Episode 43: Kubrick's Lolita & the World of Epstein

Lolita  is sometimes called Stanley Kubrick's forgotten film. In light of what we know, which I presume is a fraction of a fraction, of what Epstein was doing, how can we watch Lolita  in modern times? Why would such a movie even be made? Are we guilty of walking around with our eyes wide shut about these issues of abuse and exploitation?

Links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolita

https://www.koat.com/article/jeffrey-epstein-documents-released-new-mexico-ranch/46334470

https://www.slashfilm.com/1164814/stanley-kubrick-had-a-pretty-questionable-regret-about-the-way-he-handled-lolita/

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/jun/13/lolita-at-60-stanley-kubricks-daring-drama-is-a-deft-tightrope-act

Need more? You can visit the website at: https://consaracytheories.com/ or my own site at: https://saracausey.com/. Don't forget to check out the blog at: https://consaracytheories.com/blog. 

Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

 Welcome to con-sara-cy theories. Are you ready to ask questions you shouldn't and find information you're not supposed to know? Well, you're in the right place. Here is your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. In tonight's episode, I will be talking about what is sometimes considered to be a forgotten film of Stanley Kubrick's, which is 1962 Lolita. I debated about whether or not to even go there. I was planning to watch full metal jacket, to be honest with you, but it was going to be on one of the movie channels that we get about a week later. And I thought, Why pay for it? Why rent it for three or $4 and just wait and see it as part of a channel we already get? So I started surfing around on Tubi, and that's when I discovered that Lolita was on there for free, and I thought, Oh, God, that is such a difficult and disgusting subject matter. I don't even know that I want to go there. I really don't know that I want to go there. But the more I thought about it, I'm like, But wait a minute, knowing what we know about Epstein, which I believe is only a fraction of, a fraction of what was actually going on. There's really no telling what depth that his nefarious, diabolical deeds were going to, the depth, the breadth, the number of girls and women that he was abusing, as well as the men in high places, people I'm sure that will never get named, will never know who they were. It's incredibly disturbing, I'm like, but I sort of feel like I have to talk about it, because these situations really do happen, maybe not in the cinematic way necessarily, that Kubrick is pointing out. But then at the same time, some of the things that happened to Lolita, who seems to be this girl, that the system is completely freaking failed. Those things do happen in real life. It's not just completely the movies. I also thought about Eyes Wide Shut, because we have Kubrick making this film all the way back in 1962 and as we'll discuss, this guy, Claire quilty, has very nefarious plans for Lolita. We know that these things happen in real life, and then decades later, Kubrick's final film, Eyes Wide Shut, is also about the type of creepy, sadistic sex parties that go on amongst these hyper elites. And that was one of my thoughts. I don't want to have my Eyes Wide Shut to this topic. It is difficult to talk about. It is gross and horrid to even imagine these things going on, but that's the thing they do go on, and I think that they prosper in the darkness, the more that people can have an awareness that these things are going on, and not say I'm aware of it, but I just want to have my Eyes Wide Shut to it. I think the better off that we are. These people need to be exposed for what they're doing, and we have to lose our naivete about it. We have to understand that unfortunately, we live in a world where these things do happen, as I've mentioned, this is going to be a very difficult, gross, disgusting, terrible subject matter. If you feel like that, might bring up some emotions for you, and you just don't want to go there. I totally understand. In the meantime, we will delve into Stanley Kubrick's sometimes forgotten film, Lolita. So the backstory, of course, is that Stanley Kubrick gets the rights to make this film. It was initially a 1955 novel by Vladimir Nabokov, and it's about this guy named Humbert. Humbert, which I think is a pseudonym, actually, but he's this French literature professor, slash writer, and he moves to New England, and moves in with this lady named Charlotte, who's looking for a border. And the main reason why he moves in is because he sees her daughter, Dolores sunbathing, and he starts a private nickname for her, Lolita. But this little girl is only 12, and in fact, Charlotte is a widow, and she starts to develop feelings for Humbert, which would be more normal. You're talking about two adults. She starts to develop feelings for Humbert, and the only reason that Humbert marries her is because he sees it as an opportunity to be close to Lolita, who, again in the novel, is only 12 super creepy, super gross. Kubrick's film opens up with this creepy opening sequence of toenails being painted, and