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Referenced By / Lolita

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Film:

  • American Beauty's main character is a middle-aged man who is infatuated with his daughter's high school friend. His name — Lester Burnham — is an anagram of "Humbert Learns", as Burham ends his infatuation before sleeping with the girl.
  • Beautiful Girls: when Paul and Marty meet at the end of the film, he greets her as "the neighborhood Lolita." Earlier, Willie compares himself to Humbert Humbert.

Literature:

  • In I Think I Love You, Bill thinks of his ex-wife Clare as "light of my life, fire of my loins."
  • In My Dark Vanessa, Mr. Strane's grooming of Vanessa involves giving her a copy of Lolita. She's entranced by the story of forbidden love between a man and a child seductress.
  • Shock Point: At Peaceful Cove, kids in feedback meetings have to share something personal about themselves so everyone else can insult them for it. Cassie doesn't want to tell any actual secrets, so she lies that her stepfather looks at her for too long when she comes out of the bathroom. Heather tells her, "You think you're like that girl Lolita."

Live Action TV:

  • In Treatment: In the first season, when Laura tells Paul about her relationship she had with an older man when she was a teenager, she compares herself to Lolita.
  • Person of Interest. In "Reasonable Doubt", Sameen Shaw goes undercover to a book club meeting of "pseudo-intellectual glorified trophy wives" discussing Lolita:
    Nicole: Nabokov faced some unique challenges writing so honestly about forbidden love.
    Shaw: Speaking of forbidden love, did you frame Vanessa for Jeremy's murder because you were sleeping with him?
  • In Red Dwarf episode "Marooned", Rimmer is shown to have it among his books. Apparently it's one of the books he actually read and remembers which page is worth saving when they are forced to burn everything they can to sustain heat.

Music

  • In "Don't Stand So Close to Me" by The Police, there is a throwaway reference to "that book by Nabokov," relating the book's subject matter to that of the song, which details the setup and consequences of an implicitly sexual relationship between an adult male teacher and a female student "only half his age." Sting confirmed in an interview that the Nabokov novel was a major source of inspiration for the song.
  • "Off To The Races" by Lana Del Rey quotes the opening lines ("light of my life, fire of my loins") no less than three times. In a way, the song can almost be read as a modern retelling of Lolita, where Lo is even more screwed up. (For context, the narrator of the song is a drug addict in a somewhat destructive relationship with a man who is much older than her, but hey, at least he gives her nice things.)
  • Emilie Autumn's "Gothic Lolita."
  • There are several songs with the title "Lolita" such as by:
    • Lana Del Rey, who also referenced the line "Light of my life, fire of my loins" in "Off to the Races" from the same album.
    • Leah Labelle
    • The Veronicas
    • Throw Me The Statue
    • Miniature Tigers
    • Sky Ferreira
    • Elefant
    • Stereophonics
    • Alizèe
    • CĂ©line Dion - "Lolita (Trop jeune pour aimer)" ("Lolita (Too Young for Love")) on her 1987 French-language album Incognito. The narrator of the song tries to convince the man she loves that she's not too young to be intimate with him, which, in a case of Art Imitates Life, was exactly how the then-teenaged singer herself felt about her several-decades-older manager, Rene Angelil, whom she would later marry.
  • Marilyn Manson's "Heart-Shaped Glasses" is a reference to the poster for Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation of Lolita.

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