Asexual Assemblages, Part 2: Changed in Translation
An investigation of the unvoiced, unseen, and inchoate forces that drive relational assemblages in Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation.
This is the second entry in a three-part essay series. The other parts may be accessed here:
Introduction
Bob: What did you study?
Charlotte: Philosophy.
Bob: Yeah, there's a good buck in that racket.
— Lost in Translation
Lines of flight are everywhere in evidence in Lost in Translation[1], which narratively centers the ambiguous relational assemblage that emerges between recent college graduate Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) and aging actor Bob Harris (Bill Murray). The two strangers meet by chance while traveling in Japan, and resonate with one another despite significant gaps in age and cultural context.
Both find themselves alone, alienated, and dissociated amid the cultural landscape of Japan. Bob is traveling alone, his wife present only through curt, muffled phone calls and equally cold written communications that indicate a long, now-loveless marriage. Charlotte is traveling with her husband for his job, but their connection is equally distant, despite being much newer: in several scenes they literally talk past each other, and they end up apart in nearly every scene where they appear together.
Amid these circumstances, the two find in each other a connection that evolves into what we may productively read as a queer—intimate, alterous[2], asexual, non-monogamous—relationship of circumstance.
It is significant that this “Bob-Charlotte assemblage” forms in Tokyo, the jewel in the crown of the late capitalist order at the turn of the 21st century, a city supersaturated with dense and interlocking networks of desire and capital, literally incandescing with production and consumption, at the same time that its operation is always-already subject to the unassailable material and discursive hegemony of strong, globalized nation-states.
In this physical and psychic geography, the production of desire and lines of flight are greatly accelerated; and, conversely, the same density of apparatuses of capture that produce that flow also put those desires and lines of flight at relatively greater risk of dissipating into incoherence or being captured by the expansive hegemonic forces at play.
Terms and Conditions, Applied
It is intuitive enough to begin an analysis of Bob and Charlotte’s relationship as above—by retroactively applying the terminology contemporary queer culture and scholarship have deployed to understand, classify, and typologize desire. Terms like “queer”, “alterous”, and “asexual” can be used to characterize relationships which precede the historical use of such terms. This approach can be, and has been, a potent act of queer resistance, historiography, decolonization, etc.[3]
Such projects are deeply valuable and to some extent a necessary starting point for people who have been historically marginal or invisible. However, they have incomplete explanatory power for several reasons. The most important of these is that a relationship is an eminently vital thing, a function which transforms continuously with respect to time and Euclidean space—it rotates, reflects, shears, scales, indeed translates—and so is always-already “lost in translation” with respect to the community and intellectual frameworks that we apply to sites of individual and relational difference.
Note that this problem persists no matter how nuanced the terminology becomes: just as the fundamental theorem of calculus relates that an infinite number of discrete sections are required to differentiate a continuous function[4], so infinitely many labels are required to describe the continuous, fractal, involuting surface of an intersubjective connection.
Another critical barrier to terminological approaches is the issue of comprehension, itself. Lost in Translation is engaged in a broader contemplation of more literal communication barriers, especially those emerging from ethnolinguistic difference: almost every conversation and a good many nonverbal encounters in the film are marked by some kind of transmission error, usually severe enough to frustrate communication or prevent it entirely—even if I find the right words, can you understand them?
Your Lips Move, But—
This unreliability looms large in Bob and Charlotte’s relationship both as an external factor, and is even abstractly incorporated as an element of cinematic language. In the film’s climax, Bob—about to leave Japan, the status of his relationship with Charlotte still indeterminate—catches up with Charlotte in the streets of Tokyo and tells her something the viewer does not hear, an event which film critic Justin Horton deems “unique for the flagrancy with which it withholds the voice” expected by cinematic and narrative convention[5].
More than anything else, this “flagrancy” draws attention to an urgently-felt need for language and terminology to establish a complete understanding of the nature of an intimate connection, especially when those connections occur in ways which contest, bypass, or transcend the demands of the hegemonic culture in which they arise.
