‘Reading Lolita in Tehran’ With the Revolutionary Guard

When Reading Lolita in Tehran was first published back in 2003, Americans knew little about Iran except it was alongside Iraq and North Korea in George W. Bush’s notorious Axis of Evil. Azar Nafisi’s memoir, depicting her return to the country in 1979 following the overthrow of the Shah, before leaving once again in 1997, provided a more nuanced argument against the Ayatollah’s fundamentalist regime.

Surprisingly, it was not until 2024 that a film version of the bestseller was finally produced. And it is only now that Italian-Israeli co-production is being released in the United States, thanks to a distribution partnership with Kanopy of all companies. It’s actually rather fitting, given that Kanopy prides itself on being an educationally themed streaming service that’s free to anyone with a local library card. Reading Lolita In Tehran is, after all, a story about the importance of reading, both as a means for understanding the world as well as a means of understanding ourselves.

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Reading Lolita in Tehran ★★ (2/5 stars)
Directed by: Eran Riklis
Starring: Golshifteh Farahani, Zar Amir Ebrahimi, Mina Kavani
Running time: 107 minutes

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Reading Lolita In Tehran stars Golshifteh Farahani as Nafisi, an English literature professor who runs afoul of the Iranian regime when she comes back to teach in what she hopes to be a new Iran. Surprisingly, we see little direct oppression of her at the university — her main indignity comes when the regime makes headscarves mandatory dress and a defiant Nafisi is bullied into wearing one.

Nafisi is challenged in the classroom when a student argues against her assertion that Gatsby loved Daisy in The Great Gatsby. Despite the brevity of the unnamed student’s appearance, he argues that Gatsby only loved the vapid excess which Daisy represented. He also says that Gatsby, Daisy, and nearly every other character in the book are awful, uninteresting people. Also that Gatsby was engaged in the cardinal sin of adultery  and his death at the end of the book was a kind of divine retribution. Old Testament logic notwithstanding, this seems a valid reading of the novel — at least one worthy of a significant response. It is odd that Nafisi, our foreign educated professor, just dismisses it in favor of a comparatively dull reading of The Great Gatsby as a simple, tragic love story.

Reading Lolita in Tehran is on somewhat sturdier ground when reactionary students call for books to be banned. Unfortunately, Nafisi’s argument is still a bit weak because we know from the classroom scenes that at least some of these reactionary students have read the books, they just disagree with how they should be interpreted, and outright reject certain interpretations. There is a certain logic to this. We would be rightfully upset if someone were to teach Mein Kampf or The Turner Diaries as if they had artistic significance while rejecting any moralist interpretations. Why should The Great Gatsby or Daisy Miller be any different?

Nafisi never engages this argument. For the most part, Reading Lolita in Tehran never even acknowledges the argument posed by the Revolutionary Guard to justify its book bans. This lack of engagement is made all the stranger because Nafisi’s core is that literary interpretation is a key tool against authoritarian regimes. Despite this, Nafisi acts as if the only valid readings of these books are the ones she agrees with. But at the same time, as we see in the mock trial scene, Nafisi acts as if these books don’t have any inherent ideological bent, and treats the reactionary backlash to their content as if it’s totally blown out of proportion.

It’s also telling that the classroom interpretations by Nafisi, dealing with students who are willing to openly disagree with her, are considerably more anodyne than the book club scenes with a group that’s self-selected for allegiance to Nafisi’s own beliefs. Nafisi discusses Pride and Prejudice in the context of the book’s famous depictions of highly elaborate forms of ritualized courtship specific to 19th century England that are implicitly oppressive to women. The film never gives a clear explanation for why that geographic and historical context is important, but not Gatsby’s extravagant parties in the 1920s that were funded by the West’s exploitation of Iran and other client states.

