Lost in Translation Rebuttal

I realize I'm behind on a few things: 1. Jeanne Dielman review. 2. "Assimilation and Gender"
Firstly, summer school, while rather uneventful, still is occupying my time from 8-12:30 every Monday-Thursday and so has recreational soccer (and I still post regularly on IMDB, sort of). I'll get to those -- hey, I'm being pretty fucking productive -- but first I want to address something that I suggested earlier: common Lost in Translation criticisms. In the spirit of brevity and righteousness let's begin:

Film Quarterly - "Lost in Translation"


OK, so this is probably going to work with myself just reading the article (1st read) and just picking out things that I think serve as criticisms towards the film. I'll copy text and respond to it when I come to those "points of emphasis" and I encourage anybody else to refute or applaud any of my reactions to the film and its criticisms.

Page one sort of allows itself to not really attach to any sort of side. King pretty much sets what looks like an attack on the film's racial content -- God, I hope she doesn't ignore that 90% of the film was about the characters -- and then quickly sets up a reaction to such a complain. Is this really going to be an appraisal?

But nor does the
film sufficiently clarify that its real subject is not Tokyo
itself, but Western perceptions of Tokyo—in particular,
the fantasies that two lonely Americans project onto the
city and its residents. When Japan appears superficial,
inappropriately erotic, or unintelligible, we are never
completely sure whether this vision belongs to Coppola,
to her characters, or simply to a Hollywood cinematic
imaginary that has been offering up such images
of the East at least since Cecil B. DeMille’s 1915 The
Cheat, as described by scholar Gina Marchetti.2

Well, fuck. Isn't this the reason Lynch gets off the hook? I mean, it's not like people run around with axes claiming that David butchered the realities of Tinseltown of Prarieview, Oklahoma, right? Let's hope she drops the bomb on the next page->

Coppola’s camera adopts an ambiguous attitude, combining dazzled
humility with bemused condescension.At no point, it is
true, do we securely occupy the confident position of
the superior Western gaze upon the non-Western.

Ah...ooh, self-retorting! But the review/reaction still remains tame. But here comes the asininity:

But
the film ends up containing the Orient and “speaking
on its behalf ” in another way: by representing it as a
space where an American may get lost, but without
being significantly changed or unmoored by the experience.
As Scarlett Johansson’s character puts it, she
“doesn’t feel anything” when she encounters her cultural
others.

Firstly, Scarlett's inability to feel anything is not a revelation of the culture's lack but rather her lack. She, a philosophy major, complains on the phone to her "friend" because she feels an emptiness due to her inability to connect with anything at the moment. Damn, I bet the KKK is all over Sofia for suggesting Scarlett's alienation with her husband and for the patronization of dumb Hollywood starlets. Why is it understandable to predict that Charlotte's "emptiness" is reminiscent of a skewed approach to the culture by Sofia as opposed to Charlotte's own existentialism revealing her disconnection? And even so, Charlotte, indeed, shows admiration and respect for Japan; she has reasonable acquaintances in Tokyo and her "disconnect" is perhaps more of a spiritual lacking of herself...yes?

The scene is acted and shot for humor at the
expense of the Japanese perception of what a desirable
American male looks like: how he sits and gestures,
what kind of suit he wears, what kind of whiskey he
drinks. The more Bob gives the photographer what he
wants, the more he is emasculated, both because he is
following the orders of a man who cannot correctly
pronounce “Rat Pack,” and because the images he recreates
seem antiquated and fey by contemporary American
standards. But this emasculation does not stick to
Bob. It is returned to sender: attributed to Japanese
naïveté rather than to its American source.

The last sentence is what gets me, not so much that I disagree but that I think it yields an attack that really is sort of self-defeating. Firstly, the scene portrays a rather accurate display of the lingual differences of the two cluture; I'm not entirely against the thought that Coppola overdoes these "r/l" thing but I am against those who seek to overextend it to detract from the entire experience. Secondly, I think this quote misses what Sofia is partially trying to say: that there is a distinct appreciation or admiration by the Japanese when it comes to American stardom. When Bob is distilled by the skyscraper bearing a large advertisement of his face, it is implied that the greatest irony is just how humble the Japanese culture really is. In other words, the film progressively shows the tourists endorsement of Japan as if Sofia seeks to tell her viewers that the initial detachment from the austere environment, while natural, will eventually form into embracement, authorization, and above all, self-discovery.

