the orientalist underpinnings of sofia coppola's lost in translation
please stop being a bad tourist + video stills + book recs
Something felt off when I first watched Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation. I was in the throes of middle school when I finally got off my ass after months of digital FOMO to join the wave of Tumblr posts and Pinterest stills. If you’ve ever ventured into that part of the internet, you’ll probably recognize the iconic scenes of Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) and Bob (Bill Murray), dreams aestheticizing the liminality of hotel isolation and late night cab rides through a city full of fluorescent lights. These frames have developed their own meaning in the Rookie Mag, “2014 Tumblr Girl,” not-so-indie music subculture that captivated a small but mighty subsection of the young feminine internet. I wanted to be a part of it all, American Apparel tennis skirt and Kanken backpack in tow.
Only now do I have the words to describe my texture of feeling regarding the film. Lost in Translation lingers in my mind whenever I find myself in a new city. It makes me interrogate the urge to victimize myself under the feeling of isolation, to transpose my internal troubles onto the foreignness of a new place because that’s exactly what its protagonists do. I challenge my desire to seek salvation in a vacation, to view a city as a utility and gestalt, to never really try to reckon with the glittering complexity of a place that isn’t my home. Lost in Translation, like other vacation films, views its setting country with a utilitarian lens, only seeking to portray how it serves the careers and relationships of its white protagonists. For Charlotte and Bob–both in respective marital estrangement and quarter- and mid-life crises–Tokyo is a “wild, exotic” adventure that they eventually leave to go home from after they’ve sucked it dry of their limited interaction with it. They reinvent their lives through a perceived Other experience, using the city but never meaningfully engaging with it,1 leaving locals unsettled in their wake.
This is exactly what made me think of Edward Said’s “Orientalism.”2 The scholarship of Orientalism (studies of the “East”) has existed for centuries, but Orientalism as it’s now known emerged as a critical postcolonial lens with Said’s work back in the ‘70s. It’s a lens that takes many forms, but I’d argue its general thesis characterizes how the West’s conception of the East (from colonial era up until modern-day neoliberal imperialism) reinforce Western hegemony by the othering, exoticization and diminishment of a conceived “Orient.”
Here are some of quotes and notes from the introduction of his book for you to get a clearer sense:
“Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.”
“Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter or field that is reflected passively by culture, scholarship, or institutions; nor is it a large and diffuse collection of texts about the Orient; nor is it representative and expressive of some nefarious ‘Western’ imperialist plot to hold down the ‘Oriental’ world. It is rather a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts; it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction (the world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident) but also of a whole series of ‘interests’ which, by such means as scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape and sociological description, it not only creates but also maintains; it is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world; it is, above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with power political (as with a colonial or imperial establishment), power intellectual (as with reigning sciences like comparative linguistics or anatomy, or any of the modern policy sciences), power cultural (as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts, values), power moral (as with ideas about what ‘we’ do and what ‘they’ cannot do or understand as ‘we/ do). Indeed, my real argument is that Orientalism is—and does not simply represent—a considerable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture, and as such has less to do with the Orient than it does with ‘our’ world.”
Orientalism is a sign of European-Atlantic power over the Orient, it’s not so much a definitive take on what the Orient actually is.
Orientalism is a body of theory and practice reinforced over decades creating a discussion/view/system/institutions that reinforce Western hegemony.
Now I’m not saying Coppola was masterminding some plan to deliberately advance American hegemony. Contrary. I think her work makes a sincere attempt to showcase a diverse Japan but is inherently limited because it is necessarily a product of the wider Western culture that still grapples with colonial legacy, one that you and I probably have the tendency to partake in too. For me, the movie is evidence that the culture hasn’t rid itself of the Orientalist mindset since the book’s publishing in 1978. I see it as a wake up call to examine how the ways we interact with the world may sustain an othering of Eastern cultures.
Lost in Translation does a great job at othering. For Bob and Charlotte, side eyes, snarky comments and mocking Japanese accents is much of the medium through which they build camaraderie. Even from their first interaction, he knowingly glances at her when she’s the only other white person in the elevator, perhaps because he’s more comfortable seeing someone who looks like him. Their first conversation consists of plotting an imagined “prison break” from Japan; at a sushi restaurant, he rubs his chopsticks which is considered rude, he speaks sarcastically to the chef who doesn’t understand English and says a Japanese person might want to eat Charlotte’s bruised toe after she pulls it up to the table.3 They reconcile tension by complaining about a shabu shabu lunch, in part because they’re dumbfounded that the custom is for them to cook the meat themselves. (In honor of this, I had shabu shabu for dinner).