There is an obvious political explanation why Nafisi values the political subtext of Austen and not Fitzgerald. A feminist reading of Austen is complimentary to the West showing how it has developed up to the present day but how Iran has not. A postcolonial reading of Fitzgerald would end up with the opposite effect. And, despite protesting her actions as fundamentally apolitical, Nafisi’s allegiances aren’t subtle. When she idly fantasizes in one scene about a street looking like it did in the old days, with an occidental cafe and white people without headscarves drinking tea, she evinces a nostalgia oblivious to the fact that such creature comforts existing under the Shah didn’t make his regime any less brutal.

Like the book from which it was adapted, Reading Lolita in Tehran goes to great pains to avoid discussing the actual relationship between Iran and her idealized West. The film goes to similar lengths to avoid discussing the local pressures on the Iranian state. There is only a single scene that directly references the Iran-Iraq War which dominated the country throughout the 80s, and the reference is so oblique it actually manages to make the war look like it was mostly Iran’s fault.

The most egregious case of ignoring context, however, is with the Lolita reading group that gives the book and film its name. As Nafisi describes Vladimir Nabokov’s book, its “hero” Humbert Humbert is an obvious monster, whose grooming of a child is so clearly repugnant no person could possibly sympathize with his self-aggrandizing defense. The Iran regime banned the book and Nafisi theorizes, reasonably enough, that it did so because all the women in the country are Lolitas now. She thinks Nabokov shows how the purpose of all the misogynist oppression is to groom the women like Humbert groomed Lolita, and the book is banned in Iran to prevent people from making that interpretation.

The trouble with this theory is that today, Lolita is associated too with the Lolita Express, the plane which Jeffrey Epstein used to hook his rich, powerful friends up with teenagers he’d groomed for this purpose. Nafisi emphasizes, time and again, that access to great literature allows for greater self-reflection based on obvious readings like Humbert’s clear psychopathology. But this begs an obvious question. Why didn’t anyone who rode the plane named after a grooming victim, people who were all free to read the book, ever stop to think that maybe they were the bad guys?

Even the less salacious interpretations in Reading Lolita in Tehran fail if we try to apply them outside of the extremely narrow context of Iran under the control of the Revolutionary Guard. It’s little surprise that in a society where men openly talk about how adulterers deserve to die there’s a bit more prudishness involved in relations between men and women. When Nafisi talks about how love and feeling are separated from sex, or one of her book club associates expresses anguish over being 35 years old and having never been in love, they explicitly blame the Ayatollah’s regime for these social problems, a direct consequence of religious fundamentalists cracking down on the abstract concept of romance.

For those readers who have been living under a rock for the last decade or so, I should note that we have virtually identical anxieties in the United States, if not worse ones. And as the modern-day United States, is not yet a totalitarian fundamentalist state, the theocratic explanation for this romantic malaise isn’t a convincing one. Nor is Nafisi’s implicit argument that denying Gatsby loved Daisy is tantamount to saying that there’s no such thing as romantic love at all. Perhaps trends in Iran and the United States are caused by different problems entirely that manifest in similar symptoms, but even this explanation undercuts Nafisi’s universalist assumptions that Iran could easily be just like the West if only the Ayatollah didn’t clamp down so hard on freedom.

The real problem with Reading Lolita in Tehran is that it just doesn’t present a compelling argument that reading is all that helpful, or even focus all that much on the core concept of the relationship of great literature to totalitarianism. The majority of this movie is not book discussions, but casual totalitarian brutality. We see the Islamic Revolutionary Guard beating women up, but how this relates to reading classic literature of the Western canon is at best ambiguous.

By far the most interesting scenes are the ones where reactionary students provide oppositional readings in Nafisi’s classes. Unfortunately, this comprises a short two scenes, and Reading Lolita in Tehran instead mostly chooses to inhabit the safe space of people who so thoroughly agree with each other that there’s little, if any, interpersonal conflict. Overall this leads Reading Lolita in Tehran to an awkward combination of naive and smug, willing to acknowledge that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard isn’t made up entirely of illiterate knuckle-dragging cavemen, but refusing to seriously consider the greater implications of that fact.