Coquette Brain Rot

From Lolita to Barbie, the reduction of culture to pure aesthetics is threatening our media literacy.

This essay contains mentions of abuse.

Bradley Cooper reads Lolita to Suki Waterhouse, 2013.

I saw a photograph that had a bow on a copy of Vladimir Nabakov’s Lolita. It labelled it, among others, a coquette book. I was bewildered. For those who do not know the book, it is about a paedophile and his obsession with a young girl. After bewilderment came disgust, not unlike the disgust I felt reading the book. My mind conjured up the image of Humbert Humbert combing the hair of the stepchild whose mother he murdered so that he could become her sole carer. I imagined him tying the same bow in her hair as he sent her to school in the new town he absconded to so that he could rape her night after night. Dolores, whose story is suppressed in Humbert’s lyrical narration of his sin of sins. Yet it bubbles up as the bile that rises in the reader’s throat every time they remember.

I think about the young girl who might buy the book on the bookseller’s ribbon-tied recommendation and that bile rises again. Maybe she’s 15, about the age I was when I first read the book, and in search of herself in that bookshop. She would recognise the symbolic meaning of the bow that adorns so many of her favourite TikTok creators, and gravitate towards that display. Maybe she’ll pick Lolita for the cutesy title. Maybe it’s been on her reading list for some time. Maybe she’ll recognise the book for what it is – a study on the depths of human evil. But I worry that wrapped up in the soft pink romance of the coquette aesthetic, she will absorb dangerous ideas on what love must be for girls. I wonder if the person who put the display together thought about that, or if they’d read the book, or if they sought virality through the predictable outrage. 

At its best, literature is a test. It confronts us with a worldview different to our own, challenging our prejudices and morality. Good literature, which I believe Lolita to be, should leave you changed. As our identities harden we lose that ability to be changed. Our malleability disappears, leaving sharp corners where there should be contours. Much has been written about trend cycles and their accompanying aesthetics so I won’t bother diving into this now. But what I will say is that although the aesthetics we adopt might change rapidly, our identities are more fixed than ever – we are passive consumers in every aspect of our lives. It shows the collective inability to effectively boycott predatory capitalist companies as well as in our declining media literacy. We see and believe, we do not watch but we do buy. Ideas that challenge us are a threat to our way of life. And all criticism is character assassination when aimed at the things we love. I say “we” because I do not exclude myself – I always criticise first and foremost as a hypocrite. 

I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that media illiteracy has us teetering on the edge of fascism. That tracks considering the general trajectory of the world. How soon will we be burning books? Already in the UK and US books are being banned from schools, particularly books from perspectives outside of the mainstream, labelled under the umbrella of “critical race theory.” What will remain? Only culture that serves hegemony. 

Nabokov was no stranger to book banning. I’m certainly not proposing we start teaching Lolita in schools. In fact, it is not a book I would recommend to most people should they ask me what to read. It is quite frankly horrifying, and it’s perfectly understandable to hate it although I do not. However, good criticism requires argument and being able to name what it is you dislike and why, or how a work might fail. It requires thought. 

Feminism used to mean critique, now it means silence. It has become a weapon, not against power, but against dissent. Do not criticise certain women, lest you be labelled unfeminist, or “not a girl’s girl.” That’s difficult for me as a hater. 

Hilary Clinton bravely took a stand against the erasure of women in the Academy Awards because Margot Robbie was not nominated for Best Actress, instead other women were. Hilary Clinton, I remind you, is the failed democratic nominee for President of the United States and former secretary of state for an administration that destabilised much of the Middle East, and killed thousands of women and children. 

Maybe Hilary and I did not watch the same Barbie movie. I’m inclined to a generous reading of the film, in which the narrative arc follows stereotypical Barbie’s trajectory into realising her own ordinariness. That’s because I believe in Greta Gerwig’s strength as a writer – she did, after all, write and direct Lady Bird (2018) and Little Women (2019), two films I adore. Greta’s batting average went down with Barbie. Ultimately the film’s box office success can be attributed to its hollowness. It is a wearable plastic that the viewer can inhabit. For a short while, you can forget the woes of the world like the oppression of flesh and blood women. Perhaps you can even sympathise with the feeling of feeling less than and call it radical feminist praxis, while doing nothing other than wearing the clothes of womanhood and playing pretend. You can forget that what binds us together is ultimately a political experience. If that’s what Barbie is, then the film succeeds in recreating her experience picture perfectly. 

In The Culture Industry (1944), Adorno and Horkheimer describe “The familiar experience of the moviegoer, who perceives the street outside as a continuation of the film he has just left, because the film seeks strictly to reproduce the world of everyday perception, has become the guideline of production.” What they speak to is the ways in which the Culture Industry, represented by the big Hollywood studios, uses cultural products like film to launder the ills of the world, and disguise the capitalist impulse as its centre. Barbie doesn’t even bother hiding the fact it is a high production advert for Mattel, but most culture is selling you something – whether it’s an idea, a book, or a hot pink Stanley Cup. We need better media literacy to be able to recognise that. Perhaps that will just make you a more informed consumer, but still a consumer. But I feel that the stakes are larger than that.