The meeting of Bob and Charlotte is the meeting of two people, straying, despondent, groping in the desert of an existence, and disoriented by the foreignness of a culture emphasizing that they are adrift. Tokyo as the setting of the story brings out the loneliness of Bob and Charlotte, a swirling storm distilling its center, which is both the characters and the hotel refuge above the city; accentuating their loneliness and ennui, the culture shock of the characters lays bare what many travelers have experienced: that foreign cultures expose the contingency and existential arbitrariness of our own, revealing the hollowness of the unquestioned safeguards of meaning and purpose.
Foreign cultures thus function as existential hallucinogens for the self-aware person scouring life, hoping to divine individual purpose and meaning in a godless world—and I shall contend in this article that the setting of Tokyo, containing flashing lights and an unintelligible language especially disorienting to the westerner, is the epitome of an existential hallucinogen. Lost in Translation, a subtle and imperfect film whose strengths are those of the characters, the setting, and the themes exploited by the story, is a probing glimpse of this phenomenon, and a moving depiction of modern people experiencing what are perennial human problems having unique individual expressions.
The characters of Lost in Translation are various: some of them are authentic and convincing, such as Charlotte and Bob, each searching for answers at pivotal stages of life; others are convincing as inauthentic and distracted, satisfied with the superficies appearing in the novel metropolis of Tokyo. The first of these characters is John, Charlotte’s newlywed husband and a celebrity photographer on assignment in the city: he is slick, professional, outpacing the contemplative, searching apathy of his wife, who sits alone in her hotel room staring across a city that looms, an abstract and foreign entity. These panoramas, aerial shots of the city, magnify the smallness of Charlotte (already a diminutive woman), lost in a chaotic excess that dwarfs her. John and Charlotte exist on opposite wavelengths, so that he has alienated her and she him, as well as herself, and the tatters of this marital state converge with Charlotte’s desperate, anxious search for meaning and purpose.
Another character embodying glibness and falseness is Kelly, a ditzy socialite and small-time celebrity who is traveling with the pseudonym Evelyn Waugh. This is a nonsense Nancy basking in the limelight, the antithesis of Charlotte (who disdains her). She embodies the spirit of a chaotic Tokyo: fickle, flashy, impenetrable, and dissembling. Her falseness and fakery, her eliciting of sympathy and compliments in the hotel bar after mentioning her “anorexia”—all of this is the existential falseness of what Heidegger calls the “they,” an inauthentic and “fallen” state neglecting the angst of being in the world, alone, without meaning and purpose.
The title of Lost in Translation refers not only to the language barrier and the distress of the primary characters, but to those characters—such as Kelly and John—existing as false and un-self-reflective beings. They seem to believe the illusion that their pursuits have meaning, that their purposes are substantial; but perhaps they don’t believe their own bluster, because dwelling in them is the ticking time bomb of self-reflection and despair. The story suggests that they too will have to confront themselves, since no one can hold out for long.
Charlotte is the angst-ridden seeker of meaning, existing in a “fallen” state having realized that she has fallen; her earnest and searching character might even exhibit the seeds of authenticity and meaning, and she has yet to realize it. For while “life must be understood backwards,” as Kierkegaard writes in The Journals, affirming what philosophers have long said about human life, “it grows more and more obvious that life can never truly be understood in time simply because at no one moment can I find the necessary resting place from which to understand it—backwards.”[1] The opacity of human being is such that one cannot acquire a pure objectivity; its meaning, be it collective or individual, remains always opaque and shifting, contingent on human circumstance and the willing of the individual.
Charlotte’s search for meaning is the beginning of this willing to discover a stable foothold; without God, long the stable source of objective human meaning, the human struggle for meaning and purpose must ensue, and Charlotte in Lost in Translation has begun to struggle. She is endearing, intimate, and fragile, a pleasure to experience as an authentic depiction of post-collegiate ennui and existential apathy.
Bob Harris, an actor taking millionaire fees branding the Japanese whiskey, Suntory, has experienced loss and struggle, and as a middle-aged husband and father he has started to experience more—a shifting of boundaries, the slow estrangement of his wife, the indifference of his children, his loneliness in a foreign city. Bill Murray brings nuanced humor and pathos to the character of Bob, whose existential struggles have more hapless strain and jadedness than those of Charlotte. He lives as a weary soldier having retreated from battles that Charlotte has just begun to approach, and discovers more of his own; there is thus a fatherly dynamic between them that, in addition to the wily, childlike dynamism of Bill Murray as an actor, mitigates any oddness or “creepiness” that would otherwise becloud the age difference.
They help each other stay afloat in the madness of Tokyo, a microcosm of the instability of human existence, and their experiences of its nightlife, the devil-may-care exhilaration of running through the arcades and the streets (captured in beautiful tracking shots by the cinematographer, Lance Acord), their singing karaoke in apartments and creating inside jokes while eating out: this amplifies the urgency and vitality of their separate struggles. And it points to the moving suggestion that in the direst of times, others may help us realize ourselves.
The setting, the substance of the film, and its photography go hand-in-hand, contributing to Tokyo as a microcosm of existential disorientation that the characters, Charlotte and Bob, are experiencing. The lights of the city, its noises, its cacophonous arcades, and its foreign language exaggerate the intangible disorientation of being human—hence why I call them existential hallucinogens, providing a backdrop to the internal wading-through-chaos taking place in the hotel. This hotel may be in one sense a mirage of silence and order, superficially opposed to the Tokyo besetting it; but it is just that—a mirage—and remains a place of struggle and experience as much as the nightlife.
Lost in Translation has so many virtues of character and setting and authentic dialogue, moments of pathos and a complex, weighty humor, that it overcomes its minor flaws and remains an authentic, moving film. Its authenticity, helmed by the talented Bill Murray, evokes the subtle problems of modern existential ennui, meaninglessness, and anxiety, all of which have long plagued human beings living in a godless, post-enlightenment society in which objective meaning—following Nietzsche’s nihilism and his prophetic utterance that “God is dead”—has disappeared. And it evokes without pummeling these problems, or furnishing them with false solutions, so that the final parting of the wayward couple standing in the streets of Tokyo, bodies buzzing and humming around them, comes off as the possibility of meaning and purpose, even unbidden beauty, in a world that struggles with us to the final gasp.
- Solomon, Robert C. Existentialism. Oxford University Press, 2005. ↑