But because point of view is limited
to Bob and Charlotte, we see more of their incomprehension
than that of their hosts. The camera emphasizes
Bob’s bewildered reaction to the bowing greeters
at the hotel, his face an amalgam of jet lag and sarcasm.

Disorientation in a foreign environment, the distinct rhythmic differences of social interactions...? Give him a break, buddy.

as well as his quick exit from an after-hours strip club, as a comment
on Japanese sexuality and gender roles rather than on
American prudishness.The film focalizes these images
through Bob: it is the greeter, not he, who looks ridiculous;
it is the dancer who is overly salacious, not he who
projects this image onto her. Other scenes in the film—
Bob’s appearance on a Japanese television show, for
instance—share in this attitude.

Absurd. And yes, I'm sure that a rather blatant feminist like Sofia Coppola is attempting to comment on the disparaged gender roles in Japanese culture. I'm not disagreeing that Bob's character is flawed in a few of these regards, he's quintessentially Bill Murray in the sense that he's always on the verge of elevating his social abasement into full-blown humor but never quite there. But to suggest that the film takes a moral stance on these situations, is rather absurd given the characters arcs and the film's final distributive fondness towards the revelations discovered in the stay. In "focaliz[ing] these images through Bob" it's as if Sofia is saying, "OK, make your own remarks about his character and his sophisitication".

There are a few scenes where we get an inkling that
the incomprehension is mutual, a flicker of understanding
that the West might also be an exotic enigma
for the East. In a scene at a hospital waiting room, for
instance, a stranger asks Bob in Japanese how many
years he has been in Japan. Failing to understand, Bob
can only mimic a few syllables; his interlocutor bursts
into laughter. The tables are turned:West now imitates
East.

Well, I'll be damned.

How, then, does one make a film about one people’s
projections onto another, one culture’s fantasies
about another, without reproducing those very projections?
How does one represent what is lost in translation
from both sides?

I'll answer: by changing the fucking film. Why would a filmmaker intent on portraying two individuals channeling the same existential crises -- Bob's mid-life, Charlotte's post-college -- seek to confound the entire point by extending its arc to the other side? In fact, the film suggests that the characters dislocation is not by means of the foreign environment but more of their own. It's like saying that Casablanca should restructure its perceptions of a Nazi-controlled city as a source of purgatorial romance in order to give Africa its dues. By consistently projecting the "side's" viewpoint (not that this film doesn't do it at times) we delineate the plot to an unnecessary emotional attachment, especially one that is already overwhelming the narrative in the first place.

Lost in Translation, on the other hand, emphasizes
what is mimicked without understanding,what escapes
translation. Sensations of incomprehension, of loss of
control, of forgetting even the time of day, tend to dominate.
These sensations, the film makes clear, can be
highly pleasurable, and even transformative when one
is open to them

This is half of the point. The biggest problem with this review is that its preoccupation with environments non-communicative efforts with the characters ignores that the majority of the film was about the characters projecting upon one another. I'm not to deny that the film sensationalizes certain aspects; however, I tend to embrace those sensations because Coppola shows it on behalf of the character's own personal disconnection. The film that I think this reviewer is attempting to ostracize isn't there because the flaws of the characters inevitably embrace the environment. In neglecting the Gothic qualities of the romance and making a personal attack for what the film wasn't instead of trying to seek out what it really was trying to do this review sort of makes me wonder how many films, classic or not, can we destroy because there sociological tangents don't correctly comply with that of actuality, or what we perceive as actuality. It's a bit hard for me to get behind a well-written and fair-pointed (at times) review of Lost in Translation when the individual doesn't once mention the kiss or the disoriented barrier of Bob and Charlotte's relationship. Not all of us were overextending incongruities with the Tokyo lights as Bob departed for the airport in the final shot. Some of couldn't even see them.