Det oidipala snedsteget. En studie av Lolitakaraktären i Lolita, Léon och Hard Candy

Författare

Elisabet Nordlander

Summary, in English

Since the beginning of movie-making there has been depictions of ambivalent relationships between young girls and adult males. In the middle of last century the stir caused by Nabokovs novel Lolita (1955), one of the last centurys most famous, and infamous, novels about an adult man obsessed with a not yet pubescent girl, shed light upon this practice. These nymphic girls and their lovers, when appearing in film, might not be depicted as involved in an explicit paedohiliac relationship. However, there is always a sexual energy, and tension, and hence an ambivalence surrounding this couple.
This essay attempts to answer questions such as in which way the girl is provided with a sexuality, how the relationship between the young girl and the adult male has been depicted by film makers through different stages of contemporary history and in which way the spectator is offered identification with the movies and its characters. Films selected for this research include Lolita (1962), Léon (1994) and Hard Candy (2005). To reach an adequate understanding of these films, and the development of the Lolita character over time, theories such as psycoanalytic theory and feminist theory has been deployed.

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