Cinematic Techniques in Nabokovs Laughter in the Dark Essay -- Movie

Cinematic Techniques in Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark    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... ...chcock: 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. Seifrid, Thomas. "Nabokov's Poetics of Vision, or, What Anna Karenina is Doing in Kameraobskura." 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