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little-miss-dilf-lover · 10 months

Note

heeeeyy i saw that u write for steven…?

if you wanna- could u write a flustered/ blushing steven with a forward/ teasing reader. could be that they work together at the museum and are a couple on the dl cuz if donna found out she would fire one of you. but the reader keeps teasing steven and making it really hard for him to focus on his costumers. could end in him losing his patience and dragging the reader to the bathroom orr a broom closet? or maybe the reader corners him??👀 idk you can obvs decide how far this could go (fluff/ lime/ lemon) whatevs- entirely up to you👹✨

thanks so muuuuuch ur a really great writer💗💗

hiii!! I absolutely love this!? and anything like this tbh🤭 and omg stop it, thank you sm!! <33 🥹 thank you for requesting, hope you like it💌

interrupted break

steven grant x fem!reader

wc || 655

warnings || a little suggestive, but no ‘vulgar’ words used, just making out

・₊✧ masterlist + taglist

You and Steven were in the early stages of your relationship, so things were still very new and exciting. As you worked together at the museum, you had to be wary and careful around one another. Donna had a strict 'no dating policy', so if she were to catch you together during a moment, one of you would be reprimanded or even fired.

Recently, you couldn't keep your hands off Steven. You found any possible opportunity to touch or stroke him. You'd always be sly when engaging in contact- a light brush on his arm as you walk by, lingering touches, eye contact from across the room, just anything you can do without being caught.

Steven knew the game behind your constant teasing and flirting, and he was determined not to give in to your ways. He loves his job, as you do yours, so he had to carry the strength for both of you and resist the temptation, even though it was hard.

You were stocking shelves while Steven was on tills and attending to customers. You peek up at him, gazing at him over the stuffed hippos with a devilish glimmer in your eye. You place down the box of keyrings and pick up the new stock of pens and pencils before making your way to Steven.

"Oh hey," you subtly smirk, pulling out a fistful of stationery. "Fancy seeing you here,"

"Yup," he nods, avoiding your gaze as he knows that he wouldn't be able to refuse your allure. "Gotta get back to my customers now," he says quietly, gesturing to the non-existent queue.

"Oh really? It seems like you're avoiding me," you smile, furtively leaning over the counter to allow him a sneak peek down your top, inconspicuously showing him your cleavage. His eye line focuses on your breasts sitting perfectly in your bra, and you see his failed attempts to conceal a reaction.

"Yeah, nice try," Steven sighs, covering his crotch with his hands. "Good one,"

"Hm, seems like you're lying, Steven," you grin, resting your chin in your palm.

"Nope. I know your silly games,"

"Silly?"

"Mhm," he nods, making himself look busy as he flicks through items by the cash register. "I'm not a teenage boy anymore,"

"Okay, I'll drop it," you shrug, playing with a stray strand of hair. "What time do you get off?" you whisper, stroking his forearm, battering your lashes up at him.

"God," he exhales, visibly frustrated. "Come with me,"

You follow him towards the staff bathroom, leaving an unsuspicious gap as you walk after him. Steven checks the surroundings before yanking you into the stall, closing the door behind you, and immediately pushing you up against it. His lips brush over yours, and you instantly feel his pent-up frustrations melt away.

His lips hungrily work over yours as his hands cup and guide you, holding your jaw to manoeuvre you in the way he wants, like he's desperately trying to regain control after all your teasing. A soft moan slips past your lips as he deepens the kiss, working over your mouth more urgently, pushing you back into the door behind.

A harsh knock interrupts. "Stevie, what you doing in there?" Donna snaps, pounding on the door. "Taking forever— you have customers waiting,"

Steven pulls away, clearing his throat. "Yeah— yep, I know. Just a minute," he says with a slightly raised voice.

"What's taking so long? Having a poo or something?"

Your eyes instantly snap up to Steven's as you conceal a cackle, muffling your mouth with your palm.

"... yeah," he says reluctantly, an unamused expression on his face.

"Distugting, hurry up— and wash your hands,"

"Alright, yep— okay," he whispers, dropping his forehead into the crook of your neck. "That was so embarrassing,"

"For you, yeah— very," you snicker.

"We'll finish this at mine," Steven smiles, adjusting himself. "... for payback." he merely brushes your lips before walking out.

— — — — — — — — — — ☆ — — — — — — — — — —

steven taglist: @thewinterv @bubblezuku @idontknowwhattohaveasmyuser @queerponcho @selfryed @ugh09876554444

#steven grant #steven grant imagine #steven grant fanfiction #steven grant x reader #steven grant drabble #steven grant x fem!reader #steven grant x you #moon boys #moon knight

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redrusty66 · 6 months

Video

youtube

Batlle Royale Fest : Triggered (2020)

Discussing the 2020 Battle Royale Film : Triggered

Starring : Reine Swart, Russell Crous, Liesl Ahlers, Cameron Scott, Steven John Ward, Paige Bonnin, Kayla Privett, Suraya Rose Santos, Michael Lawrence Potter, Sean Cameron Michael

Director : Alastair Orr Writer : David D. Jones, Alastair Orr

My Score 8.7/10

IMDB : https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9419976/ Trailer : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xy2gK3OO0sw

My IMDB : https://www.imdb.com/user/ur48636572 My Letterboxed : https://letterboxd.com/Redrusty66/ My Poetry : https://allpoetry.com/Redrusty66

#horror #review #battleroyale #slasher #film #reaction #film

#youtube

0 notes

saintorr · 6 years

Text

aka Chris McBeth

https://chrismcbeth.wordpress.com/2018/07/28/74/

#Steven Orr writer #East Village NYC #nycmasseur.com #nycmasseur #newyorkqueen #queer writer #stevenorr.com

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sharperthewriter · 3 years

Text

The 16th Annual Kim Possible Fannies Awards - Final Round Voting

Good evening, everyone! After two very tough rounds of voting, it all comes down to this: the third and final round of voting that will decide the winners of each of the 33 categories.

Here are the rules for voting. As the famous Mandalorian line goes, "this is the way."

Rules

* Authors can vote for yourself up to five times.

* You can only vote for one person/story per category. You cannot split your votes.

* You must include your regular username from whatever platform you use with your vote, or it will not count.

* Submit your vote in the same methods as the nominations, listed above.

* You may only vote ONCE. Anyone found cheating will have their votes disqualified.

* Your vote MUST be private. Any votes found to have been shared publicly will be disqualified.

* Your vote for the 16th Annual KP Fannies must be submitted by November 20, 2021 at 11:59 Central Time (USA).

How To Vote:

* Send a PM to the KP Fannies Committee FFnet account.

* Send an email to: [email protected]

* Send a PM to Sharper the Writer on his most-used platforms (FFnet, Tumblr, DeviantART, Twitter, Discord, and Reddit).

You can only send votes in ONE of these methods.

Without your username, your vote will not count.

