Cinematic Techniques in Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark
By Christopher Batty
Vladimir Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark takes the movies for
its style as well as its subject matter. In recounting the farcical tragedy
of director Albinus and starlet Margot, Nabokov imports a wide variety
of techniques and imagery from the cinema into the novel. But Nabokov's
"cinematic" style is not analagous to that of a screenplay:
the polished prose is always tinged with the novelist's trademark irony.
Gavriel Moses notes that
Nabokov's most consistent reaction to popular films in their public context is his awareness that the film image... is overwhelming in its insistent claim to presence and, as a consequence, to truth. But in formula films perceived uncritically or absorbed inertly, film tends to displace... what is really important in life and to impose its own schematic simplifications upon life's teaming and idiosyncratic details. (62)
Virtually all the characters in Laughter in the Dark take their understandings of life from the film industry. Their ideas and impressions, therefore, tend to be rather banal, predictable, and superficial. Nabokov's people never surprise the reader, never think unusual thoughts, never reveal unexpected depths. In contrast to the complex psyches found in Tolstoy and Chekhov, for instance, Albinus, Rex, and Margot are cartoons, with speech balloons floating above their heads. Indeed, even their thought processes resemble the interior monologues of characters in Hollywood films. So, for example, when Nabokov transcribes Albinus's silent thoughts, he employs a standard voice-over template:
Albinus, his queer emotions riding him, thought: "What the devil do I care for this fellow Rex, this idiotic conversation, this chocolate cream...? I'm going mad and nobody knows it. And I can't stop, it's hopeless trying, and tomorrow I'll go there again and sit like a fool in that darkness... Incredible." (13)
Albinus's thinking consists of "talking to himself," forming
complete, grammatically correct sentences in his mind. This is an artistic
convention: in real life, people rarely ever think this way. But the convention
conveys information in a brisk, economical manner, so the reader accepts
it without protest. Nonetheless, Nabokov uses this "voice-over"
technique to reveal what characters are thinking more often than most
novelists do (and more often than he himself does in his other books).
As a point of comparison, here is a snippet of Norman Bates' final voice-over
monologue in Hitchcock's Psycho, as quoted in Donald Spoto's The
Art of Alfred Hitchcock: "They're probably watching me now...
Well, let them. As if I could do anything but just sit and stare... I
hope they are watching me! They'll see and they'll know, and they'll say..."
(323). Norman's thoughts are expressed the same way as Albinus's: both
men talk to themselves. Whereas a novelist steeped in literary tradition,
like James Joyce, would tend to favour more complicated, sinuous, and
"imperfect" interior monologues. The famous Molly Bloom passage
which concludes Ulysses begins like this: "Yes because he
never did a thing like that before as ask to get his breakfast in bed
with a couple of eggs since the City Arms hotel when he used to be pretending
to be laid up with a sick voice doing his highness to make himself interesting..."
(659) Albinus's thoughts, like Norman Bates's, can be recited by an actor;
Molly Bloom's cannot, at least not without confusing an audience. Joyce
achieves verisimilitude, a faithfulness to the rough texture of actual
thought, but at the expense of Nabokov's brand of cool clarity.
Nabokov's black humour is also cinematic. Early in the novel, the narrator
foreshadows the denouement by stating, "No, you can't take a pistol
and plug a girl you don't even know, simply because she attracts you."
(13) This is like a Marx Brothers one-liner, zany and absurd. Harp too
much over the meaning, and the comedy withers. A conversation between
Albinus and the movie star Dorianna Karenina reads like something out
of a satirical film:
"By the way", do tell me, my dear, how did you come to hit on your stage name? It sort of disturbs me."
"Oh, that's a long story," she answered wistfully. "If you come to tea with me one day, I shall perhaps tell you more about it. The boy who suggested this name committed suicide."
"Ah–and no wonder. But what I wanted to know... Tell me, have you read Tolstoy?"
