting clichés, John notices the pistol. Putting his hand on Humbert’s arm, his neighbor tells him not to do anything rash, and has Jean tell him that Charlotte had been born with only one kidney and that the other had nephritis, so wouldn’t have lived long anyway. Finally, they remind him of his daughter, telling him he must live for her sake.

{We’ll let this stormy scene resound Lacan’s assertion that} what is involved in what one might say are, at first, savage relationships between man and woman [due to] certain unease about where exactly the male path of desire is going to lead her {Noting that this unease disappears after consummation, He brings up a passage from T. S. Elliot’s “The Waste Land” that followed a scene in which} the carbuncular young dandy, the little clerk from the building society, has finished with the typist whose surroundings are all along depicted for us … “When lovely woman stoops to folly/and Paces about her room again, alone/She smooths her hair with automatic hand/And puts a record on the gramophone.” [23]

We dissolve to Humbert’s car as he approaches Camp Climax. Once there, he tells Lolita that her mother is sick and is being treated in a hospital near Lepingsville, and takes her to a hotel, claiming they are stopping on the way. We see the inn, The Enchanted Hunters, and hear the strange music from the beginning as we watch Quilty and Darkbloom enter, and the music continues as the celebrity flirts with night manager/former actor, Mr. Swine. Swine suggests that, as a playwright, Quilty could use him sometime, and Quilty agrees that he might use him, chuckling as he echos “sometime.” He then asks Swine what he does in his spare time, and the night manager responds, “I swim, play tennis, lift weights. Gets rid of the excess energy,” and asks what the writer does. While Darkbloom rubs his shoulder, her face a mask of sphinx-like impassivity, Quilty answers, “judo …she throws me all over the place. … I lay there in pain but I love it. I really love it. I lay hovering between consciousness and unconsciousness. It's the greatest.” The breezy music returns as Lolita and Humbert enter, and Quilty and his partner move further down the reception desk, Quilty’s ear toward the camera throughout Humbert and Swine’s conversation. Although the manager says that the rooms are tied up with a convention, Humbert presses for accommodations, and Swine calls his co-worker, Mr. Potts, asking if Captain Love has called. Finding that the reservation has been cancelled, Swine says that Humbert can have the captain’s room, and we cut to Quilty and Darkbloom as the night manager adds that, although “lovely,” it only has one bed. Humbert agrees to take the accommodations, despite the troopers’ having snapped up all the cots. Registering, the professor asks what sort of convention the inn is holding, then giggles briefly when he is told it is hosting the state police, and we fade to him and Lolita entering their dark room. We see Humbert nervously tip the bellhop, then discuss the size of the accommodations with Lolita, responding to her belief that her mother will divorce him and strangle her on finding that they had shared a bedroom - Humbert stammers that as they travel they will often be thrown together, adding that “two people sharing one room inevitably enter into a kind of...how shall I say, a kind of...” Lolita, yawning, then asks if he shouldn’t follow up on the cot. We dissolve to Humbert strolling the lobby as the tune, “Two Beat Society” plays, then see Quilty and Darkbloom watching as he approaches a manager and asks if he has heard from his wife. After the manager says he hasn’t, but is still working on the cot, the playwright raises his newspaper as the professor turns away. Quilty then follows Humbert out to the patio. Leaning over the railing, facing toward the camera and away from his rival, he smirks, telling Humbert he is with the police convention. Our protagonist offers to leave him alone, but Quilty protests, “I get the impression that you want to leave but you don't like to ... because you think I think it looks suspicious…” He stammeringly engages his adversary, complimenting him on his “normal” appearance and saying how much he would like “to get together and talk about world events, in a normal way.” When Humbert tries to decline, Quilty also compliments him on the “lovely little girl” who came with him. Humbert tells him that she is his daughter and, to his query, says that his wife should be joining them. Quilty says that he had noticed that Humbert had looked uneasy at the desk, and our protagonist answers that his wife had been hit by a car, but that he understands she will come later. Quilty giggles, asking, “What, in an ambulance? I'm sorry I said that. I shouldn't say that. I get sort of carried away, being so normal and all” We get a closeup of Quilty’s intense, rapidly blinking face, as he offers, knowing Mr. Swine, to get Humbert and his daughter a nicer room, perhaps a “bridal suite.” After Humbert’s request that he not take trouble on his account, the playwright continues to chatter, telling his new acquaintance that he could “take a swipe at” Mr. Swine “for not giving you a lovely, comfortable, sleepy, movie-star bed.” Humbert objects that his daughter is probably asleep, and we get another shot of Quilty’s manic face as he asks if he can look “at the accommodation that you have, and take it in for a second, then I can have a word with George Swine?” When Humbert finally excuses himself, Quilty asks to have breakfast with the pair, offering to have it laid out for them all, but the professor begs off. Humbert gets to his room in time to see the bellhop, with the folding bed, knock on the door. He asks him to be quiet, saying they don’t need it anymore, but, when he finds that he got it because two of the troopers agreed to double up, has him bring it in. We see Lolita asleep in the foreground, light coming through the venetian blinds forming a bar-like pattern on her, as the two enter. After extended bumbling with the cot, Humbert and his assistant get it open, and our protagonist ushers him out. We fade to Humbert emerging, clean shaven, from the bathroom and stealthily approaching Lolita, turning the covers down. As he gets one knee on the bed, she awakens, notes that the cot came, and bids him goodnight. He then gets into the folding bed, which immediately collapses. Next morning she wakes up before he does and, getting behind him, says urgently that the hotel is on fire, laughing at his initial alarm. After he reproaches her, she asks what time it is, and he replies that it is time for breakfast. Not wanting to eat yet, she proposes they play a game she had learned from a boy who had worked at Camp. She whispers something in Humbert’s ear, then moves seductively in front of him, and the screen goes black. We cut to the pair in the car and, at Lolita’s questioning, Humbert says that he doesn’t think they will make it to Lepingsville by the evening. The girl asks the phone number at the hospital, and her stepfather says it will be just as well if she waits until they get to their destination. At Lolita’s pressing, Humbert finally says that her mother is dead. The teen laughingly responds, “Come on now, cut it out! Why can't I call her?” Humbert repeats the sentence, and we get a closeup of Lolita’s smile fading before we dissolve to a twilight view of their next hotel.

