Reader's Request Week: Lost in Translation (2003)

9 months ago

Reader’s Request Week: Lost in Translation (2003)

LET’S NEVER COME HERE AGAIN BECAUSE IT WILL NEVER BE AS MUCH FUN.

by Erica U.

I’ve been thinking lately that travel and love are two of the most connecting forces we can know.

Both can create a sense of boundless intimacy — can weave a two-person community and a set of experiences the outside world will never really understand.

And both can be profoundly lonely.

Once, I traveled three days by train over the Chinese mainland, through the valleys sunk like an extraction and the fields, raised as a scar. For those 72 hours, I saw no other foreigner, no one with skin as watery and untested as mine. My berth held six bunk beds triple stacked in a tiny cabin less than ten feet tall and ten feet wide. At night, I’d lie in the top bunk, too close to the ceiling to do anything but recline and listen to the quiet Mandarin chiming and gonging below me and the rattle and sway of the tracks below that.

At dusk, I’d leave the berth and walk out to stretch my legs. Past the families filling their Styrofoam noodle bowls at the hot water spigot and the old men playing games at the small round tables in the narrow train hallways. When they’d let me, I’d take an empty seat and watch the countryside pour by like old film, stained in sea tones and unraveling.

At the top of the mountains watching over the valley, workers lit oil fires in caves. Settling bank on their haunches and elbows for the night, their nests glowed like jack-o-lanterns in the slate cliffs over the lush wet banks over the river near the tracks. No one had told me China would be so beautiful and somehow, I’d never decided to create that expectation for myself. I hadn’t expected the train station to be so English-free, or so hot and stuffed as a pierogi with a million Chinese headed to familial homes for the festival weekend. I hadn’t expected the train ride to be so endless, or to feel so overwhelmingly alone for every one of its hours.

This is just one card in a deck full of isolating and lonesome travel experience, each of which I would do over again. But you need to understand what you’re getting into.

Charlotte in Lost in Translation is the last time I can really tolerate Scarlett Johansson in a movie. It’s probably not her fault; If God made you a Samuyed, it’ll be a hard campaign to get cast as a Beagle, you know? But back then, she was still sort of a beagle. Brunette and smart and a little frumpy in her sensible shoes. Snarky and bookish and suspicious of a certain kind of woman, like we are.

Charlotte has joined her photographer husband of two years – an ADHD Tom, played well by Giovanni Ribisi – on some vague assignment in Tokyo. Young Tom is a little star struck and increasingly affected by the eurotrash bands and brash blonde starlets he shoots. Charlotte is sweet and petty, grounded and increasingly lost.

Even in this most relatable role, at times I want to smack Charlotte for all her whining and self-pitying and huffing. For sealing herself up in her ivory hotel tower and being so focused on not being her husband’s focus that she nearly misses this city waiting to court her.

Until we meet Bill Murray’s Bob. An aging famous actor, Bob has come back to Tokyo for easy capitalization on fame. Two days filming a sort of degrading, sort of ego-boosting whiskey commercial and sitting for a photo shoot in which the artist begs him for More Mystery, More Intensity, More James Bond, and a hefty check is his for the taking.

At night, in between these obligations, he lingers in the hotel bar, listening to the horrifyingly earnest and self-adoring cover songs of a red headed lounge singer in a slinky dress. A pretty embarrassment of a woman he’s too good for and later beds anyway, making us hate him a little.

Between his nights getting half drunk and his days reading passive aggressive faxes from his American wife, Bob waits out his life like a teeth cleaning.

Until he meets Charlotte.

These two need each other, that much we get from the start. In their own ways, with varying levels of self-awareness and understanding of how they came to be so, Bob and Charlotte are both so Lost. Lost and lonely and then hark, here comes a lighthouse and a ship. One to shine upon the other and one to be shone upon.

I am far more afraid of being lonely beside someone than I am of being lonely and alone.

It’s a dupe, you know?

Being alone, you steel yourself. There is no expectation but for self perseverance and at least you’re allowed that thrill of pride. But if you set down your independence and let down your draw bridge and then it doesn’t work? Then you find yourself – or them – still impenetrable? Who can stand that?

You’ve been there too. Those quiet doubting drive homes. Those shut out, wordless, withholding trips beside a partner who’s shutting down. Or maybe you’ve shut down. And have endured the nearly unbearable wait for them to notice.