it's just like, oh God, already this is making my flesh crawl in a repulsed kind of way. I. Peter Sellers plays the drunken Claire quilty, and he's in a trashed out mansion. Humbert, who's played by James Mason, is there asking about Lolita. He is also there we learn to murder quilty, which he successfully does. Now we flash to four years earlier. Humbert goes to Ramsdale, New Hampshire, and he has a lecturing job in the fall at a university. Shelly winters plays lolitas Mother Charlotte, and she seems to be interested in Humber. Basically, immediately, he's not sold on the room for rent until he sees Lolita in a swimsuit. And there are copious amounts of innuendo in this scene about cherry pies and late night snacks. And I was like, oh my god, oh god, this is so gross. It's so wrong, because, again, we're not talking about a grown woman. I'm not a prude when it comes to adult men and adult women in a consensual environment, but we have to just remember they're talking about a child, an underaged girl. Is super creepy. Now we cut to a scene of all three, so Charlotte, Lolita and Humbert at a drive in monster movie, and you see Humbert and Lolita holding hands. There's also this chess game where he, like Charlotte, and Humbert, are playing chess with each other, and there's this innuendo of you're going to go take my queen. I was like, Oh God, this is so bad. Lolita gives both of them a good night kiss, which is creepy. I mean, I understand that this was set in a different time, but it just seems to me that it would be abnormal to kiss on the cheek someone that's just a lodger at the house for a few months. A woman at the summer dance comes on to Humbert and tells him that both she and her husband are, quote, broad minded. So this seems to be another instance of a woman overtly coming on to Humbert making it clear they're like, hey, my husband and I are open to this. Are you down? And he's like, No, I don't want to be with an adult. Just gross. They also talk about this summer camp for girls, that's titled camp climax.

Obvious innuendo. There. Humbert at the dance hides in a floral arrangement so he can spy on Lolita Clara quilty, played by Peter Sellers, is also at this summer dance, and Charlotte Hayes attaches herself to him. He tries to be polite to her, basically, but it's clear he doesn't remember her. And based on her whispered conversation with him, it sounds like they were intimate whenever he was at her book club. But funny enough, he remembered Lolita. Lolita gets invited to a slumber party, and Humbert gets aggravated. He tries to force himself into the arrangement as a chaperone. Charlotte senses it's time to seduce him like, Okay, well, Lolita is going to be out of the picture for tonight. We can just go and be at the house just the two of us. It's time for me to make my move. And it's obviously an awkward setting. Humbert looks like he wants to crawl out of his own skin. Lolita comes home early, just as Charlotte is trying to put the moves on Humbert, and he is like, oh, thrilled to see her. Offers to make her a sandwich. And then he I think in another case of innuendo is like, it's loaded with mayonnaise, just the way you like it. Like, this is so gross. It's about a child, Charlotte and Lolita get into a fight because Charlotte is hoping to have sex. She wanted Lolita out of the picture for the night. You've ruined my game. You've ruined my seduction scene. Here you are back again. And so Charlotte has a massive shit fit. Humbert goes off to bed, and then Charlotte cries, and we discover that Humbert has this perverted fantasy journal where he writes about Lolita. Lolita spies his diary and starts asking him questions, and then she begins a conversation with him as she's feeding him eggs, Humbert learns that Lolita is going to summer camp, and he's clearly disappointed. He fakes a toothache to get away from Charlotte, because, again, he she's trying to always be putting the moves on him. So Lolita hugs and kisses Humbert and tells him not to forget her. And then he collapses onto her bed. Charlotte writes Humbert a love letter, instructing him to leave unless he is in love with her. And he laughs out loud while he's reading the note, and so we assume, as the viewer, that he will leave ASAP, but he doesn't. The two of them get married, and Charlotte is like static. Claim she will not even leave him alone while he's on the toilet. She produces a gun and claims that she will commit suicide if she were to discover that Humbert is an atheist, which is also a super weird reaction. So it's like, I think Charlotte may be mentally imbalanced on top of being overly desperate for a romantic relationship. It seems like there's something going on in her wiring there. She says that she wants Lily. To go straight from summer camp to a boarding school and then to college, so she'll be out of our hair forever. We'll just be alone, just the two of us, and that bratty little kid will be out of our way. Well, Humbert is obviously upset, because remember, the whole point of him being with Charlotte is so he can, by proxy, be close to Lolita. Now we discover that Humbert has been sneaking candy to Lolita at camp, and he finally