I don't think I've had another relationship with a piece of media as multi-faceted and long-lasting as the one I've had with Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation. Like, I still listen to a lot of the same music I did growing up and love it for pretty much the same reasons. But Lost in Translation shifts around in my consciousness. It was my favorite movie for probably a decade. Now I still have a lot of appreciation for it, but find maybe I've outgrown it. Like, I react to it differently now. I identify with different characters. It's still one of my favorite movies, no doubt, but I understand more why people don't like it. And it doesn't define me and how I view the world as much as it once did.
If I remember correctly, I watched Lost in Translation for the first time in a hotel room with my dad and my brother when I was maybe fourteen or fifteen. We were on a road trip. I forget where we were, maybe Colorado? My dad, being the way he is, brought along a DVD player so we didn’t have to buy movies from the hotel streaming service or depend on the unreliable offerings from cable TV. I think we may have purchased Lost in Translation on the road in a Target bargain bin.
I was an average near-rural suburban Midwestern teenager for the most part: White, upper-middle class, smart, comfortable. I was also closeted, lonely, unmotivated, intermittently embracing and rejecting solitude. I had already been drawn to Japanese literature, starting with Haruki Murakami, finding comfort especially in the lesbian yearning experience that is Sputnik Sweetheart, and moving on to Kawabata, Mishima, Dazai and others (Note: I've only recently begun to read the work of Japanese women writers, and damn was I ever missing out. Like Sawako Ariyoshi? Shizuko Go? Harumi Setouchi? Shit's great). I was fascinated by the concept of Japanese culture I made up based on the vibes from the media I was consuming: Shinto shrines, simple food, ceremonies, mindfulness — stuff like that. It reflected what I wanted my life to be like: Simply, peaceful, accepting of my place.
Something about how those things were captured in Lost in Translation, tied with the displacement, ennui, and depression of its main characters, made me feel seen.
It’s a movie about two Americans abroad — fading movie star Bob (Bill Murray), who is escaping his home life by taking on a job endorsing Suntory Whiskey, and Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), a recently graduated philosophy major who followed her celebrity photographer husband on a business trip to Japan.
The movie garnered some criticism for its kiddie-pool depiction of Japan, portraying it as wacky and incomprehensible, full of bright neon lights, maze-like urban streets, goofy TV show hosts, overbearing business people, kinky strip clubs, and mindbogglingly loud arcades and pachinko parlors.
Not to give the movie too much credit to Coppola, who I don't think had “Create a holistic and respectful interpretation of Japan through Western eyes” in mind when making the film, but one could also easily argue that we as an audience get this shallow interpretation of Japan because Charlotte and Bob are too self-centered and miserable to take in the culture in a way that doesn’t immediately affect them.
Like, Charlotte is only touched by Japan when she sees a wedding ceremony that reflects her feelings on monogamy and love, and when she’s invited to help with some flower arrangements that reflects her desire to have purpose. Bob, the more miserable and hopeless character (even if he’s more charming about it), meanwhile exploits Japan as an escape from a wife who doesn’t understand him and kids who love him and who he loves but “are fine” without him.
Bob and Charlotte both drift through the foreign country, refusing connection from those to whom they are already connected, seeking new experiences instead. They meet each other, explore Tokyo, have fun, fall in something like love, and depart from the place and from one another, unclear if they're better people for the experience.
Growing up in a near-rural suburb, existing at a high school that wanted to cut its already minimal arts funding in lieu of more athletics, where there were very few queer kids to relate to, I definitely had a desire to escape in the ways that Bob and Charlotte did. And by that I mean I lived comfortably and only had emotional needs that weren’t met, so I wanted to escape as luxuriously as possible. I didn’t want to give up the comforts I’d grown used to, but I still wanted things to change. Lost in Translation captures that feeling really well, unable to reach beyond a limited sphere while still wanting to live outside it. I was lonely, but I had no obligations. I had food and shelter and an amount of support. I just needed something that no one around me seemed capable of giving and I had no will of my own to change my living conditions.
Like Bob and Charlotte, I used Japanese culture—mostly videogames and literature—to displace myself. It wasn’t always a happy process, but it was soothing to deny the things I didn’t like about where I lived, the problems that stemmed from living there and who I lived with. I felt more at ease outside small town America, where I felt like I was being judged at every turn and could only either act out or subdue myself.
I’m not sure which character I like the best anymore. I’m impatient with Charlotte for not really having any idea what she wants to do with her life and not doing anything to change that, opting instead to be self-absorbed and lazy. I'm equally disenchanted with Bob, who comes off more as a miserable curmudgeon than an affable dude in a midlife crisis the more you think about him. I have a lot more sympathy for Charlotte's husband John, a workaholic celebrity photographer, because even though he's clearly too engrossed in his job to notice that his wife is depressed, Charlotte is also completely indifferent to his work and unsupportive of something that must mean a lot to him.
I think Anna Faris's character Kelly ends up coming off the best in the end. She seems to wander the hotel setting just enjoying everything and everyone around her, even if it's just singing a James Bond theme song at karaoke to two vaguely amused onlookers in the middle of the night. We're supposed to see her as a dumb blonde — like how Charlotte makes fun of her for booking her room under the name Evelyn Waugh, who's a man — but who cares, honestly? She's the only character with any amount of space and dialogue within the story who seems to unilaterally enjoy her lot in life.
The last time I watched Lost in Translation, I maintained my overall appreciation of the movie, but allowed myself some distance for critique. The privilege of the protagonists is beyond grating, the scope of their curiosity limited. It's especially bad during the pandemic when I can't believe anyone can be miserable while still having the ability and access to travel. I still found things in common with them, sure, but I didn’t feel as connected to their problems anymore.
Maybe I want them to admit their complicity in their problems more than they do. Bob and Charlotte exploit the freedom of being in a foreign culture to distance themselves from their home lives, rather than use this experience to gain perspective.
The summer after my junior year of college, my ever-traveling father graciously recruited me to go on a trip with him to what he keeps calling “the Far East.” It was a multi-week trip in which we explored China, South Korea, and Japan. The first two-thirds of the trip are a story for another day: Traveling to Japan, my dad and I did much of what the characters in the movie do. We ate food we weren’t sure the contents of, got lost in Kyoto, failed to communicate with locals in a semi-comedic way. We even went to the very hotel Lost in Translation was filmed in, the Park Hyatt Tokyo.
Appropriately, the bar and restaurant in which the characters find themselves for a large portion of the movie is called the New York Grill. So they stay in a place called New York in the middle of Tokyo. Which I guess goes to show these characters can’t stray too far from what's familiar to them, strong as their desire is to escape, to get lost.