"Doll's Toy?" queried Dorianna Karenina. "No, I'm afraid not. Why?" (191)
The whole exchange is set up to deliver a wicked punchline. The dialogue
is snappy, fluid, and swift. In Joyce, Jane Austen, Dickens, Tolstoy,
and George Eliot, conversations are rarely this hasty and brief, because
all of these writers are traditional, "literary" practitioners
of their craft. On the other hand, Nabokov's sketch, though strongly influenced
by the movies, would not necessarily deliver the requisite laughs if it
were delivered by actors in front of a camera. Nabokov has to remind the
reader at exactly the right moment that this woman's stage name
is, after all, Dorianna Karenina. Simply hearing a performer deliver the
line "Doll's Toy?" wouldn't work: we need to read that cruelly
witty little reminder ("Doll's Toy?" queried Dorianna Karenina"),
otherwise the line falls flat. Nabokov's imagination cross-pollinates
literature with cinema to produce a unique hybrid.
The most interesting and persistent of Nabokov's cinematic techniques
is his vivid description of the sensory surface of things, which Moses
links to the author's synesthesia.
Moses provides numerous moments of Nabokov's prose at its most evocative,
its most synesthetic: "Such a one is the moment during Irma's last
hours, when Albinus notices that 'on the table, a glass bowl with oranges
gleamed' (L:174)." (76) What is of key significance here is that
the oranges appear to gleam because Albinus is in an extremely emotional
state. If Irma were not dying, would the oranges still gleam for Albinus?
Probably not. Nabokov is influenced by the movies' tendency to accentuate
the visual, to place certain objects in stark visual relief and throw
others out of focus, depending on the director's own whim. But Nabokov
refuses to forfeit the advantages of literature. In a novel, an orange
can gleam, and the reader does not scoff. In a movie, an orange cannot
literally "gleam" without making the character seem psychotic.
A filmmaker can foreground the oranges, he can lend the oranges significance
by cutting back and forth between closeups of the fruit and the actor's
face, but he cannot make the fruit shine with light without reducing his
movie to kitsch.
Another notable example of Nabokov's tendency to straddle the literature/cinema divide occurs when Albinus is shaving:
The water went on rushing–and grew louder and louder. He had turned the corner, so to speak, and was about to return to his Adam's apple, where a few little bristles were always reluctant to go, when suddenly he noticed with a shock that a stream of water was trickling from beneath the door of the bathroom. (205)
Nabokov cuts back and forth like a film director between Albinus' throat with its prominent Adam's apple ("... a few little bristles...") and the stream of water trickling beneath the door. At the same time, he adjusts the "volume" of the "soundtrack," informing us how much "louder and louder" the rush of water is growing. But he finishes his description with a single sentence that returns from the cinematic back to the literary: "The roar of the taps had now taken on a triumphant note." (205) A director can convey precise, modulated changes in volume, but he cannot force the audience to hear a "triumphant note" in the rush of the water. Only a novelist can control perception to that degree.
To understand what Nabokov is up to in Laughter in the Dark, it's helpful to see what his "camera style" technique does not consist of. Martin Amis, in a mostly positive review of Michael Crichton's novel The Lost World (the sequel to Jurassic Park), nonetheless tartly observes, "Animals–especially, if not quite exclusively, velociraptors–are what he is good at. People are what he is bad at. People, and prose." (222) Amis quotes a typical excerpt:
Levine removed the black anodised Lindstradt pistol in its holster, and buckled it around his waist. He removed the pistol, checked the safety twice, and put it back in the holster. Levine got to his feet, gestured for Diego to follow him. Diego zipped up the backpack, and shouldered it again. (223)
Commenting on this passage, Amis writes:
Recast those sentences in the present tense and you see them for what they are: stage directions... Reading these passages, why, you can almost hear the cinematographer unscrewing his lens cap; you can almost see the rewrite team activating their laptops. (223)
Crichton's prose is perfunctory throughout, which is why his novels are so easy for Hollywood filmmakers to adapt. Because the author writes stock characters instead of distinctive personalities, generic speech instead of memorable dialogue, and breathless action instead of detailed description, Steven Spielberg was able to translate The Lost World from print to screen with a minimum of tinkering. Laughter in the Dark, by contrast, contains only one sequence that mimics the bare-bones layout of a screenplay:
Stage-directions for last silent scene: door–wide open. Table–thrust away from it. Carpet–bulging up at table foot in a frozen wave. Chair–lying close by dead body of man in a purplish brown suit and felt slippers. Automatic pistol not visible. It is under him. Cabinet where the miniatures had been–empty. On the other (small) table, on which ages ago a porcelain ballet-dancer stood (later transferred to another room) lies a woman's glove, black outside, white inside. By the striped sofa stands a smart little trunk, with a colored label still adhering to it: "Rouginard, Hotel Britannia." (292)
The difference between Crichton and Nabokov is that Nabokov's description has an ironic purpose. As Moses points out, the "stage directions for last silent scene" directly refute the blind Albinus' "view" of the room as he enters it: Albinus "sees" the miniatures and the porcelain dancer in his mind's eye, but in reality they are long gone. This sort of irony, which exploits the gap between a character's subjective impressions and the objective physical reality of his environment, can only be generated by literature, not by cinema. Purely visual ironies tend to flatten out or to turn into kitsch, which is why Nabokov, despite his fondness for exploiting the techniques of filmmakers, has been ill-served by Hollywood adaptations of his novels. Nabokov makes linguistic feasts out of the movies, but the movies make only mincemeat out of Nabokov.
