Is innocence dangerous?

My curiosity was caught on reading the title of an interview given from the former US President, Barack Obama “Innocence is dangerous”. Therefore, I tried to meditate about the concept of innocence and about how it could be dangerous. Immediately, I reminded myself of the famous Stanley Kubrick movie “Lolita”. I haven’t read the novel but I am mentioning the movie intentionally because I know Kubrick always did big changes to the original story in his movies. And I personally always appreciated such changes because they have always been an important aspect of his creativity (Kubrick is one of my favorite film directors). I am mentioning some particular scenes of the movie.

In Kubrick’s Lolita the protagonist, Humbert Humbert, is attracted to his wife’s daughter. Immediately after his wife find’s out his secret she has an accident and dies. When Humbert finds out about her death he realizes he is not upset at all because he didn’t really love his wife and that fact can allow him to stay with Lolita. I always thought it was a very weird change that Kubrick made to the original story and I often wondered myself about the meaning of such strange detail. I think Kubrick’s changes to the original story of his movies are particularly interesting and meaningful. One must pay attention to such details. I personally interpret this sequence as something related to the meaning of innocence, especially because this short essay is about innocence. From the movie we perceive as really strange the coincidence that Lolita’s mom dies immediately after she becomes dangerous to Humbert’s plans and desires, as reality was in Humbert’s mind and he could shape it through it. When we watch the scene we feel like Humbert was sort of responsible for her death because it happened because of the outburst she had after she found out his secret, and because it was exactly what Humbert would had want to happen. Yet we know it was just a coincidence, macabrely lucky to Humbert. He talks to the police and we can sense that he sort of feels afraid and guilty, like he had committed her murder. But that’s not true, Humbert is in every way innocent to her murder: he didn’t plan to kill her and didn’t do anything directly to make it happen. But in the eyes of the people who are watching the movie he looks like a monster and he looks like he is indirectly responsible for her death. At this point one wonders: is Humbert innocent or is he not innocent? Is the fact of imagining and desiring something that is wrong a mistake or is it not? It is obvious to me that Kubrick, who in my opinion had a very interesting and controversial personality, is trying to make a reflective mind trick through this scene: the viewer feels like the protagonist is sort of guilty but at the same time he feels relief that the hero made it for his secret to not be revealed. It is typical to Kubrick’s movies to have anti-heroes as protagonists and to use it as a tool for pushing the viewer to self-reflection.

What is innocence? I personally believe that nature is innocence: it is as it is. Lolita is obviously innocent: she has sexual desires and instincts that are natural for her age, and doesn’t wonder or worries about it. But she is not aware of the effect that she has upon other people, typical behavior of children and immature people. Maybe one of the greatest difference between children and adults is that children do not worry about understanding the feelings and instincts of the people that surround them. Lolita often poses in a sexual manner, it is not a fully conscious behavior, and she doesn’t understand the effect that it produces to the people who are viewing her. Lolita is innocent, throughout all the movie she behaves as her instincts and desires tell her to do and is never aware about the effect that her acts and choices provoke to the adults who surround her. Guilt is a defensive state of mind that is produced by our thoughts and rationality. An image of a naked teenager is just as it is, if you are feeling guilty of watching it, that’s because your mind is associating it with dangerous thoughts.

One of the interpretations of the Genesis parable is exactly what I just described. God made the Universe and the human beings as they are and they were free to roam naked, without any sense of shame or guilt. But after eating the prohibited fruit everything changed. The apple represents the rational mind that makes associations and connections between things. For this reason, Adam and Eve were punished into leaving the Garden of Eden. The state of mind-lessness is itself a state of heavenly peace and happiness, the acceptance of your own nature and the acceptance of God’s nature. But our rationality is not in accordance with nature: we tend to judge everything and we want to dominate nature. For this reason, we were punished by God: it is an act of ingratitude to not accept what God has given to us. The basis of the vast majority of psychological complexes comes from considering sex or your own sexual desires as a mistake.

Lolita doesn’t wonder about her nature and about her desires. But Humbert does. By associating Lolita to sex, his mind is automatically deducing that he wants her mother to be eliminated, since her mother’s elimination is for him the only way to stay with Lolita. This is the meaning of the movie scene that I described previously. He isn’t guilty for Lolita’s mother death, yet he feels guilty.

When we look at the movie plot, we perceive Lolita as a femme fatale who caused a lot of discord and mess, including murder. There exists even something as the concept of femme fatale: the girl who unwittingly causes mess and conflict. Societies always tended to judge such girls, independently of their age. Even in cases where such girls never did anything to provoke discord: even when they never dated anyone or wore sexy outfit, they were judged anyways. It is like they were judged for the simple fact of existing, like society is implying that they just shouldn’t even exist. It is a novelty in Western societies that such girls are not judged anymore, especially if they are minors. Minors are only considered as victims. I think that this is a progress, it is a good thing, even though it is especially related to our change in costumes: girls are now free to wear as they like and we are heading towards an acceptance of individual responsibility. 

What I consider as a progress is a better concept of what responsibility is: Lolita is the cause of the conflict, yet by our modern standards of justice she is not responsible.

This is true even without thinking that Lolita obviously represents innocence, and innocence cannot be considered guilty, by definition. It is the eyes of the adult people who see her, their minds and their thoughts, that generate guilt and discord.