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Tim Jones

ENGL 7221

Dr. Freedman

12/10/14

“There is Nothing More Than This:” Neoliberal Cool, the Indie

Genre, and the Hollowness of Counterculture in Sofia Coppola’s

Lost In Translation

In the twenty-first century, the dominant image of American

independent cinema has turned from the 1990s Miramax-era current

of boundary-pushing, idiosyncratic films from a diverse

collection of filmmakers in the wake of Pulp Fiction and Do The Right

Thing to the narrowly-defined “indie” concept of aesthetically-

focused romantic comedies dependent on “quirk,” a trait given to

characters or the narrative that causes it to appear as an

unconventional subject for a romantic comedy. This value is a

broad interpretation primarily of the aesthetic qualities of the

films of Wes Anderson, however, Anderson remains a critical

darling whose films are exempted from the concern of box office

success. The 2000s big-time indie filmmaker par excellence is Sofia

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Coppola, whose Lost In Translation represented a pivotal event in the

commercial viability of the indie film. LIT made around 30 times

its $4 million budget and garnered an Oscar nomination and a win

for Coppola for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay

respectively. Coppola’s indie sensibilities combined with her

filmmaking pedigree (her father is Francis Ford Coppola, whose

production company American Zoetrope she now owns) make her the

face of “Indiewood,” filmmakers who make films of an independent

sensibility that have major studio distribution from companies

like Universal subsidiary Focus Features as Coppola’s do. In

this paper, I will develop an outline of the way in which

countercultural cool has carried qualities which make it, rather

than alternative or antithetical to capitalism, quite compatible

with and even evangelical for it. Following this is a description

of the indie film aesthetic’s use of semiotic systems of popular

subcultures, hence the way in which indie has come to be more

prevalent as a generic classification than a description of

factors of production. On a specific textual level, Sofia

Coppola’s films represent Western neoliberal cool as the ideal

affective structure, positioning its cultural products as more

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meaningful and authentic than those of mainstream society in the

West or anywhere else.

The Western neoliberal cool of the previous sentence is

easily summarized by an enduring descriptive epithet: “hipster.”

In the twenty-first century, hipster tends to be a pejorative to

describe someone or something who appears unnecessarily concerned

with asserting their individual coolness against popular

acceptance; one popular joke goes “Why did their hipster burn

their mouth? They started eating before it was cool.” For this

reason I prefer to describe what is for some “hipster culture” as

“indie,” as hipster seems to me to be a bad-faith dismissal of

aesthetic pursuit that comes dangerously close to anti-

intellectualism. Hipsters are indie, but to be indie is not

necessarily to be hipster. Indie is a sort of loose generic term

that comes from a by-now vestigial association with indie rock.

For example, the platinum selling major label band Fun. is

described as an “indie-pop” band by both Allmusic and Wikipedia,

likely because their music reflects a melancholy, intellectual

sensibility with spare instrumentation while still devoted to

primarily to the catchiness of the vocal melody. The melancholy,

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intellectual sensibility is the pervading aspect of indie-ness,

in music as well as the fashion of brands like Urban Outfitters

and the fiction of Dave Eggers. This paper deals with the

political economy of indie as it is expressed in film, drawing on

the semiotic system developed over time that has led to its

aesthetic.

The concept of the hipster is not a recent invention. The

word has been around at least since its investigation by Creole

writer Anatole Broyard in his 1948 essay “Portrait of a Hipster,”

where it describes a group who “longed, from the very beginning,

to be somewhere. […] But the law of human gravity kept him

overthrown, because he was always of the minority—opposed in race

or feeling to those who owned the machinery of recognition.”