In an illuminating article of 2000, "The Nabokov Gambit," Steven Poole explains why film adapters have always been defeated in their attempts to do justice to Nabokov's prose. The problem, writes Poole, centres on Nabokov's spine-tingling "indeterminism," and the most graphic illustration of the "filmmaker's impotence" in the face of this coms in Fassbinder's 1978 film of Despair, the novel Nabokov published right after Laughter in the Dark. According to Poole,
Dirk Bogarde plays Hermann Hermann, a chocolatier in prewar Berlin who is bored with his wife. On a business trip abroad, he spies his identical double, and plots to switch lives with him by killing the other man and stealing his identification. The novel's demonic brilliance lies in the fact that only right at the end do we realise that Hermann's "double" in fact looks nothing like him: the narrator is simply insane, and he is promptly arrested by the police. In the film, however, the "double" has to be shown. He is played by another actor who looks nothing like Bogarde, and we therefore know that Hermann is mad from the inception of his plot. All the story's dramatic tension is lost. (paragraph 16)
Nothing so clearly elucidates the peculiar nature of Nabokov's achievement, his ironic indeterminism, than the persistent failure of filmmakers in adapting his work for the screen. Without the medium of prose to support them, Nabokov's pictorial and auditory ironies wither and die. Even the most cinematic of prose styles is still, at bottom, literature.
Copyright Christopher Batty, 2003
Works Cited
Amis, Martin, "Park II: The Lost World by Michael Crichton," in The War Against Clich�, pp.219-223. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada: A Division of Random House of Canada, Ltd., 2001.
Joyce, James. Ulysses. England: Penguin Books Ltd., 1968. First published in Paris 1922.
Moses, Gavriel. "Albinus Fake Movies." In The Nickel was for the Movies: Film in the Novel from Pirandello to Puig, pp.62-95. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Laughter in the Dark. New York: Vintage Books: A Division of Random House, Inc., 1989. First published 1938.
Poole, Steven. "The Nabokov Gambit." Article published in The
Guardian, August 25, 2000.
http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/classics/story/0,6000,358450,00.html
Spoto, Donald. The Art of Alfred Hitchcock: Fifty Years of His Motion Pictures. New York: An Anchor Book, Doubleday, 1992. Originally published by Hopkinson and Blake in 1976.
Works Consulted
Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. New York: Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, Inc., 1999. First published 1955.
Raguet-Bouvart, Christine. "Camera Obscura and Laughter
in the Dark, or, The Confusion of Texts." Translated from the
French by Jeff Edmunds.
http://www.libraries.psu.edu/iasweb/nabokov.ragko1.htm
Seifrid, Thomas. "Nabokov's Poetics of Vision, or, What Anna
Karenina is Doing in Kamera obskura." Copyright 1996 Board of
Trustees of Davidson College. Originally published in Nabokov's Studies
#3 (1996).
http://www.libraries.psu.edu/iasweb/nabokov/seifrid1.htm
Simon, John. "Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years." From The
New Criterion Vol.9, No.6, February 1991.
http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/09/feb91/nabokov.htm