{The pair’s drive can take us to Lacan’s discussion of the incompatibility of male and female jouissance:} …What the woman demands from us analysts, at the end of an analysis conducted in accordance with Freud, is no doubt the penis, Penisneid, but in order to do better than the man. [Lacking this assistance, a woman is left] to offer to the desire of man the object involved in phallic claims, the non-detumescent object to sustain his desire, it is to make of her feminine attributes the signs of the omnipotence of man. {Underlining the idea with the phrase, coined by analyst Joan Riviere, “womanliness as masquerade,” Lacan says that in abandoning women to this path, analysts} renew the phallic claim, which becomes … the hostage of what one demands from woman in fact for taking charge of the failure of the other. {Lacan thus maintains that for a woman,} what we have called Penisneid, that she can only take the phallus for what it is not, namely either o the object, or her own too small (  ), which only gives her a jouissance approximating to what she imagines is the jouissance of the other, which she can no doubt share through a sort of mental phantasy, but only by straying from her own jouissance. {He illustrates the point by noting how many women seek} to be analysed like their husbands and often by the same psychoanalyst… {Lacan names castration as the price of this structure (built by the elusiveness of the requisite phallus and the resulting anxiety) but also as an “illusory game” in which it never appears where expected except as lack} And all of this means that the phallus is called on to function as an instrument of potency. Now potency, I mean what we are speaking about when we speak about potency, when we speak about it in a fashion which vacillates about what is involved – for it is always to omnipotence that we refer ourselves… [24 (scholarly citations removed)]

