Lost in Translation and me

By Sriman Narayanan

First, ignore the fact that Sofia Coppola is a nepo-baby, because she’s only the third woman ever to be nominated for Best Director at the Oscars, and we should be happy for her.

Then ignore that the film opens with an uncomfortably long look at 17-year-old Scarlett Johannson’s butt. Ignore that Bill Murray is more than 35 years older than her in this film.

Ignore that all the film’s attempts at comedy come at the expense of the Japanese. Ignore that these jokes strip their men of masculinity, strip their women of agency, strip their food of taste, and endow their faith with an oriental grandiosity. Ignore that this grandiosity is introduced at the briefest possible interlude so that one of our leads, the owner of the butt, is made to acknowledge her own internal malaise, because she has watched monks chant and she doesn’t feel anything. 

You’re ready to watch, and maybe enjoy, Lost in Translation.

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You’ll often hear the epithet as advice for the chronically, hopelessly online: you’ll go crazy if you try to consider everything. Because the planet is burning, and people that shouldn’t die are dying, and women can’t get an abortion, and if you try to lead a life through this veil of tears while remaining entirely swallowed within it – well, you can’t. To share a laugh with friends – maybe around drinks, a blinding itself – one can’t be hung up on impending geopolitical doom. 

No; to survive in the contemporary moment is to ignore.

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I like to think that all Indian children in America develop a facility for this ignorance. At school, you ignore life at home and the language you are weaned onto alongside your mother’s milk; in due time, you will prefer reheated board-like slices of pizza to the bowls of sambar rice freshly prepared hours later.

Because what is the alternative? Stare all day at your white peers? Pull their lips to the side, marvel at how pink their gums are, while yours remain brown no matter how aggressively you brush them?

You can’t do that, because there are grades to make, and friends, too – anyways, you don’t have to look at yourself when you talk to them. If you keep your arms tied behind your back when you speak, you will learn the patterns of their speech and might forget that you’re any different at all. How they squish syllables. They say “cumf-trable,” unlike your mother, who speaks the British style of English insisted upon her, who says, “come-furt-ah-bull,” which technically makes more phonetic sense but you are now able to classify as wrong. You must not consider this for any longer than a child can, because there is too much on the line.

With each passing year, this ignorance pays off. First, birthday parties, which become individual invites to white boys, their homes. Moments of consideration: they’re having corned beef for dinner, and you tell yourself it’s rude to decline, so you indulge, and it’s salty and so foreign to your mouth, and when you come home your mother asks how it went, and you cry and collapse into her arms in apology. Ignore this, too.

By the time you’re 18, you feel you may have transcended your skin entirely. And then you get to college, where only every second person is white, and even they want to “hold space” for your racial experience. But you didn’t have a racial experience, you say.

It makes you angry, because you thought you were supposed to be “post-racial,” you thought the point of your being here was so you could be just like the rest of them.

Because you thought the point of Lost in Translation was to show two lost people trying to find themselves. And anyone that’s trying to focus on the messy shit around it is missing that point. 

And then, because you’re in college, you read Toni Morrison, and you realize that you shouldn’t just run from messiness, that you can never escape it, that you should actually look at the world and your life and everything in between. 

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Lost in Translation is a silencing film – every time Charlotte sits against that big open window in her hotel room, eyes glazed over with Tokyo’s infinite light, you hold your breath because you’re sure she’s going to say something, because you would like her to verbalize the lack of direction she feels.

This has always been your experience as a filmgoer. You are preternaturally inclined to ask films for clarity, however it decides to provide that. You see grains of yourself in Charlotte, because she’s also between worlds and unsure of how she’s supposed to act and feel. 

When your parents finally switched you into a public school — they didn’t know better when you were born, they were taught in India that money bought quality, not Catholicism — the principal thought you didn’t speak the language. Words were such a burden at that age, because what you said decided who you were, apparently. It was stressful. You couldn’t manage many at all. You spend a week in special learning. That first week at Greenbrier Elementary, a white girl believes she’s being kind and waves at you, she says “hola” while you crawl over a jungle gym alone at recess. 

You would like to say this is why you feel like Charlotte, but you did not have a brown friend to commiserate alongside, to make fun of the way the other boys would spread ranch across their pizzas and refer to soda as “pop” and say “comfortable” incorrectly. Charlotte and Bob’s relationship is predicated on the idea that their lives are inherently incompatible with the city they’ve come to. You had no such luxury, nor an idea of who you even were or could be.

All things were possible and nothing was safe, so you chose to nosedive into that sea of possibilities, and later found your identity stretched to the walls and distorted in every direction. You tossed four years of high school into football’s hypermasculinity, spent your undergraduate career tearing through Milton and Melville and the canon of men who looked nothing like you or the people you came from. Your head grew more messy (perhaps from the three concussions) with concerns of how a brown boy was supposed to traverse the world than it had been before, back when you were told a man was to be muscular and strong, back when you were told you “had to read” Moby Dick and Paradise Lost and War and Peace before you died. 

And you cry when Bob says “You'll figure it out. I'm not worried about you. Keep writing,” because you still want to be Charlotte, you want the world to be simple enough to where “keep writing” is the only advice you need. 

You cry, despite the fact that your own self-evaluation of value has been diminished by the forces that influence Coppola’s orientalist understanding of humor in the film, despite the fact that she hasn’t actually reckoned with it entirely, that she doubled down on it with an acid trip scene in her newest film Priscilla, one that’s exotically set over Indian drums not dissimilar to the ones your grandfather once played.

Right, you should be angry, because this movie doesn’t get you. But you still want to be in it, this 100-minute moving polaroid, you’d absolutely spend a week at the Park Hyatt if it meant falling in love, if it meant feeling the heartbreak of that, because at least then you’d know, really, that someone else had felt it too. So you decide to ignore it all.