It used to be idle—or scholarly—to compare films to the novels from which they were taken; now, one can scarcely avoid it. The index to the change is the difference between Stanley Kubrick's The Killing (1956) or Paths of Glory (1957) and his Lolita (1962). The earlier films were real films; Lolita is in the current style of the un-film.

The only truly cinematic effect I noticed was a cut from somebody's face to a face in a horror movie at a drive-in, a cut so drastic I cannot even remember what face Kubrick cut from. In the absence of cinema, such details as Charlie at the girls' camp or Dolly's husband's hearing-aid are dutifully lugged over from the novel; they make a film à clef for those who are "in" on the novel, but never become part of the film as such, and this, despite the fact that Nabokov...