by Alana Massey
THE OFFICIAL WEBSITE FOR THE 2003 film Lost in Translation remained live and intact at the beginning of 2016, well over a decade after the film was released.1 The central image is a still photo of a disheveled Bill Murray, sitting on a hotel room bed, looking into the camera. He is schlumpy and morose in a bathrobe and slippers, his hairline deeply receded. A much smaller still image of Scarlett Johansson standing outside in the Tokyo rain is offset to his left with her gazing in the direction of Murray. The alignment is such that if you follow her path of vision, it is actually at his shoulder, but the creative intention is clear. Below her image is the film’s tagline, “Everyone wants to be found,” in an uninspired font. At the bottom of the page is the claim, “Over 245 Critics Nationwide Rave ‘ONE OF THE BEST PICTURES OF THE YEAR!’ more than any other movie of 2003” next to an appeal to buy the sound track on CD.
It is in some ways a charming artifact of a time in the early millennium before user experience was meticulously accounted for and when movie trailers took longer than milliseconds to upload, offering a sense of reward when they finally rolled. In other ways, it feels prescient for how people would come to understand the film years after its filters and afterglows had worn off. Though I’m sure it was not intended, it captured in amber what the film was about at its core. Everyone wants to be found. It is a true and incomplete thought. People want to be found, yes. Most of us long to be discovered, seen, and known by another. Despite those 245 critics gushing over the film as a simple but poignant portrayal of isolation giving way to friendship, I cannot help but see the asymmetry of that discovery. To me, the site reads the same way the film does: There is a peripheral woman who finds an important man. She looks at him longingly despite any apparent thing about him to long for. When I watched the film at the age of eighteen, I felt cheated that this was the sort of man I was supposed to be satisfied, even excited, was coming to find me.
That first viewing of Lost in Translation was characterized by boredom and bewilderment. Though I was not yet radicalized into wild hopes for a world of gender equity and I still harbored fantasies of saving undeserving men from themselves, I still felt as if something was amiss. My male peers ogled Johansson in the role of Charlotte, her first shot on-screen famously being a close-up of her ass. To lust after her was indeed their right, even their obligation. Charlotte’s loveliness and soft-spoken wit are in sharp contrast to her absentee traveling companion, a vapid celebrity photographer husband who is based loosely on Coppola’s ex-husband, director Spike Jonze. Johansson was stunning in the film, and she remains so today. For those of us who came of age around the turn of the millennium, Johansson embodied ideals of beauty and sex appeal held by both men and women. Her figure helped usher out the 1990s monopoly that fashion-model thinness held over the female bodies of A-list Hollywood for the decade prior, the proportions of which were still well beyond the realm of mortals. I can’t bring myself to resent her beauty because it is so distant from my possible reality that I’m not able even to aspire to it, so I simply admire it.
The film would become a foundational document to the present mythology of Johansson and lovely girls everywhere. What I resent is how her beauty functioned in the film, not as a perk to a memorable and desirable character but as the defining feature that rendered her memorable and desirable. Johansson is a tremendous talent, but in Lost in Translation, she plays little more than a mirror in which I feared that the young men around me watched Lost in Translation and were granted permission to languish for decades before they had to realize the value of the gentle beauty that surrounded them in the form of unhappy but hopeful girls.
The reviews of the film by men reflect a thorough satisfaction with a state of affairs in which very young women are conduits for older men’s self-discovery. Peter Travers at Rolling Stone wrote, “The movie isn’t girly in the way The Virgin Suicides sometimes was. Coppola has found her voice with this artfully evanescent original screenplay. When she brings Bob and Charlotte together, the tone seems exactly right.” Because apparently it is impossible to praise a woman’s professional growth without cutting down her previous work. (And for the record, The Virgin Suicides was girly because it was about five girls.) Travers closed his review with the line, “Funny how a wisp of a movie from a wisp of a girl can wipe you out.”2 Never mind that Coppola was a thirty-one-year-old woman when she made the film; Travers lets her alluring thinness and notable beauty turn her into a mere girl, where she can fit into the mythology of the wisp whose sole purpose is delivering daydreams to grown men.
