There is Nothing Lost in Translation - Todd McGowan
Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 24: 53-63, 2007 g
Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC a Routledge ISSN: 1050-9208 print / 1543-5326 online 8 Taylor & Francis Group DOL: 10.4080/10509200500486023
There is Nothing Lost in Translation
TODD McGOWAN
The idea that there is something “lost in translation” suggests that each language, each culture, has an excess appropriate to it, an excess irreducible to meaning (which, unlike this excess, can be translated). The excessive dimension of language or of any signifying system is what Roland Barthes misleadingly calls the “obtuse meaning’”-—a meaning that serves only to disrupt the system's process of meaning-making. We do not need the obtuse meaning in order to understand, and yet it accompanies every act of understanding. As Barthes puts it, “The obtuse meaning is not in the language-system (even that of symbols). Take away the obtuse meaning and communication and signification still remain, still circulate, still come through: without it, I can still state and read” (60). No translator can capture the excess of the obtuse meaning; the most the translator can hope to do is to reproduce in another language a similar relationship between meaning and excess.
The only problem with Barthes’s formulation lies in its suggestion that one can remove the excess from language. But in fact, the excessive dimension of language functions as what Lacan would call the objet petit a of the language: it stains every aspect of the language and yet cannot be isolated in any positive element because it occupies an extimate place. In this sense, the excess houses the enjoyment that inheres in any language: the jouissance expressed in the mere fact of speaking a certain way rather than in the context of what one says. Not only does this type of enjoyment exist in every language, it also exists in every culture and every subject. Every symbolic entity contains an excess that marks its mode of enjoyment and resists absolutely the act of translation.
The untranslatable nature of the linguistic or cultural excess seems especially evident (and comic) early on in Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003) when we see Bob Harris (Bill Murray) filming a whiskey commercial. In this scene, Coppola depicts Bob receiving instructions from the director of the commercial. The scene begins with a long set of instructions given by the director in Japanese. Because Bob doesn’t speak Japanese, he relies on a translator. The translator relays these lengthy instructions in a way that renders obvious the exclusion of something, as she says only “He wants you to turn, look in camera, OK2” Recognizing that the director has spoken many more words than this, Bob responds, “That’s all he said?” The translator confirms, “Yes, turn to camera.” This exchange appears to allude to the title of the film, to indicate that there is something “lost in translation.” This loss is underscored when Bob asks the director a brief question about which direction he should turn. In repeating his question in Japanese, the translator transforms the brief question into an extremely long one. In each exchange involving the translator and the director, the Japanese language seems to involve an excess that does not affect the meaning
Todd McGowan teaches film in the English Department at the University of Vermont. He is the author of The Feminine “No!,” The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment, and the co-editor of Lacan and Contemporary Film.
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itself and thus cannot be translated. This excess—Barthes’s obtuse meaning—is the point at which we can identify enjoyment within the language, and it is the point at which Bob, as someone who doesn’t speak the language, feels his complete alienation.
In the world of global capitalism, the excess embodying pure enjoyment has become the explicit focus of our attention. We live in a world of excess because we are constantly trying to tap into the enjoyment that this excess promises. The excessive nature of global capitalism becomes visible in the sequence depicting Bob’s arrival in Tokyo at the beginning of film. We initially see Bob looking out a car window at the buildings and lights of Tokyo, which are blurred but visible in the background. Coppola alternates a series of traveling shots of the brightly lit Tokyo nightscape and close-ups of Bob looking awestruck at this world of excess. Finally, Bob sees a huge image of himself sipping whiskey on a billboard advertisement. In this sequence of shots, Coppola depicts Tokyo as a city bubbling over with excess: the city overwhelms Bob because there are too many buildings, too many lights, and too many advertisements. One cannot possibly take it all in. As a visiting American, Bob experiences this excess of Tokyo as an untranslatable mode of enjoyment that he cannot access. But unlike almost all of the other Western characters in the film, Bob sees through the excess of Tokyo and of global capitalism in general. Bob and Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) are able to connect during their stay in Tokyo precisely because they each realize that the excess that bombards them throughout Tokyo conceals a fundamental absence. Their relationship has its basis in an embrace of the emptiness lying beneath the excess they encounter. Through her depiction of this relationship in Lost in Translation, Coppola authors a critique of the global capitalist culture of excess for its failure to be excessive enough, for its failure to provide enjoyment, as she locates enjoyment in absence rather than in plenitude.