Finalists List - 16th Annual KP Fannies Awards - Round 3 Voting

Best KP-Style Name

Gothicthundra - Carmella Sweets - Random Tales of Drakgo

bcbdrums - Admiral Cuddles - There's Christmas--and Christmas

BeatlesTributeMan - Chief Salvo - KP Sitch of College

K1G0 - Quinn Phy-Knight - And You and I

Slyrr - Grimm Probable - All Things Possible

Val Orr - Val Orr - No Time Like the Present

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Best KP OC

Gothicthundra - Cleopatra - Random Tales of Drakgo

K1G0 - Captain Brooks - And You and I

split-n-splice - Priscilla Kimbley - The Company You Keep

Sharper the Writer - Mary Juana and Canna Abis - Stoppable Family Vacation

BeatlesTributeMan - Marty - KP Sitch of Summer CA Trip Sitch

WriterChic16 - The Duke - Possible for a Possible

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Best Minor Character

Gothicthundra - Motor Ed - Random Tales of Drakgo

bcbdrums - Mama Lipsky - There's Christmas--and Christmas

K1G0 - Ann Possible - And You and I

split-n-splice - Midas - The Company You Keep

Sharper the Writer - Bonnie Rockwaller - Possible-y Utah

WriterChic16 - Britina - Possible for a Possible

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Best Villain

Gothicthundra - Dr. Botox - Random Tales of Drakgo

K1G0 - Captain Brooks - And You and I

bcbdrums - Sangerson - Just Hold Me

split-n-splice - Priscilla Kimbley - The Company You Keep

MakeWolfStarGayAgain - Gemini - This Is Not A Death Fic

WriterChic16 - The Duke - Possible for a Possible

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Best AU-Fusion

bcbdrums - Stone House, Forest of Oak

JStormRaider - Tara is the Girl Next Door

sammiesue - If You Could Read My Mind, Love

Gothicthundra - Witches and Demons

PurpleGirl761 - True Blue

Shthar - Aja

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Best Crossover

PurpleGirl761 - Sky Blue, Ocean Blue - Steven Universe

writerChic16 - Crane Interference - Frasier

LJ58 - KP: Where No Man Has Gone - Tv xOvers

brycewade1013 - You and Me Against the World - Suite Life

JxstSaiyan - Family and Trust - Dragonball Z

MacMan - XPossible - X-Men

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Best Alt-Other Canon Pair

Gothicthundra - Frugal Lucre/Adrena Lynn - Random Tales of Drakgo

DavidFalkalyn - Kim/Josh - Arts In the Park

JStormRaider - Ron/Tara - Tara is the Girl Next Door

NeoTyson - Ron/Tara - More than Just a Blonde

CrowJones - Ron/Bonnie - Hidden Affections

kmtdiccion - Ron/Bonnie - Winter's Lie

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Best Kigo

K1G0 - And You and I

Lhyaran - Mission Possible

Beth of Liz - A Hero Would Never Fall For a Villain, Would They

EORaptor - In Brightest Day

Neo the Saiyan Angel - Finding Life in Dull Places

Supreme Distraction - Villainess' Intent

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Best Drakgo

bcbdrums - Pandemic

split-n-splice - The Company You Keep

sammiesue - If You Could Read My Mind, Love

Eclipsing-Dreams - Lab Results

Baronesscmd - Arrivals

DarkOnesRoses - Heightened Emotions

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Best Kim/Ron

SuperReneyyy - Snippets of Forever

SimplyShelbs16 - A World of Fragile Things

Gothicthundra - Come In

Sharper the Writer - Possible-y Utah

F86Sabre53 - This Is Our Year College

BeatlesTributeMan - KP Sitch of Summer: The Wedding

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Best Comedy

bcbdrums - The Cocoro of Rococo

split-n-splice - Practice Makes Perfect

Whitem - Even Naked Mole Rats Believe In Santa

Eclipsing-Dreams - A Precise Hand

MakeWolfStarGayAgain - All the Words

Sharper the Writer - Stoppable Family Vacation

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Best Romance

Super Reneyyy - Snippets of Forever

bcbdrums - Brighter Than the Moon

K1G0 - And You and I

Gothicthundra - Random Tales of Drakgo

sammiesue - If You Could Read My Mind, Love

split-n-splice - The Company You Keep

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Best Friendship

bcbdrums - They Sing Your Heart's Desire

Gothicthundra - Random Tales of Drakgo

sammiesue - The SheGhost In My Lair

split-n-splice - Sick Day

Shthar - What's In a Name

GoForDrakgo - Friends

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Best Action-Adventure

bcbdrums - Mad Angry, Mad Crazy

Gothicthundra - Random Tales of Drakgo

Hotrod2001 - KP Rides Again

split-n-splice - The Company You Keep

BearSent - Storm Chaser

General Quin - Lotus War: The Bloom of War

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Best Drama

Gothicthundra - Random Tales of Drakgo

split-n-Splice - The Company You Keep

NeoTyson - Ron Stoppable: Emotion Sickness Remix

Sentinel103 - The Hunter Book 2

Mahler Avatar - Beyond the Stars

SammieFlute - Glow in the Storm

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Most Unlikely-Unique Story

bcbdrums - Stone House, Forest of Oak

sammiesue - The SheGhost In My Lair

split-n-splice - The F Word

Gothicthundra - Witches and Demons

Campy - Cheerleader on the Edge of Forever

Eclipsing-Dreams - A Precise Hand

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Best One-Shot (K-T)

bcbdrums - Depths

Gothicthundra - Bloodlines

split-n-splice - Thunder

Whitem - Momentary Passings

Eclipsing Dreams - Lab Results

WriterChic16 - A Dream and A Nightmare

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Best Short Story (K-T)

SimplyShelbs16 - A World of Fragile Things

bcbdrums - Still Beautiful

Gothicthundra - Blind Spot

sammisue - Drakgo OneShots

split-n-splice – Fly-In

Eclipsing-Dreams - Relief

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Best Medium-Sized Story (K-T)

bcbdrums – Adrift

Gothicthundra - Bloodlines

sammisue - If You Could Read My Mind, Love

MakeWolfStarGayAgain - As Time Goes By

DarkOnesRoses – Heightened Emotions

Eclipsing-Dreams – Lab Results

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Best Novel-Sized Story (K-T)

bcbdrums - There's Christmas--and Christmas

Gothicthundra - Random Tales of Drakgo

split-n-splice - The Company You Keep

MrDrP - What's the Alma Mater

Mahler Avatar - Beyond the Stars

JStormRaider7 - Tara is the Girl Next Door

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Best Series

SimplyShelbs16 - Center Will Not Hold

bcbdrums - The Little Ones

sammisue - The SheGhost In My Lair

split-n-splice - The Company You Keep

BeatlesTributeMan - KP Sitch of Summer

F86Sabre53 - This Is Our Year

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Best M-Rated One-Shot

Gothicthundra - Save on Time

split-n-splice - Morning Glory

bcbdrums - Just Hold Me

NeoTyson - Club Banana Shopping

Eddy13 - Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Bathe

Kakerot Badrockson - Stoppable The Drama

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Best M-Rated Short Story

Denaith - In Your Arms

Gothicthundra - Save On Time

Sewrtyuiop - Shattered Illusions

split-n-splice - Love Burns

UniqueBooks - Ron Stoppable: Change

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Best M-Rated Medium-Sized Story

bcbdrums – Just Hold Me

Lhyaran - Mission Possible

Campy - Cri De Guerre

Chaotic Harlequin - One Last Chance

NeoTyson - The New Fearless Ferret

RedWolfBlack - End of the Road

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Best M-Rated Novel-Sized Story

SuperReneyyy - Snippets of Forever

K1G0 - And You and I

DismalOrc29177 - My Kind of Hero

Hotrod2001 - KP Rides Again

Sharper the Writer - Stoppable Family Vacation

Beth of Liz - A Hero Would Never Fall For a Villain, Would They?