The camera slowly pulls in on Humbert, in bed, as he reacts to the sound of Lolita crying. We then see her move from her room through the bathroom to lie face down, still crying, next to her stepfather. Finally he tells her that everything will be all right and, to her contention that “Nothing will ever be all right,” caresses her back and hair. During his continued attempt to console her, we hear a quiet, almost childlike version of the love theme as Lolita mourns the loss of her home and “normal” life. He tells her that they can find a new home at Beardsley, Ohio where he has gotten his lectureship, and, to her objections, he utters the line quoted at the beginning of this post. Skeptical that they can stay in Beardsley forever, she lies in his arms, asking him to promise never to leave her – “I don't want to ever be in one of those horrible places for juvenile delinquents … I'd rather be with you. You're a lot better than one of those places.” Humbert promises, using her words- “Cross my heart and hope to die.” We fade to black before cutting to Beardsley. Lighter music plays while our narrator tells us to forget Ramsdale and accompany him to his new home, six months after the previous scene. He praises the school that Lolita is now attending before we dissolve to the teen’s bedroom, where he is giving her a pedicure and asking why she was late coming home the day before. After prevaricating, she says that she and her friend Michele had stayed to watch football practice, but Humbert says that he had seen her in the ice cream parlor, “The Frigid Queen,” with two boys. She explains that she and Michele had stopped for a malt, and that Roy and Rex, the co-captains of the football team, had sat down with them. Humbert reminds her that he had forbidden “dates,” and the two argue about whether the situation under discussion constitutes one until our protagonist says, “Whatever you had yesterday, I don't want you to have it again.” He then questions her about having been late Saturday and asks why Michele gives him “searching looks” whenever she visits, and finally tells his stepdaughter not to see her so often. Lolita protests, “…she’s the only friend I've got in this stinking world,” adding that Humbert never lets her have any fun. Looking hurt, our hero lists various things he does, such as cooking, cleaning, and buying things for her. Her face softening, Lolita says, “Come here.” When he complies, she asks him if he still loves her, then says that what she wants “more than anything else in the whole world” is for him to be proud of her. He declares his love and pride before she says that she is wanted for a part in the school play. His look of tenderness fades to one of suspicion as he asks, “Who wants you?” To her announcement that she had been chosen by the drama teacher and the two authors over 30 other girls who had read for the lead, he says only, “I suppose that Roy has a part in this production?” Surprised, she asks what he has to do with anything, but Humbert forbids her participation, saying he doesn’t want her mixing with “those boys.” Lolita indignantly says that Humbert doesn’t love her - “You just want to keep me locked up with you in this filthy house,” and he tells her to wash her face, “And don't smudge your toenails.” We dissolve to a night scene of Humbert driving home, then entering the building. He opens the hall door to a dark room, and the light partially reveals a man seated there - illuminating only two hands resting on his lap – as we hear a German-accented voice saying, “Good evening, Dr. Humbert.” Our protagonist switches on the light, and we hear Quilty’s theme music as the playwright, now wearing a mustache, thick, wire-framed glasses and a conservative hairstyle and suit introduces himself as Beardsley High School psychologist Dr. Zemph. Explaining that Lolita had let him in and that he had sat in the dark to save Humbert the “expense of ze electricity,” he asks if they can discuss Lolita. Humbert sits across from him, and Zemph claims that she seems to be having trouble adjusting to her budding maturity and the attentions of the male students. Emphasizing his common status with Humbert as “symbols of power, sitting in our offices,” he asks Lolita’s stepfather to remember when they were both “High School Jim … carrying High School Jane's schoolbooks.” Zemph then reads a list of Lolita’s behaviors, claiming that they all point to “acute repression of the libido.” Listening nervously throughout, Humbert asks what the psychologist recommends. Zemph suggests that Dr. Cudler, district psychologist to the Board of Education, visit the teen’s home, assisted by three board psychologists, to discover the “source of ze repression.” Humbert gingerly tries to dissuade Zemph from the intrusion, and the psychologist, at first stating that there may be no other choice, says that to avoid going to a “higher level of authority,” Humbert must help him. When Humbert asks how, Zemph, after declaring the need for a new approach, suddenly appears to be hit by inspiration - Lolita could find a new area of adjustment, “perhaps by taking a larger share of the extracurricular school activities!” Humbert denies that he had kept his stepdaughter from taking part in such activities, and Zemph, claiming that the teen’s friends are “saying things,” tells him to allow her to participate in the school play. When his rival capitulates, Zemph asks him to also loosen his restrictions on dating and dancing.

{With this dialogue we’ll approach our next passage, where Lacan asserts that omnipotence is not what is involved, being} already the slippage, the evasion with respect to this point at which all potency fails – one does not demand potency to be everywhere, one demands it to be where it is present. [The phallus’ elusiveness is what] allows us to pierce this illusion of the claim engendered by castration, in so far as it covers the anxiety presentified by every actualisation of jouissance; it is this confusion between jouissance and the instruments of potency. {Our lecturer connects this slippage with the concept, “profession,” in both religious and economic senses.} Impotence, as one might say, in its most general formula, is what destined man to be only able to orgasm (jouir) from his relationship to the support of (+ ), namely from a deceptive potency.

{Lacan notes Freud’s discussion of male homosexuality as a social bond} linked to the aspect of sexual failure which is imparted to it very specially because of the fact of castration, whereas} precisely in this field those who are at an advantage, are precisely those who do not have the phallus, namely that omnipotence, the greatest liveliness of desire is produced at the level of this love which is called Uranian, which I believe has marked by its bonding the most radical affinity to what one can call female homosexuality. {This “idealistic” love, based on the “minus,” is found} to be the universal third term, to be this ego … in so far as it constitutes the field of the Other as lack, I only accede to in so far as I ... attach myself to the fact that this “I” makes me disappear, that I only rediscover myself in what Hegel perceived of course, but which he justifies without this interval, only in a generalised o , only in this idea of the ego in so far as it is everywhere, namely in so far as it is nowhere …{Asserting the need to grasp the desire/joissance antinomy, Lacan reminds us (using the “Avalokitesvara” illustration from our last entry) that the possibility of this very impasse is linked to a moment which anticipates and conditions what has come to be marked in the sexual failure of man. In this reminder of the primordial failure constituting humanity, Lacan points to the major difference between other animals and ourselves - the “ubiquitous subtraction of libido” in human subjects.} [25]