Elvis Mitchell at the New York Times wrote, “Ms. Johansson is not nearly as accomplished a performer as Mr. Murray, but Ms. Coppola gets around this by using Charlotte’s simplicity and curiosity as keys to her character.” Now, with all due respect to Mr. Mitchell, Murray was not so much accomplished in comparison as he was just a lot fucking older. That he champions adult female simplicity as a strong quality reveals more about him than it does about the film’s stars. Mitchell tellingly concluded, “As a result of Ms. Coppola’s faith, this is really Mr. Murray’s movie.”3
Peter Rainer at New York magazine is less boorish in his assessment but is also ultrasympathetic to Murray’s character. He refers to issues like Bob’s wife’s “needling queries about home redecoration” in lieu of details like how Bob forgot his son’s birthday or acknowledging that this needling wife is managing their family on her own. Rainer continues, “He and Charlotte aren’t lovers in any physical sense, but they enjoy the novelty of each other’s company. They know that this is one of those far-flung friendships that will last only for the length of their stay, and it’s sweeter (and more unsettling) for being so.”4
As was his custom, Roger Ebert reviewed the film with more empathy than his peers but also belabored the point that the film was about friendship primarily: “They share something as personal as their feelings rather than something as generic as their genitals.”5
But denying the erotic tension of the film is to be willfully ignorant of the rituals of courtship and desire that pervade the relationship between Bob and Charlotte. Nowhere is this dynamic more evident than during the scenes in which Bob and Charlotte go out for partying and karaoke in Tokyo. Bob shows up at Charlotte’s hotel room wearing bright orange camouflage, about which Charlotte laughs good-naturedly rather than being horrified. “You really are having a midlife crisis, aren’t you?” she asks as flirtation rather than concern. They stand too close and stare too long. Charlotte sings “Brass in Pocket” more seductively than Chrissie Hynde likely ever intended, and the pair exchange more “fuck me” eyes at karaoke than one can keep count of. At the end of the night, Bob carries a drunk Charlotte back to the hotel. Though a friend would force their drunk companion to lean on them and stumble, Bob holds her entire body in his arms in the manner of a groom carrying his wife over the threshold. He removes her shoes before tucking her into bed. Then he takes a few moments to watch her sleep before departing.
When Bob returns to his room, he drunk-dials his wife back in the United States. She is trying to get their child to eat, and Bob insists impotently from half a world away that the child eat because he told her to. His wife is clearly distressed and insists on returning to her unenviable duties and hangs up, just as Bob prepares to say “I love you.” He says, “That was a stupid idea,” to his empty room, somehow unaware that calling his wife in an attempt to repair the family he has neglected is likely one of the most decent things he’s done in ages. The moment is a chance to redeem himself from the haplessness that has characterized much of his relationship, and he thwarts it with a juvenile self-conscious.
Later, Bob sends a message from the hotel lobby in the middle of the night to see if Charlotte is awake and she joins him in his room to morosely watch movies and drink. They continue in the manner of lovers, recalling the first times they had seen the other. In a shot of their reflections over Tokyo, Charlotte says morosely, “Let’s never come here again because it would never be as much fun,” before revealing that
she is professionally adrift and unsure what she’s “supposed to be.”
After Bob has a one-night stand with the hotel’s lounge singer, Charlotte comes knocking on Bob’s door to invite him to sushi. When Charlotte hears the jazz singer in the shower, she becomes despondent and jealous. “Maybe she liked the movies you were making in the seventies when you were still making them,” she says with a smirk over an awkward lunch. Nowhere in the critical discourse around the film does anyone wonder why this stunning and smart young woman cares about the sex life of this morally flailing and physically declining man, nor is it clear why a gentle and sad young woman whose negligent husband appears to be the primary source of her isolation is enamored with a man neglecting his wife far away.
