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remake/remodel
February 19, 2004
notes on the yale gaze
I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I enjoyed Lost in Translation, though I’m also astonished that the movie’s admirers tend to pass over its blithely indifferent racism without much notice. It’s true that we the viewers must of necessity see our protagonists’ journey of pouty self-absorption through their subjective filters (by the way, thanks! while spiritual estrangement in Texas seems boring by comparison, it’s nice that we can all connect through this film, and I so know that Evelyn Waugh was a man) — and lord knows I’ll probably never have the good fortune to visit Japan myself, so it may well be all blinking lights and flower arranging and hotel interiors — but I do wonder why it’s this perspective of blinkered alienation to which we — me included — continually return. It’s as if we’re a generation of Holden Caulfields who can’t be bothered to finish reading our own story.
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i only saw it once, but i remember the tension of clear endearment the filmmaker felt towards japanese, expressed through poking fun. she has a much more uncomplicated love affair with the japanese landscape. away from people, and crowds, and the cityscape (breathtaking from above on a hotel window perch), she is herself.
it seems like she is not talking about the japanese at all, but chose the setting to highlight this interior we all have in common, of feeling lost in stange cities. i guess that is why the poking fun doesn’t seem sinister, since it mainly seemed to highlight difference from an american point of view… after all, the most pathetic character was an american actress, the acquaintance of the photographer husband.
i don’t think it was best movie but i think the nomination was a nod for its refreshing alternative to the banality of our romantic comedy genre.
posted by sentry on February 19, 2004 1:37 PM
I agree that there was nothing spectacularly sinister at work — I don’t ascribe any bad intentions to Coppola — but what might strike someone here as affectionate strikes me instead as patronizing. Coppola’s manner of poking fun struck me as crude and stereotypical, and it disappoints me. Now, the movie’s ‘point of view’ — it strikes me as both banal and appealing due to familiarity, and that’s the source of my ambivalence. Fun movie, though.
posted by jacob on February 19, 2004 4:49 PM
Have you - you have, of course, Mr Waugh, travelled a great deal.
A fair amount.
A fair amount, yes. You - how do you find people of various countries, various nationalities, various parts of the world - are they all much about the same as you were now saying, or are they all individuals? What I mean is, have they desires, aspirations in common, or are they -
I clearly can’t make myself understood. I was saying that people weren’t ever anywhere alike at all. There is no such thing as a man in the street, there is no ordinary run of mankind; there are only individuals who are totally different, and whether a man is naked and black and stands on one foot in the Sudan, or is clothed in some kind of costume in the bus in England, they are still individuals and entirely different characters.
Then you think that travel is not useful to a novelist, for example? You might as well stay at home in Gloucestershire.
Well, a novelist again; you see you’re always trying to use these meaningless phrases -there’s no such thing as a novelist: there are a great variety of novelists. Certain novelists can indeed stay at home, like Jane Austen, and produce admirable novels out of just what they see within five miles of their own rectory. Other people, like Conrad, have to go to the Seven Seas in order to find stories.
I think you said earlier that you weren’t interested in people in groups but when you travel you meet people in groups. You rarely have time when travelling really to meet individuals. Or do you find that you do?
Well, of course, the truth is that one doesn’t look on them as individuals when you’re travelling. You know they are individuals, but if you’re just in a town, say, in Morocco watching a religious festival, you’re simply enjoying a spectacle as someone might like going to the theatre.
You’re enjoying a spectacle, apart from the festival itself, of crowds, and yet crowds you don’t like.
Well, I shouldn’t really wish to be mixed up in the crowd of people slashing themselves with daggers and going into ecstatic frenzies, you know. I’d sooner be in an upper window looking down on them.
You like, in fact, generally speaking to be in an upper window looking down?
If it’s a matter of crowds, I like the spectacle of a strange crowd, not the contact of a familiar one …
posted by Evelyn Waugh on February 19, 2004 7:32 PM
Now that strikes me as uncannily appropriate, what she wrote.
posted by jacob on February 19, 2004 8:26 PM
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