The Sentimentality of Isolation

Lost in Translation (2003) is a movie about two people dealing with the disappointment and loneliness present in their lives. Bob and Charlotte meet in Japan, a country where they don’t speak the native language and where they are separated from their spouses. Bob is an old movie star and Charlotte is a recently graduated philosophy major, and neither one is satisfied with what their life currently is. Bob is in Japan for business. He is being paid to represent a whiskey, which involves commercials, photos, and going on programs to promote the product. The film follows him through these experiences and instills a sense of loneliness through its imagery. Parallel to this is Charlotte’s story. She is a young wife of a photographer who is in Japan to photograph a band. Even when he’s around it seems he’s leaving her on her own. When they talk, it is clear they are not really communicating. Eventually he goes for a few days to shoot on location, leaving Charlotte on her own.

In Platinga’s essay “Spectator Emotion and Ideological Film Criticism”, he refutes the idea that an emotional response to film is something to be ignored so that you may use only reason to understand the film. Platinga puts forth the cognitive perspective on emotion. He claims that the emotional experience relies on the previous experience of that spectator. He presents a case for the agency of both the spectator and film in the creation of emotional responses.

Romantic comedies and horror films are well known examples of the manipulation of the spectator’s emotions. They use very specific music and images to produce the correct feelings for the plot. This engages the viewer and results in their commitment to the characters. People often feel that the homogeneity of the manipulations these films employ is a major flaw in our culture. We mass produce films with the same songs, plots, and characters. However, Lost in Translation (2003) is not one of these standard romantic comedies.

Lost in Translation (2003) employs several techniques to produce sentiment in the spectator. The beginning of the movie follows the two main characters as they deal with their environment. By setting the movie in Japan, where the two main characters stick out like sore thumbs, the viewer is already conditioned to be considering the topic of loneliness and isolation. These are emotions that most everyone has felt at some point, and so by making our characters foreigners the film produces a very visible representation of loneliness even in a sea of people. This is used to condition the spectator, so that later when it becomes clear that the real problem is that in their everyday lives these two characters feel loneliness and isolation , even with the ones they love.

I found it very interesting that while Lost in Translation (2003) purposefully created a romantic relationship, they did not equate this with sex. In so many movies focused on romance, they equate love with sex. However in Lost in Translation (2003), they focus on companionship and understanding. This is further emphasized by the overall sense of loneliness and isolation that pervades the film. This allows the spectator to root for their love without having to go against their morals. The married status of these characters makes a sexual love problematic, but by not sexualizing their relationship, the spectator can appreciate and be fully invested in it. Bob’s affair with the red-haired singer furthers this point, their relationship clearly superficial though sexual.

Unlike most romance movies, Lost in Translation (2003) does not use Aristophanes’ view on love from Plato’s The Symposium to outline the story. There are no two perfect halves finding each other in this love story. The two main characters are in committed relationships. In a more typical movie, their unhappiness in their marriages would be replaced the happiness inherent in finding their true match, the true second half of their soul. However, that is not what Charlotte and Bob find in each other. They find companionship and friendship. They find an escape from their isolation. They find love in each other, but we do not get the impression that they are each other’s second halves.  They do not leave their spouses for each other. They do not make plans to see each other. They found understanding and peace within their relationship in a time when they felt isolation. They are a necessary part of each other’s story, but their relationship was necessarily brief. The truthfulness found in their love suggests that the myth of a second half may be just a myth.  

The Struggle Between Emotion and Obligation

Emotions are a powerful driving force for many, if not most, people. They can cause us to do things we normally wouldn't but can also hinder us. Human emotion is an incredible source for inspiration but this can be overpowered by other things like the social obligations we make with the people around us. Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation is a film which shows how one’s emotions and obligations can collide. The movie is about a middle aged actor named Bob Harris who is shooting a commercial in Japan and the intimate friendship he forms with a young woman named Charlotte. Both characters are married, Bob having being married for over 20 years and Charlotte having recently married a young photographer who has been stationed in Japan. Bob and Charlotte find themselves dissatisfied with the current state of their marriages and happen to meet in the hotel they both stay at. After a series of interactions they become close friends, spending time drinking at bars and singing karaoke. It seems to be apparent that the two of them share a unique bond that they are missing in their marriages and so this causes a conflict between their emotions and obligations.

Diane Jeske writes about obligations in her work Families, Friends, and Special Obligations. Jeske talks about how people have special obligations to certain individuals, consisting of family and friends alike. Much of this work discusses the differences and similarities between obligations to family and friends and shows that familial obligations can be entered voluntarily as well, even though people cannot choose their family. In discussing the obligations which we have with friends, she says that there are implicit and explicit ways of establishing these obligations. Marriage is one of the explicit ways of doing this because one takes a set of vows which they are expected to uphold. Breaking these vows, or any obligation which one is engaged in, makes one morally corrupt (especially in the case of marriage which are considered sacred/high tier vows). This is the risk faced by both Bob and Charlotte in the movie. The two of them form an intimate bond of friendship and it is apparent that there are feelings of desire between them, but they never act on those feelings completely because of the obligations to their respective spouse.