I watch Charlotte watching him throughout the film, and I wonder what it is I cannot see. I watch Bob look at her with something akin to pity, and I am angry that it is she who is pitiful. I watch the final scene in which they bid farewell as Bob leaves for home, and I am heartbroken. We know from an earlier conversation that Bob is going home in time for his daughter’s ballet recital. We know he is going home to a $2 million paycheck for acting in the Japanese whiskey company’s commercials, which is why he came to Tokyo. But we do not know where Charlotte is going or what she is going to do. We do not know where her husband is. As her eyes grow teary as they bid farewell, there is a single moment where she looks panicked. It is as if she’s realized she will be trapped in Tokyo forever, stuck alone on the set of the whimsical few days she’s just shared with Bob. We never learn when Charlotte gets to go home.
Thirteen years and even more films later, the shadow of the accommodating Charlotte still lingers over Johansson’s career. She has been reimagined as a hollow avatar animated by the desires of strangers. Though this is the case for many celebrities, hers is an especially storied history of being the object of such projections. She generated a minor scandal when she revealed in 2006 that she was tested for sexually transmitted infections twice a year. Rather than seeing this practice as an admirable commitment to safe sex, the public responded with outrage. “Scarlett Johansson takes two HIV tests a year but says she’s not promiscuous,” read the headline of the Daily Mail’s article on her remarks, delicate as ever.6 Globe magazine called in a self-described “sex expert” to remark on Johansson’s testing frequency, who concluded, “‘It tells me that although she is in a steady relationship, she may be having sex with other partners. Or she suspects her significant other may be straying.’”7 Unlike Britney Spears, Scarlett never tried to sell the story that she was a virgin. The public was instead sold the perhaps more insidious fantasy that Scarlett was their girlfriend, which enables people to feel justified in being possessive of Scarlett’s fidelity more than merely lustful for her physical body.
In a 2013 profile for Esquire, which had just named Scarlett “Sexiest Woman Alive” for the second time, Tom Chiarella describes walking behind Johansson and notes, “And I didn’t look at her ass. I don’t know that she wanted me to. Probably not. Surely not. In any case, I didn’t.” It is obnoxious that a professional journalist cannot get through the story without making note of her ass, but Chiarella’s acknowledgment that Johansson does not actually want to be objectified by men lusting after her is more self-aware than many. This self-awareness becomes more evident later when Chiarella is talking to Johansson during her beach vacation. “The sunglasses are big enough that I realize I haven’t really gotten a look at her. And then, for some reason, I’m suddenly about to ask her to take them off so I can see her face. I’m about to tell her what I want, making it a demand, an assertion, rather than a request. So dumb, so overly familiar, so wildly inappropriate that I don’t have time to think of better things to say. So I choke back the words. Inexplicably I say ‘Sunglasses,’ just that, as if making a note in the afternoon air between us.”8 The only thing unique about the incident is that Chiarella actually caught himself experiencing the myths projected onto Johansson before his sense of entitlement to her image.
That same year, French novelist Grégoire Delacourt released The First Thing You See to much critical acclaim in his home country. It is the story of a handsome mechanic named Arthur Dreyfuss in the sleepy town of Long, France, who encounters a distraught Scarlett Johansson at his door one night, setting in motion a tender and apparently humorous series of events between a working-class sad sack and an international sex symbol. But it is soon revealed that the woman is not in fact the American starlet but a simple French woman named Jeanine who bears the burden and blessing of having a face identical to Johansson’s. The book is a manifestation of the impulse to take Johansson’s face and assign a new identity to the person behind it.
A translation of the novel was released in the United Kingdom in September 2015 after Johansson’s legal team failed to get an injunction against its release in English. It is notable because Johansson is not an actress who hoards elements of her own image. And though she’s filed lawsuits against tabloids before, she is not especially well-known for protesting against the invasiveness of celebrity culture. Yet many scoffed at Johansson’s attempt to thwart the efforts to bring the novel to a wider audience. They argued that it is just her face in the book, after all; it is not meant to be an account of any real activities. When the book was initially released, Delacourt himself unironically told media, “I thought she might send me flowers, as it was a declaration of love for her.”9 He even thought Johansson would perhaps be excited to play the role of Jeanine in a film adaptation. Like many before him, Delacourt was perplexed about why his imaginary girlfriend Scarlett wasn’t tripping over herself with gratitude at the opportunity to bask in his own genius.
