Great Moments in Misprision; or, Why I always thought Lost in Translation was an anti-racist film, not the other way around.

I'm having one of those moments in which I wonder whether I was watching the same movie everyone else was.  At Racialicious, Thea Lim discusses Complex Magazine's list of The 50 Most Racist Movies You Didn't Know Were Racist, and while the majority of the list disappoints (on account of me already knowing the overtly racist films listed were racist), some of the entries simply baffle me.  Foremost among them is Bulworth, Warren Beatty's film about the centrist penchant to use blacks as electoral pawns—Bulworth won't die in defense of his principles, but he will commit suicide for a lobbyist payday, at least until he realizes that black people are really people, at which point American political logic demands he be assassinated—but not far behind is Sopphia Coppola's Lost in Translation, which Lim glosses thus:

[T]he whole point of the movie disgusts me. As in, the nauseatingly self-indulgent focus on the deep, brooding subjectivity of two Anglo-Americans, against a backdrop of depthless Japanese people who, with their hilariously absurd subcultures, bizarre language and affinity for bowing, are all exactly the same.

Lim then quotes a section about self-involved white cluelessness from Restructure!:

[W]hat disgusts me about Lost in Translation is that it centers on the lives of white people in a country where they are the minority, and it suggests that the social isolation that comes from being a minority is something that could only happen to white people.

I'm not sure why either writer assumes that the experience Coppola describes in the film is something that can only happen to white people, because to me, the film seems to do the exact opposite: it demonstrates that white Americans are emotionally and intellectually unprepared to understand the non-majoritarian social experience.  So maybe it does describe an experience that can only happen to white people—but only because white people are alone in being unable to recognize their privilege for what it is.  Neither Bill Murray's "Bob" nor Scarlett Johansson's "Charlotte" have given a moment's thought to the plight of non-whites in American society, so the events of the film represent their first encounter with any form of double-consciousness—even one in which their whiteness still affords them privileged social stature.

The film begins with caricature and absurdity because these characters are incapable of understanding Japanese society, or their roles as others in that society understand them to be; e.g. Bob is baffled by the arrival of an escort because he is unfamiliar with the sexism endemic in traditional Japanese business culture.  Charlotte knows one of her roles—that of the tourist in exotic Japan—and indulges in some Orientalist fare, visiting a temple to watch some monks chant.  Their relationship, such as it is, is only possible in an environment in which their previously stable and unquestioned identities have dissolved in the face of their own otherness.  I took this to be a criticism of American insularity and arrogance, not an assertion of its eternal provenance.

To an American audience, it may seem as if the Japanese in the film are the foreigners; but from the Japanese perspective, the film registers as a story of two unmoored Americans bumbling through a culture they can't understand on its own terms.  Unlike most films in which the white interlopers have adventures with the natives, Lost in Translation never demands its audience believe that white culture is inherently superior.  Bob and Charlotte are not bequeathed the preternatural ingenuity or Rooseveltian ruggedness so common among American characters abroad; they are, in fact, technologically illiterate representatives of an ostensibly superior culture who, in a reversal of the minstral trope, sing the songs of their ancestral homeland, England, from whence Brian Ferry and Roxy Music came.

All of which is only to say, I never realize how contrarian my reading of the film was until I read the Racialicious and Restructured! posts, because I had always thought Lost in Translation a remarkable feat: for white audiences, it only works as a film if they force themselves to imagine a subject position in which they are foreign but not superior—a situation in which white characters are not there to civilize noble savages or ravage native cultures with tongues, guns, or both.  These are privileged white people who are, to quote "More Than This," "hopefully learning" that their identities are contingent upon a social structure and that that social structure is different, but not superior, to the one in which they currently find themselves.  For non-white audiences, I can understand why this revelation would feel underwhelming; after all, Bob and Charlotte are learning late in life what they've known, exquisitely, for the entirety of theirs.

