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Hmm. It won "best comedy film" and Bill Murray "best comedy actor" at the Golden Globes. I think it won something for the script as well, but I only mention these as... comedy? I mean, it's funny, but I really wouldn't class it as a comedy, is all. I think one of the key things with regard to people misunderstanding this film, is that they expect a Bill Murray romantic comedy, which isn't really what this film is at all.
From the Guardian:
The anti-Japanese racism in Sofia Coppola's new film just isn't funny
Kiku Day
Saturday January 24, 2004
The Guardian
Film reviewers have hailed Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation as though it were the cinematic equivalent of the second coming. One paper even called it a masterpiece. Reading the praise, I couldn't help wondering not only whether I had watched a different movie, but whether the plaudits had come from a parallel universe of values. Lost in Translation is being promoted as a romantic comedy, but there is only one type of humour in the film that I could see: anti-Japanese racism, which is its very spine.
In the movie, Bill Murray plays the alienated Bob, a middle-aged actor shooting whisky commercials in Tokyo. He meets the equally alienated Charlotte, played by Scarlett Johansson, a Yale graduate accompanying her fashion photographer husband. The film is billed as exploring their disconnection from the country they are visiting and from their spouses, and how they find some comfort in one another through a series of restrained encounters.
But it's the way Japanese characters are represented that gives the game away. There is no scene where the Japanese are afforded a shred of dignity. The viewer is sledgehammered into laughing at these small, yellow people and their funny ways, desperately aping the western lifestyle without knowledge of its real meaning. It is telling that the longest vocal contribution any Japanese character makes is at a karaoke party, singing a few lines of the Sex Pistols' God Save the Queen.
The Japanese half of me is disturbed; the American half is too. The Japanese are one-dimensional and dehumanised in the movie, serving as an exotic background for Bob and Charlotte's story, like dirty wallpaper in a cheap hotel. How funny is it to put the 6ft-plus Bill Murray in an elevator with a number of overly small Japanese? To manufacture a joke, the film has Murray contorting himself to have a shower because its head isn't high enough for him - although he is supposed to be staying in a five-star hotel. It's made up simply to give western audiences another stereotype to laugh at. And haven't we had enough about the Japanese confusing rs and ls when they speak English?
While shoe-horning every possible caricature of modern Japan into her movie, Coppola is respectful of ancient Japan. It is depicted approvingly, though ancient traditions have very little to do with the contemporary Japanese. The good Japan, according to this director, is Buddhist monks chanting, ancient temples, flower arrangement; meanwhile she portrays the contemporary Japanese as ridiculous people who have lost contact with their own culture.
Coppola follows in the footsteps of a host of American artists who became very interested in the cultural appropriation of East Asia after the second world war. The likes of Lou Harrison, Steve Reich and John Cage took "eastern" philosophy, music and concepts to fit an image of the mysterious east, which is always related to ancient civilisations.
Those not conforming to this never have a voice of their own. They simply don't have a story to tell, or at least not one that interests "us". This is the ignoble tradition into which Lost in Translation fits. It is similar to the way white-dominated Hollywood used to depict African-Americans - as crooks, pimps, or lacking self control compared with white Americans.
The US is an empire, and from history we know that empires need to demonise others to perpetuate their own sense of superiority. Hollywood, so American mythology has it, is the factory of dreams. It is also the handmaiden to perpetuating the belief of the superiority of US cultural values over all others and, at times, to whitewashing history.
The caricatures play to longstanding American prejudice about Japan. The US forced Japan to open up for trade with other countries in 1864, ending 400 years of isolationist policy by the Tokugawa regime. The US interned thousands of Japanese during the second world war and dropped two nuclear bombs on the country. After Japan's defeat, America became more influential in East Asia; Japan was occupied, not only by the US forces but, more important, politically and culturally.
Some have hailed the film's subtlety, but to me it is reminiscent of the racist jokes about Asians and black people that comedians told in British clubs in the 1970s. Yet instead of being shunned, the film this week received eight Bafta nominations, and is a hot favourite for the Oscars.
Coppola's negative stereotyping of the Japanese makes her more the thinking person's Sylvester Stallone than a cinematic genius. Good luck to the director for getting away with it, but what on earth are people with some semblance of taste doing saluting it?
· Kiku Day is a musician specialising in shakuhachi (Japanese bamboo flute); she spent 10 years living in Japan
kday@mills.edu
I can't quite bring myself to even comment on this yet, but I thought it would be useful posted here. |
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