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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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