When not met, this need for epistemological certainty can yield intensive feelings of discomfort and disappointment. Horton highlights, too, the way that the gap between seeing Bob hold and whisper to Charlotte, while simultaneously not-hearing the same creates destabilization. Without words, there is no single way to characterize this interaction terminologically, discursively, narratively—its apparent form will differ based on frame of reference; cultural expectation; interpretation of the narrative so far; the viewer’s psychic projections, transferences, and displacements vis a vis all of the above, etc.
For all of this, the question is still the one posed at the end of the preceding section—“even if I find the right words, can you understand them?” Would knowing what Bob said to Charlotte actually yield an improved understanding of what their relationship “is”, what it “will be”?
No. This need for narrative closure and discursive specificity around relationships is a fantasy that must always be disappointed because a relationship is an assemblage and so is always in flux and tension, never a seamless totality. In short, I agree with Horton’s film-critical framing of the scene, and his analysis of how fundamentally it violates well-established cinematic expectations usefully parallels to the many other types of violations depicted and explored in the film.
It is perplexing, though, that Horton goes out of his way to disavow the broader cultural implications of the concept or implications of the “unheard voice”:
The “unheard voice” of my title is meant to be taken in the literal sense and not as a metaphor for those who have been excluded from representation or participation in mass media—be it for race, gender, class, ethnicity, sexual preference, or what have you—though by no means do I mean to diminish such a clearly important project.
It seems quite obvious that every single one of the identity categories Horton excludes are deeply intertwined with the way Bob and Charlotte’s relationship has evolved over the course of the narrative, such that the unvoiced line in this scene stands in for all of the other unvoiced, unvoiceable qualities in both the Bob-Charlotte assemblage and the other adjacent assemblages explored throughout the film. Greater critical insight can only accrue from turning towards, rather than away from, this complexity.
Time Travel
Horton is in error, but this lack of engagement with identity and alterity is not specific to his thought process, alone. It is useful to briefly touch on the ways in which popular critical discourses around the film’s release in 2003 sought to cast the Bob-Charlotte assemblage in conventional, totalizing terms.
Desson Thomson (formerly Howe), writing for the Washington Post, frames a question on the matter of the intimacy between Bob and Charlotte: “[… the] crucial question is: What kind of relationship should they have? Are they aspiring friends, lovers or both? Or neither?”[6] Thomson’s deceptively simple, even inane, question embeds a surprising number of assumptions about relationships, namely:
a relationship occurs between two people;
a relationship has a shape that it “should” be, and
that shape may only be both, one, or none of “friends” and “lovers”.
Additionally, it is assumed that we all know:
what a “relationship” is;
what “friends” are, and
what “lovers” are.
I don’t mean to single out Thomson, either—his article is a timely, well-archived example of a question that has been omnipresent in popular discussion of the film in the years and decades following its release. Nevertheless, this critical and popular preoccupation reveals how the elements and arrangement of an intimate relationship are always-already being evaluated in the context of the network of hegemonic drives toward compulsory sexuality, romanticism, monogamy, heteronormativity, cisnormativity, etc.
In other words, popular critics and viewers have both exhibited a tendency to epistemologically “lock down” the relationship between Charlotte and Bob in terms that entrench dominant social understandings of what sex, love, and intimacy can be, and are allowed to be. To do so is to read against the thesis of Lost in Translation, namely, that connection is always in flux, at all times breaking from, negotiating with, being recuperated by the discursive and material conditions out of which they emerge, amid which they persist.
Libidinal Economies
A woman lies left lateral recumbent on a hotel bed, faced curtain- and window-ward, dressed in a blue knit sweater and sheer pink underwear. Production credits fade in and out across the upper half of the frame. Finally, slowly, the film title comes in over the woman’s backside. Such is the opening shot of Lost in Translation, establishing the first of the film's many troubled, intimate relationships—between the viewer and Charlotte, an aimless recent college grad (Yale, philosophy) who’s joined her husband John (Giovanni Ribisi) on his work trip to Tokyo to photograph a Japanese “lock and loll” band[7].