We dissolve to the outside of the high school, a sign in front announcing the play, The Haunted Enchanters, and hear Quilty’s theme in the background. After cutting to the offstage right area, we see Quilty and Darkbloom on one side of the curtain and Lolita, in a tiara and elfish makeup, on the other. Quilty pulls the curtain back enough to see the teen, and she glances at him and smiles before going onstage to deliver her lines. As she approaches, a boy says, “You see before you a weary goat. The bewitcher is bewitched.” Lolita, taking one of his arms, says to another tiara’d player, “Look, Semiramis, look!” and her companion, taking the other, replies, “Yes, the goat removeth his horns.” They lead the former goat offstage, “to the dark kingdom.” Humbert approaches as the players gather for their bows, and Lolita’s cute piano teacher, Miss Starch, greets him. When she compliments Lolita’s acting, our protagonist says that his stepdaughter had caught him by surprise, not having let him attend rehearsals. Remarking that the teen must have worked very hard, Starch says, “No wonder you decided to suspend her piano lessons.” To his questioning, she reveals that Lolita hadn’t taken any for four weeks. Putting her hand on his arm, she offers to visit and play something for him sometime, but he quickly excuses himself. Humbert searches for his stepdaughter and finds her with the male lead’s arms around her shoulders. As he drops them, greeting Humbert, Lolita turns and excitedly asks how he liked the play, and her fellow actress invites him to her house for the cast party. The professor says that he must take his stepdaughter home, and, to her and her friends’ protests, he says that he wouldn’t want her to miss any more piano lessons. He leads her away, to her and her fellow actors’ dismay, while Quilty, watching, sends his assistant, Brewster, for Kodachrome. We dissolve to stepfather and daughter entering their dark house, Humbert preventing Lolita from going upstairs, eliciting screams. Pushing her onto the sofa and shutting the door, he says urgently, “Now perhaps you will tell me. What were you doing on Saturday between 2:00 and 4:00 in the afternoon?” After he catches her in the falsehood about piano lessons and reassures her that he “really” wants to know what she has been doing, she says that she has been going to extra rehearsals. He dismisses her explanation as a “fatuous lie,” claiming that he knows what she has been doing – “You've been with this leading man of yours, this Roy, isn't that so?” She slowly turns to him, calling him “sick,” and continuing to tell him that he is “imagining things” while he repeats the accusation. Finally, kneeling next to her, he says that if she swears that she is telling the truth, he will believe her, but she, turning away, refuses. Stroking the girl’s arm as she chews and pops her bubble gum, he blames himself and intrusive outsiders for their problems, then, yelling at her to “stop doing that!” he proposes they leave for a trip around country. He answers her objections about his work “My job doesn't mean anything,” then interrupts her as she says that her play has two more performances next week – “That's what's just come between us!” Calming himself, he asks if she wouldn’t like to get back to where they were before coming to Beardsley, “…Don’t you want to come away with me?” Lolita suddenly shouts, “No!” and, striking the couch, rises, crying, “I hate you!” Clenching and unclenching her fists, she tries to walk away, still shrieking, but he grabs her arm and whirls her around. She aims a couple punches at him, but he restrains her, saying, “You want to stay with this filthy boy!” The argument continues to escalate until they hear a knock – it is their next-door neighbor, Miss Le Bone. Embarrassed, she says that she can hear every word next door, and that she has a clergyman visiting her. As Humbert tries to downplay the incident, Lolita greets her, says goodnight, and goes out. Humbert explains that the teen is in costume for a play she had performed, and the handsome woman gently tells him that the neighbors are “getting curious” about him and his girl, then flirtatiously invites him to join her and her guest. Humbert takes a “rain check,” and, as soon as the woman is out of sight, pursues the teen. We dissolve to a phone booth at a gas station and watch as Humbert, running, comes into view and spots Lolita talking in it.

{We can use this sighting to show us that “specularised vision gives the form” of} injection of the libido into the field of insight … But this form hides from us the phenomenon of the occultation of the eye, which henceforth ought to look from everywhere at the one that we are, with the universality of sight. {He then qualifies this formulation.} Usually, what is satisfying precisely in the specular form is the masking of the possibility of this apparition. In other words, the eye establishes the fundamental relationship of the desirable in the fact that it always tends to make it miscognised, in the relationship to the other {He illustrates the idea by asking us to imagine Avalokitesvara,} the most relaxing of desirable things, in its most pacifying form, the divine statue which is only divine {and then asks,} What would be more Unheimlich than to see it coming to life, namely to see it showing itself as desiring! {He states that psychoanalytic praxis is faulty regarding the genesis of o, “born elsewhere and before this, before this capture which hides it”} in part with respect to itself, and also that there should be a residue [where the subject S that is still unknown has to constitute himself in the Other] in which the o appears as the remainder of this operation. He therefore asks us to look beyond the visual structuring hypothesis by exploring the origin of communication itself.} [26]