snaps at Charlotte for treating him like a lap dog, and he decides to work on ways to murder Charlotte, but he chickens out and can't shoot her as he had planned to do. He discovers that she is reading his private diary. He has called her awful names in the diary, as well as saying highly inappropriate things about Lolita, Charlotte tells him that she'll leave and that he can have everything, but he will never see Lolita again. And as she's talking to her dead husband's ashes, she's blaming Lolita for everything. And this was something I'll talk about this more when I get to the to the end of the movie analysis here, but it's like, this is something else that I think is so diabolical about these abuse cases, is you have people that will blame the victim, blame these little girls like it was their own fault. And it's like, Oh my God. What a world so Humbert wants to convince Charlotte that his diary was the beginning of a novel he was writing. It's a pure fiction. Meanwhile, Charlotte has left the house and has been hit by a car in this freak auto ped accident. Naturally, Humbert is delighted, but he has to play the role of the grieving widower. Humbert goes to get Lolita at the summer camp, and he tells her that her mother is sick and in a hospital, rather than admitting to Lolita that Charlotte is dead. And their conversation in the car is far too grown up and creepy. When they get to a hotel, quilty is there. There's a convention at the hotel, and only one room with one bed is available, quilty and his weird beatnik girlfriend have been eavesdropping, and quilty pretends to be a policeman from the convention. And there's this oddly comedic scene of Humbert and the hotel staff wrestling with a cot while Lolita is sleeping, because he makes this production of, well, if there's only one bed, and it's me and my daughter here, then we really need to have a cot. But he doesn't actually want the cot. He wants to crawl into bed with Lolita. So a hotel staff member finds a cot, and there's this big comedic scene of Humbert and this man trying to get the cot unfurled and stay quiet while Lolita is asleep. And it's like this is another point to ponder about this film. Is it appropriate to have moments of comic relief in a film about a pedo? I mean, what kind of message are we sending here? So we discovered that Humbert didn't want Lolita to be disturbed because he was planning to crawl into bed with her, which is so gross and creepy. After they wake up in the morning, she starts whispering secrets to him, and based on what we can hear and her description of playing games with a buoy at camp, we can guess this is an inappropriate conversation of a sexual nature in the car, she says something like, let's tell mother. And this also suggests that they've done something inappropriate. He continues to lie about Charlotte being in the hospital, until Lolita persists on wanting to call Charlotte, and Humbert has to confess that she's dead. So Lolita has a crying breakdown. He tries to convince her that things will be fine, she makes him promise not to leave her as she doesn't want to wind up in a place for juvenile delinquents. Now we fast forward by six months, and they've relocated to Ohio for humbert's teaching role. Humbert is painting lolitas toenails. He confronts Lolita about being late from school and how he saw her in a restaurant with boys. He says something about nasty minded boys, and she says it's funny for him to say that about someone else. So there's a very clear implication here. She talks about her friend Michelle, and says, You can't have her. She belongs to a Marine. Also very creepy. I mean, it's it doesn't take a rocket scientist here to read between the lines on what's been happening between Lolita and Humbert. It's being made clear to us. It's indirect, but it's crystal clear. Humbert asks Lolita if she's told Michelle anything about them. Humbert portrays himself as her slave. It's also clear that Humbert wants to isolate Lolita from the world, and Kubrick portrays Lolita as manipulative, like she's using their perverse situation as a way to manipulate Humbert into buying her things and letting her have her own way all the time, which is another topic, because this is like blaming the victim while. If Lolita was manipulative, if she was wise beyond her years, if she was using weaponized sex as a juvenile, then does it excuse Humbert? I mean, that's the subtext here. When you really distill it down, that's the subtext. I find that to be so disgusting and so awful. So after telling Lolita that she cannot star in the school play, quilty wears a disguise and goes to Humbert and claims that he's her high school psychologist. And quilty tells Humbert that Lolita isn't acting appropriately appropriately at school. He claims that she is repressed and is causing her to act out. He claims that a panel of psychiatrists need to investigate lolitas home situation, and this makes Humbert uncomfortable. He tells Humbert that maybe if Lolita got involved in extracurricular activities, it would help. And he gets forceful about Lolita participating in the school play, because, after all, Humbert doesn't want authorities in the home life.

