There is a fine, far-reaching moment in Stanley Kubrick's Lolita, handsomely set up by the director and beautifully spun out by the actor. Peter Sellers, as the creepy and protean Clare Quilty, has struck up a conversation with James Mason, as Humbert Humbert. The latter is in no mood for any kind of conversation, since he is just marking time before he returns to his hotel room to have sex, as he hopes, with his under-age stepdaughter. Quilty, having mysteriously divined most of this, pretends to be a plainclothes policeman and starts up a series of speculations about what 'a really normal guy' like Humbert must be feeling. Mason, who most of the time looks a touch too normal for the movie's good - sinister, but normal - gets very uncomfortable and by the time Quilty, thoroughly enjoying himself, has used the word 'normal' for the fifth or sixth time, both characters seem distinctly weird and the very idea of normality appears freakish. How could anyone be 'normal'? What could be stranger?

LRB 20 March 2008 | PDF Download