The teen hangs up as Humbert opens the door, and he pulls her out, rebuking her. She claims that she had been trying to call him and, to his observation that she had been talking to someone, takes his hands in hers, saying softly, “I got a wrong number.” To his delight, she says that she wants to leave school and travel – “We'll go wherever I want to, won't we?” He hugs her as they walk away, saying, “Yes, my darling,” and she responds, “Let's go home. I feel sort of romantic.” The light “travelling music” plays as our narrator says that he had told Beardsley School that he was going to Hollywood for a temporary “engagement,” having suggested that he was to be “chief consultant in production of a film dealing with existentialism, still a hot thing at the time.” We watch him drive through various landscapes before we see another automobile follow him, then we cut to him looking uneasily in his rearview mirror as Lolita fails to amuse him by pulling her scarf across her face, covering everything below her eyes, “muslim” like. We hear Quilty’s theme as the shot dissolves to a twilight exterior of Humbert’s car still driving, then we cut back to the car’s interior, headlights glaring through the back window from the one behind it. The narration resumes, “I cannot tell you the exact day when I first knew with utter certainty that a strange car was following us. Queer how I misinterpreted the designation of doom.” Later, as Humbert gets his tank filled, he looks through the window of the men’s room and, to his horror, sees Lolita talking to someone. We then dissolve to him driving through a desert. Lolita, cold, tries to climb into the back seat for her sweater, but slips, and angrily asks why Humbert is driving so fast. Her stepfather tells her that a car has been tailing them for the past three days and had parked outside their motel the previous day. When the teen says that she thinks he is imagining things, he asks whom she had talked to at the gas station. At first denying that she had spoken to anyone, she then corrects herself – “Oh, yes, that man. He wondered if I had a map. I guess he got lost.” Humbert says that he thinks it is the police, and, when Lolita responds that the best thing to do is to ignore him and slow down, Humbert asks what exactly she had told the “lost” driver, what he said to her, and if he had asked where she was going. The professor adds that he would think that the driver would have asked the man at the service station for a map, and Lolita agrees. Humbert then starts to say that he thinks he has lost him, when we hear a loud pop, and the car swerves and stops. When Lolita scolds him for having driven too fast, Humbert explodes, “Leave me alone – Do you think I wanted to have a blowout?!” and then shushes her as he sees a car approach from behind. He asks the teen if she recognizes the vehicle, and when she says no, he quickly turns her head away from it, telling her not to look anymore. When it stops, he speculates that the car is parked too far back for someone who wants to help them, and that a policeman would have pulled alongside them to write a ticket. His stepdaughter starts to talk, and he frantically silences her again, grips his upper left arm and, breathing heavily, says, “Maybe it's a special kind of police who are just supposed to follow people.” Lolita excitedly says, “Yeah, like the vice squad!” He again tells her to be quiet before asking, “What are we going to do?” Reproaching her for pointing out the contradiction between his last two requests, he expresses (to her alarm) the intention of confronting his pursuer. When he asks why he shouldn’t, Lolita, pulling back a bit, says it might be dangerous. He then closes his eyes, moaning and bending forward, and gasps, “My arm is killing me. I don't seem to be able to breathe properly.” At first dismissing his complaint as probably gas, the teen suddenly says, “I once read in a Reader's Digest that this is the way heart attacks start.” Humbert responds, “Shut up will you!”

{Humbert’s orders can help us recall our next quote} [A]t the origin S has nothing to communicate for the reason that all the instruments of communication are on the other side, in the field of the Other, and because he has to receive them from him… his own message in an inverted form. however interrupted this message may be and therefore however insufficient, it is never unformed, starting from this fact that language exists in the real, that it is on a journey, in circulation, and that for its part the S, in its supposedly primal interrogation, that with regard to it, many things in this language are already regulated. [27]