The culture of excess—that is, the culture of global capitalism—succeeds in seducing subjects into its logic through the promise of plenitude. Global capitalism offers subjects a plenitude of choices, images, and objects. Each commodity contains within it the promise of the ultimate enjoyment, and each commodity must constantly betray this promise in order to sustain the subject in the position of the consumer. The betrayal is not contingent or empirical but necessary and systematic, insofar as it works to maintain the structural relationship between the commodity and the consumer. The consumer who attains satisfaction is no longer desperate for the next commodity. As a result, the commodity must perpetually betray the global capitalist consumer, and yet this consumer returns to the next commodity seeking again the ultimate enjoyment that it did not find in the previous one. In this way, the subject who invests her/himself in plenitude and the idea that plenitude will provide the ultimate enjoyment inserts her/himself perfectly into the functioning of global capitalism and also dooms her/himself to an inevitable chronic dissatisfaction.
The film shows the prevalence of plenitude and the investment in it not only through images of the prevalence of the commodity in Tokyo, but also in the relationship that Bob and Charlotte each have with their spouses. Bob’s spouse maintains contact with Bob through phone calls, fax messages, and packages, and the majority of these contacts concern the choice of a carpet shade for his office in their home. She even goes so far as to send different swatches (via FedEx) to Bob while he is in Tokyo in order to allow him to choose a color. This absurd gesture indicates the extent of her investment in the idea of maxiraum choice, as well as that of instantaneous and total communication. Bob, however, can muster no enthusiasm for choosing from among the different colors because he recognizes that the choice is meaningless, that no matter which choice he makes, he will not discover the enjoyment that the choices initially appear to promise. Like the cityscape of Tokyo, the carpet samples reveal the duplicity of plenitude. We have a multitude of options, but this
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“freedom” depends on the very banality of the decision. Bob recognizes that one cannot discover enjoyment along this path. He recognizes, at least implicitly, that enjoyment is organized around what one doesn’t have rather than around what one does have.
Charlotte’s relationship with her spouse John is equally vexed and equally revelatory. In contrast to Charlotte, John feels no dissatisfaction in his experience of excess. For John, Tokyo represents an opportunity for the kind of total enjoyment that he didn’t have at home. He embraces aspects of the culture-—he learns a greeting in Japanese and wears Japanese clothes—because they allow him to immerse himself in the exotic. What is most significant, however, is John’s very reason for being in Japan. He is there to shoot pictures of a rock band that came to Japan in search of an exotic setting in which to be photographed. According to this vision of Japan, it is the site of mysterious plenitude in which Westerners can find the ultimate enjoyment. When she witnesses John’s response to Japan, Charlotte complains that she no longer recognizes the person she married. As is the case with Bob’s spouse in a different context, John accepts fully the lure of plenitude, and by exposing his banality, Coppola exposes the emptiness of plenitude itself.
Absence, not excess, is the foundation of language, culture, and subjectivity, and excess emerges as a response to this absence, as an attempt to mitigate its trauma. Language emerges through what Lacan calls “creation ex nihilo,” by carving out an emptiness at the heart of the real that it then attempts to fill. The signifier is thus like a vase or a jug—its center or essence is not its material substance but the hole in the middle. The signifier suggests that something is missing in the real, that an absence exists requiring the content that the signifier will provide. As Lacan puts it, “the fashioning of the signifier and the introduction of a gap or a hole in the real is identical” (121). That is to say, we have a world of signification only on the basis of an originary positing of an empty space through the act of the signifier. Without this prior emptiness, we would lack the very space for signification (and culture) to emerge; the real would remain self-enclosed and impenetrable. It is in this sense that Heidegger claims, “Only on the ground of the original revelation of the nothing can human existence approach and penetrate beings” (105). The “revelation of the nothing” or of the void opens up the world to the subject. Every culture has its basis in this originary emptiness, but it becomes more difficult to see in another culture due to an illusion of perspective: to see the emptiness in the other culture would deprive us of our own image of the ultimate enjoyment that we posit there.