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Best Young Writer

CrazyRedQueen

IconicGwen

SammieFlute

sammisue

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Best New Writer

GoForDrakgo

K1G0

IconicGwen

MakeWolfStarGayAgain

SammieFlute

Shthar

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Best Single Line

"Too many emotions swirled within her at the kind insistence of his voice, the gentle authority in his eyes, and the tender way he held her hands as if they were glass and might break. Her lips trembled and she didn't know what to do as everything inside her seemed to collapse under a tsunami wave of passions, both good and ill." (from Ch. 8 of "Pandemic," by bcbdrums)

"The moon, a friend of hers in nights of solitude, could not repair the cracks within her broken heart that continued to grow as she vividly imagined the rich relationships maintained by her brothers—relationships that she once held within her feeble hands, but let slip as her own selfishness tore her away from those she loved the most." (from Ch. 4 of "If You Could Read My Mind, Love," by sammisue)

Kim knew even before alarms began to flare and emergency lights flickered on scarlet from every socket that [the button] must have been a self-destruct mechanism. It was just that kind of day." (from "True Blue," by Purplegirl761)

"It appears that you have again taken up a course of study that I at least, had hoped that you had abandoned years ago." Yori said, her face a blank mask hiding any real emotions. It was only the tone of her voice that let Ron know her true feelings. Subtle to any that didn't know her well, loud as a thunder clap to those that did.

He remained silent as he waited for her to continue.

"The art of being stupid. One of the more advanced classes." (from "Past and Present V2," by Levi2000a)

"Well, let's get you to the cannon and blast you into space, cos your coffee is rank, Lady," Quinn said and the look in her eyes told Betty that the girl was only half-joking. (from "And You and I," by K1G0)

Traci dribbled confidently with her left hand, easily protecting the ball from Kim's feints at a steal. Nothing seemed to be about to happen when without warning Beth took three quick steps back to a spot well behind the three-point line. Before Crystal could react Traci dealt a perfect no-look bounce pass to the diminutive girl, who let fly a two-handed set shot right off a circa 1950 Minneapolis Lakers highlight reel that kissed the backboard and swished through the hoop. The crowd cheered.

"She'll sink that from Denver if the wind's with her," Traci told an astonished Kim. "You cheerleaders are goin' down like cheerleaders in a raunchy direct-to-video teen sex comedy." (from Ch. 2 of "Cri De Guerre," by Campy)

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Neb Award

Hotrod2001

bcbdrums

MrDrP

Tennente

Gothicthundra

F86Sabre53

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Kimmunity Achievement Award

Hotrod2001

bcbdrums

Gothicthundra

Slyrr

Librana

PurpleGirl761

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Best Reviewer

Celioxa

bcbdrums

split-n-splice

writerchic16

Gothicthundra

MakeWolfStarGayAgain

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Best Story of 2020

MrDrP - What's the Alma Mater

K1G0 - And You and I

bcbdrums - Pandemic

SuperReneyyy - Snippets of Forever

split-n-splice - The Company You Keep

sammisue - If You Could Read My Mind, Love

MakeWolfStarGayAgain - As Time Goes By

JStormRaider7 - Tara Is the Girl Next Door

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Best Writer of 2020

bcbdrums

K1G0

split-n-splice

sammisue

MakeWolfStarGayAgain

PurpleGirl761

F86Sabre53

WriterChic16

Good luck to all the nominees!

#kim possible #fanfiction #fannies awards #16KPFA #voting #ron stoppable #rufus #drakken #shego #drakken x shego #kim x ron #kim x shego #kigo #drakgo #monique #tara #bonnie #bonnie rockwaller

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scotianostra · 3 years

Photo

Born on May 15th 1857 in Dundee, Williamina Paton Stevens Fleming became one of the leading lights in astronomy.

Her father had died when she was seven; at 14, she had become a student teacher to help support her mother and siblings.

At 20, she had married a Dundee bank employee and widower, James Orr Fleming, 16 years her senior—who would abandon her and their unborn child shortly after her arrival in the United States a year later.

Willamina worked as a maid in the home of Professor Edward Charles Pickering, who was director of the Harvard College Observatory. The story was told that Pickering was often frustrated with the performance of the (all-male) “computers” at the observatory and, reportedly, would complain loudly: “My Scottish maid could do better!” And so it was she went to work for him at Harvard.

Fleming became a full time employee at the observatory in 1881 despite a lack of any math, astronomy, or physics background. She eventually became the first woman to be designated Curator of Astronomical Photographs in 1899. This was the first corporate appointment of a woman at Harvard ever.

Fleming contributed to the cataloging of stars that later were published as the Henry Draper Catalogue. In nine years’ effort she cataloged more than 10,000 stars. During her career she discovered 59 gaseous nebulae, over 310 variable stars, and 10 novae. In 1907 she published a list of 222 variable stars she had discovered.

In 1888, Fleming she made her most well known discovery, the Horsehead Nebula.

The second phot is a depiction of the lady by Greg Moodie, artist and writer, you can see his work in the Scottish newspaper The National

Read more about her in this Harvard Magazine article here. http://harvardmagazine.com/2017/01/williamina-fleming

#Scotland #scottish #teacher #astronomer #history #strong woman

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bluewatsons · 4 years

Text

Nathan Abrams, A Jewish American Monster: Stanley Kubrick, Anti-Semitism and Lolita (1962), 49 J Am Stud 541 (2015)

Abstract

This article presents a case study of the filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, considering how his films can be considered an emotional response to the Holocaust, the legacy of European anti-Semitism, and stereotypes of the Jewish American woman. It will argue that there are various clues in Kubrick's films which produce Jewish moments; that is, where, through a complementary directing and acting strategy, in particular one of misdirection, the viewer is given the possibility of “reading Jewish,” albeit not with certainty, for Jewishness is “textually submerged.” Its focus is Kubrick's 1962 adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1955), in particular the character of Charlotte Haze, played by Shelley Winters, especially in light of Kubrick's choice of casting for the role, and Winters's subsequent performance of it. It will conclude that Holocaust and anti-Semitic stereotypes/reverse stereotypes haunt Kubrick's version of Lolita as an emotional, yet sub-epidermis, presence