Coppola’s own self-analysis of her opening shot has been varied over the years. Shortly before the film’s national release, Sorina Diaconescu quotes her in the LA Times:
“I don’t have a really good reason for it,” she says with disarming frankness about the memorable shot. “It’s just how I wanted to start the movie. I liked having a hint of the character -- a sweet, young girl waiting around in her hotel room -- and then go into the story.” [8]
She provides a more specific artistic precedent in a 2013 interview with Marlow Stern of the Daily Beast: “There’s a painter called John Kacere who does paintings of girls in different underwear, so it’s taken from one of his paintings.”[9]
Inspiration and influence are complex matters into which even the artists themselves often have only partial insight (this is one reason why we speak, à la Barthes, of the death of the author). What Coppola’s difference of interpretation reveals, though, is that there must be “more going on here” than can be accounted for by either whimsy or artistic precedent.
And indeed, she is rather understating the nature of Kacere’s oeuvre, which consists almost exclusively of extensively, obsessively reproduced forms of normatively ideal (thin, white) feminine midsections rendered in magnified, photorealistic detail and differing mainly in the details of their dress and the ways in which body segments are rotated, reflected, scaled, and translated with respect to the patriarchal gaze always located at origin.[11]
With respect to the mass (re)production of feminine forms, we might productively imagine that Coppola felt obligated to provide a “better” explanation of this opening shot in her later interview. Specifically, the allusion to Kacere implicitly acknowledges that Johansson’s body had come to serve a substantially more abstracted function by 2013, in particular through her role as ballerina cum assassin Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow[12].
In and through this role in a blockbuster film, through the attendant incessant representation and reproduction of her body of in film, print, and ad copy, Johansson’s body has become internalized culturally and individually as an ideal, aspirational aesthetic object for femininity and an ideal, aspirational sexual object for masculinity.
This is the same form and consequence of patriarchal, capitalist reproduction Kacere’s oeuvre alludes to, participates in, and is complicit with. The output of Kacere’s art is mechanically indistinguishable from the flickering reproduction of Johansson’s body across the approximately 864 frames comprising the opening shot.
Some of these frames are inscribed with marks of studio and cinematic ownership, though never Coppola’s name. Kacere, too, is rather unusual in his decision not to inscribe his name in the frame of his paintings, preferring rather to sign the back of the canvas. With such a move, Coppola and Kacere simultaneously highlight and disavow their complicity in the global-scale industrialized reproduction of the feminine form that is integral to capitalist and biopolitical imperatives, materialized in an ocean of mass print, digital files and impressions, psychic introjects, sexual and intimate desires, self and object beauty ideals, etc.
For Coppola, though, in both her interpretation and the text of the film itself, this relationship is problematized. Charlotte, whom Coppola characterizes as a “sweet, young girl waiting around in her hotel room” is also waiting to be codified, segmented, and captured by the dense network of repressive territorial, state, and capitalist assemblages that characterize the film’s setting and zeitgeist.
In the closing section of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man[13], Stephen Dedalus describes what he sees as the obstacles he must clear in order to Become (in an ontological sense): “when the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets”. Similarly, in the opening shot of Lost in Translation, Sofia Coppola frames the crucial challenge of how one may “fly by those nets”, represented by the dense web of territorial, state, and capitalist assemblages at play in Tokyo.
This outcome and process needn’t be inevitable, however. There are ways out. Deleuze and Guattari observe that, for the nomad, “every point is a relay and exists only as a relay. A path is always between two points, but the in-between has taken on all the consistency and enjoys both an autonomy and a direction of its own”.
As noted above, one effect of Lost in Translation’s “flagrantly” open-ended conclusion appears to be to frustrate readings the Bob-Charlotte assemblage which would represent their relationship as a seamless totality, as a path with a definite, final end state. The answer is in fact a question, not only for Charlotte and Bob, but also for any subject who seeks liberation in themselves and in assemblage with other bodies, elements and agents. It is a revolutionary question which may take this form:
Can we make connections, bonds, and loves that generate lines of flight powerful and directed enough both to escape capture, and articulate a revolutionary synthesis of elements, a new set of conditioning relations of, by, and for us?
What About Bob?
Success in this venture is far from guaranteed. There are many ways in which lines of flight can fail to materialize, fail to cohere, fail to stabilize sufficiently to constitute a new assemblage long-term. Coppola’s allusion to the paintings of John Kacere in her exegesis on the opening shot articulates a threat of incoherence via capitalist commodification, sexualization, and reproduction.