Absence provides the only mode of enjoyment possible for subjects, and this is what Bob and Charlotte jointly recognize in Lost in Translation. That is to say, when we enjoy, we are always enjoying what Lacan calls the objet petit a, the privileged object, in its absence rather than in its presence. This object only comes to exist in the act of our losing it. As Richard Boothby explains,
The object is ceded not in order to preserve an already formed desire but, in the most radical sense, desire originates precisely in such ceding. The object is thrust away so that it can be desired, it is lost so that it can be found for the first time. Desire paradoxically comes into being in and through its limitation, the upsurge of desire is thus coincident with its inhibition. (247)
We can only enjoy the absence of the object because absence produces the object’s desirability, and the object remains enjoyable only insofar as it remains absent. The object that we would enjoy, as Lacan puts it in his Seminar V, is an object “which is never there, which is always situated elsewhere, which is always something else” (19, my translation).
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Once the object becomes present and accessible, it ceases to be the objet petit a and becomes Just another ordinary object.
This means that our enjoyment of any object will never be complete; we will never fully have the object that we enjoy. Unlike the other characters in Lost in Translation, both Bob and Charlotte recognize the necessary absence of the object and the relationship between this absence and their own enjoyment. This is a traumatic recognition insofar as it implies the impossibility of a total enjoyment that we nonetheless have the ability to imagine. They understand that they can imagine an enjoyment they will never experience. But by recognizing that they must enjoy through absence, Bob and Charlotte are able to embrace their enjoyment rather than continue to believe that it lies elsewhere. This recognition also allows them to break free from the culture of excess that seduces the other characters in the film. Throughout Lost in Translation, Coppola highlights the contemporary culture of excess, but she edits the film so as to call into question the excess depicted in the filmic image. Rather than following scenes through to their denouement, she abridges them and forces the spectator to experience amid the excess of the image. In this sense, she uses the form of the film in two opposing directions in order to create a film that exposes the global capitalist culture of excess and provides an alternative conception of enjoyment through absence.
Coppola’s critique of the ideology of plenitude demands that she challenge the inherent plenitude that derives from the cinematic experience itself. The cinema bombards the spectator with a plenitude of images and sounds. As Christian Metz puts it in The Imaginary Signifier, “The unique position of the cinema lies in this dual character of its signifier: unaccustomed perceptual wealth but at the same time stamped with unreality to an unusual degree, and from the very outset” (45) As a result of the “unaccustomed perceptual wealth” that the cinema provides, the spectator gains a sense of transcending all limitation. According to Jean Mitry, “in the cinema, I am both inside and outside the action, inside the space and outside it. With the power of ubiquity, I am everywhere and nowhere” (80, his emphasis). The cinema inserts the spectator into an world of images and sounds but at the same time allows the spectator to exist outside this world. This excessive presence offers almost no space for the experience of absence,
When cinema does employ absence, absence tends to function ina way that furthers the illusion of total presence. That is to say, cinema deploys absence only in order to contain it within its world of total presence. As Stephen Heath claims, “In its movement, its framing, its cuts, its intermittences, the film ceaselessly poses an absence, a lack, which is ceaselessly recaptured for [...] the film, that process binding the spectator as subject in the realization of the film’s space” (52). For Heath, cinema inherently tends to recuperate the absence that it proffers in order to pacify the threat that absence represents to its regime of plenitude. The unwavering plenitude of the cinematic experience destroys any momentary emergence of absence. In Lost in Translation, however, Coppola attempts to affirm the priority of absence even at the point of the greatest plenitude. In doing so, she constantly undercuts the iusion of plenitude offered by the cinematic signifier itself.
The aesthetic that Coppola constructs in Lost in Translation suggests an association of enjoyment with absence—an association that has become counterintuitive for subjects of global capitalism. Though the film foregrounds the excess of global capitalist culture, it depicts this excess in such a way that it no longer seems excessive. That is to say, Coppola’s aesthetic at once highlights excess and associates this excess with absence. This occurs most demonstrably through Coppola’s use of focus in the film. She aimost entirely eschews deep
focus shots in the film, especially when she shoots the excesses of the Tokyo cityscape. This cityscape often appears as the blurry background to a conversation taking place in focus
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close to the camera. This aesthetic choice has the effect of emphasizing the limitations of the cinematic experience, drawing attention to what we can’t see rather than what we can. In this way, Coppola renders the very excess that she depicts as an absence. She does this through the narrative structure that she constructs in the film as well.