Introduction

Filmmaker Stanley Kubrick was rarely thought of as a Jewish director who made Jewish films (however that may be defined). Yet, born in 1928, and growing up as the Holocaust was taking place in Europe, the awareness of the inescapability of his Central European Jewish heritage arguably had a significant emotional impact upon him. Although Kubrick said very little about the Holocaust, its presence is felt in his films, but it is approached obliquely, often via analogies and metaphors, sometimes by overt, albeit brief, moments which explore the very same issues raised by the Shoah. Frederic Raphael, who collaborated with Kubrick on the screenplay for his final film, Eyes Wide Shut (1999), suggested, “S.K. proceeds by indirection ... [his] work could be viewed, as responding, in various ways, to the unspeakable (what lies beyond spoken explanation).”1 And John Orr and Elżbieta Ostrowska have pointed out, “Kubrick, who never realised his Holocaust film project, nonetheless had a post-Holocaust vision of the contemporary world.”2 This may well have been amplified by his third marriage, in 1958, to Christiane Harlan, the niece of Veit Harlan, who had directed the notoriously anti-Semitic propaganda film, Jud Süss in 1940. Kubrick had met Harlan in 1957 and wanted to make a film about him, and Kubrick therefore was surely sensitive to the impact on the Harlan family of Harlan’s decision to work so closely with the Nazi leadership.3

How this post-Holocaust sensibility operated in Kubrick’s films will be explored via a detailed case study of a key character in one of his films, namely Charlotte Haze, played by Shelley Winters, in his 1962 adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955).4 She has been chosen because in casting and performance Winters’s real-life Jewishness and her performance of Haze’s onscreen persona provide a key prism through which to consider Kubrick’s own ethnicity and attitudes towards it, as well as his post-Holocaust sensibility, at a crucial stage in his career and in postwar Hollywood. It will be argued here that, if, as Daniel Anderson has suggested, “The language and the visible world of Lolita are so deeply conditioned by their post-Holocaust circumstances,” then they must have also influenced Kubrick.5 Consequently, the Holocaust haunts his version of Lolita as an emotional, yet submerged, presence, producing an intriguing representation of the Jewish American Mother.

Scholars have already detected the novel’s underlying concerns with the Holocaust.6 Susan L. Mizruchi, for example, has elucidated the novel’s “holocaust subtext”; that is, “a consistent pattern of references to Nazi persecution and genocide in Europe.”7 Many of the metaphors and descriptions in the novel evoke the trains, camps, and other details of the Holocaust, both directly and subtextually. Nabokov refers to “the brown wigs of tragic old women who had just been gassed” or “the ashes of our predecessors.”8 In 1935, the year of Lolita’s fictive birth, Hitler passed the Nuremberg Laws and Anderson reads an imaginative equation between the Nazis’ obsession with race and therefore sexual reproduction and Humbert’s paedophilia, while Mizruchi posits that Humbert’s “case” parallels the ongoing trials of Nazi war criminals in Nuremberg from 1946 to 1949.9 The repetition of twins and twinning in the novel – the twin beds and the picture of twins in the motel, the twin girls in blue bathing suits who almost discover Lolita and Humbert Humbert (itself a twinned name), the four pairs of twins in Lolita’s class list (at least one of whom, “Cowan”, may be read as Jewish as it was common to alter the name “Cohen” to that) – evokes the notorious pseudoscientific medical experiments of Dr. Josef Mengele at Auschwitz. Kubrick would later go on to make use of twins in The Shining (1980), which like the famous Diane Arbus photograph Identical Twins (1967) that inspired him, also prompts audience reference to Mengele and Auschwitz.10

Mizruchi also observes Lolita’s “attention to American anti-Semitism.”11 Humbert is often mistaken for being Jewish. Before marrying him, Charlotte first wants to find out precisely how “foreign” Humbert is: “Looking down at her fingernails, she also asked me had I not in my family a certain strange strain.” She can tolerate a “Turk” as one of his ancestors, as long as he himself is truly Christian; however, “if she ever found out I did not believe in Our Christian God, she would commit suicide.”12 Likewise, her friends, John and Jean Farlow, also have a vague suspicion he may be Jewish because of his dark looks and exotic name. So when John is about to make disparaging remarks about Jews in Humbert’s presence, “Of course, too many of the tradespeople here are Italians . . . but on the other hand we are still spared,” she cuts him off.13 Humbert attempts to check in to the Enchanted Hunters Hotel but is initially refused entry because it is restricted, advertising itself as being “Near Churches,”14 a coded expression used in adverts to indicate its discriminatory, restrictive practices.15 Nabokov also makes continuous use in the novel of the number 42, as the workings of what Humbert regarded as “McFate” stalking him to his doom. The number also recurs in his Lolita screenplay.16 Cocks suggests that 42 was “conscious and unconscious cultural shorthand for the Holocaust.”17 Consequently, Anderson argues that “the novel’s rich amalgamation of post-war America with pre-war Europe” evokes the “unbearable memory of genocidal holocaust.”18 Yet Kubrick omitted many of these details, consistent with his practice of writing Jews out of his films, although he did reference them indirectly by various means. For example, he did use 242 as the number of the room at the Enchanted Hunters Hotel in which Lolita and Humbert first have sex (and 42 as a reference to the Holocaust throughout The Shining, which is set in the haunted Overlook Hotel).

These concerns may have been one of the motivating factors behind Kubrick’s desire to film the novel in the first place, although, given his refusal to be explicit on the subject, we will never know for certain. Kubrick solicited writer Calder Willingham to produce a screenplay, but Kubrick rejected it on the grounds that it was “not worthy” of the book, its “most serious fault not realizing characters.”19 Kubrick subsequently approached Nabokov himself, telling him, “you are only one for screen play. If financial details can be agreed would you be available quick start for May 1 Production appreciate cable.”40 Nabokov then began the laborious task of adapting his own novel, producing various draft screenplays, little of which Kubrick ultimately used.21 Instead, what became the final screenplay was written by Kubrick and his producer, James B. Harris, using the book, Nabokov’s various drafts, and their own ideas, as well as those generated from the rehearsals and the process of shooting itself. Nonetheless, they decided to give the screenwriting credit to Nabokov.22