So Humbert relents, and quilty is obviously leering at Lolita in her costume, her piano teacher confesses to Humbert that Lolita hasn't been attending lessons for a month, which Humbert did not know. He gets mad, and he refuses to let to let Lolita attend the cast party when she's very angry. And when questioned, she claims that she's been going to extra rehearsals, and he accuses her of being with some boyfriend. Instead, he says that maybe they should pack up and leave just be together, just the two of them. He's willing to quit his job and simply go and I've written in my notes, he is as bad as a jealous husband. He wants her to quit school and the play, and she yells that she hates him. One of the neighbors comes to complain about the noise, because this fight that they're having between the two of them gets pretty ruckusy and loud. Lolita uses this as a chance to leave the house unimpeded. The neighbor also tells him that there's neighborhood gossip about Humbert and Lolita having a weird family dynamic. Lolita claims she's thought it over and she will quit school so they can run away. She even says she feels romantic. And Kubrick plays this scene like it's a lover's quarrel again, you know, if we're talking about two grown adults, if you have two people that are 25 years old having a lover's quarrel, it's fine, but this is a girl. This is a little high school aged girl and a grown ass adult man, Humbert, lies in Ohio and tells everybody that they're going to Hollywood so he can be a consultant on a film. During their road trip, Humbert realizes that they are being followed. He notices Lolita talking to a stranger while they're at a gas station. She claims the man only asked her for directions on the road, they have a tire blowout, and this only makes humbert's Paranoia worse, and in fact, he gets so stressed out that he starts to feel like he's having a heart attack. Lolita complains that she doesn't feel well either, and she lays down. In the next scene, she's in a hospital. Humbert brings her a stack of books and questions her about everything, and his intent is to abduct her and take her off to Mexico. Humbert gets a call in the middle of the night, and it's clear from the voice that it's quilty. You're not going to really mistake Peter Sellers voice. So you know, as the viewer that it's quilty. He claims that rumors are floating around about Humbert and his daughter. He also asked about humbert's Personal sex life. Humbert is ill himself with some kind of a cold or the beginnings of pneumonia, and he turns up at the hospital to get Lolita at three in the morning, and he learns from the hospital staff that Lolita was discharged at 815 that evening. He flips out and has to be restrained, which that may be the only fairly normal part of this film is that if you were someone's parent or step parent, and you found out that they had been taken from the hospital by a stranger, and you have no idea where the hell they are, that would be a reason to flip out. A nurse claims that Lolita was taken by her uncle. They threatened to call the police. So Humbert starts making up outrageous lies and just claims that he was drunk. We find Lolita writing a letter to Humbert, saying that she's married and pregnant and needs money from him. We also learned that this is like a flash of, I think, about maybe three years into the future, Humbert has a gun and shows up at a run down house, and he finds Lolita there. She's married a man named Richard, and she claims that Richard doesn't know anything about Humbert and Lolita, she says Richard did not abduct her from the hospital. She met Richard in Phoenix while she was working as a waitress. What Humbert really cares about is who took her from the hospital that night. She tells him that the German psychologist the car that followed them Charlotte's old flame, the. Late Night caller and the man at the hotel with the police convention all of the above. Claire quilty, and she admits that she had a crush on him. She calls him a genius. Quilty figured out what was going on between Humber and Lolita, and Lolita wanted to be with quilty, and was skipping those piano lessons in order to be with him. Quilty took Lolita to New Mexico. Hello, Epstein, Whoa, that was a mind blower for me. So quilty takes Lolita off to New Mexico, and she says there was a group of weirdos there, and quilty said he'd get her a Hollywood contract, but in reality, he wants Lolita to star in a pornography film, but she refused and he kicked her out. We see that Lolita is drinking even while she's pregnant. Lolita and Richard intend to move to Alaska for some kind of nebulous job opportunity. Humbert seems horrified by the whole scene. Humbert wants Lolita to run off with him, leave her husband and just go she