Broyard also identifies one of the few linkages between the

original hipster and the modern one, “a priorism,” a sense of

inherent rebellious importance which “arose out of a desperate,

unquenchable need to know the score; it was a great protection, a

primary self-preserving postulate. […] The indefinable authority

it provided was like a powerful primordial or instinctual

orientation in a threatening chaos of complex interrelations”

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(333). The 1940s version of hipsters were primarily black jazz

fans, who formed the culture “borrowed” by what Norman Mailer in

1957 dubbed “the White Negro” in one of the most widely-cited

explanations of the white hipster’s cultural attitude. Mailer

characterized the hipster as “a philosophical psychopath, a man

interested not only in the dangerous imperatives of his

psychopathy but in codifying, at least for himself, the

suppositions on which his inner universe is constructed,”

suggesting that the two major tenets of hipsterism were a drive

to reject mainstream society and an obsession with cataloging the

reasons and processes by which they rejected it (Mailer). The

hipster formed “the negation of the psychopath” by being

“absorb[ed] in the recessive nuances of one’s own motive,”

endlessly questioning not just society but also their own

interpretation of it.

One of the questions at the heart of popular culture studies

is to what degree people’s participation in cultural production

and consumption affect the world, aesthetically and politically.

Mailer’s essay is rather optimistic about the revolutionary

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possibility of the hipster: he sees a possibility for it to

create

A neo-Marxian calculus aimed at comprehending every circuit

and process of society from ukase to kiss as the

communications of human energy—a calculus capable of

translating the economic relations of man into his

psychological relations and then back again, his productive

relations thereby embracing his sexual relations as well,

until the crises of capitalism in the Twentieth Century

would yet be understood as the unconscious adaptations of a

society to solve its economic imbalance at the expense of a

new mass psychological imbalance. (Mailer)

Mailer’s writing on the White Negro sounds rather similar to

Herbert Marcuse’s ideas about The New Sensibility. He notes

subcultural trends that instigate “the reversal of meaning,

driven to the point of open contradiction: giving flowers to the

police, "flower power" — the redefinition and very negation of

the sense of "power"; the erotic belligerency in the songs of

protest; the sensuousness of long hair, of the body unsoiled by

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plastic cleanliness" (36). Marcuse saw a great possibility in a

kind of aesthetically focused culture of rebellion in which

“technique would then tend to become art, and art would tend to

form reality” leading to the end of “the opposition between

imagination and reason, higher and lower faculties, poetic and

scientific thought” (24). Mailer and Marcuse’s critiques rely on

a politically necessary but unreal division, a particular

countercultural “us” against the “society of affluent

capitalism,” which falls apart as soon as one realizes the

paramount importance of commodities in communicating this very

division. This recalls Marcuse’s friend and intellectual negative

Adorno’s earlier critique of jazz, the musical product of the

original hipster: “[Jazz] characterize[s] a subjectivity that

revolts against a collective power which it itself is; for this

reason its revolt seems ridiculous and is beaten down by the drum

just as syncopation is by the beat” (Adorno in Witkin 146). The

way that Adorno saw jazz, as a standardized form that Robert

Witkin calls “ornamented with changes” is an equally prescient

critique of the logic of the revolutionary subculture of hipness

(146).

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In fact, the hipster and the New Sensibility appear at a

historical moment when the concept of counterculture was about to

be embraced wholeheartedly by the “square” world. In Conquest of

Cool, Thomas Frank outlines the way in which the mass-

counterculture of the 1960s as disseminated through music,

fashion, and politics provided one of the most important

innovations in the meaning of consumption: “With leisure-time

activities of consuming redefined as ‘rebellion,’ two of late

capitalism's great problems could easily be met: obsolescence

found a new and more convincing language, and citizens could

symbolically resolve the contradiction between their role as

consumers and their role as producers” (Frank 32). Frank argues

convincingly that the oft-used concept of co-opting, that “the

cascade of pseudo-hip culture-products that inundated the

marketplace in the sixties were indicators not of the

counterculture's consumer-friendly nature but evidence of the

"corporate state's" hostility” is an insufficiently dialectical

way of understanding cultural mass production in the age of

neoliberalism (Frank 16). As Frank alludes to in the previous

quotation, it is not that the establishment is threatened by the

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politics that countercultural commodities seem to carry and thus

removes what is dangerous from seemingly pure concept in order to

sell it, but that the ideologies of the counterculture of the

1960s (and onward) were particularly amenable to being

transmitted through commodities. The project of the

counterculture and advertising alike “was not to encourage

conformity but a never-ending rebellion against whatever it is

that everyone else is doing,” an ethic hardly incompatible with

capitalism (Frank 90).