After Lolita sits back, we get a closeup of her as she cries that she is sick of hearing about Humbert’s moans and groans, and adds that she doesn’t feel well, either. We cut to the two of them, Humbert looking in his mirror as their pursuer turns and leaves. Then, noticing his stepdaughter, with her sweater hood up and clasping the garment around her neck, he asks if she is cold. She answers, “Yeah. I feel all achy,” and, putting his hand to her forehead, he finds that she has a fever. Commenting, “We make a fine pair,” he tells her to lie back, saying he will change the tire, and we fade to black. We see his car park at a hospital, then cut to him entering with some books and flowers. A nurse, Mary, bringing Lolita’s medication, joins him, telling him that the teen’s temperature is normal and her cough is gone. After greeting Humbert and letting him kiss her cheek, Lolita takes her medicine and remarks on his “gruesome flowers.” Requesting that the nurse put them in water, Humbert picks up some envelopes, accusingly asking Lolita, “Have you been getting notes in the hospital?” Taking them from him, Mary asks the teen, “Does your father think that you get notes from my boyfriend?” After she leaves, the two have a spat about his behavior; Lolita then mentions that he doesn’t look well; and Humbert says he is catching a cold. His stepdaughter comments that he has caught it from her before Mary re-enters, saying that he has parked his car right next to a sign saying, “staff only.” He impatiently says that he will be leaving in a moment, and the nurse, apologizing, says “these are the Hospital rules.” After she leaves, Humbert quips that she and Lolita have probably been “exchanging confessions,” gives his stepdaughter the books, and notices a pair of sunglasses on the tray. Reacting with suspicion to Lolita’s explanation that they are Mary’s, he asks when she can leave the hospital. The teen, having picked up a magazine as a shield against Humbert’s implied accusations, says, “What?” and her stepfather asks if she is going to read the magazine or talk to him. She then tells him that the doctor wants her to stay another 48 hours. Humbert starts to discuss his travel plans to start early Tuesday morning and get to Mexico in three days, but Mary again enters, insisting he move his car. We cut to Lolita as she says goodbye and turns away from Humbert’s kiss – “might catch your cold.” She lifts the magazine before he leaves, and we fade to black. We then fade in to a nighttime shot of the hotel, then to the interior as the telephone rings. Humbert, illuminated from outside through venetian blinds, coughs and knocks a cup and saucer off the bedside stand, fumbling for the light switch. Still coughing fitfully, he sits up, revealing that he is wearing his coat. He battles his cumbersome comforter, trying to wrap it around himself, and grabs for the phone, knocking it off the desk. He finally picks up the receiver and answers. A stammering voice apologizes for disturbing him, asking him if he is enjoying his stay in “our lovely little town here.” When Humbert asks who is calling, we hear, “My name... It doesn't really matter. It's really an obscure and unremarkable name... but my department is sort of concerned … sort of concerned with the bizarre... [here we get a closeup of our protagonist] rumors that have been circulating about you and the lovely, remarkable girl you've been travelling around with.” Rocking back and forth on the bed, Humbert insists the stranger identify himself, but the man ignores him, asking for confirmation that he is unable to see a psychiatrist regularly. Humbert cries, “I have no psychiatrist, and I don't need a psychiatrist!” and the caller says that he is “classified in our files as white, widowed male.” When he asks Humbert to give his investigators a report on his current sex life, Humbert indignantly replies, “I don't know who you are, and I certainly have no interest in your investigators, so I'm afraid that you will have to terminate this conversation.” Before he finds the phone and slams the receiver on it, we hear the voice saying, “‘Afraid’ is Freudian lingo.”

{I’ll use this phone to transmit Lacan’s proposal to} show us the autonomous operation of the word as it is presupposed in this schema. {He starts by discussing an experiment made with a tape recorder in a nursery, capturing the primordial monologues of very small children. He reminds his students of Piaget’s term, “egocentric language,” a somewhat confusing term, since such monologues} can only be produced precisely in a certain community. {He notes that the nursery tapes reveal the} primordial tensions in the unconscious, we cannot doubt that we have here something that is at every point analogous to the function of the dream {and proposes that it is in this} voice detached from its support that we ought to search for this remainder. [28]