Though the film depicts the romance that develops between Bob and Charlotte, Coppola stresses what doesn’t happen between the two of them more than what does. More than 30 minutes of the film go by before Bob and Charlotte even speak to each other. Their first meeting in a Tokyo hotel elevator involves just a smile without any conversation. The second encounter in the hotel bar also takes place without words, as Charlotte orders a drink for Bob after the two make eye contact. Rather than being a prelude to further interaction, this gesture functions as an end in itself and facilitates no additional contact in this scene. But what is most significant about this scene is what each character sees in the other: Charlotte buys Bob a drink because she sees in him the same alienation that she feels, In these first two scenes of interaction between Bob and Charlotte, we see much less contact than we would expect in the typical film depicting a budding relationship. Instead of connecting through contact and proximity, they seem to connect at a distance.
This emphasis on the role of absence becomes increasingly apparent as they begin to converse with each other. Their scenes together always end abruptly, leaving us with a sense that something is missing that should be taking place. In each of their scenes together, Coppola’s editing forces us to feel the absence of something that would complete the scene. She doesn’t allow the scenes to build to a denouement but cuts them off without even the hint of a climactic moment. After a night out in Tokyo, for instance, Bob carries Charlotte back to her hotel room. This creates the expectation of an explicitly romantic or sexual moment, but Bob simply deposits Charlotte in her bed and retums to his room. Later in the film, they spend a late evening drinking and watching old movies while lying together on the bed in Bob’s hotel room. This scene again creates romantic expectations, especially through the way that Coppola shoots it. We see a shot/reverse shot sequence of Bob and Charlotte on the bed, and then Coppola cuts to a shot looking down from above at the two of them lying on the bed. We see Charlotte curled up facing Bob, who is lying on his back. Bob says to Charlotte, “You’re not hopeless,” and immediately after this remark the scene ends with a fade to black. What is startling about this scene is not just the absence of any overtly sexual moment, but more the absence of any climax whatsoever. Like each of the scenes depicting the relationship between Bob and Charlotte, it seems to end in midstream rather than building to a conclusion. That is, in the scenes showing Bob and Charlotte getting to know each other, nothing happens—no passionate embrace, no telling revelation, no moment of recognition. As a result, these scenes create the sense in the spectator that something is missing. Coppola constructs each scene of interaction between Bob and Charlotte in order to emphasize in a filmic way the fundamental absence—and the embrace of absence—that animates their character, thereby countering the inherent plenitude of the filmic image.
When Bob sings a karaoke song on his first night out with Charlotte, the film offers a straightforward expression within the diegesis of the idea propelling the film as a whole. He sings Roxy Music’s “More Than This,” a song that formally recreates the structure of the film in which we hear it. Like Lost in Translation itself, the song suggests initially that an excess exists—that there is something “more than this.” It does this through the title and through the arrangement of the lyrics. One hears the words “more than this” before hearing “there is nothing... more than this.” After proffering the idea of an excess, of something “more than this,” the song then claims that the only thing more than this is nothing. In this way, the song that Bob sings karaoke style affirms the nothingness that excess hides.
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By having Bob sing this particular song, Coppola shows directly the privileged role that nothingness plays in the film and in Bob and Charlotte’s relationship.
Bob and Charlotte connect like they do because they see absence where others sees excessive presence. When, for instance, Bob’s employer sends a woman who calls herself a “premium fantasy” to his hotel room, Bob expresses dismay rather than simply enjoying himself. And Charlotte is likewise unable to enjoy the Tokyo nightlife, unlike her husband and his friends. For Bob and Charlotte, the excesses of Tokyo produce insomnia rather than enjoyment. Through her depiction of their response, Coppola explodes the notion that Tokyo—and Japanese culture in general—is bubbling over with enjoyment. Even the scene in a strip club, because we experience it through Bob and Charlotte, connotes boredom rather than extreme enjoyment. The Tokyo of the film—the Tokyo of Bob and Charlotte—is one beset by a fundamental emptiness at the heart of its excesses. It is the focus on the role of absence in Tokyo that saves Lost in Translation from the charge of racism that we might at first be tempted to level at the film. In fact, by emphasizing the absence that lurks beneath every cultural excess, Coppola attempts to undermine the psychic position that informs racism.