The Holocaust was much in the news and in popular culture at precisely the same time as the film was in preproduction. The Diary of Anne Frank had been published and serialized in the leading New York intellectual magazine Commentary in 1952.23 It was subsequently adapted for the stage, and then made into the 1959 film (directed by George Stevens) for which Winters won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. The following year, in 1960, high-ranking Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann – one the chief architects of the Nazi genocide – was captured in Argentina, kidnapped and transported to Israel, where he was imprisoned while awaiting trial. Incidentally, at some point during his incarceration, one of Eichmann’s guards gave him a copy of the recently published German translation of Lolita (1959), as German Jewish émigré philosopher Hannah Arendt puts it, “for relaxation.”25 After two days Eichmann returned it, visibly indignant, telling his guard, “Quite an unwholesome book.”25 (Is it possible that Eichmann rejected Lolita not only because of its sexual content but also because he detected it as being somehow “Jewish”?26) In 1961, Judgment at Nuremberg (Stanley Kramer), with camp footage, was released and Raul Hilberg published his magisterial and ground- breaking Holocaust study, The Destruction of European Jews, which Kubrick subsequently read.27 That same year, with much publicity and international attention, Eichmann’s trial for war crimes began in Jerusalem. As a result, secular Jewish intellectuals, particularly in the United States, became much more conscious of the devastation of the Holocaust. Furthermore, they were vocal about it, using the Shoah to mould public opinion, increasingly making explicit comparisons between the Nazi genocide and nuclear mass death in the 1950s and early 1960s. Even Kubrick suggested it in his next film, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), for example.28 The 1960s were also a time when American Jewish filmmakers began to introduce a wider range of Jewish themes and characters, including the Holocaust, into their films in a fashion not seen since the 1920s.29

Kubrick’s decision to cast Shelley Winters as the pseudo-intellectual suburban housefrau, Charlotte Haze, is perhaps the most significant clue to reading this film as an emotional response to his own Jewishness, as well as to the Holocaust, and goes some way to recovering Nabokov’s underlying concerns in the novel. It is certainly hard to ignore Winters’s own ethnicity and previous roles as a consideration in Kubrick’s casting of her as Charlotte. Winters was born Jewish, as Shirley Schrift, in 1923, but took her mother’s maiden name. She had already played Natalia Landauer, a German Jewish girl, in I Am a Camera (1955), based on Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories (1945), about the doomed intelligentsia in prewar Berlin. Winters had lost an aunt and cousins in the Holocaust: “our family had missing relatives who, we found out later, died in the concentration camps.”30 As a result, she refused to film exterior shots in Germany “because I could not reconcile the thought of doing so with the image of my Holocaust-survivor uncle Yaekel.”31 Winters then played a variety of roles, in which she specialized as lower-class blondes murdered halfway through the film.32 Thereafter, she progressed to “more matronly roles.”33 As mentioned above, she eventually won an Oscar for her portrayal of the Jewish refugee Mrs. Petronella Van Daan in The Diary (a part for which she gained twenty-five pounds). From then on, comments J. Hoberman, “Winters would never return to glamour roles.”34

Arguably, Winters’s role as Van Daan influenced all of her subsequent performances. She recalled,

When we started shooting the film, Stevens had all the adult actors come to a projection room. He showed us the films his unit in the Special Services had taken of the concentration camps. His Army unit had been the first into Dachau. Watching those horrendous films possibly made me play that role so that I won the Oscar, but I believe that shooting that film scarred me for life. I can never read or watch anything about the Holocaust.35

Winters spent almost six months on the set of The Diary.36 “I learned something about acting that I was to use for the rest of my life.”37 She also stated that it was “Anne Frank whose memory and words have inspired me all of my adult life.”38 Winters, then, brought what she had learned on The Diary to her performance in Lolita.

Given the prominence and success of this role, only three years before Lolita, it seems impossible to ignore that this was a consideration in her casting. Furthermore, Anderson argues that the circumstances surrounding Lolita “so perfectly reverse” those of the manuscript of Anne Frank that “Nabokov envisioned Lolita as a fictional mirror image, an opposite twin, of her celebrated nonfictional contemporary.”39 He points out that Lolita’s forerunner, Annabel Leigh, “died of typhus–the endemic disease of the concentration camps in the closing months of the war, and perhaps not so coincidentally the cause of Anne Frank’s death in Bergen–Belsen early in 1945.”40 He further notes how The Diary appeared in 1952 and Lolita was published in 1955.41 In a further twist of uncanny symmetry, The Diary was made into a film in 1959 and Lolita in 1962– again three years apart – and both featuring Winters as a supporting actress.

Winters also recalled that her Jewishness came through on the set of Lolita. She wrote how, refusing to drop a silk robe with her back to the camera and instead hitting the microphone with her head, mixing up her lines and breaking James Mason’s glasses (Mason was playing Humbert), she was named “the klutz”, as a specifically Jewish put-down of herself.42 Furthermore, she remembered, “At one point, when I was squirming with embarrassment under the covers with just panties on, Mason whispered to me: ‘Would it make you feel more comfortable if I tell you that a long time ago my name was Moskowitz, and not Mason?’”43

Winters was certainly essential to Kubrick’s thinking; so much so that he was willing to cast her despite the obstacles to doing so. The first potential hurdle was the Eady Levy that came into effect on 9 September 1950, which provided indirect funding to film producers but only if a film qualified as “British.” In order to qualify as a British film no less than eighty-five per cent of the film had to be shot in the United Kingdom or the Commonwealth, and only three non-British individual salaries could be excluded from the costs of the film, ensuring the employment of British actors, technicians and film crew. The other two principal actors – Mason as Humbert and Peter Sellers as Clare Quilty – were British where Winters was not, and she had to be flown over and put up at considerable expense. Second, the daily production reports indicate that she proved to be a pain on the set.44 “Winters tried Kubrick’s patience,” wrote Kubrick’s biographer, Vincent Lobrutto.45 “Winters was very difficult,” recalled Oswald Morris, Lolita’s cinematographer,

wanting to do everything her own way. She was very nearly fired off the film. At one point Kubrick said to me, “I think the lady’s gonna have to go” – which would have been very serious halfway through production. But he’d have got rid of her, he really didn’t care about the consequences.56

She was also ill with stomach problems and diarrhoea, delaying the shoot.47 Nonetheless, Kubrick persevered with her either because the cost of replacing her so late into the shoot was prohibitive, or because of what Kubrick valued that she specifically brought to the role. Frustratingly, however, Kubrick’s archives contain no explicit reference to his reasons for casting her, or to her ethnicity, so we will never know for certain what it was that Kubrick specifically valued about what Winters brought to the role.

Although there is no indication in the novel that Charlotte is Jewish, nor is there any other explicit evidence in the film beyond the fact of Winters’s own ethnicity and previous roles, a series of clues combine to allow us to read her as Jewish. First, Charlotte is the embodiment of the stereotype of the Jewish American Mother (JAM) that began to emerge in postwar American Jewish literature at exactly the same time as Lolita was published. In 1955 Herman Wouk’s best-selling novel Marjorie Morningstar produced a stereotype that would be much copied over the coming years. Unlike her pre-Second World War counterpart, the yiddische Mama, who was viewed with affection, the Jewish Mother was not. She was presented as meddlesome, domineering and controlling. Toward the end of the decade, the Jewish mother and her spoiled suburban daughter became the objects of literary ridicule, as evidenced by Philip Roth’s Goodbye Columbus (1959), a template which, in many ways, fitted Charlotte and Lolita Haze.48 According to Susan Bordo, Charlotte is “the monster of the story.”49 Like the JAM, Charlotte is pretentious, irritating, bossy, “a behemoth mom.”50 Charlotte is a baalebusteh who cooks and kibitzes, nagging her daughter incessantly, and henpecking Humbert, as her husband, into desperation and longing for a means of escape.51 In return, Humbert describes her as a “brainless ba-ba,” a designation attributed to his first wife in Nabokov’s novel but attached to Charlotte in the film.

