Lester Burnham, aged forty-two years, underage love fascination named Angela Hayes. Humbert Humber, estimated age forty-five years, underage love fixation named Dolores Haze. The two male figures named above are from American Beauty and Lolita respectively. They are both the main characters throughout their respective genre’s, and both project what they think is the apex of beauty, youth, and sexuality onto girls under the legal statute. While Humbert never quite gets over his fixation of this projected idea of “love”, Lester does.
The similarities between the film American Beauty and Lolita are numerous, from the names of the last names of the “nymphets[1] to the broken marriages both lead characters suffer at some point or another. It would seem that one of the primary influences for American Beauty might have been Lolita, and thus makes for very interesting comparison between the evolution of love in both.
Humbert is a self-confessed pedophile, while Lester is not and I would argue that Lester is not a pedophile at all. The way both characters fall in love with their nymphets, and the specific grandeur that they place on the nymphets to solve all their problems and needs are indeed parallel plots.
Lester, during the course of the film, goes through a type of mid-life crisis, during which he quits his job, alienates his “cold” wife, and starts fixating on young Angela Hayes. When Lester first sees his nymphet, she is dancing in a performance (with Lester’s daughter) at a basketball game that Lester’s wife had to drag him to. The camera cuts back and forth between Lester and Angela as she is slowly singled out and put in absolute focus, and solely fills up the screen and Lester’s mind. Lester immediately latches on to this girl, not as an actual person, but as an idea of what could make everything better for him.
Similar to Lester’s first meeting of Angela, Humbert meets his nymphet in a house that he is supposed to take residence in. Humbert had no intention of staying at this residence until he saw his nymphet,
But there was no question of my settling there [in the house]. I could not be happy in that type of household with bedraggled magazines on every chair and a kind of horrible hybridization between the comedy of so-called “functional modern furniture” […] I find it most difficult to express with adequate force that flash, that shiver, that impact of passionate recognition. […] my glance slithered over the kneeling child […] the vacuum of my soul managed to suck in every detail of her bright beauty […] (Nabokov 37, 38).
Humbert latches on to this girl as more of an idea of what he has been searching for since his disheartening dis-intercourse with a childhood lover of his (Nabokov 11-12). He offers that perhaps he had been searching for this girl for so long, and Dolores’s striking resemblance to said earlier lover (Annabelle) was perhaps why he latched on to Dolores.
Both Lester and Humbert latch onto these girls as ideas of love that they believe will make their desires and fantasies come true. Humbert is in pursuit of a passionate love he had when he was very young with a girl who loved him in the same way. This love was hindered by the girl’s family, and eventually the love is completely severed. This apparently retarded his growth out of that phase of love, and ever since that point there was a void he had been trying to fill. Dolores was not an actual person to Humbert at all, she was a sexual object – a picture of what would fill that void.
Lester is in, what he essentially calls during the course of the film, a “dead marriage”. He and his wife do not make love at any time during the course of the film (despite Lester’s efforts), and it is alluded to that they have not made love in a very long time. Lester confesses several times through the movie that he masturbates a good bit, and it can be derived that he does this to fill his lack of satisfaction with his marriage. Angela is a prime sexual being who is very sensuous and seductive towards Lester. The idea that Lester latches onto is that Angela can fill the void of intimacy that his wife has left in him. To this extent Lester starts working out and doing several other things (smoking pot, working at a fast food restaurant) to impress Angela. Some of the things he does also signal a regression to a younger age group, which can be speculated as Lester’s subconscious getting him to a stage where he is on the same level maturity wise as Angela.
It should also be said that there are parallels between Humbert’s and Lester’s marriages. They both have essentially meaningless relationships with their wives. Lester notes in the beginning of the film that his marriage had not always been this way, and he directly addresses his wife with the same sentiment, “Christ Caroline. When did you become so…joyless?” (American Beauty 1:15:48-55). Humbert’s first marriage (with Valeria) was no better than Lester’s. Humbert remarks about his wife with great melancholy, “This state of affairs [the marriage] lasted from 1935 to 1939. Her [Valeria] only asset was a muted nature which did help to produce an odd sense of comfort in our small squalid flat […]” (Nabokov 26). Both of the wives end up cheating on their husbands, and both of the husbands find out about it. Strangely enough, neither Humbert nor Lester care particularly that their wives cheat on them, which goes towards the proof that they no longer felt much of anything for the marriage. The marriages are arranged with little rules and a few boundaries, suffered via painful tolerance.
Lester and Humbert both come to realizations about their nymphets, like they come to realizations about their marriages – neither were as wonderful as they worked them up in their minds to be. Lester gets his chance, after much physical training he feels fully adequate to consummate his relationship with Angela. When he finally gets his chance, and is literally inches away from the thing he has dreamed of for so long, Angela says, “This is my first time” (American Beauty 1:47:15-16). Lester has a kind of epiphany; he suddenly jolts out of his daze and finally sees Angela as a girl – a person. He realizes that he cannot do this to the girl, and quickly wraps her up in a blanket and makes her some food.
Humbert never comes to a realization quite like Lester, that is to say Humbert never gets to a point where he sees Dolores for the true person she is. Humbert completely falls in love with the idea of Lolita, and never evolves past that. Even after he relives moments similar to those with Annabelle, he cannot let go of Lolita. Humbert also comes to half realizations that Dolores is not everything he wanted her to be, primarily he dislikes her attitude, yet still cannot let go. Even at the end of the novel, when he finds her again and she is much older, he sees her as the little girl and still wants to be with her. He is utterly stunted in the ability to move on or realize the pain he has caused this girl. This is the primary difference between Lester and Humbert, Humbert cannot let go of the idea of Lolita, he cannot “snap out of it”. This is also why I would argue that Lester is not a true pedophile, only sucked into a fantasy.
Humbert and Lester both fall in love with ideas of “love” and while Lester realizes that the idea is only a farce, Humbert never does. While these two stories have striking similarities, the endings are totally different. It is almost as if American Beauty has a modernist approach, in that you can take something away from the film, while Lolita ends without any real message as many post-modern novels do.
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[1] Even though “nymphet” is entirely a Lolita convention and term, I will be using the term in this paper to describe both love interests of Humbert and Lester, and while proof could be offered to prove that Angela is also what Humbert would describe as a nymphet, this is not the purpose of this essay. It is presupposed that the reader knows that Angela does try to seduce Lester in the film.