In fact, permanent rebellion and total individualism

characterize the project of neoliberalism rather effectively.

Naomi Klein writes in The Shock Doctrine that economist Milton

Friedman’s concept of “disaster capitalism,” in which

privatization and deregulation are effected through reaction to

destructive crises, “promised ‘individual freedom,’ a project

that elevated atomized citizens above any collective enterprise

and liberated them to express their absolute free will through

their consumer choices” (Klein 60). It is exactly the equation

of absolute free will with consumer choice that gives rise to the

modern logic of counterculture and subculture, from hipsters to

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hippies to punk to indie; the collective of individuality that,

as Michael Newman puts it, “counters and implicity criticizes

hegemonic mass culture, desiring to be an authentic alternative

to it, but also serves as a taste culture perpetuating the

privilege of a social elite of upscale consumers” (Newman 17).

These qualities are readily apparent in indie and its

antecedents. Mailer’s manifesto is glaringly fetishizing of a

particular, necessarily heterosexual black experience, which

Marcuse also unreflectively takes up: “they are soul brothers;

the soul is black, violent, orgiastic; it is no longer in

Beethoven, Schubert, but in the blues, in jazz, in rock 'n' roll,

in ‘soul food’” (Marcuse 36). James Baldwin, in a sort of

response to “The White Negro” titled “The Black Boy Looks at the

White Boy” recognized the work this was doing: “why should it be

necessary to borrow the Depression language of deprived Negroes

[…] in order to justify such a grim system of delusions? Why

malign the sorely menaced sexuality of Negroes in order to

justify the white man’s own sexual panic?” (Baldwin). Thus the

idea of rebellious consumption created a market for consuming

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people and experience, often at the cost of turning human

interaction into a commodity.

This and other characteristics of hipsterism outlined by

both Broyard and Mailer endure in the modern understanding of

indie. However, they manifest in different forms accordance with

the concept of a priorism, a sort of in-group signifier that is

supposed to be only commanded by the hipster, is the modern

“before it was cool” of the preceding joke, the drive to be

perceived as culturally sui generis by seeking out forms unknown by

others. Mailer’s “negation of the psychopath” concept, of the

hipster as a person fueled by introspective speculation about

their own understanding of the world, continues in its present

form as ironic distance, a constant awareness of the possible

meanings of actions that seems to produce a nihilistic sense of

meaninglessness about them. Slavoj Zizek writes in The Sublime

Object of Ideology that “Cynical distance is just one way - one of

many ways - to blind ourselves to the structural power of

ideological fantasy: even if we do not take things seriously,

even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them,”

and in the particular case of the modern hipster and the indie

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product, that ideology is neoliberalism in the form of

rebellious consumption (33).

Understanding the unstable nature of mainstream versus

indie construction is necessary to a dialectic critique of

products that engage in its ideology. If anything, film or

music or any art’s “independence” is a question of degree rather

than of discrete categories, particularly in an age of

capitalist realism, in which “the widespread sense [is] that not

only is capitalism the only viable political and economic

system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a

coherent alternative to it” (Fisher 2). Meaningful analysis is

not in argument over the impossible notion of the authenticity

of a text’s production, but in how the text disseminates ideas

about its authenticity. Thus, the critiques of the films that

follow are about how they use the logics of indie, consumption

of experience, ironic distance, and the authenticity fetish to

advance ideas about taste, consumption, and power.