It is surely no coincidence that, following Lolita, Winters was thereafter typecast. She played Jewish women/mothers in A House Is Not a Home (1964), Enter Laughing (1967), Wild in the Streets (1968), Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell (1968), The Poseidon Adventure (1973), Blume in Love (1973) and Next Stop, Greenwich Village (1976). As J. Hoberman put it, “No actress since Gertrude Berg has been more associated with the Jewish mother than Shelley Winters.”52 Significantly, he continues, she “was a Jewish mother for the 1960s: blowzy, strident, and generally overwhelming.”53 Although Hoberman does not list Lolita in his discussion of Winters, his description neatly fits the role of Charlotte.

Charlotte manifests other stereotypical Jewish tics. She is zaftig (Yiddish: plump). Her taste in clothing and interior decoration is vulgar. She wears fur wraps and leopard-print dresses and belts. Her kitchen is hideously decorated with very loud wallpaper covered in food motifs. Similarly, her taste in art and artefacts–a porcelain cat sits on a dresser beneath a painting at which Humbert contemptuously stares – reveals the levels of her vulgarity. Indeed, her house is littered with so many tshatshkes (Yiddish: ornaments, trinkets, knickknacks) that it might well have come straight out of a Mad magazine caricature. She displays a lack of civility and decorum and her body language lacks the required reserve. She stuffs her mouth with a hotdog at the summer dance. She encroaches upon the personal space of others and is unaware of their discomfort. She talks too much and fails to read the cues, particularly when alone with Humbert, who does all he can to reject her sexual advances, which, however, she fails to notice. At one point he simply walks out of the frame and Winters keeps yakking. As Norman Podhoretz wrote, the “association of Jewishness with vulgarity and lack of cultivation” is fairly widespread, “not least among Jews.”54

Furthermore, Charlotte is desperate to hide her origins. Consequently, she is determined to mimic her idea of a cultivated and sophisticated suburbanite. She affects a French accent, referring to Humbert as “Oh M’sieur.” She smokes through a cigarette holder. She belongs to a book club, is “Chairman of the great Books Committee,” and decorates her house with her idea of high art and artefacts. She name-drops at every opportunity, citing Dufy, Van Gogh, Monet, Schweitzer and Zhivago as evidence of her insistence on just how cultured, progressive and advanced she really is. She informs Humbert, “We’re really very fortunate here in West Ramsdale. Culturally, we’re a very advanced group with lots of good Anglo-Dutch55 and Anglo-Scotch stock and we’re very progressive intellectually.” At the same time, Charlotte’s choice of words, which were taken verbatim from the novel and retained by Kubrick, suggest an implicit postwar racism of the genteel Gentleman’s Agreement type in which covenanted neighbourhoods prevented Jews from buying or renting property there.

Charlotte’s multiple references to culture reveal her attempt to pass – and to make a pass at Humbert – but in reality they suggest an excess, a trying too hard to be the same but failing, becoming, in Homi Bhabha’s famous formulation, “almost the same, but not quite.”56 It is revealed, for example, by the fact that her artworks are merely reproductions or simulacra, as well as by her mispronunciation of the name Van Gogh as “Van Gock.” Charlotte’s mimicry, which surely can be described as “undisciplined,” has long been felt to mark the Jewish condition. For Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, “undisciplined mimicry” was “engraved in the living substance of the dominated and passed down by a process of unconscious imitation in infancy from generation to generation, from the down-at-heel Jew to the rich banker.”57 This was because “Jewish Emancipation involved Jews in collisions with the differentiations of Western society [and] Jews were being asked, in effect, to become bourgeois, and to become bourgeois quickly.”58 Charlotte here is desperately trying, but failing, to pass by masking her Jewish roots through her failing mimicry (a faux posh accent, use of words, intellectual/ cultural airs and graces), but it is the very excess of her mimicry that gives her away, revealing her failure to pass, and echoing the Jewish saying that “Jews are like everybody else, only more so.” As if to stress the point, and to make sure that the translators and dubbing directors understood his intentions, Kubrick annotated the Dialogue Continuity script with instructions. For example, when Humbert is shown around Charlotte’s house, Kubrick has written, “Note to translators and dubbing directors: Charlotte Haze’s choice of words in English are pretentious and awkwardly pseudo-intellectual. Try to retain that feeling because it is the basis of much of the comedy.” When she says, “Oh Paris ... France ... Madame,” Kubrick noted, “a good example of her pretentious and awkward choice of words.”59 These mannerisms precisely fit the emerging JAM stereotype of the 1950s and 1960s as described by Martha A. Ravits: “she personifies garish ethnic manners and materialistic, middle-class pretensions.”60 In this respect, it certainly seems very illuminating that Winters drew upon someone she knew (although whom she does not actually reveal) in playing the part of Charlotte. “I had known a pseudointellectual suburbanite like Charlotte, the character I played, during my childhood days in Jamaica, Queens, and Stanley Kubrick knew what acting buttons to press in my acting computer to bring her back.”61

Charlotte also affects a Christian/Catholic religious identity. In her letter of love and confession to Humbert she writes, “Last Sunday in church, my dear one, when I asked the Lord what do about it . . .”. She keeps her late husband’s ashes in an urn on a sideboard, in a bedroom shrine, complete with a crucifix and flanked by Catholic icons, as if copying Tennessee Williams in Rose Tattoo, noted the Brooklyn Tablet.62 This display again reveals the excess of her mimicry, for arguably only a Jew could conceive of such a Christian/Catholic shrine and indeed the shrine is the product of the Jewish imagination: Kubrick’s. Furthermore, as the Brooklyn Tablet further noted, while Charlotte “prattles about God” she “gives daughter Lolita neither religious training nor good example.”63 As if recognizing this fact, John Baxter has written that Kubrick replaced a crucifix with a triptych of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, following complaints about the juxtaposition of Mr. Haze’s ashes with a crucifix in Charlotte’s bedroom, resulting in “a Byzantine image that probably looked sufficiently exotic to count as Jewish or Middle European.”64 Making Charlotte Catholic/Christian and have her attend church is Kubrick’s misdirection.