The belief that a cultural excess really is excessive—that it contains a plenitude rather than an absence—lies at the basis of the racist response to the other culture. When one sees this excess in the other, one sees the other enjoying in an exclusive way, in a way that seems unapproachable. As Lacan notes in the Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, “Such is true envy-—the envy that makes the subject pale before the image of a completeness closed upon itself, before the idea that the objet a, the separated a from which he is hanging, may be for another the possession that gives satisfaction.” (116). The envy of the other’s excessive enjoyment propels a racist sensibility. On the one hand, Coppola’s film confronts us with an image of the excesses of Tokyo and of Japanese culture, and in this sense it promotes a racist interpretation of Japanese life. For instance, the film encourages us to laugh at-—and perhaps even recoil from—the excessive entertainment, gestures, and sexuality that we see in Tokyo throughout the film. But at the same time, Lost in Translation exposes the absence at the heart of each of these excesses.
In this sense, Lost in Translation both entices its audience toward a racist reaction and reveals the fundamental illusion on which this reaction bases itself. The film bombards us with the image of Japanese excess and thus encourages us to associate a mysterious enjoyment with Japanese life and even with the Japanese language. This is undoubtedly why the film provoked the “Lost-in-Racism” campaign that encouraged Academy Award voters not to vote for the film in any category. If the film had simply accepted the image of Japanese excess that it proffers, one could wholeheartedly buy into this campaign. But the image of Japanese excess is precisely what the film explodes through its depiction of Bob and Charlotte’s response to Japan. After luring the spectator into an association of Japan with excessive enjoyment, Lost in Translation subsequently reveals that this mysterious enjoyment does not exist. In other words, the charge that the film is not interested in real Japanese culture is precisely the point, which is what Peter Brunette’s representative critique of the film misses. He says,
the characters take cab rides through the brightly-lighted Ginza area of Tokyo, where a rainbow of neon plays on their faces, go to nightclubs and hang out with strange people, stare respectfully at Buddhist ceremonies, watch a flower-arranging class, go golfing at the foot of Mt. Fuji, and never, ever get even one millimeter below the surface of this apparently impenetrable Other and these Kodak moments. (“Sophia Coppola’s Overly Subtle”)
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The film’s failure to penetrate below the surface of the Japanese Other is at once its great success. For Coppola, the Other does not house a wealth of strange or even exotic content—it is not a mystery to be solved—but is simply a void. Seeing a mystery in the place of this void is the racist response to the Other that Coppola’s film challenges us to move beyond.
Even the most apparently racist moments in the film—the moments that undoubtedly inspired the “Lost-in-Racism” campaign—follow this logic. For instance, at one point Charlotte asks Bob, “Why do they switch the r’s and the I’s here?” Her very posing of this question suggests a mystery in the Other to be probed, a secret enjoyment in the Other’s way of speaking. But Bob’s answer explodes this entire line of thought. He tells Charlotte, “For yucks, you know, just to mix it up. They have to amuse themselves because we're not making them laugh.” Here, Coppola has Bob make clear the Jack of mystery in the Japanese pronunciation of English. On the one hand, his statement foregrounds the contingency of this pronunciation—it has no special meaning at all—but on the other, the irony in the statement undermines the question itself, revealing its wrongheaded premise concerning the status of the enjoying Other.