Sofia Coppola’s 2003 film Lost In Translation is about young

married woman named Charlotte (Scarlett Johanson) who meets aging

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actor Bob (Bill Murray) in a hotel in Tokyo. Alienated by the

Japanese culture and the stagnation of their own lives, they find

comfort and a suggestion of romance in each other’s company

before Bob leaves Japan to return to his wife and children.

That’s the plot of the film at least, which does very little of

the work. A major characteristic of modern indie film is a

vision of what Michael Newman calls “indie realism,” which is

“character-focused storytelling set in recognizable locales

within the context of indie culture,” a vague-sounding

description that requires further explanation (Newman 88).

Essentially, indie realism constitutes the “real” in two

concurrent fashions. The realism is found in fidelity to the

affective experience; how something feels is the way in which it

is real. This sounds like romanticism, the opposite of realism,

but it is expressed in the formal attributes that have come to

constitute cinematic realism, i.e. handheld camerawork, low

budgets, minimal use of effects and production design. Shot for

$4 million entirely on location in Japan, LIT qualifies for the

latter two, but hardly uses handheld shots. This is in part

because stillness is so important to the aesthetic of the film,

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and the unsteady shaking of handheld cameras would work against

it. More importantly, it is because LIT depends on how “the

affective experiences elicited by the film are homologous to

those of the characters, thus encouraging spectators to share in

(rather than merely identify with) Bob and Charlotte’s states of

being;” where the handheld foregrounds the existence of the

camera and the audience’s spectatorship, the classically-shot

film still seeks to disappear into representation (Ott and

Keeling 369). From the first shot of the movie, a long, still

close-up on Charlotte’s pink-underwear-clad butt, the viewer is

given a sense of intimate access to the characters; we are forced

to invade Charlotte’s privacy, the register in which the film

operates most meaningfully.

The second aspect, where the indie intercedes, is in the

figuring of an inauthentic, “square” Other that provides a way to

experience or consume the real and authentic. The way it is

expressed in indie film narrative tends to be through the use of

“quirk,” an apparently ostentatious display of being “off-beat.”

that lets the viewer know the film will be “different” (King 32).

This feature is what enables the rest of the indie signifiers to

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appear in films, most importantly music: Wes Anderson’s films in

particular feature songs with unimpeachable indie cred deftly

chosen to amplify the scenes they accompany, and as we will see,

Sofia Coppola is equally skilled at this. In later Indiewood

cinema, this often manifests in characters who appear personally

difficult or in some cases explicitly mentally ill, such as Safety

Not Guaranteed’s character who sincerely believes he has built a

working time machine, or Greenberg’s cantankerous, compulsive

letter-writing protagonist, from whom their romantic foils learn

life lessons by confronting the difficulty of the “quirky”

person. Lost In Translation predates the two films above and thus the

subsequent development of the indie-romance formula, in fact it

is likely the foundational text of the genre. LIT does not have a

“quirk” as such, but its use of the Tokyo cityscape and “alien”

Japanese culture as an inscrutable other that drives its two

leads together functions in much the same fashion.

Early in the film, we follow Bob on his jet-lagged cab ride

to the Tokyo Grand Hyatt; most of this sequence is composed of

drive-by shots of multicolored flashing electronic signs written

in Japanese. These shots, suggestive of a utopian companion to

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Blade Runner’s equally hyperstimulating dystopic Los Angeles, are

meant to clash with the film’s preferred visual style: a muted

color palette emphasizing grays and blues, lingering on unmoving

figures. One repeated sequence of shots throughout the film is a

wide shot of Bob or Charlotte walking on a crowded Tokyo street,

a cut to a short walking handheld shot from his or her

perspective, that then transitions into a close or medium shot

that begins the next scene. The long shots are meant to

repeatedly emphasize the alienation of the characters among the

Japanese people around them, with the handhelds conveying their

confusion, while the close shots in the film convey the

characters’ emotions and relationships with each other. A

recurring motif of Charlotte sitting in a high-floor hotel window

looking out at the city Wendy Haslem writes that “Coppola’s

fascination is with the ellipsis between dialogue and its

translation and in the intimacy that Bob and Charlotte discover

against the frenetic setting of contemporary Tokyo. Meaning

arises from the gaps between hearing and understanding, stillness

and movement – in the “spaces in between,” outlining that the

movie creates its emotional resonance through opposition

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(Haslem). “Hearing and understanding” and “stillness and