Where the novel, as mentioned above, was full of allusions, both direct and indirect, to the Second World War and the Holocaust, the film removes these, but their traces remain. The one explicit remaining reference is when Charlotte tells Lolita (Sue Lyon) off and orders her not to disturb “Professor Humbert.” In reply Lolita mimics a Hitler salute, albeit with her left hand, and says “Sieg heil.” As if responding to the gesture, in the scene that immediately follows, Charlotte informs Humbert that she has been “too liberal” and is sending Lolita off “long-distance” to a “camp” for “isolation.” The phraseology here, through its close juxtaposition with the direct invocation of Hitler, uncannily echoes the Nazis’ euphemistic language (“final solution,” “solution possibilities,” “special treatment,” “cleansing operation,” “deportation,” “displacement,” “resettlement,” and “evacuation”),65 as well as anticipating Betty Friedan’s striking comparison of Nazi concentration camps to American suburban homes one year later. In one of the most potentially shocking passages of her The Feminine Mystique (1963), Friedan claimed that “the women who ‘adjust’ as housewives, who grow up wanting to be ‘just a house- wife,’ are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps.”66 Friedan went on to explore this analogy for several pages, and then continued to use the phrase “comfortable concentration camps” to refer to suburban homes throughout the rest of the book.

Furthermore, in another shift from the novel, in the film Humbert lies on the marital bed contemplating murdering Charlotte. In the foreground, a gun is on the bedside table. The following conversation, transposed almost verbatim from the novel, takes place:

Charlotte: Darling, you’ve gone away.

Humbert: Just a minute, darling, I’m following a train of thought. …

Charlotte: Am I on that train? Humbert: Yes.

Humbert’s thoughts, in the form of a voice-over narrative, confirm the suspicion: “No man can bring about the perfect murder. Chance, however, can do it. Just minutes ago she had said it wasn’t loaded. What if I had playfully pulled the trigger then? She said it wasn’t loaded. It belonged to the late Mr. Haze.” The proximity of the gun, and Humbert’s assumed thoughts, suggest a connection between trains and killing, what Cocks refers to as the “association with Nazi mechanics of murder that would show up in The Shining.”67 Again, to repeat a key point, in light of Winters’s starring in The Diary only three years earlier, both of these conversations are particularly poignant and suggestive.

Significantly, Kubrick made various other changes which deviated from Nabokov’s novel. In his close textual comparison of the novel and film, Greg Jenkins registered that

Kubrick’s few changes work to the detriment of Charlotte, magnifying her undesirable qualities . . . the Charlotte of the film is more brazen than the original, practically launching herself at Humbert. She is more noxious, rambling angrily in Winters’ diva voice; the fictional Charlotte condemns her daughter in nothing but indirect quotations, a device that distances the reader from her fury. Again, the film craftily maneuvers us away from Charlotte; it asks us to take sides, to view her unsympathetically.68

These alterations served to emphasize the negative aspects of Charlotte’s character. As Jenkins put it, “All these adjustments undercut the image, not sterling to begin with, of Charlotte . . . rendering her less sympathetic, more vulgar.”69 Richard Corliss adds, “Winters does appear to be twenty pounds heavier, fifteen decibels higher and ten I. Q. points lower than Charlotte deserves.”70

Contemporary reviewers, especially those who were part of the intelligentsia, certainly picked up on this characterization. Writing in Partisan Review, Pauline Kael described Charlotte as “the culture-vulture rampant . . . Shelley Winters’ Charlotte is a triumphant caricature, so overdone it recalls Blake’s ‘You never know what is enough until you know what is enough.’”71 Arthur Schlesinger Jr. felt, meanwhile, that “Winters, as Lolita’s mother, gives the performance of her life, laying bare with delicate exactitude the genteel pretension, the tremulous hope and prurient passion of what Nabokov apparently regards as the typical American middle-class woman.”72 Finally, Dwight Macdonald opined, “Miss Winters plays her so fortissimo that she becomes a brawling Bronx fishwife whom one cannot imagine having poor Charlotte’s cultural pretensions.”73 Indeed, he labelled her a “Monsterette.”74

Macdonald misses the point that her casting intentionally transformed Charlotte from genteel to brawling, but he does inadvertently pick up on the implicit Jewishness of her character in locating her in the Bronx, where Kubrick grew up. Again, a brief glimpse of Kubrick’s intentions is seen in his notes, where he refers to Charlotte’s “ugliness.”75 At the same time, Kubrick coaxed a performance out of Winters that emphasized Charlotte’s worst qualities. This led her to reflect,

I think the role of Charlotte in Lolita is one of the best performances I ever gave in any medium. She is dumb and cunning, silly, sad, sexy, and bizarre, and totally American and human. Until I saw the whole film cut together, I did not realize the gift that Kubrick had given me. I was enchanted with Charlotte and very proud of her. Kubrick had the insight to find the areas of me that were pseudointellectual and pretentious. We all have those things in us.78

A later, and similar, Kubrick casting decision supports this reading. Winters’s role anticipates a comparable choice he took concerning the casting of Miriam Karlin in his A Clockwork Orange (1971). Before attacking Miss Weathers, the “Cat Lady” (played by Karlin), Georgie (James Marcus) justifies robbing her because her house “is full up with like gold, and silver, and like jewels.” Cocks comments,

That this might be an echo of a common stereotype of Jews is suggested by the fact the woman is played by Miriam Karlin. Karlin is a British actress active in Jewish causes and a prominent member of the Anti-Nazi League, which was one of the responses to the stirrings of neo-fascism in Britain at the time. Her mother came to England from Holland, and had lost her entire family at Auschwitz.77

Furthermore, as Cocks has argued, since the Cat Lady is “by conventional Hollywood standards a less than physically and personally attractive person,” the audience is not encouraged to sympathize with her – just like it is not with Charlotte Haze.78 Thus she fits into a pattern of “Kubrick’s indirect insinuation of the issue of Jews and anti-Semitism.”79 In this respect, it is certainly significant that when Winters saw the film, she wrote to Kubrick praising it and jokingly asking why she had not been asked to play “the very British woman who gets raped in this film.”80 Winters recalled, “He did not get the joke. He sent me back a very stern reply and informed me that he would cast me in any role I was suited for in any one of his films. And that was final.”81

The question remains, then, why did Kubrick create such a negative caricature of a Jewish woman and mother? One answer would be to suggest an emotional and psychological impulse of misogyny and self-hatred; that is, that after two marriages to two different Jewish women – he divorced Toba Metz in 1955 and Ruth Sobotka in 1961– Kubrick took a dim view of Jewish femininity, buying into the caricature of the JAM that had begun to emerge in the mid-1950s. Evidence that might fit this last assertion may lie in the fact that Kubrick married Christiane Harlan, a non-Jewish German woman, who grew up during the Third Reich, for his third (and last) wife. Christiane recalled how “I was the little girl who moved in where Anne Frank was pushed out.”82

However, this answer seems far too easy. Kubrick was close to his (Jewish American) mother Gertrude (and she to him). According to Kubrick’s third wife, Christiane, his mother was still buying him clothes as late as 1957 and was “more up on his films” than his father.83 According to LoBrutto, she was an “intelligent” and “well-spoken woman” from whom “Kubrick had inherited his looks.”84 Indeed, in the sole film in which Kubrick allowed someone to make the only formal record of him at work – Making The Shining (1980, directed by his daughter Vivian, Gertrude appears, paying an on-set visit to her son. She is seen discussing with Jack Nicholson the daily script changes and the meaning of the colour of the script pages. Kubrick played a heavy hand in its editing, so the final cut had his approval, indicating a certain warmth towards his mother.