Charlotte’s response registers Bob’s point, as she returns the conversation to their enjoyment and away from that of Japanese enjoyment. She says, “Let’s never come here again because it would never be as much fun.” This statement brings their relationship back to the terrain of enjoyment in absence—‘“Let’s never come here again’”—rather than in plenitude—switching the r’s and |’s. During this dialogue, Coppola uses the camera to underline the shift, When Charlotte asks her initial question, Coppola pans across the window of the hotel room. We see the Tokyo nightscape in focus and the reflection of Bob and Charlotte on the hotel bed out of focus. After Bob undermines the idea of a mystery in Japanese pronunciation, Coppola shifts the focus: the nightscape moves out of focus, and the reflection of Bob and Charlotte moves into focus. This change alerts us to a return to a mode of relating to the Other as absence. As Tokyo moves out of focus, the film lets us know, paradoxically, that the characters are again relating to it properly. Coppola’s rejection of a deep focus shot in this scene allows us to relate to the Other as an absence and see beyond the illusion of Other’s plenitude. There is, according to the logic of the film, nothing to see deep within the Other.
Rather than showing a mysterious essence at the heart of Japanese society, Coppola shows American culture itself. That is to say, the film depicts the excess that bursts forth in Japan as the adoption of American culture. This is what the opening scene of Bob looking out at the Tokyo nightscape reveals: he seems awestruck by the excesses of this foreign nightscape, and then he sees the huge image of himself on a billboard advertisement at the heart of the excess. Later, we see Bob and Charlotte running through the Tokyo nightscape. Coppola shoots them in focus, but leaves the background of Tokyo that they run through out of focus. The neon lights of the city are visible, but not distinct. However, when Bob and Charlotte encounter a huge moving billboard of Bob’s face, the billboard is in focus. The billboard of Bob is the only part of the excess of Tokyo that Coppola shoots in focus in this scene, and this emphasizes non-exotic and non-mysterious nature of the Other that Bob and Charlotte find in Tokyo. It is in this sense that the cultural excess disguises an absence. Instead of excessive difference, there is an absence of difference.
Lost in Translation differs from the standard Hollywood film about Western characters discovering themselves in the East because of this depiction of Tokyo and Japanese culture. For most films of this type, from Peter Weir’s The Year of Living Dangerously (1982) to John Boorman’s Beyond Rangoon (1995) to Edward Zwick’s The Last Samurai (2003), the East holds a secret kernel of jouissance that allows the wayward Westerner to find
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her/himself anew.'In each case, the film’s exploration of the Eastern world serves as a backdrop for the development of Western character. To take just the most recent example, Nathan Algren (Tom Cruise) begins. The Last Samurai as a drunken, tired soldier, and through :his encounter with Katsumoto (Ken Watanabe) and the Samurai ethos, he finds renewal and a new reason for living. Lost in Translation counters this type of film not in the way. that we would expect. Namely, it does not commit itself more truly to the exploration of the mystery of Japanese culture for its own sake. It does not, in short, attempt to depict the “authentic Japan.”
Even when Charlotte goes to a Buddhist temple—a location that, unlike downtown Tokyo, we might associate with authentic Japanese culture—she doesn’t discover anything substantive but reports, “I didn’t feel anything.” Far from indicating the failure of the: film. to go deep enough into Japanese culture, Charlotte’s failure to feel anything demonstrates the film’s refusal to treat Japan in an Orientalist manner. The Orientalist film always fetishizes the mystery of the East that the film then interprets. As Edward Said recounts in his description.of the Orientalist scholar, “The relation between Orientalist and, Orient was essentially hermeneutical: standing before a distant, barely intelligible civilization or cultural monument, the Orientalist scholar reduced the obscurity by translating, sympathetically portraying, inwardly grasping the hard-to-reach object” (222). The Orientalist film functions in the same way, constructing the East as a mystery to be solved..But Lost in Translation, in contrast, reveals the emptiness of this mystery: there is no secret hidden at the heart of Japanese culture; its excess does not embody a strange mode of enjoyment but instead represents a response to a determining emptiness: Rather than reducing a foreign culture to a self-help method, Coppola’s film depicts an East ‘where: the: subjects are as split and barred to themselves as subjects in American culture 0. a
. Where Nathan Algren finds renewal, Bob and Charlotte find a void. Their recognition of the emptiness of the culture they exist in forces them to recognize the void that is their own subjectivity. Neither character gains any positive content from the events we see depicted in the film; instead, the encounter with Tokyo causes both characters to recognize the void that defines their existence. Instead of finding a self replete with new content in Japan, Bob and Charlotte discover an absence of content. Tokyo reveals to them their own fundamental emptiness. This further sets Lost in Translation apart from the typical Hollywood films that immerse Western characters in an Eastern setting where they find a hidden or emergent—and thus authentic—self. Bob and Charlotte find the clichéd vapidity of global capitalist culture empty, yet they have no alternative in which they might find meaning...