Something that this movie made me think about was the way in which people take into account other people’s obligations. When it comes to our friends (and our family as well) we tend to avoid doing things that cause them to fail in their obligations to others. I think this is seen in the movie when Bob sleeps with a woman he meets at the bar toward the latter half of the film. Charlotte catches him and the two have a quarrel (well Charlotte’s jealousy is shown at least). What I noticed though is that instead of going to Charlotte who he has real feelings for he hooks up with a stranger. I’m sure that part of this was due to the situation of it all and the age gap that exists between Bob and Charlotte but when following emotions it makes more sense for him to sleep with Charlotte, who I am sure would not be opposed to the idea. What I think is shown is that friendship in itself creates an obligation which implicitly demands that one should not do something which will compromise the other’s obligations. This is why I believe Bob slept with the woman instead if Charlotte. Sleeping with either woman would break his obligation to his wife, but if he had chosen to sleep with Charlotte he would also break the obligation he has to her. In this example we see that Bob’s emotions are powerful enough to break the obligation he had to his wife, but not the one he had to Charlotte.

Since I am talking about emotions I also want to address the emotions evoked in the film. In Spectator Emotion and Ideological Film Criticism by Carl Plantinga, he discusses how people should critique the films they watch to understand “the moral and ideological import of experiences offered by films” (Wartenberg and Curran 148). In this work he mentions how some movies can produce manipulative emotions which can cloud the viewer’s outlook on the movie. I think that Lost in Translation is a movie which does not produce manipulative emotions; or at least it does so to a minimum degree. I watched this movie with a friend and we both couldn't help but notice that much of the movie just seemed to be random events within Bob and Charlotte’s lives together. To me this movie seemed to paint a realistic picture of the situation. There are some romanticized parts but much of it seemed like something I could expect to see in real life. In conclusion this movie does a good job at portraying realistic characters who, like the average human, must deal with the conflicts of their emotions and obligations. 

The Sentimentality of Lost in Translation

Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation (2003) could be described as tale of forbidden love and ageless attraction found in exotic locales. The two lead characters, past-his-prime movie star Bob Harris (Bill Murray) and neglected wife Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) are both married, so their “love” is “forbidden.” Harris is considerably older than Charlotte, so their attraction does seem ageless. The whole narrative takes place in Japan, so the locale is exotic. Yet those of you who have seen the film know that the description above misses the mark. This is no Nicholas Sparks story with oft-quoted beach scenes or soggy, impassioned embraces. In many ways, the film seems to intentionally step around sentimentality.

In his article “Spectator Emotion and Ideological Film Criticism,” Carl Plantinga defines sentimentality as “false or unearned sentiment” (155) – in the case of films, it is the real sympathy or empathy that a viewer feels for fictional characters in fictional situations. However, Plantinga seeks to defend sentimentality and emotional responses to films by suggesting that such reactions can generate important and useful conversations about the interplay of feeling and reason. He criticizes the claim that “emotion clouds a certain kind of critical judgement,” further stating that “the kind of emotional experience a film offers, and not emotion per se, is a proper target of ideological investigation” (148).

Lost in Translation presents a unique example: as mentioned previously, much of its content aligns with more traditional “chick-flicks,” yet the treatment of that content seems to separate it entirely from that category. To return to Plantinga's text, the film begins to separate emotions “which are benign or beneficial from those which are manipulative or harmful” (151). There have been many instances when I exit a theater or finish watching a film at home and feel manipulated, particularly with respect to romantic movies. A Walk to Remember (2002) is an especially pertinent example (and another Nicholas Sparks creation; guess I've really got a bone to pick with that fellow?). The film itself might simply irk me because it elicits the intended emotional reaction, against my better judgment. So yes, I get very upset when things go south for the characters, when certain inevitabilities come to light – I would say more, but I don't want to spoil the surprise for anyone who has yet to experience the landmark film for themselves. 

Yet my primary issue with that film, like my issue with many other “chick-flicks,” is the unrealistic expectation it sets. Plantinga states that “our emotional experience at the movies may affect our ways of thinking and thus reinforce or alter the emotion schemata we apply to actual situations” (158). The bad boy changes his ways for the quiet, church-going girl; the single dad and his son meet the perfect woman at the top of the empire state building; the blood-sucking vampire is actually good, and he falls in love with the awkwardly reserved human girl. These narratives of happy endings begin bleeding into our approach of reality. Notably, the same argument has been made many times about depictions of violence in film.

Back to Lost in Translation: unlike the typical romantic-film arcs that I list above, Coppola's movie offers a more realistic set of situations with subtler emotional responses. Many critics argue, as Plantinga mentions, that “emotions must be 'bridled' or 'mastered' to allow reason to function adequately” (149), as if emotional responses and rational thinking are mutually exclusive (spoiler alert: in many cases, they are not). In Lost in Translation, Harris does not leave his family to run off with Charlotte due to his emotions. Yet he does not conquer them in any sense, since he still runs after her at the end of the film; he rather uses his emotions in conjunction with his reasoning skills. In terms of spectator response, though, I am a bit at a loss. I have always had difficulty identifying with the characters in this film, but perhaps that's precisely Coppola's intention. Perhaps all the interactions between Harris and Charlotte are intended to be perfunctory, leaving little long-term impact after the pair leaves Japan or the viewer leaves the theater. Is this film less sentimental simply because audiences do not sympathize with the characters as much as they do in more mainstream romances? Is this simply because Coppola is less manipulative in her emotional approach? “'Soft' emotions” (149) are certainly present, but a lot of emotional numbness is implicit in Harris's sexual encounter with the red-head bar crooner. Do you think this was a swing-and-a-miss at sentimentality, or is the absence of a powerful emotional response intentional?