The Mysteries of "Lost in Translation"

More than twenty years since the film's release, I'm still thinking about the mystery of its beginning and its ending.

Lost in Translation, written & dir. Sofia Coppola (2003)

Lost in Translation begins and ends with questions.

As the film fades into its opening shot, we’re confronted with twenty-two-year-old Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) lying on a hotel bed, with her back to us, sleeping in the middle of the day as she adjusts to the time difference here in Tokyo. I’m being somewhat coy with this description, in a way that the film decidedly isn’t: the opening shot is an unbroken view of Charlotte’s ass in sheer pink panties. The shot holds, lingers, the title eventually appears and dissolves away, before the image fades to black and the movie proper begins.

It’s an opening shot that unquestionably implies some measure of eroticism; it’s unusual in its framing, subject, and duration; the way it lingers keeps us waiting in expectation — will something happen, will she turn over or speak? The opening shot is an invitation to questions, not least of which is What was that all about?

But we’ll come back to that.

If we fast-forward through the film — through Bill Murray’s Bob, actor in decline, arriving in Tokyo to shoot a commercial and avoid the disintegration of his marriage, through his meeting Charlotte, a fellow insomniac hotel-wanderer, through the next several nights exploring the city together, through their respective existential crises (hers: who will I be in this life I’m just beginning? His: what do I have left as I near the end of this life I’ve been living?) — we come to the final scene, which raises another big question.

A taxi whisks Bob away from Tokyo, when he catches sight of Charlotte in a crowd. He jumps out of the car and catches up with her. They stare wistfully at each other, as if there’s so much to say that neither of them can say anything at all. Then he pulls her into him and they hug. With his mouth by her ear, he says something that’s muffled by the sounds of the busy street, people’s feet hitting concrete and cars rushing by. Only Charlotte hears what he says, which ends with, “Okay?” and she responds, “Okay.”

It’s a subtle, tender, nuanced moment that offers some closure but not in any conventional sense, a scene that frustrates while satisfying. And it’s led innumerable viewers, over the twenty-two years since the film’s release, to ask, “What did Bob say to Charlotte?”

There’s been no shortage of proposed answers to this question. Some theories have been raised to the status of semi-gospel truth with evidence provided by software that enhances Murray’s voice and mutes the surrounding audio. Probably the most popular guess is:

“I have to be leaving, but I won’t let that come between us. Okay?”

The strength of this theory is that it responds to the central preoccupation of the film — connection. When Bob says (if Bob says) that he won’t let distance come between them, he’s acknowledging that they’ve developed an unusual bond over the few days they’ve known each other. This connection explains the depth of their sorrow at parting in spite of the brevity of their friendship.

When we first meet Bob, arriving at the hotel where he stays for the duration of his trip, he is immediately out of place. He’s plastered with fawning attention of questionable sincerity from the concierge, hotel manager, and porters who express their pleasure at his being there. In spite of this, or perhaps even because of this excess, Bob seems completely alone. He is isolated by his celebrity; he literally stands out when he gets into a crowded elevator and his head rises well above those of the locals crammed in around him.

A small number of critics have seen Bob’s “out-of-place-ness” as racist, as if the Japanese are the butt of a running joke. There’s undoubtedly an element of “these locals are strange”, but that’s an unavoidable fact of any traveller’s experience. Spend enough time in a place and you’ll see that people are as strange here as they are back home — they’re just strange in their own ways. But this isn’t the point of Bob’s inability to ingratiate himself into Tokyo life. He is the punchline. It’s Bob who looks ridiculous as he struggles with an exercise machine and calls out absurdly for help, or has to crouch to fit beneath the showerhead in his hotel room.

There are two scenes that sit back to back, suggesting that Bob’s disconnectedness echoes Charlotte’s, and vice versa. In one, Bob is attempting to please a director he can’t understand. As the director shouts advice, gesticulating with great emphasis yet little meaning, Bob sits impotently aside, reliant on the translator. When translation comes, the lengthy, expressive speech is reduced to a single line of banal direction: “He want you to turn, look in camera.” Bob’s sure that there’s some information missing here (literally lost in translation), and when the director is displeased with his performance, Bob has no clue how to fix it.

The next scene sees Charlotte discovering a temple where she watches a religious ceremony. Later, distraught and near tears, she tells an American friend on the phone that she failed to feel anything in response to what she saw. She’s unable to connect because she’s outside of this shrine’s meaning and lacks the necessary knowledge. The friend to whom she attempts to communicate her sorrow doesn’t register the importance of what Charlotte is telling her, treating the call like a glorified postcard, the kind of vacuous communique full of platitudes intended to incite little more than reassurance or envy.

This is the disconnectedness our two lead characters are feeling when they enter each other’s lives. This is the wound that the other begins to mend in each of them. Little wonder that they’re both so loathe to lose this connection when the time comes to part ways.