movement” however are subordinate to greater conflicts: American

and Japanese, indie and mainstream, and most importantly, the

prized authenticity and simple sincerity.

One scene in the film exemplifies this handily, when

Charlotte and her husband John (Giovanni Ribisi) meet Kelly (Anna

Faris) for the first time. Kelly is an actress who is in Japan

promoting a film in which she is the lead opposite Keanu Reeves;

Faris plays her with an energy that would be called infectious in

a standard romantic comedy but in the indie film is humorously

uncool. John and Kelly know each other from some unstated past

event, and so she invites him to look her up in the hotel’s

directory to co-ordinate dinner; she mentions her name is listed

under Evelyn Waugh and winks. As she leaves, Charlotte turns to

John and this conversation ensues:

CHARLOTTE: Evelyn Waugh was a man.

JOHN: Oh, c'mon, she's nice. You know, not everyone went to

Yale. It’s just a pseudonym for Christ's sake.

CHARLOTTE: Why do you have to defend her?

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JOHN: Why do you have to point out how stupid everybody is

all the time?

CHARLOTTE: I thought it was funny. Forget it.

Our protagonist is a more aware cultural consumer than Kelly, and

John (who eventually disappears from the film) sympathizes with

Kelly, rejecting the importance of cultural knowledge for polity.

The importance of indexical cultural knowledge is a major

characteristic of indie, as Matthew Bannister writes in White Boys,

White Noise, his survey of indie rock:

Camp ‘ambiguity’ – the aestheticisation of mass culture –

became another strategy that could be employed to assert a

superior aesthetic awareness. The power of the audience to

create meaning is annexed to the power of the artist, who,

in modernity, asserts his control through an aestheticising

gaze. It is a simplification to read the camp insistence on

style and artifice, so beloved of UK critics, as producing a

feminine counter discourse to male rock authenticity.

Reversing the terms of the mass culture critique, as Warhol

did, simply produces a new set of essentialisations. The

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cultivation of style over substance simply reified the

capitalist patriarchal binary. (Bannister 159)

As Bannister says here, the postmodern critique of mass culture

simply recreated another idea of legitimacy, an indie

authenticity parallel to mass authenticity. This is also when we

first learn that Charlotte is a graduate of Yale, which along

with her knowledge of Evelyn Waugh serves to inform us that she

fits solidly into the indie archetype of intellectual cultural

maven.

Kelly is Charlotte’s foil in the movie, similar in age and

physique but opposite to her: she has a defined career, she

worries about her diet out loud, and has terrible taste. After

all, she is in a movie with Keanu Reeves, who we are supposed to

understand as a bad, mainstream actor, a signifier of low

cultural value.1 Sincerity is antithetical to one of the major

tenets of the indie platform, irony, the preferred method of

communication between Charlotte and Bob for most of the film: Bob

1 As far as having an independent ethic, however, Reeves routinely takes considerable pay cuts to allow productions to hire actors who ask more than hedoes, and notably once donated $80 million dollars of his earnings from The Matrix films to the stunt and set crews on the film.

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appears in a gaudy orange camouflage t-shirt and Charlotte

remarks “you really are having a midlife crisis,” to which Bob

responds “I was afraid of that, I kept telling myself I just

wanted to be ready in case we go to war tonight.” Lionel Trilling

defines sincerity as “a congruence between avowal and actual

feeling,” which through the lens of authenticity is not enough.