A decade after Lost in Translation, Johansson would work on the film Her with Spike Jonze, the very man whose apparent negligence had inspired Coppola’s first film. After filming of Her had wrapped, Johansson was brought in to replace Samantha Morton’s voice on an adaptive artificial-intelligence companion, Samantha, that Joaquin Phoenix’s disillusioned loner, Theodore, quickly falls in love with. Samantha is endlessly accommodating, always at the ready with compliments and a cheery commitment to organizing Theodore’s files and sorting through his feelings with him. “I mean, I’m not limited—I can be anywhere and everywhere simultaneously,” Samantha says of not having a body, blissfully disregarding that she is trapped in a device. But she is not just anywhere and everywhere; she is also anyone and everyone. When Theodore asks if she talks to other people while talking to him, she reports that she talks to 8,316 others. He asks if she is in love with any others, and she hesitates, ever gentle with how to handle him. “How many others?” he asks, to which she replies 641. That is a lot of love to have to give. Just as Coppola won an Academy Award for the screenplay to Lost in Translation, Jonze won the same award for Her. It is rewarding indeed to put words into Scarlett Johansson’s mouth.
Lost in Translation’s last scene contains one of cinema’s most discussed mysteries, the question of what Bob inaudibly whispers into Charlotte’s ear and to which she replies simply, “Okay.” I, too, have wondered about what he says, if only because I hold on to some hope that I can get closer to understanding the appeal of this character and the film. I want to know what Charlotte is agreeing to after already agreeing to so much. I want to know the next words we hear come from the closing track, “Just Like Honey,” by the Jesus and Mary Chain. It is a lush, feedback-heavy lust song that starts, “Listen to the girl / As she takes on half the world.” We can’t, of course, because the film is over, and as the credits roll, everyone is already asking aloud about somebody else’s last word.
No She Without Her
On Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen and the Singularity
THE FIRST TIME I HAD (and likely the only time I’ll ever have) a penthouse address was from 2004 to 2005 during my sophomore year at NYU. The student housing on Lafayette Street boasts several penthouses that are mostly reserved for fraternities and sororities, but my unaffiliated friends and I lucked out in
the housing lottery when we landed a two-floor, four-bedroom penthouse overlooking the Hudson River. We promptly decorated it in oversized posters featuring a zoomed-in image from The Garden of Earthly Delights painting by Hieronymus Bosch and David Bowie’s album cover for Ziggy Stardust.
Greek life at NYU was something of a joke to those of us who did not partake, but the memo seemed to have been lost in the mail to those young men and women who did. Members of the fraternity who lived on our floor swaggered through the hallways and looked at us like outsiders in our dark blazers and silk camisoles, when they were the ones wearing Lacoste and popped collars in downtown New York City. But a night of drunkenness crumbled the barriers between our two camps, and some fraternity brothers invited a friend and me over to their penthouse for drinks and some low-quality cocaine.
I don’t recall what we drank exactly, but I can assume it was some variety of middle-shelf liquor (any would do) mixed with Diet Coke. The fact that these young men kept Diet Coke on hand for female company charmed me, even if it was mostly for the purpose of intoxicating girls for nefarious ends. I recall how our decorating tastes differed: Their living area was bare save for some football paraphernalia, and the shared boys’ room we entered was decked out in wall-to-wall photos of Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. This would be unremarkable were it not for the fact that the two were enrolled at NYU that semester, making the shrine to the famous teens more unsettling because they were not just celebrities now, they were our classmates.
In the year prior to their enrollment, somewhere far from NYU, an enterprising man with a pervy streak named Chase Brown started a countdown clock to the girls’ eighteenth birthdays that referred to when they would be “Playboy legal.” Brown’s adorable little shrine to predatory imaginary coitus was picked up by the E! network, and then several entertainment outlets followed suit. The web was soon littered with men on forums and comment sections frothing in eager anticipation of June 13, when the girls would reach the age of consent. They wrote as though the only thing in the way of unbridled passion between ordinary sleazes and billionaire teenage performers and entrepreneurs was a pesky statutory rape law that would soon be irrelevant.