Let’s leave the ending for a moment and return to the start of the film: Scarlett Johansson’s ass in those sheer pink panties filling the opening frame. The shot is, as far as I can tell, a direct reference to the work of artist John Kacere (if you want convincing, just look at Kacere’s Jutta)¹. The director is clearly making a statement, but what statement is she making?

Coppola says that although she knew early on this was what the first shot would be (it’s scripted with specific reference to the type of underwear we see on screen), she’s unsure why she chose it. Just as with the question of Bob’s whispered words to Charlotte, we’re free as viewers to explore our own ideas about what it means.

Film historian Wendy Haslam believes that the shot’s purpose “appears to be to defy taboos and to undermine expectations surrounding what might be considered the ‘money shot’ in more traditionally exploitative cinema”.² Film scholar Todd Kennedy argues that the moment “lasts so long as to become awkward — forcing the audience to become aware of (and potentially even question) their participation in the gaze”.³

I tend to agree with Kennedy. I take this shot as a self-conscious invitation to voyeurism. We are made to look, forced to keep looking, and at some point — in the darkness of the cinema as the eyes adjust and the mass of surrounding people become visible again, or sitting beside a friend on the sofa, or alone but with one’s own self-consciousness drawing attention to one’s gaze — we become aware of our own looking.

Once this pictorial prologue is over, it’s followed by what we might take as the film’s “true opening”, with Bob asleep in a taxi that ferries him through the neon streets of Tokyo. We see his face at the edge of the frame; behind him, through the car window, a blur of colours and cityscape speeds by. As Bob wakes and rubs the sleep from his eyes, we’re given clearer shots of the city, no longer out of focus. As the stranger looks out on this strange land, we become sightseers along with him.

In the final scene, Bob and Charlotte share a moment of intimacy so profound and so deep that it can exist only between these two people. In turning away from the world, away from the audience, Bob and Charlotte share something that exists solely for and between them. A connection always means a corresponding disconnection; if I’m connecting with you, I am tautologically not connecting with anyone else. Even when connecting with a group, when I and others form a community bond, the in-group defines an out-group. In keeping their final words hidden from us, the unique connection between Bob and Charlotte is emphasised.

Throughout the film, we’ve witnessed the alienation of the two lead characters, then the growing bond between them, which we also become some part of in the viewing, and finally we experience disconnectedness for ourselves. This is not the vicarious experience of Charlotte or Bob’s isolation, but true disconnectedness, shut out from the characters’ experience, from the moment they share, and from the film itself. As viewers, we usually enjoy the right of access to personal scenes in characters’ lives. Films invite us to be sightseers, but here, at the close of Lost in Translation, we are denied entry.

Of course, there’s one obvious method of discovering what Bob says to Charlotte: ask the people who made the film. However, when asked about what he said to his co-star, Bill Murray has only offered different versions of, “None of your business.”

What about the director? In a 2018 interview with Little White Lies, Sofia Coppola said that what “Bill whispers to Scarlett was never intended to be anything. I was going to figure out later what to say and add it in and then we never did”. She’d workshopped a bunch of potential lines, none of which held the requisite power for such a moment, so she told Murray to say whatever he liked in the moment. Not even Coppola knows what he chose to whisper and, as she suggested, it never really mattered what words he chose. It was always about what the secret itself meant.

The question we most want to ask — What did Bob say to Charlotte? — is secondary to the question that really matters, the question that sits beneath every missed connection, every misunderstanding, every inability to convey oneself fully or articulate clearly what is supposed to be communicated with our feeble, failing words. The fundamental question is What does this communication mean? Ultimately, meaning is what communication is about. The words, the intonations, the accompanying facial expressions don’t matter in and of themselves. They only count as far as they carry meaning between minds.

We might ask ourselves, even as we wonder what Bob whispered to Charlotte, what does it mean that he told her anything at all in this final moment? And what does it mean that we don’t get to know what he said?

There are as many answers to that last question as there are viewers of Lost in Translation. Coppola’s film draws our attention to two things, one via the other. First, it makes us aware of the act of watching; then, it reminds us that we don’t simply see, we must interpret what we see. We must continually ask ourselves as engaged film-watchers, “What does it mean to see what I am seeing?” This is the philosophical bedrock on which cinema exists as an art form. All cinema is voyeurism. At its best, it’s a self-reflective voyeurism that discovers what’s beneath and inside our looking.

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Marginalia, plur. noun:
“In getting my books, I have always been solicitous of an ample margin … for the facility it affords me of penciling suggested thoughts, agreements and differences of opinion, or brief critical comments in general.”
~ Edgar Allan Poe

John Kacere’s Jutta & the opening shot of Lost in Translation

1.

2. “Neon Gothic: Lost in Translation”, in Senses of Cinema, Wendy Haslam (2004)

3. “Off with Hollywood’s Head: Sofia Coppola as Feminine Auteur”, in Film Criticism, Todd Kennedy (2010)