The Japanese in the film are depthless, but only in the first act—as the Americans learn more about Japanese culture, these characters become slightly less inscrutible.  Were this the sort of film in which the white anthropologists almost instantly acquire intimate knowledge of the primitive culture in which they're immersed, the film would have closed with scenes of Bob and Charlotte conversing with three-dimensional characters in fluent Japanese; but because the pair's otherness and ignorance is so great, it ends with Japanese characters who are only marginally rounder than they were when it began.  Put differently: if we were to impose this narrative onto, say, The Last Samuri, Tom Cruise would have arrived in Japan, been thoroughly confused by what he found, then fled the country feeling alienated and unconvinced of his cultural superiority.

Which, I think, would have been a good thing.  In all seriousness, how many movies subvert white America's innate sense of superiority on the sly?

Comments

[Karl Steel]

huh. I've been avoiding Lost in Translation since, well, it came out. Now I might see it.

I don't have the energy to do your treatment on any of the others...but, you're right: it's pretty clumsy, and it'd be better if it weren't mostly limited to such Hollywood schlock. As for Sam Fuller's White Dog? I don't remember it being racist; just very very earnest. The explanation on the site doesn't convince me otherwise. Hell, if White Dog is racist, there's a better case to be made for Guess Who's Coming To Dinner, whose message seems to be that class trumps all. Great!

(the treatment of Scarface is pretty clumsy too. Sure, it's a ridiculous stereotype; on the other hand, it's not as though ethnic minorities have exactly been turned off by the film...ignoring the film's cultural effect is a pretty hamfisted way to read)

[Ahistoricality]

What an odd collection that is: there are some interesting choices, but most of it is low-hanging fruit and, like Lost in Translation, satires and commentaries on race the effectiveness they reject more or less out of hand.

[Luther Blissett]

I'm so sick of the *Lost in Translation* debate. Minority/majority make so sense as critical terms when it comes to 2000-era Japan/American relations. The Japanese are FAR better off, economically, than the Americans. It's only a creepy cultural bigotry that could possibly see the economic victors of capitalism -- the Japanese -- as some oppressed native culture.

Instead, what we really see in the movie is a washed up actor whose only role is a campy bone thrown to him by his Japanese bosses. And a woman who agrees to go to Japan so her husband can photograph the cultural elite in/of Japan.

And let's not be gentle: other cultures' customs are weird. If they weren't, then they couldn't be described as other cultures. If this were a film about Japanese tourists in a weird American environment -- like, say, *Mystery Train* -- no one would complain.

[tomemos]

I knew the Lost in Translation conversations weren't for me when someone objected to Johannson's character attending a (Japanese) wedding for people she didn't know and finding it poignant. Because, you see, when a foreign culture causes a white person to reflect on their own situation, that is automatically a case of colonization and cultural appropriation, and the foreign culture is necessarily being treated disrespectfully, as a shallow prop. Cripes, what lazy thinking.

The only part of that movie that I think was genuinely racist was the scene with the prostitute, which is the only part where the Japanese are being made fun of for being stereotypically Japanese: being prostitutes (or sending prostitutes to your room), mixing up r's and l's, etc.

As for the rest of the list, it unfortunately reminds me why I spend so little time in the anti-racist and anti-sexist blogospheres. Plenty of good work being done there, no question, but stuff like this list—where we put The Air Up There in the stocks one more time to jeer and spit at, just in case anyone forgot how bad it was (that movie is more than fifteen years old! Has anyone rented it since the Clinton administration?)—are so unbelievably lazy and smug that the thought of someone actually spending a few hours typing it all out makes me feel very, very tired.

[Endy]

By using the term "reverse racism" to describe something racially offensive to whites and in the process denying the existence of "reverse racism," Ms. Lim reveals that her conception of racism depends on a universal whites vs. non-whites frame rather than a situational majority vs. minority frame or situational enfranchised caste vs. disenfranchised caste frame.
Your arguments about Lost in Translation have no standing with her, because in her understanding whites are the most enfranchised people in any setting, whereas your opinion is based on the idea that there are places in which white people are 'the wrong kind of people.' For Thea Lim to work with your argument she would first have to allow the existence of a paradoxical place where white people are literally not white.
Of course my reading is probably too cruel, a childish reaction to the generally infuriating nature of the original Complex Magazine feature, but Thea Lim honestly strikes me as someone emotionally and intellectually unprepared to understand the non-minoritarian social experience.