One scene goes like this:
Charlotte: Why do they switch the R's and the L's here?
Bob: Uh... for yuks. You know? Just to mix it up.
Bob: They have to amuse themselves, 'cause we're not making them laugh.
I don’t see any successful attempt to understand Japan as is or learn respectful etiquette in the movie. They impose their own moral hierarchy of behavior, habits and ways of life as the standard, viewing the city through the ego. Even with Charlotte’s Japanese friends, they seem more like eclectic, loud background characters than real people. None of them are given even a sense of a storyline.
When alone, Bob’s interactions with Japanese people are used to emphasize and mirror his isolation–both internally and as a tourist. He looks around with one of those “am I the only who’s seeing this?” looks of incredulity when the English translation of long-winded directions from the animated, zany photographer are brief. He snaps at the surprise prostitute sent to his room by his company when he can’t understand that she’s asking him to rip her stockings. He crouches under the low shower head as if Japanese bathrooms are oddly built when he could have literally just screwed it up a bit higher. There’s also the scene where he gets stuck sprinting on an elliptical because he can’t understand its complicated buttons and Japanese narration. I can understand that these situations would frustrate a sleep-deprived, married man, but the whole notion of using foreignness as the butt of the joke and a metaphor in his own loss in personal translation is what irks me. Too often, I felt that Coppola’s characterizations of Japanese people were reminiscent of Mickey Rooney’s Mr. Yunioshi in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”. My own interactions in Japan have been nothing like the sort. Instead, moments depicting Bob’s jet lag (the bodily feeling of being out of time), cringey midlife fashion choices, or the silliness in receiving dozens of carpet swatches from his wife back home, to me, are more pointed and sensual depictions of his estrangement that I would’ve liked more of.
I can entertain the thought that Coppola may have intended her protagonists to act as a critique on their brash Americanness, but by the end of the movie, I didn’t get a sense that these characters respected Japanese culture or saw the country as more than for what it served them. This leaves the bow to that point untied. From hookers to zany photographers, a man reading hentai on a train and giggling aunties, a hospitable entourage and fun friends who smoke, I never felt that any of the Japanese characters had a humanity beyond a caricature that they seemed to represent in order to further the plot. The fact that they were reduced to stereotypes in their own country reminds me even more of Said’s parallels and the invasive nature of colonial tendencies to define. To me, this feels incredibly Orientalist–using the East as a simplified means to further a perceived realer Western life.
All of this is a shame because I do think in many ways it’s a precious movie. I enjoyed the ambiguous and awkward bond between Charlotte and Bob as well as the idea of two people meeting at parallel but completely different parts of life. Time is a lonely train that can never turn back, and for a bit, their railways aligned and their trains stopped at the same station to indulge in an ephemeral fantasy. The Kodak Vision film stock softly reflects the silent blue hues of the story and it’s so lovely to look at. The score has the same nostalgic sensuality.4
Wherever you go, there you are.
I don’t think a vacation can cure your sorrows. I don’t think gallivanting across a new city and shouting like maniacs in the middle of a crowded street will close the distance in your marriage or reinvigorate your life’s purpose. You will always be you, even on the other side of the world. The work is deeper than that, and travelling is a gift. I won’t accept using a foreign country as the butt of the joke and the escapist solution to all our problems.
No, I don’t count going to a sex club and one karaoke bar as meaningful interaction–not in the way they did it at least.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York, Pantheon Books, 1978.
Bob: This country, someones gotta prefer a black toe. Should we wait around until someone orders it? [To the sushi chef] Hey what’s with the straight face?
Brian Reitzell supervised the soundtrack. I loved what he did even more with the Virgin Suicides. I still think about “Hello, It’s Me” by Todd Rundgren and “Run To Me” by the Bee Gees all the time.
Here are some of my favorite female authors who write in Japanese and their books:
Banana Yoshimoto (“Dead End Memories,” “Kitchen” and “The Premonition” are some of my favorites of hers)
Mieko Kawakami (“Breasts and Eggs,” “Heaven” and “All the Lovers in the Night”)
Yū Miri (“Tokyo Ueno Station”)