John tells Charlotte about the photoshoot he is doing with a

Japanese band in which the producer wants them to wear “rock and

roll clothes” but he thinks it is better to “let them be who they

are.” Immediately after this, he tells Charlotte to stop

smoking, which signals to the audience that John is a hypocrite,

someone who seems concerned with authenticity but does not

recognize in it Charlotte. Something cannot just be truly felt,

it must also be True and authentic “which implies the downward

movement through all the cultural superstructures to some place

where all movement ends, and begins” (Trilling 12). The truth

behind authenticity is as unstable as the concept itself. So, it

is important when evaluating the indie film, so heavily reliant

on notions of the authentic, to explain what it figures as

authentic and inauthentic. So far, in the latter category LIT

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has sincerity, naiveté, and self-assurance as derived from Kelly,

but things get more sinister when the turn is made to the film’s

other antagonist, Japan.

As Bob is having still photographs taken of himself in a

tuxedo for the Suntory Whisky ad campaign in which he is

starring, the photographer gives him a series of directions in

heavily-accented English:

PHOTOGRAPHER: You know double oh seven?

BOB: Double oh seven?

PHOTOGRAPHER: Roger Moore.

BOB: Roger Moore? You know I think of Sean Connery. Didn’t

you guys get the Connery ones over here?

According to Coppola, this scene was completely improvised; she

fed lines to the actor playing the photographer and Murray

responded (Coppola). This conversation contains a judgment of

taste (Connery’s Bond films are better) followed by an inquiry

about the possible ignorance of a superior cultural product; we

are meant to think the photographer’s affinity for Roger Moore as

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James Bond is odd. Bob, to a certain audience of pop culture-

aware viewer, is thus figured as a savvier consumer than the

photographer. However, it is certainly understandable that the

photographer might have this opinion if he has seen You Only Live

Twice, a Connery Bond film in which Japan is prominently featured

as a land where “men come first and women come second” and

Connery sports embarrassing yellowface makeup for one sequence.

Implicit here is the audience’s recognition that Moore’s Bond

films are inferior2. Bordieu’s famous maxim that “taste

classifies, and it classifies the classifier” plays out here, as

Bob/Photographer constructs Connery/Moore and Savvy/Sincere, thus

Cool/Square.

The apparent sincerity of Japanese people is consistently

shown to be alienating throughout the film. In one scene,

Charlotte walks through an arcade and sees a man dressed in punk

clothing with a cigarette dangling from his lip, playing a game

that requires playing a simulated guitar; he strums and bobs with

an attitude that suggests he would do the same if he were playing

a real guitar. We see a man playing a game that involves hitting2 3 of Moore’s make up the bottom 5 of critical aggregator Rotten Tomatoes’ ranked list of Bond films, Connery’s Dr. No is #1.

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multiple dome-shaped buttons to a rhythm, but he adds a greater

level of engagement to the game by spinning around, clearly

concerned with the aesthetics of his movement. The other shots

in this scene focus on the noise and the flashing lights of the

arcade, the quick portraits of the people there are meant to

blend with this to create an estranging feeling of identification

with Charlotte. Antonia Felix writes that “Their desire to be

pretenders, backed by digital electronics, replaces their musical

creativity. Each of these elements imbues the film with a sense

that culture is a fraud, a collection of hollow substitutes for

genuine feeling and art—reflections of Bob’s tortured sense of

having sold out for easy money,” but this operates on the same

presumptive level of the indie position’s pretension to authentic

taste (138). We are meant to be bemused or mystified at the

people in the arcade’s interest in video games, not through

identification with the character of Charlotte, who to this point

has not expressed any opinions that would give us an idea of how

she feels about video games, but through identification with the

film’s implicit position as an objective observer.