[Karl Steel]

Your arguments about Lost in Translation have no standing with her
? has she already responded?

[Chuck]

I couldn't get through the list after I saw her list Bottle Rocket at #49. Yeah, Inez the docile Latina maid isn't exactly complex, but she dismisses that film (as opposed to countless others) just because most of the other characters are white?

I've struggled against the "racist" reading of Lost in Translation, but I find your reading of it far more persuasive.

[Caio]

Yeah, Chuck, I loved this line:

"...the movie is so violently white that you know something fucked up is going on somewhere."

Seriously? This is your argument?

[latinist]

Also, the "You didn't know were racist" part of the title of that list is extremely false advertising. I refuse to believe that anyone who reads that list is going to say "Oh, you're right! 'Bringing Down The House' was kind of racist! I hadn't even noticed the importance of race in the interactions between Eugene Levy and Queen Latifah, but now it is all made clear to me! I feel so bad about mistaking that film for a subtle examination of the universal human condition!"

[Gary Farber]

"18. The Siege
Year: 1998

While it seems to sympathize with Arab-Americans, who the U.S. military rounds up and interns on Randall's Island after terrorist attacks shake NYC, leading to martial law, The Siege's real message is that the Middle Easterners who you least expect of wanting to kill you definitely have a belt of explosives in their wardrobe."

Disagree.

[JPRS]

Endy, just because that list of films is not well written, and just because not all cases of racism involve white people oppressing black people, it does not follow that the racism of the past 500 years or so, worldwide, has not and does not continue to be a general case of white exploitation of non-white people.

[Caio]

Correction, JPRS: racism in the past 500 years has been a general case of white exploitation of non-white people insofar as it has involved white people. But even if we ignore the many, many instances of racism between non-white ethnic groups, white racial oppression still has always been, as Endy characterizes it, situational, whether through official repression by a white majority or ruling class, or through an unofficial, and in many cases unconscious, expression of in-group mentality. The take-away point is that painting racism as essentially and universally white-versus-nonwhite, with the white as the oppressor, is a pitifully limited understanding of how racism works.

[Picador]

I'm glad somebody made the "Mystery Train" connection to "Lost In Translation" above. The seconed one is pretty obviously constructed in the context created by the first.

A lot of good point also about how much of the list (The Air Up There et al) don't make sense on a list of "secretly" racist movies.

There's yet amother category of errors in this list, though, the best example of which is Ace Ventura 2: When Nature Calls. This movie is not racist. I know this because racism in a film is a flaw, and that film has no flaws. QED.

[timb]

Gary Farber.

I was borderline offended by the inclusion of the Siege, which I see as prescient. America will toss everything overboard when attacked, torture and recrimination of the Muslim minority will make it worse, and, as more and more abuses are perpetrated, even Arabs/Muslims who originally were willing to join the cause of universal values (as exemplified by Benning and Washington) will turn against the US for not living up to its own rhetoric.

Since basically that's what happened, albeit mostly overseas, the movie only missed the massive US direct payment to one day terrorists/the next day allies characters. otherwise, it's a scenery change away from being a historical documentary

[marriotr]

I've been in a similar place about the debate around the Hurt Locker- some see it as a racist action film, some see it as a paternalistic and poor attempt at a Iraq commentary film with actiony bits, and I see it as a postmodern deconstruction of the war in Iraq, the war film concept, and a direct assault on the moviegoer's passive tendencies. I mean, if anything, I thought it assaulted our complacence as viewers a bit too much- but, no, apparently I'm reading too much into it.

[Gary Farber]

TIMB, I haven't seen The Siege in some years, but your summary is my memory of it, as well.