LOLA IS A CINEMATIC ANOMALY. What makes a given Lola “Lola” is her cinegenic name. By this I mean a name that engenders a profusion of films, each featuring a character who bears the name and shares key characteristics. Lola is unique in this regard. There is no other name as prolific in film history. In an ongoing series of some twenty films so far, beginning with Joseph von Sternberg’s Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel, 1930), Lola has come to designate an individual, usually a singer and dancer, whose persistent and self-confident sexuality understood as pleasure — her pleasure — provokes a variety of male and female responses. Lola is a persona. I use this term to emphasize the fact that Lola names no single person. Lola is not a given name and certainly not a Christian name. It is, on the contrary, an assumed name, a stage name, a name of choice, not chance, and an important choice at that. Even if Lola has historical antecedents — two nineteenth-century Lolas with European careers as Spanish dancers, the notorious Lola Montez and the less well known Lola de Valence — she is, from the beginning, a persona: a leggy pose, a cocked head with a top hat and an attitude, a song and a dance, a wig and a wink.

One of the things that makes Lola an anomaly is the fact that she has been deliberately dissociated from death. Lolas don’t die and Lolas don’t kill. In other words, for all her disruption of patriarchal and masculinist orders, Lola is neither a femme fatale nor a femme fragile. This is reflected in my title, “Lola Doesn’t,” with its allusion to Theresa de Lauretis’s Alice Doesn’t. Given not only that Lola operates largely within the conventions of cinema with its limited array of female representations, but also that Lola arises as a cinegenic name in an era marked by spectacular and abundant violence against women, this is remarkable. Maria Tatar’s study Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany makes a strong case for the inescapability of male aggression toward the female body during the period of Lola’s origin.