Charlotte still loves her husband (or some version of him), but she is losing him. At least what she needs of him – his worshipful focus, his rapt attention, his down-to-earthness, his agreement to sit out the whole big superficial ride with her. Suddenly denied the security of this tether and pact is a scary place to find yourself. Whatever she was before she was his has grown timid as a casted arm.

Bob still loves his wife, probably. It’s hard to know what they are outside their machinations, but there seems to be a similar promise of teamship here too. Or at least the fossil of some loyal intimacy. They’re older than Charlotte and Tom and so their routines are a little more acerbic, a little less elaborate. They’ve learned the shortcuts to really wounding each other.

They’ve also developed the fortitude to cope. Bob’s wife hides behind the royal duties of child rearing and interior design and stays home. Sends carpet samples to prove her martyred service to Bob in lieu of tenderness. And Bob stays on the road. Sends home his paycheck and halfhearted romantic overtures in lieu of responsibility.

I saw Lost in Translation once, years ago, and really loved it. Loved it in the quiet, deep sort of way you love books you only read once at a particular time in your life and don’t think or speak of much again.

Rewatching it now, I am less forgiving initially. Irritated that Charlotte and Bob need this dalliance, which is less innocent than I remember it to be. What I also cataloged in memory as nuanced, wanting looks unacted upon are actually elevator kisses and sultry karaoke songs sung to each other with pointed meaning and drunken swaying hips.

But it isn’t much more than that – not much more than a teenage caper formed to kill a few echoey days in an electric city one million miles from home. And so I forgive them, again this time and again the next time I watch it, another decade from now, because we have been there too.

What I mostly loved about Lost in Translation the first time, I think, is the gaps. It is a movie defined by what is missing. The quiet spaces and the unspoken words and even that cult classic final scene. The whispered farewell between Bob and Charlotte that we’re not asked to hear. Do you remember this? There are entire websites devoted to analyzing and breaking down what he said to her, his aging cheek pressed to hers – soft and taut and flawless as a whole lifetime left before you. I really love that Sofia Coppola never told us. I want something in all this to be pure. If it must be a secret, so be it.

That’s the beauty of the entire movie – its sort of Japanese elegance. What it invites and never forces. The line it toes.

I am a person who could never not say what is in her guts, her overactive mind, her thumping chest. And here is this whole poised world. This Asian fairy tale told in elaborate gift giving greetings and techno club dances and the subtleties of marital jousting and the choreography of black and white movies amidst an insomniac’s midnight panic. The drunk-making mystery of friendship with just slightly too much more.

Give in to where you are. This might be my best travel advice and my greatest travel challenge. There is so much for a human to fear. Not in hiking through Malian outback alone, not in forging the medinas and the subways and the canals. It’s the connection. Understanding how to insert yourself into the stream of human connection when there is so much potential for misstep. The rapids you misunderstand and the pace to which you are unaccustomed. The depth for which you are unprepared. And ultimately, the possibility that you will be rejected – heaved back out to shore. Approaching a stranger on a train or on-line is not just that thing; It is everything. It is risking it all – gambling against rejection, wagering love that may spend itself down to the loneliest fibers. Risking that despite it all, we may end up alone.

And that’s why you can forgive Bob and Charlotte.

Because in a wild city that doesn’t belong to you, a million literal or figurative miles from your partner, you might change. It might take something different than you think to keep on keeping on. And even if you, like Charlotte and Bob, hold on to your promises and moral fiber, you still might need to surrender to the moment. Find someone’s hand to hold and run the streets with them until you forget everything. Until you can make yourself go home again.

Finishing this essay took too long for no particular and a hundred insignificant reasons. Sitting on an airplane drinking gin and tonics and wondering about quinine and procrastinating it, I read this quote and finally pulled it all together:

“First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons — but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which had lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world — a world intense and strange, complete in himself.”

- Carson McCullers, “The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories”

And I thought that’s it – exactly, and still it is only part of it. Just like travel, we enter love for different reasons than we remain in that country. We change, they change. What we want changes. We learn them too well, the illusion burns off, they stop needing us, we let them down.

Somehow, we drift apart and there is an incredible loneliness in the indecision over whether we’ll paddle after each other or not.

Sometimes it takes work to love a country. Most times, it’s never what you thought it would be and you have to decide if you can let it be what it is, and love it fiercely anyway.

Erica U. recently moved cross country to LA, though she still does not own a romper. Here she lives with her boyfriend and their adorable cat, works, writes and regrets watching favorite movies which are better left to memory.