says she's already ruined too many things in her life, and Humbert has a crying breakdown. He gives her $400 in cash and a check for 2500 and says that the house in New Hampshire is to be sold. He runs off, and she offers to write him from Alaska. This in this ending scene, now transitions into the beginning scene where he confronts quilty in that cluttered mansion, and in the Epilog we learned that Humbert died in prison while awaiting the murder trial, ie, for murdering Claire quilty in that trashed out mansion. So the big sort of twist ending there is that it was Claire quilty all along, and that, I mean, we knew as the viewer, obviously, that he was the man at the police convention, and he was the fake German psychologist, which also that scene of him putting on an accent and being like a precursor to Dr Strangelove. That's also played for Comic Relief, but it's like, what is the appropriateness level of trying to put dark comedy into a film about a pedo. I just I find that awfully disturbing, and then at the same time, I have this debate with myself, and I'm like, okay, but wait a minute, you laughed at Dr Strangelove. Mean, that's a film about mass murder, nuclear holocaust and mass murder, and it lampoons this Nazi agenda that Dr Strangelove has of well, we'll just go down in the bunker, and we're going to have to have all of these attractive concubine women, because it'll be on us to replenish the earth and keep the population going while we're down in the bunker until it's safe to go back to the Earth's surface, and there's that funny part about you'll have to answer to the Coca Cola company when all of this is done. I mean, it's, it's a funny movie, but it's about death. It's about it's a film about mass murder. So then I'm like, well, am I? Am I being a hypocrite here, because I laughed at that movie, but then the parts of Lolita that were supposed to be funny, I was like, I don't really think it's appropriate to tell jokes about child abuse. I mean, this, the whole damn thing, feels incredibly wrong to me. But so you have Claire quilty luring Lolita away. He doesn't actually care anything about her. Obviously, they've been engaged in inappropriate sexual contact. And then he wants to take her off to this weird, like artist colony that he has in New Mexico and have her star in a pornographic film. So he is going to make child pornography in New Mexico, and it's like, oh my god. But then at the same time, you know that these things are real, you know that these things actually happen. I live in a fairly quiet area of the Midwest, but not that long ago, I'm going to say it's been maybe a year or two back there was a guy who was involved in, like, a murder suicide, and one of the things that he was planning to do was get a group of teenagers and make underaged child pornography with them. I mean, this really happens. So part of me is like, is Kubrick trying to tell people through this movie? Is he using it as a vehicle to say there are people out there, predatory people like clear quilty that see nothing wrong with preying on teenage girls, even to the point of putting them in a pornographic film

when he's talking about New Mexico, I immediately thought of Epstein. I'll drop a link to this article from koa TV. Secrets in the mansion documents reveal disgusting activities at Jeffrey Epstein's New Mexico ranch. New Mexico was mentioned more than two dozen times in recently unsealed documents that highlight what's been called disgusting activities that occurred in Jeffrey Epstein's southern Santa Fe county mansion. Epstein was the billionaire who was accused of. Trafficking underage girls for sex. He killed himself in jail before his trial. The documents released last week are part of a civil suit filed by Virginia Geoffrey against jizz Lane Maxwell, a long time acquaintance of Epstein, who is currently serving prison time for child sex trafficking. The documents contain more than 900 pages of documents describing what occurred at the New Mexico mansion he called the Zorro ranch. For the past several days, target seven has been combing through these documents and found that New Mexico and this mansion were mentioned more than two dozen times as being a place where some horrific acts were occurring in the documents, Gia fray says she was recruited at the age of 16 to give what was called massages inside Epstein's estate to the rich and powerful. These massages are alleged in the documents to include nudity, sex acts and sex toys. End quote, oh my god. So it's like you think about this whole story of Lolita and Claire quilty as being a prelude to Epstein, and it's like, this is awful. Everything about this is awful. Everything about this is disgusting. And I think that's one of the reasons why it's easier for