By contrast, the much-older Bob Harris awakens to a world that is already supersaturated with incoherent forms, overcome by a dazzle of signs and ads flashing with characters from the upper regions of the Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane as his cab drives into Tokyo. Bob’s reflection in the cab window is not photographed: there is no mediation of self-image until, amusingly, Bob encounters his own image in the form of a billboard for Suntory whisky, the very product for which he has traveled to Tokyo to shoot a commercial.
As the actress Scarlett Johansson was captured and redeployed by the assemblage of hegemonic femininity in the “real world”, so the actor Bob Harris has already been impressed into the service of the assemblage of hegemonic masculinity in the fictive world of Lost in Translation. This cultural position is highly salient, and fraught, during Bob’s social encounters throughout the film, especially his interfaces with sexuality, which I will analyze in the following sections of this essay.
But even here, in this introductory scene, the film encodes a parallel that breaches the boundary between fictive and real space in a way that is both eerie, and serves as an important reminder that the “general equivalence” engendered by capitalist assemblages is sufficiently flexible, and viral, to perfuse static textual barriers like the “fourth wall” as easily as mechanized fascism deterritorialized the Maginot Line.
(This, by the way, is the phenomenon observed in Frederic Jameson’s titular argument that postmodernism is the cultural logic of late capitalism: capitalism is not a force bound by discursive structures, but rather decomposes such structures as an enzyme or a solvent.)
On a similar note, this is also one of many places where privilege is forefronted as a factor in self-discovery: in one sense it could be said that Bob and Charlotte are working through parallel existential crises, but they are only able to play out their feelings and explore their connection by virtue of already having the material resources to make intercontinental travel feasible. Charlotte is unemployed and Bob’s job takes up relatively little of his time in Japan, a situation out of reach of almost all humans.
A question: to what extent are investigations into sexual identity a function of privilege, and how does the privilege position of people investigating these questions (Bob and Charlotte, me and you) make a difference in the conclusions we reach and the definitions we create?
Mr. Kazu’s Premium Fantasy
Bob’s first full day in Japan is one of the more remarked-upon sections of the film. And it is remarkable, indeed: we first witness a miserably frustrating encounter between a rushed director, inept translator, and a so-over-it Bob as the three struggle to communicate regarding an ad spot for the aforementioned Suntory whisky. In his hotel room that evening, Bob receives a visit from a Japanese sex worker (named “Premium Fantasy Woman” in the screenplay) hired by one of his handlers. The scene is worth watching in its entirety:
Due to Japanese speakers’ confusion of the two liquid phonemes in English (/r/ and /l/) Bob at first fails to grasp that the woman means for him to “rip” her stocking. Once he understands, still clearly disinterested, he assents to rip her stockings and asks her to “tell Mr. Kazu we had a blast”, and makes a calm, chaste motion to do so. At that point, however, the woman reacts with histrionics, falling to the ground and screaming for a still-motionless Bob to not touch her: it seems Mr. Kazu’s “premium fantasy” was intended to be a consensual non-consent scene, now become truly non-consensual in a moment of dark irony.
Bob is able to say, like Melville’s Bartleby, “I would prefer not to”[14]; he has the privilege to assert his refusal to be forcibly inserted into the assemblage of erotic fantasies which he happens to find uninteresting, risible, even perhaps repulsive. To refuse an open sexual advance is to contest the hegemony of compulsory sexuality. Bob’s disinterestedness thus constitutes a challenge that may become a line of flight, specifically, a conception of his own desire that is not recuperable to or directed by patriarchal imperatives.
Bob is capable of articulating this challenge due to his privilege, but his level of privilege makes the challenge more hazardous given his position as a representative and commodified symbol of that specific form of patriarchal masculinity. So, privilege, however expansive, is never a guarantee, and ultimately Bob’s refusal to engage does nothing to dissuade the sex worker who continues with her performance irrespective of Bob’s interest.