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The thorough othering of Japan through this tactic even

leads the film to ask us to laugh at jokes that would be blatant

“ugly American” humor in a film which did not establish this

grounding; Bob asks, before leaving for the airport, if Charlotte

is going to “wish [him] a nice fright.” One of the longest

comedic scenes turns on a woman who is sent by Suntory to Bob’s

hotel room to give him a “premium fantasy massage,” which has her

imploring him to “lip” her stockings. When he does she falls on

the floor in an exaggerated display of sexual submission which

Bob makes it clear he is not interested in. This is a familiar

Orientalist trope in Western narratives about Japan writes Katya

Sarkowsky, which figures Japan as

difficult to understand for Westerns; displaying a ‘lack of

emotions;” wearing ‘masks’ impossible to decipher for non-

Japanese; however, this image of inscrutability is also

translated onto Japanese culture […] as rigid and

unchanging. It is this ascribed rigidity of social

structure and custom which […] set off the individualist

(and thus assumed to be countercultural in the Japanese

context) traits of the protagonists. (Sarkowsky 115)

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Thus we find the affirmation of the rightness, of the

authenticity of the main characters located in a colonial

rhetoric. We are asked to identify with the frustrations of the

only two people who cannot speak Japanese surrounded by people

who can because they are countercultural, and thus indie heroes.

There are, however, two separate “cool” Japans. One is the

Japan of its traditional image, of Shinto shrines, Buddhist

ritual, and kimonos. Early in the film, Charlotte visits a

shrine to listen to monks chant. Ott and Keeling note that “in

the sequence of shots at the temple, Coppola employs no close-up

shots of the chanting monks, which would risk making them

interesting and important to viewers. They, like the city, are

held at a distance by the camera” (Ott and Keeling 371). Being

“interesting and important” is almost wholly reserved for the two

protagonists, the only other characters who receive this

treatment are members of the second cool Japan discussed later.

Upon returning, she calls a friend of hers in tears, saying that

as she watched the monks she “didn’t feel anything.” This

suggests a commodity exchange in which “the product is culture

itself; and, while the laboring bodies may be present, the sheen

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of spirituality allows the neoliberal spiritual subject to view

her encounters with natives not through the lens of consumption,

but through the lens of an authentic experience that carries the

potential to radically change her life” (Williams 11). One of

the only scenes in which Japan is presented as comforting comes

near the end of the film when Charlotte leaves Tokyo and

witnesses a man and a woman dressed in traditional Japanese

clothing, the woman with white make-up on her face, walking

slowly through a field hand-in-hand. After this, Charlotte

participates in o-mikuji, the practice of obtaining a fortune

written on a slip of paper from a shrine and then tying the slip

to a tree. She smiles as she heads back to the train. The

juxtaposition of this vision of Japan and the one we are

presented with for most of the movie seems to suggest that the

Japan of the Orientalist imaginary is the “real” authentic Japan,

and the Japan of modernity is a silly attempt to mimic the West

by a people who do not understand it. From Mailer forward, the

platform of hipness contained an element of cultural consumption

based in an ethnic essentialism, and neoliberal global capitalism

has merely expanded the menu from which to choose cultures-as-

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products. This is not a restatement of Frank’s co-optation

theory, which would posit that there is some degradation of the

cultural practice’s authenticity in being practiced by someone

else, but an observation that reifies the relationship of a

consumer to an essentialist national imaginary.

The second cool Japan in the film is one suspiciously

similar to a vision of the United States. Bob and Charlotte go

out on the town with a Japanese man referred to as Charlie Brown,

who introduces them to other cool Japanese people. Some of them

surf, some of them smoke weed, and one even speaks French, the

only Japanese person Bob seems to have an enjoyable conversation

with in the whole film. But what finally marks these people as

authentic, as indie, as countercultural, is their appreciation

for the ultimate indie currency: music. LIT’s popular music

soundtrack serves not only to identify the film as indie but also

has a diegetic function in which it constructs the characters as

authentically indie. Bob and Charlotte accompany the Japanese

indie crew to a karaoke room, where we see pieces of four

performances. First is Charlie Brown doing the Sex Pistols’ “God

Save the Queen” with a faithful Johnny Rotten snarl, Charlie not

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only appreciates cool music, but he also gets it! Second is Bob