We dissolve to his car approaching the hospital, then see him enter at about 3 am. Humbert tells the receptionist, Miss Fromkiss, that he is paying the bill for Miss Haze in Room 3 and bringing her home, and Fromkiss replies that he must get permission from Dr. Keagy. She pages the doctor and has the impatient Humbert wait. Keagy arrives, and our protagonist, dismissing the doctor’s concern about his cough, repeats he is there to take Lolita home. Keagy asks the receptionist, “Wasn't she discharged earlier this evening?” Mary, in a coat, approaches them as Fromkiss confirms that the teen was discharged at 8:15 that evening, and Humbert interrupts the woman’s departure – “You, Nurse, what's your name? She's still in there, isn't she?” When she confirms that Lolita had left, an incredulous Humbert storms into the corridor where his stepdaughter’s room was. Mary tries to dissuade our hero, who then grabs her neck, asking, “Where have you put her?!” A nearby orderly seizes him, then the doctor and another attendant assist, Keagy telling a third orderly to get a straightjacket. Humbert controls himself, telling them he is calm, but when the nurse says that Lolita had left with her “uncle,” he reacts violently until the three men wrestle him to the ground, Mary helping them hold him there. The doctor threatens to call the police, and Humbert regains composure. Keagy then says, “Let’s get this business straight; this girl was officially discharged earlier tonight in the care of her uncle.” When Humbert responds, “If you say so,” the doctor presses – “Has she or hasn’t she an uncle?” We get a closeup of our protagonist on the floor, two sets of hands holding him down, saying, “Let’s say she has an uncle” as Lolita’s theme starts to play [29]. When the doctor asks him what he means, Humbert finally says, “All right, she has an uncle. Uncle Gus, yes, I remember now…he was going to pick her up here at the hospital. I forgot that.” To Keagy’s comment, “That’s a strange thing to forget…,” Humbert answers, “You don't know my brother Gus. He's very easy to forget.” He then seizes on an orderly’s speculation that he is drunk, and the doctor, declining the straightjacket he had requested, asks Hubert if he wants coffee. We cut to a more distant shot as our protagonist passes up on the coffee and, saying he is much better, asks to be let up. Keagy consents, telling the orderlies to make sure he gets home all right. The music gets louder as Humbert starts walking away, turns, and asks if his stepdaughter had left any message for him. His attendants then walk him to the hospital exit before we fade to black. We cut to a typewriter, the keys printing out correspondence to “Dear Dad.” Saying that Lolita has “been through much hardship and sorrow,” it reveals that she is pregnant and that she and her husband are unable to pay their debts and “get out of here.” When it asks that Humbert send them a check, we fade to black. We hear suspenseful music as we watch Humbert driving through various urban areas to his stepdaughter’s neighborhood. Pulling over, he takes Harold’s “rod” from the glove compartment, puts it in his coat pocket, and approaches the house. We see him react to the name, “Ricard Schiller” on the mailbox [30], then knock on the door. Lolita, wearing horned-rimmed glasses and a maternity top, answers, apologizing for her appearance – “you've caught me on ironing day.” She invites him in and asks if he wants a drink, commenting “I won't be able to do that in another month.” Humbert looks out the window at two young men doing carpentry work and asks if the one facing them is “him.” The music stops as Lolita says that it is her husband, and asks Humbert to watch what he says –“He doesn't know a thing about you and me.” Finding that Dick Schiller isn't the man who had posed as Lolita’s uncle, Humbert presses her to tell him who is. When he reminds her of her financial request, his stepdaughter asks if he remembers Dr. Zemph, then brings up various other enigmatic characters with whom they interacted during their time together. Impatient with her remark that he still hasn’t “guessed,” Humbert demands that she tell him who had taken her from him, and she answers that it was Claire Quilty. “Lolita’s theme” starts to play softly as she remarks that her world didn’t revolve around Humbert when he moved in. She says that she had had a crush on the playwright starting when he used to visit her mother, adding that he wasn’t a “normal person” and praising his “Japanese, oriental philosophy of life.” Lolita reveals that Quilty, after having seen the two together at The Enchanted Hunters Hotel and deducing what was happening, “was up to every brilliant trick he could think of.” When Humbert asks if he had done “all these brilliant tricks for the sheer fun of tormenting me,” she answers that sometimes - such as when Humbert had forbidden her to be in the play - he had to. To Humbert’s questioning, she says that she had been with Quilty when she had claimed she was practicing the piano – “I guess he was the only guy I was ever really crazy about.” When Humbert gestures out the window toward her husband, she says that, although she is happy with him, “it’s just not the same thing.” Her stepfather responds, “I suppose I never counted,” and Lolita replies that he has no right to say that. When Humbert resumes his questioning, Lolita reveals that Quilty had taken her to a dude ranch in New Mexico, having told her that he was going to Hollywood and would eventually get her a studio contract, “but it never turned out that way. Instead he wanted me to cooperate with the others in making some kind of … an art movie.” She says that Quilty had kicked her out for refusing, and Humbert replies that she could have come back to him, then the music pauses. Dick enters, saying that his neighbor, Bill Crest, has cut his thumb. Lolita introduces them to her stepfather before helping Bill, and Dick asks his father-in-law if he wants a beer. Humbert declines, and Schiller turns toward the refrigerator, revealing a hearing aid. His wife, sending Bill upstairs for a bandage, tells Humbert to speak louder, “His phone's on the blink,” and takes the extra beer from Dick. Lolita then sits against her husband on the sofa and asks him to tell her stepfather about his opportunity in Alaska. Dick says that industry is opening up there, and that, if they can pay off their debts, he can “get in on the ground floor.” Bill returns, and Dick, saying he needs to get back to work, says, “I guess you two have a lot to talk about” and invites his “dad,” when he is finished, to see what he’s making for his child.

{We can let Dick’s device embody Lacan’s assertion that, although ordinary} experience is that everything the subject receives from the Other through language is received in a vocal form… there are ways other than the vocal one to receive language {but also that a} relationship that is more than accidental links language to sonority. {Following the path of how the ear functions, he says that} what is proper to resonance is that it is the apparatus which dominates in it {and that this apparatus only resonates to its own note. Although admitting that he has taken us down another detour, he says that this} reminder is all the same designed to actualise the fact that in the form, the organic form, there is something which appears to us akin to these primary, topological, transpatial data which made us interest ourselves very especially in the most elementary form of the created or creative constitution of a void, the one that we have incarnated in the form of an apologetic for you in the story of the pot. {He reminds us that a pot is also a tube before bringing us a further step in our progress, breath. After discussing the distinction between the voice of singer and that of orator, identification and incorporation, he provides an illustration in “malicious experiments” performed on the shrimp genus, palaemon, a salt-water animal with the habit} of plugging the shell during its metamorphoses with tiny grains of sand, of introducing them into what it has in terms of a reduced apparatus described as stato-acoustic, in other words into the utricles – for it does not have our extraordinary cochlea – into the utricles, having introduced these lumps of sand – because it has to put them in from outside, because it does not produce them of itself in any way – the utricle closes again and here it is inside these little bells that are necessary for its equilibrium. [The] experimenters substituted grains of steel for grains of sand, as a way of amusing themselves subsequently with the Daphnia and a magnet [demonstrating that a voice] is not assimilated but it is Incorporated, this is what can give it a function in modelling our void. [31 (scholarly citations removed)]