Rather, an alternative suggestion will be posited here, that it may well be that Kubrick was deliberately playful with that very JAM stereotype, using an underlying and Jewish-inflected humour to make emotional, cogent and deeply serious points about anti-Semitism. Much has been written about the function of stereotypes in general and Jewish ones in particular, especially how they perform cultural work in demonizing minority groups from the outside, and emotionally perpetuating group solidarity and continuity from the inside. As Bhabha suggests, the stereotype offers “a secure point of identification”;85 that is, emotional reassurance. Daniel Boyarin called this form of comfort “Jewisssance.”86 Itself a play on the French term jouissance – literally translating as “orgasm,” but also referring to physical or intellectual pleasure, delight, or ecstasy – Boyarin defined Jewissance as “a pleasure” that “brings to many men and women an extraordinary richness of experience and a powerful sense of being rooted somewhere in the world, in a world of memory, intimacy, and connectedness.”87

Yet, on a deeper level, stereotypes contain a “surplus value,” which provides “enjoyment or jouissance [and] enables us to understand the logic of exclusion.”88 Bhabha similarly suggested that the stereotype is characterized by a “productive ambivalence” between “pleasure and desire” and “power and domination.”89 In other words, stereotypes are enjoyed because they allow us to see contested images at work and understand their ideological implications. They entertain us, as well as serve to ridicule the logic of exclusion.90 This use of Jewish stereotypes by Kubrick, then, reveals a deeper strategy beyond Jewissance and pleasure. The reversal of insult, or “victim humour,” is a technique against anti-Semitism, to “disguise the aggression and hostility by turning it on oneself.”91 This is comparable to what Michel Foucault labelled a “reverse discourse,” which seeks to “demand that its legitimacy . . . be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was . . . disqualified.”92 Bhabha pointed out how “the same stereotype maybe read in a contradictory way or, indeed, be misread.”93 This “reverse stereotype,” then, achieves the status of what Foucault called “a hindrance, a stumbling block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy.”94 Or what Sigmund Freud described as “a rebellion against authority, a liberation from its pressures,”95 glossed by Bhabha as “a strategy of cultural resistance and agency committed to a community’s survival.”96

As we have seen with the character of Charlotte, reverse stereotypes may take the form of “mimicry,”97 which “is never a simple reproduction of those traits. Rather, the result is a ‘blurred copy’ . . . that can be quite threatening. This is because mimicry is never very far from mockery, since it can appear to parody whatever it mimics.”98 The reverse stereotype and mimicry, therefore, was a means for Kubrick to draw upon his Jewish background and Yiddishkeit (Yiddish: “Jewishness” or “Jewish culture”) as a means to mimic, mock and critique the representation of the Jewish woman, particularly at a time when explicit Jews, played by Jews, were not much in evidence in Hollywood cinema and when representations of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism were only really beginning to emerge into mass media in the United States. Furthermore, if, as has been argued, the way that Kubrick adapted Nabokov’s novel retained its concerns with the Holocaust and anti-Semitism, it fit into a period from the early to mid-1960s when various Jewish American intellectuals, who had grown up while the Holocaust was happening, used Nazism to forge emotional and deeply personal expressions of identity.99

Footnotes

Raphael, Frederic, Eyes Wide Open: A Memoir of Stanley Kubrick (London: Orion, 1999), 150Google Scholar; see also Cocks, Geoffrey, “Indirected by Stanley Kubrick,” Post Script, 32, 2 (2014), 22–35Google Scholar.

Orr, John and Ostrowska, Elżbieta, The Cinema of Roman Polanski: Dark Spaces of the World (London: Wallflower, 2006), 142Google Scholar.

Cocks, Geoffrey, The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History, and the Holocaust (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 70Google Scholar.

Reasons of length preclude a consideration of other characters and elements in the film, especially those that are also integral to a post-Holocaust sensibility. This may include a reckoning with the relationship between sexuality and perversity and “Jewishness,” so central to anti-Semitism as played out through Humbert in particular. The casting of Peter Sellers was yet another interesting and significant casting choice; Seller's maternal Jewishness was also, I would argue, important to his selection. Furthermore, there are many possible ways and “coded clues” to reading his character/performance as Jewish. In both cases, then, there is certainly the implication that Humbert and Quilty might also be coded as Jewish, connecting their “inappropriate” sexuality to anti-Semitism.

Anderson, Douglas, “Nabokov's Genocidal and Nuclear Holocausts in ‘Lolita’,” Mosaic, 29, 2 (1996), 75–89, 82Google Scholar.

Abrams, Jerold J., “The Logic of Lolita: Kubrick, Nabokov, and Poe,” in Abrams, (ed.), The Philosophy of Stanley Kubrick (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2007), 109–29Google Scholar; Mizruchi, Susan L., “Lolita in History,” American Literature, 75, 3 (2003), 629–52CrossRef | Google Scholar; Pitzer, Andrea, The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Pegasus, 2013)Google Scholar.

Mizruchi, 631.

Nabokov, Vladimir, Lolita (London: Transworld, 1961; first published 1955), 267, 210Google Scholar.

Anderson, 78–79; Mizruchi, 637.

See also Cocks, “Indirected,” 28–29, on Kubrick's use in The Shining of a painting by Paul Peel, After the Bath (1890), which depicts two naked little girls in front of a fireplace.

Mizruchi, 639.

Nabokov, 79.

Ibid., 83–84.

Ibid., 275.

Appel, Alfred Jr. (ed.), The Annotated “Lolita” (London: Penguin, 1971), 423Google Scholar.

See Cocks, The Wolf at the Door, 103 for a full list.

Cocks, “Indirected,” 29.

Anderson, 275.

Calder Willingham, Lolita screenplay, SK/10/1/1, the Stanley Kubrick Archives, University of the Arts, London (hereafter SKA); Kubrick, telegram to Vladimir Nabokov, 8 Dec. 1959, MSS Nabokov, the Berg Collection, New York Public Library (hereafter Berg).

Kubrick, telegram to Nabokov, 8 Dec. 1959, Berg.

Nabokov later published his version, enabling comparisons to Kubrick's film.

James B. Harris, interview (Fall 2002), at www.hollywoodfiveo.com/archive/issue2/exclusive/harris/harris.htm, accessed July 2013.

“The Diary of Anne Frank,” Commentary, 13, 5 (1952), 419–32; “The Diary of Anne Frank – II,” Commentary, 13, 6 (1952), 529–44.

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These were A Double Life (1947), A Place in the Sun (1952) and Night of the Hunter (1955).

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Ibid., 126.

80 Winters, Shelley II, 360.

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LoBrutto, Stanley Kubrick, 147.

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#lolita #yiddishkeit #jews #jews in media #the holocaust #shelley winters #vladimir nabokov #stanley kubrick #stereotypes #antisemitism #jewish-american women #identity

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‘A Quiet Place’ roars to $50 million debut