performing Elvis Costello’s “What’s So Funny ‘Bout Peace, Love,

and Understanding?” which, along with establishing Bob as having

tastes that skew slightly older than everyone else, provides a

metatextual claim to authenticity for those in the know: Bill

Murray was a Saturday Night Live cast member when Elvis Costello

appeared on the show and famously stopped playing “Less Than

Zero” after a few bars to begin playing “Radio Radio” instead, an

incident that saw him banned from SNL for ten years and “earned

Costello the respect and attention of a lot of music fans”

(Eakin). The final two are Charlotte and Bob performing The

Pretenders’ “Brass In Pocket” and Roxy Music’s “More Than This”

respectively. These perform the narrative function of giving

Charlotte a flirtatious moment with Bob and, like the other

songs, signify the movie’s status as a credible indie text.3.

“Bad” music is just as important. Rick James’ “Love Gun”

plays from a boom box while a few Japanese hotel patrons do water

3 While “Brass In Pocket” was a top 40 single at the time of its release, The Pretenders are nominally a punk band, with Chrissie Hynde appearing several times in Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s history of early punk rock Please Kill Me. “More Than This” was also a radio hit at the time of its release, but Roxy Music are fondly remembered as the early band of indie hero Brian Eno.

Jones 29

aerobics, meant as the soundtrack to what the audience is meant

to see as another bizarre ritual. James is the only non-white

musician to appear on the soundtrack, again reinforcing the

specific location of the indie platform in which “blackness

allows white masculinities to take up a ‘victim’ position, and

this in turn generates the fantastic identification with

blackness that is so central to white musical subcultures,” with

the caveat that James’ music does not fit the generic template

for indie rock at all, thus disqualifying him from inclusion

(Bannister35). The karaoke scene is later parodied in another

karaoke scene. Kelly, the uncool American actress, drunkenly and

poorly sings Carly Simon’s “Nobody Does It Better” to a near-

empty hotel bar. We have here a tableau which presents

everything considered uncool by the film: the too-sincere

Westerner, the inscrutable Japanese, and the theme song from a

James Bond film that stars the person who appears to be Lost In

Translation’s secret antagonist, Roger Moore. One minor episode in

the film revolves around the unnamed singer of the hotel bar’s

band, who perform soft-jazz renditions of songs like “Scarborough

Fair” that cause Charlotte and Bob to glance at each other

Jones 30

derisively from across the room. Bob eventually sleeps with the

singer, which, despite her being closer to his age and unmarried,

Charlotte seems to take as a personal offense; not only does he

spend personal time with someone else, he does it with someone

uncool.

The implicit assertion of the superiority of indie music and

associating with indie culture in Lost In Translation, far from

producing a countercultural outburst, recapitulates the

paradigmatic supremacy of Western capitalist cultural production

above all else. Matthew Bannister writes that “art rock, punk and

then indie all emulated high art ‘seriousness’, in line with

their increasingly exclusive appeal, and as a way of highlighting

their superiority to more commercial pop and rock” (Bannister

133). The claim to seriousness and thus the superiority of indie

rock above all others creates a very narrow, very demographically

exclusive conception of what can be legitimate art. In many

ways, modern capital has created a situation in which the

consumption of the products of a culture are the culture itself.

This can be seen through the evolution of the countercultural

figure from the hipster onward and the parallel evolution of

Jones 31

commodity’s relationship to culture. As it asserts that

superiority, it suggests that Japan not attempt to mimic it.

Instead, it should stay the imaginary historic picture of itself,

better for consumption. The conclusion here is not that cultural

choices are meaningless enterprises, but that the concept of a

counterculture is, rather than an antagonist to dominant culture,

merely a parallel system of capital.

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