.. What makes Bob and Charlotte unique as characters—and what stands out about Lost in Translation as a film—is that they do not fill the void of subjectivity with some new content. In psychoanalytic terms, they don’t abandon their subjectivity for the sake of any ego identifications. None of the experiences that we see Bob and Charlotte have together in Tokyo offers them an identity that they might organize their lives around. Instead, these experiences continually uproot any sense of identity and expose the emptiness of subjectivity itself.
The relationship between Bob and Charlotte remains unconsummated because it centers around absence rather than presence. Both of them unconsciously recognize, as subjects.in love seldom do, that to have sex would not bring them closer or create an ultimate enjoyment that they are now lacking. Just as they jointly grasp the absence at the heart of the excesses of Tokyo, they grasp the absence at the heart of their relationship. They understand, in short, that their longing for each other is already a way of enjoying
we em
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each other and that there is no more complete mode of enjoyment. The full presence of the other as a sexual partner would not allow either to have the other as objet petit a.
Toward the end of the film, Bob seems to betray his relationship to Charlotte when he has sex with the singer (Catherine Lambert) from the band playing in the hotel lobby. Bob is unable to endure Charlotte’s absence for a single night and opts for the presence of the singer as a substitute. We see Bob experience a feeling of guilt when he wakes up and discovers that the singer has spent the night in his hotel room. His embarrassment when Charlotte comes to the door and discovers the woman’s presence further underlines the sense of betrayal that the act produces. However, this act remains strictly within the ethic of absence that structures the relationship between Charlotte and Bob. By. having sex with the singer, rather than betraying Charlotte, Bob ‘ensures that rheir relationship will remain unconsummated. That is, Bob’s sex act with the singer allows his relationship with Charlotte to continue on the same terms precisely at the moment when sex was beginning to become a possibility in the latter relationship. As a result, the relationship with Charlotte will continue to revolve around their shared recognition of absence—the Fecognition that they are closest precisely when they lose each other.
What’s more, Coppola shoots Bob’s liaison with the singer in a way which emphasizes that absence remains central despite the singer’s undeniable presence. At the beginning of this sequence, we see Bob drinking in the hotel bar as the singer approaches him and says, “Hi.” After just this one word and no other interaction, Coppola cuts immediately from this shot to a shot looking down on Bob lying in bed in his hotel room. This cut excludes not only the sex act itself but also the entire seduction. When we see Bob wake up, neither he nor we as spectators are quite sure if he has actually had sex. We see him rise and look around, and then the film cuts to a shot of a table with plates and a flower on it. The next cut again shows Bob looking around, followed by a shot of a champagne bottle and two glasses. As we see this, Coppola overlaps the voice of the singer from the bathroom, which makes clear that she has spent the night with Bob. Coppola edits together Bob’s encounter with the singer by omitting the key events in order to stress its place within the ethos of absence that dominates the film and the relationship between Bob and Charlotte. By “cheating” on Charlotte with the singer, Bob preserves the foundation of their relationship.
In keeping with the nature of Bob and Charlotte’s relationship, it is appropriate that the scene depicting its end would be the most pivotal. Bob and Charlotte initially say “goodbye” in the hotel lobby before Bob rides to the airport. Their parting, like their relationship itself, involves an absence of words. After all they have experienced together, Charlotte simply says “goodbye,” even when Bob asks her if she will at least wish him a good flight..The parting leaves us as spectators with a sense that something more must be said about the relationship.
In this sense, it seems like the perfect conclusion. If the film ended at.this point, the emphasis on absence would still exist, but the absence itself would remain outside of the filmic image. Thus, the film would suggest that the role of absence in this relationship indicates its failure as a relationship; we could still dream of a “successful” relationship that could overcome absence. It is for this reason that Coppola adds an additional goodbye scene, in which absence becomes foregrounded as foundational for the relationship. The scene that follows allows Coppola to include absence within the mise-en-scéne of the film; here, absence becomes present.