Because in this case, it does not matter whether Bob consents enthusiastically or at all—the desires of Mr. Kazu, who employs both Bob and the sex worker, take precedence such that when Bob rises to open the door for the sex worker to leave, she grabs his leg and forces him to fall down onto the bed, then the floor, breaking the lamp such that the scene ends with a collapse into dark.
A line of flight may be disarmed by mechanisms of violent recuperation, even culminating in physical harm or death. The patriarchy is both ancient and powerful and is able to deploy these mechanisms in many contexts, even against otherwise highly privileged subjects. Its reach is not absolute, however, and there are other moments in Lost in Translation when Bob and Charlotte are able to “fly by” its nets.
“I would prefer not to”
Peaches’ 2000 song “Fuck the Pain Away”[15] plays over the scene in which Bob awkwardly waits at a strip club where Charlotte—apparently unaware of the nature of the venue—has asked him to meet her and her friends. When she arrives, Bob asks “can I buy you a drink, or two?” The sardonic question belies their shared, palpable discomfort with the explicit sexuality of the space and they agree to leave almost immediately.
In this moment Bob and Charlotte decisively escape the assemblage of compulsory sexuality and become a nomadic assemblage, cognizant of its own elements and conditioning relations which has become “absolutely positively deterritorialized”, i.e., a line of flight spun off into a new assemblage—albeit, importantly, one which can still disintegrate or be reterritorialized.
Returning to the Hyatt, they come across a woman performing a karaoke of Carly Simon’s mawkish “Nobody Does it Better”[16] to a mostly-empty bar. It is Kelly (Anna Faris), an American actress and friend of Charlotte’s husband who is in Tokyo doing PR for a movie. Throughout the film Kelly has engaged in a “flirting/flattering” relationship with Charlotte’s husband John, often in front of her. In this case Charlotte chooses not to tolerate Kelly’s presence as she has earlier in the film, but to join with Bob—together in a movement of escape through the hallway, toward the elevator, returning back to their respective rooms.
Spatially separate but still in relation to one another. Later in the evening, Charlotte is sleepless in her room when she receives a telegram from Bob. They meet in his room to drink sake and watch old movies. Charlotte and Bob ultimately find themselves lying together on the bed, reflecting on the future and past of their respective marriages. Careful attention is paid to configuration of space and the almost-total absence of touch:
As in the opening shot Charlotte is again left lateral recumbent, but this time her whole person is in frame and she is relatively more “contained” in the knee-chest position—a containment mirrored by the boundaries of closed eyes, Bob, and the hotel room window echoed from the opening shot. These closed interfaces belie a highly interconnected site of intimacy characterized by synthesis and crosshatching of breaks and flows in everchanging shape as the characters shift in space and their understanding of one another.
For Deleuze and Guattari the elements of an assemblage “subsist independently from their internal relations within a unity” and behave like mechanisms in and of themselves. Charlotte’s “independent subsistence” allows her to exist in an assemblage of intimacy with Bob that is qualitatively quite unlike the others in which she is simultaneously an element (John, Kelly, the Western gaze, etc.)
All Good Things
Immediately after Bob’s encounter with the sex worker early in the film, Lost in Translation cuts to a very brief interstitial scene in which he is eating breakfast:
INT. HOTEL RESTAURANT - DAY
In the harsh sunlight of the big windows Bob eats breakfast alone. Next to him is a table of TEXANS in cowboy hats. At another table a JAPANESE COUPLE in sunglasses chain smoke and drink coffee.[17]
In the film as shot, the TEXANS and JAPANESE COUPLE are absent, although there is some muffled background noise and Bob looks up briefly to regard something or someone out of frame.
I contend that this shot was adjusted to more closely match a parallel scene which occurs soon after Bob and Charlotte’s line of flight from the strip club:
INT. PARK HYATT BAR – NIGHT
Melodramatic '70s Japanese music plays. Bob sits alone, hating himself, at the bar. The redheaded Jazz Singer takes a break, and a seat next to him.
CUT TO:
INT. BOB'S ROOM - MORNING
In the harsh-morning light, Bob wakes up in his bed.
