Laughter, Tragedy, and Comedy Revisited
I can’t resist offering a postscript of sorts to an earlier post I wrote about film depictions of Lolita. As I suggested there, Kubrick’s Lolita has widely been praised on the grounds that it captures the undeniable humor of the novel; by contrast, Lyne’s Lolita has been criticized because it mostly fails (or declines) to do so.

On my view, however, this gets things backwards: Kubrick’s version fails precisely because it plays Lolita as comedy; Lyne’s succeeds precisely because it plays Lolita as tragedy. There is undeniable humor in Lolita, as Kubrick and others have correctly recognized, but this humor fades to the background when contrasted with the tragedy depicted in it. In other words, to get Lolita right, its humor has to be subordinated to the tragedy it depicts, not foregrounded at the expense of the novel’s plot or theme. On my view, while Kubrick inverts the relevant priorities, Lyne gets them right.