As he is riding to the airport, we see Bob looking out the car window as he rolls the
window down. The next shot shows Charlotte walking away from the camerainacrowd.of |.” people. Bob then leaves the car to follow Charlotte. When he catches up to her, they appear».
in a long shot from the side as they are looking at each other face to face. Next, we see Bob. =
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embracing Charlotte-in a closer shot from behind her, followed by a close-up of Charlotte’s face. During this close-up, we see and hear Bob begin to speak, but the content of his speech remains inaudible. The subsequent close-up of Bob speaking into Charlotte’s ear allows us again to see but not hear his speech. When the camera cuts back to a close-up of Charlotte’s face; we'can finally hear Bob end his speech with “OK?” and Charlotte responds “OK.”
‘The inaudibility of Bob’s speech in this scene does not mean that a secret exists between Bob and Charlotte that we as spectators cannot access. The point is not that we can’t hear what Bob. communicates but that he communicates what can’t be heard. That is to say, Coppola shoots the scene in this way—not allowing us to hear what Bob says—in order to emphasize the unimportance of the content of his speech. Rather than try to probe the mystery of the exchange between Bob and Charlotte, we should take the absence itself as signifying. What Bob says is nothing to Charlotte, just as it is nothing to us as spectators, and this nothing is the traumatic Real at the heart of their relationship—the trauma of our constitutive incompleteness itself. In speaking nothing, Bob articulates and makes explicit the'shared recognition that has provided the basis for the relationship throughout the film. When we base.a relationship on this nothing—as the film suggests that we should-——we relate to the other, to put it in the language of Walter Davis, “without guarantees” and in a way that grasps the necessarily displaced nature of our own enjoyment.
The traumatic effect of this articulation reverberates in the form of the film after we see Bob speak. After the close-up of Charlotte’s face as she acknowledges Bob’s speech, Coppola cuts to a long shot of Bob and Charlotte embracing. In a series of close-ups, we see them kiss. The cuts here occur in rapid succession and violate the 180 degree rule, causing Charlotte’s head to move from-one side of the image to the other and thereby causing us to lose*our bearings as ‘spectators. Coppola violates the 180 degree rule here in order to indicate the traumatic power of Bob’s revelation. Because we see Bob speak but can’t hear what he says, we know that we are missing something, but we don’t know what it is. The film challenges us to see this act of missing as itself an act of finding. At this moment, Bob and Charlotte come as close as one'can come to the other’s objet petit a through the act of missing it, just as we experience the film’s objet petit a when we see but cannot hear Bob’s revelation. The act of missing the object—experiencing the object in its absence rather than its presence—provides the moment at which one most authentically knows the objet petit a. The absence of this object is traumatic both for Bob and Charlotte and for us as viewers, but this traumatic experience is at once an experience of enjoyment in the Real. To try to discern what Bob actually says or to speculate about it is an attempt to flee from the traumatic enjoyment.of the objet petit a itself, to transform this impossible object into an ordinary one. :
Whereas most Hollywood romances end with an image of the plenitude of the ultimate enjoyment embodied in the successful romantic couple, Lost in Translation concludes with an image of absence and failure—the absence of what Bob says to Charlotte. In doing so, the film suggests that the relationship organized around absence actually provides a mode of enjoyment far more profound than the relationship dedicated to presence and plenitude. As Lost in Translation shows throughout, excess inevitably promises more than it can deliver, and consequently, the only enjoyment that it provides for us is imaginary. When we see images of excess, we imagine that they carry the ultimate enjoyment, but this enjoyment only exists insofar as it remains out of reach in the image. Every attempt to realize it creates dissatisfaction, The enjoyment of absence, however, is ani enjoyment in the Real, and as a result, itdelivers more than it promises. It is this mode of enjoyment that Lost in Translation enjoins us to. commit ourselves to.
Be Bi
Hi Hi
Li
Lost in Translation 63
Works Cited
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Heath, Stephen. Questions of Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1981.
Heidegger, Martin. “What Is Metaphysics?” Trans. David Farrell Krell. Basic Writings. Ed. David Farrell Krell. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1977: 92-112.
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Trans. Dennis Porter. New York: Norton, 1992.
Metz, Christian. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982.
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Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1978.
