I watched the movie Lolita. Let’s find out if Professor Humbert’s love was really love.

LOLITA by Vladimir Nabokov

Humbert, a 47-year-old philologist who is still haunted by the pain of his first love, travels to New England to teach a course. He stops at the home of a widow named Charlotte to find a place to stay, where he meets a young girl: her daughter, Lolita. Inside the house, events quickly take a turn for the worse as Charlotte goes berserk, leading to her death. LOLITA, directed by Adrian Line, is a 1997 movie adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s original LOLITA. Although it is based on the novel, the character and details of the movie are distinctly different due to the director’s perspective.

Was Professor Humbert’s love really love?

As a character, Humbert is clearly a pedophile in the novel and refers to Lolita as a nymphet. However, in the movie, Humbert’s love for Lolita is overwhelming, and he is portrayed as pitiful and wistful, unable to forget his first love. This is amplified by the fact that Humbert is played by a wonderful actor named Jeremy Irons. In Forbidden Love, Humbert or director Adrian Rhein rationalizes that perhaps the death of his first love made him this way. This rationalization would have been accepted by the audience. However, this rationalization ruined Lolita’s life. Humbert is also shown to be obsessed with Perish. No matter how intense his feelings were, his love was definitely not love. All he wanted from her was not her happiness, but his own happiness through her in his arms. In the end, he kills this beautiful little girl’s childhood. Her childhood, which should have been the greenest years of her life, the most innocent, the sunniest, and the most joyful, was ruined by a love-hate relationship with her mother, a physical relationship with her stepfather, an unstable home, and a desire for love as the fulfillment of her sexual desires, which will surely hold her back for the rest of her life. He would say he loved her, but he lusted after her the way he wanted to, and she was not in it. He would say he loved her, but he lusted after her the way he wanted to, and she was not in it. He locked her away from him even more, afraid that she would just walk away from him. He lusted in the way he loved, but a relationship in which there is no me and no you cannot be love.

The most important word: taboo

If I had to describe the movie Lolita in one word, it would be “taboo,” because “taboo” contains the words “love” and “desire.” This word is also the reason for Humbert’s death, because he kills Qualtie, and somehow makes it seem heroic, like he did it for her, which makes us sympathetic. But Qualtie’s last words are right. Humbert knows he shouldn’t have loved her, and he dies with the guilt that he did everything he wanted to do, even though he knew he shouldn’t have.

The fatal seduction of a young girl

Lolita’s relationship with her mother suggests that she did love Humbert, but as a father. At the end, she says to Humbert, “I never loved you. Nevertheless, Lolita’s seduction of Humbert was more than just an Elektra complex on her part. She seduced Humbert, her mother’s favorite, to win the competition with her mother. She was sexually precocious for her age, reading Hollywood magazines and learning the concepts of titillating, fantastical Hollywood movies instead of the concepts she needed. Then her mother’s death causes her to become very distressed, and she wants to get away from Humbert. But she can’t escape: she has nowhere else to go, and to Lolita, Humbert is family. Eventually she goes to Quint, but as Quint tells her, the only way she can find happiness is if she finds a happier home for herself.