Reviewers have hailed Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation as though it were the cinematic equivalent of the Second Coming. Reading the praise, I couldn’t help wondering whether I had watched a different movie and whether the plaudits had come from a parallel universe of values. Lost in Translation is being promoted as a romantic comedy, but there is only one type of humour in the film that I could see: anti-Japanese racism.
In the movie, Bill Murray plays the alienated Bob, a middle-aged actor shooting commercials in Tokyo. He meets the equally alienated Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), a Yale graduate accompanying her fashion photographer husband. The film is billed as exploring their disconnection from Japan and from their spouses and how they find some comfort in one another through a series of restrained encounters.
But it’s the way Japanese characters are represented that gives the game away. There is no scene where the Japanese are afforded a shred of dignity. The viewer is sledgehammered into laughing at these small, yellow people and their funny ways, desperately aping the Western lifestyle.
The Japanese half of me is disturbed; the American half is too. The Japanese are one-dimensional and dehumanised in the movie, serving as an exotic background for Bob and Charlotte’s story, like dirty wallpaper in a cheap hotel. How funny is it to put the 1,8 metres-plus Bill Murray in an elevator with a number of overly small Japanese? To manufacture a joke, the film has Murray contorting himself to have a shower because its head isn’t high enough for him. It’s made up simply to give Western audiences another stereotype to laugh at. And haven’t we had enough about the Japanese confusing r’s and l’s when they speak English? While shoe-horning every possible caricature of modern Japan into her movie, Coppola is respectful of ancient Japan. It is depicted approvingly, though ancient traditions have very little to do with the contemporary Japanese.
Coppola follows in the footsteps of a host of American artists who became interested in the cultural appropriation of East Asia after World War II. The likes of Lou Harrison, Steve Reich and John Cage took ”eastern” philosophy, music and concepts to fit an image of the mysterious East, which is always related to ancient civilisations.
Those not conforming to this never have a voice of their own. They simply don’t have a story to tell, or at least not one that interests ”us”. This is the ignoble tradition into which Lost in Translation fits. It is similar to the way white-dominated Hollywood used to depict African-Americans — as crooks and pimps.
The United States is an empire, and from history we know that empires need to demonise others to perpetuate their superiority. Hollywood, so American mythology has it, is the factory of dreams. It is also the handmaiden to perpetuating the belief of the superiority of US cultural values over all others and, at times, to whitewashing history.
Some have hailed the film’s subtlety, but to me it is reminiscent of the racist jokes about Asians and black people that comedians told in British clubs in the 1970s. Yet, instead of being shunned, the film this week received eight British Academy Award nominations, and is a hot favourite for the Oscars.
Coppola’s negative stereotyping of the Japanese makes her more the thinking person’s Sylvester Stallone than a cinematic genius. Good luck to the director for getting away with it, but what on earth are people with some semblance of taste doing saluting it? — Â