us to walk around with our Eyes Wide Shut, because it is so horrifying. We don't want to think about these things going on. It's it's awful to think about. There's an article from slash film.com Stanley Kubrick had a pretty questionable regret about the way he handled Lolita. And this was just published back in January of 2023 Stanley Kubrick pushed a lot of boundaries as a filmmaker, but perhaps most controversial was his adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's famed novel Lolita. The story centers around a middle aged man's affection for a teenage girl, a romance that raised eyebrows when the film was released in 1962 and it is still the subject of controversy to this day, the director had no regrets about making such a scandalous film. In fact, he wished he had pushed the envelope even further. Lolita was an incredibly successful novel before it was made into a movie. However, it wasn't the book's popularity that attracted Kubrick to the project. We bought it when it had not yet appeared on The New York Times Best Seller list. The filmmaker revealed to the Guardian, we never dreamed of the popularity that the book would achieve. We thought it would be popular, but how could one guess that it would become the number one best seller in the world? Instead, it was the content of a story that caught the director's attention. To me, Lolita seemed like a very sad and tender love story, he explained. He likened it to other famous love stories like Anna, Karenina and Romeo and Juliet that also have estranged themselves from society. Kubrick felt that this alienation encouraged the viewer to think critically. It seems to me that one of the wonderful things about Lolita is that it shocks because of the relationship. The filmmaker said, You are prevented from making a premature and overly sympathetic judgment of humbert's position by the shock that's created in your mind. End quote, yeah, I don't feel any fucking sympathy for him. This is disgusting, and I don't think it's fair to compare it to something like Anna Karenina or Romeo and Juliet. Romeo and Juliet were both kids. They were both teenagers. Anna Karenina is about a married woman who has an affair with another man. I mean, it's like a predator, a sexual predator, who's going after a child. I mean, I think we have to stop being euphemistic about these things, because the language that we use matters teenage girl, nymph, a child, an underage child. On the Guardian we read Lolita at 60. Stanley Kubrick's daring drama is a deft tightrope act. What happens when a magnet for controversy depolarizes with age? Vladimir Nabokov's 1955 novel, Lolita still attracts plenty of analysis, admiration and disgust in the classroom and beyond. But despite the pedigree of the beloved filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, the first film adaptation of Lolita released 60 years ago this week, of course, this is a couple of years old now, is arguably more of a curio these days, forced to excise or elide some of the book's thorniest elements for the sake of being allowed to exist at all. The sheer unlikelihood of a Lolita movie being made near contemporaneously with the novel was worked into the ad campaign some of its posters adorned with a cheeky question, how did they ever make a movie of Lolita? Good question. Relatively simple answer, by aging up the title character slightly and relying on innuendos and implications to keep the most explicit material off screen. Wow, I'm gonna scroll down a little bit to be clear, Humbert does prey on his stepdaughter off screen, and Lolita refers to their trysts with blight tartness, yet re watching Lolita today in a world that is gradually becoming more attuned. To sexual abuse and terms like grooming. It's not the movie's level of permissiveness that jumps out, though it keeps much of lolitas pain off screen. It does not exactly use her slightly raised age to excuse humbert's fixation, nor does it feel like a powder keg provocation ahead of its time, Kubrick prefers to flirt with bad taste by recasting sections of the movie as dark comedy, acting as a point of contrast that make it sad moments all the starker. End quote, yeah, I don't know if they make the films sad moments all the starker for me. I think the danger and the irresponsibility of trying to inject moments of comic relief into this is that you're saying it's not that serious. Yeah, it's a big deal, but it's not that big of a deal. Yes, it is. You're talking about ruining somebody's life, doing untold physical, mental and spiritual damage to a child. What the fuck is funny about that? I don't understand. I don't get it. Again, I was thinking about this just in light of what we know, which I think is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of