When the young men leave, Lolita, observing, “Dick's awfully sweet, isn't he?” takes off her glasses. Her theme music returns as Humbert takes her arm and pulls her toward the door, trying to convince her to leave with him - “I want you to live with me and die with me and everything with me. … It was an accident that you met him in the first place. You're not bound to him, whereas you are bound to me…” Lolita, after looking incredulously at him at this claim, reminds him that she will have her husband’s baby in three months, adding, “I've ruined too many things in my life. I can't do that to him, he needs me.” As her stepfather puts his hands over his face, she tells him not to make a scene. After she makes a couple more requests that he stop crying, Humbert reaches beneath his coat and takes out some papers. Saying that, it coming from the rent of the house, there are “no strings attached – it’s your money, anyway,” he gives her $400 in cash, a check for $2,500, and a down-payment of $10,000 from “someone in Ramsdale who’s prepared to take care of the mortgages on the house.” After marveling at the sum, she turns back to him, gently saying, “Come on now, don't cry” and apologizing for having “cheated so much.” He pushes her comforting hand away and rushes to the door, his stepdaughter following. We cut between a closeup of her at the door holding the money and Humbert running to his car as Lolita calls out, “Listen! Let's keep in touch. I'll write to you when we get to Alaska.” The music continues as we dissolve from the vehicle driving away to the foggy scene from the beginning, then to Humbert again in Quilty’s mansion as he walks between a young woman’s portrait and the draped chair, past the mirror, around the harp [32], and toward the ping pong table. The music stops before our hero calls, “Quilty?” and we fade to black, then resumes as we fade in to a closeup of the portrait that Quilty had hidden behind, now defaced by bullet holes beside the girl’s nose and at the base of her throat. An epilogue then scrolls up reading, “Humbert Humbert died of coronary thrombosis in prison awaiting trial for the murder of Clare Quilty.”

{With Humbert’s sentence, I’ll summon our final quote, where Lacan notes the shofar’s unmusical quality, “powerfully wrenching our ear away from all its customary harmonies” and, after the desire of the Other has taken the form of a commandment, “giving to anxiety its resolution.” Calling desire a “primordial fault” he tells us:} Change the meaning of this fault by giving it a content in the articulation of what? Let us leave it in suspense. And this is what explains the birth of guilt and its relationship to anxiety. {Our professor ends the session promising, for the next class, to deal with the concept of sacrifice.} [33]

Although I had linked on this topic a couple months ago, I thought this updating article speaks to the idea of sacrifice, as well as to buying new “records” to replace old ones. [34]

1. Stanley Kubrick and Vladimir Nabokov. Lolita (1962.) in: Script-o-Rama. Based on the novel, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. (1955.)

2. Jacques Lacan. “Anxiety.” from The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X. (1962-63.) pp. 231 - 251. in: springhero.wordpress.com. (January 17 – 27, 2011.)

3. “Lolita: Love Theme” by Bob Harris.

4. A ghostly form on the right moves off screen during this dissolve.

5. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [231]

6. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [232]

7. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [233]

8. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [234]

9. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [235]

10. Charlotte pronounces the painter’s name, “Van Gock”.

11. Amusingly, Lolita’s father looks like an older version of Quilty.

12. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [236]

13. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [236-237]

14. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [238]

15. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [239]

16. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [239-240]

17. We never hear her name, but it and her profession (i.e., Quilty’s writing partner) are in Nabakov’s book.

18. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [241]

19. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [242]

20. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [243]

21. Coincidentally, in this scene we see the first four letters of a “Ramsdale High” sign hanging from her ceiling.

22-23. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [244]

24. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [244-246]

25. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [246-247 (there seems to be part of the seminar that had been omitted from this site, but I found it here)]

26. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [247-248]

27. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [248]

28. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [248-249]

29. In an ironic touch, we are shown the orderly stroking Humbert’s hair, in an attempt to passify him, from this point until Humbert leaves.

30. Interestingly, the same last name as the writer of the poem that Beethoven used as lyrics in “The Ninth” - a piece intimately connected with the last film we covered.

31. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [249-250]

32. There are subtle differences between the last scene and its counterpart; now, for instance, the bottle is on Quilty’s lap rather than on his head, and Humbert barely touches the instrument. Kubrick also seems to have used a different shot for the drive to the castle.

33. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [251]

34. Deirdre Fulton. “Reversing Grassroots Win, US Senate Approves Fast Track Trade Measure.” in: CommonDreams. (May 14, 2015.)