what was really going on, how deep that cesspool really went with Epstein and Maxwell. We know that these things happen. We know that these predators are out there. Now, why would somebody feel compelled to write a novel like that? Why would somebody then feel compelled to make it into a movie? I don't know. I think if we can use it as a warning, I think if we can use it to remind ourselves these people are out there, predatory people that at the end of the day, really don't see anything wrong with what they're doing. They don't have any moral compunction about what they're doing. It's important for us to know that. I understand it's disgusting. I understand it's difficult subject matter to think about, but it is important for us to realize these people exist. And I also think the subtext of well, Lolita was fast. She had already been sexually active with somebody from camp, and she seemed wise beyond her years. She seemed to be doing things that was intentionally provocative. I feel like all of that is done to try to excuse the perpetrator, to blame the victim and excuse the perpetrator. I'm thinking about what Dr Phil would say on his show, like sometimes he'd have guests on that would be getting into domestic disputes, and he would tell the men, you don't hit a woman, you just do not do that. Well, what if she's trying to hit me? What if she's throwing things? Leave. Leave if you feel like there's a temptation that you need to get away from leave, whether it's a provocation towards violence or a provocation towards something else. Leave. But see Humbert sees Lolita in the bathing suit, and instead of going, I have to get out of here. This is bad. This is evil. I don't need anything to do with this. I need to get the hell out of here. He immediately rents the room and ingratiates himself into their life and the excuse I'm using that in huge air quotes as well, Lolita was fast. She was already sexually active. She already knew the ways of the world. There is no excuse. And so for me, putting in these elements of dark comedy and trying to make it seem like Lolita was a manipulator, because Stanley Kubrick does that in this film. He makes it seem like Lolita is a master manipulator. She's wrapped Humber around her little finger, and he'll just do whatever she wants. If you're talking about a film or a novel whatever, of a grown ass woman who's 30 years old, using weaponized sex against a grown man, fair game. I don't think it's appropriate to talk about a little girl who's 12 or 14 years old. Well, I mean, she was using sex as a weapon. She was using it to manipulate Humbert. So, I mean, hey, uh, there is no excuse. Full stop. Full stop. This is a predatory situation, and I think trying to depict it as anything else other than that, trying to say it's like Anna Karenina or Romeo and Juliet is incredibly disgusting and irresponsible. That's my thought. You know, as I said, I I laughed during Dr Strangelove, which is a political satire, slash dark comedy about nuclear annihilation. But then I look at Lolita, and I just think, my God, you know, as a grown woman, I was a teenage girl once, I just think about, you know. What, what that would have been like to have somebody move in on you, a grown adult who's smarter to the ways of the world, because that's the thing, even if Lolita is manipulative and she's trying to use Humbert for her own devices. At that age, you don't know what. You don't know your child. You don't have the mental capacity that an adult has. Your brain is still growing. Your functions are not fully fine tuned. You don't know what you don't know, even though he tries to put in moments of dark comedy, I just didn't find it funny. I just found the whole thing to be gross and wildly inappropriate. I felt like I needed to talk about it, because we're we're living in the post Epstein era. And I say post Epstein only because he's dead, wink, from suicide, wink. But you know, these programs still carry on, whether he was intelligence and he was running honey pot type scandals with kids to blackmail people, whatever the real story behind his activities might have been. You know, these things are still going on, and that's why I think it's so important for us to understand that's that's reality. It's unfortunate that we live in a world where these predators exist, but they do judge for yourself if you decide to watch the movie, Judge for yourself what you think. But in the meantime, the main thing that I would say is, please stay aware that that we live in a world where these people do exist, and unfortunately, their nefarious deeds are not always brought to light. Unfortunately they're not always brought to justice. I will see you in the next episode.

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