This hookup takes place after Bob and Charlotte’s flight from the strip club. The encounter is remarkable, and amusing, for its extreme attenuation—the cut omits any conversation, flirting, or sexual play between the characters and relies entirely on the cliché that a cut to one or more characters bed in the morning denotes sexual activity. So filmic narrative can short circuit the intimacy of a sexual encounter just as sex itself can be used to short circuit other intimacy.
This is the political function of what Deleuze and Guattari term the territorial assemblage—the tendency to code flows of desire and subjectivity to their “natural” or “proper” place, and in this way to effect a segmentation and attenuation of desire in order to regulate and minimize its libidinal force. Subjected to enough codification of this kind, the line of flight represented by the sex act can be shrunk down in prominence to the infinitesimal span of filmic time between frames.
Despite (or perhaps because of) this elision, the effect of the hookup is destabilizing—Charlotte finds out and becomes angry with Bob for what she perceives as—what? It is unclear. Perhaps she is angry over a violation of the implicit norm of sexual exclusivity (existing in spite of their apparent asexuality and the unstated nature of their relationship); or maybe it’s the form of intimate abandonment (leaving with the Jazz Singer at the bar rather than waiting for her).
Whatever the cause, the hookup has the effect of forcibly rearranging Bob and Charlotte’s asexual intimacy back into the cultural framework of compulsory sexuality, roles clearly delineated in and by the cold light of the elevator cab. Indeed, the same motion is at play in Bob’s unsuccessful attempt to effect a line of flight against Mr. Kazu’s premium fantasy. This is the hazard of a non-normative relationship, the hazard of not having a label with which to differentiate oneself from the hegemonic, default norm.
Thus the scene on the elevator becomes invested with an entirely different emotive character, one which is new to the space of Charlotte and Bob’s relationship, yet also much more easily identifiable as a cultural trope: the conventional question of “will they or won’t they” is here intensified by the sexual expectation-laden weight of being alone in an elevator with a potential or current intimate partner. Compared to the intentional, natural arrangement of forms on the bed in Bob’s hotel room, here the two are persistently cold, tired, uncomfortable, shifting. Indeed, Bob is so anxious that he jumps the gun to get off on what is Charlotte’s floor; and instead kisses her on the cheek, barely, awkwardly.
The two have repaired their earlier conflict, but at the cost of a palpably different, partly severed connection. Now self-conscious and uncertain, Bob and Charlotte cover up, close off, codify, and segment themselves, defining what for a time had been unnamed, unlabeled, and so for a time nomadic and transgressive.
Partial Synthesis
At the start of Lost in Translation, Bob and Charlotte have arrived in Japan in apparently similar states of existential depression and dissatisfaction with their intimate relationships and the world at large. The two connect and through a variety of encounters and experiences are able, for a time, to create a relational assemblage that escapes capture by the “nets” of compulsory/normative sexuality, monogamy, and romanticism.
This assemblage is nomadic and transgressive, a dynamic site of connection between Bob and Charlotte that is also challenged and circumscribed by the hegemonic social forces at play both within the narrative world of the film and the real world in which we live. As evidenced by the close readings throughout this section, the two characters attempt to resist the imperatives of compulsory monogamy and (hetero)sexuality. Sometimes this resistance is successful, sometimes less so: ultimately, Bob’s encounter with the sex worker, and his later participation in casual sex, contest the Bob-Charlotte assemblage and force it into the awkward, ill-fitting conditioning relations of compulsory monogamy and (hetero)sexuality.
Recall, however, that for Deleuze and Guattari an assemblage can never be a “seamless totality”; elements are always shifting in relation to one another and in relation to the abstract machines by which these elements are organized and given meaning.
So it is that at the end of the film Bob and Charlotte are able to connect once again. In a scene which recalls the one in which he first appears, Bob is in a cab leaving Tokyo. He sees someone who looks like Charlotte (from behind) and lowers the window to confirm—removing the reflective barrier of linguistic incoherence he faced entering the city. He asks the driver to stop the cab, effecting a tiny, temporary break in Tokyo’s traffic-capital flow, and walks over to Charlotte in the street, reuniting with her momentarily and so creating a new configuration of elements and conditions—a new relay for these nomads to follow, a new line of flight whose meaning, direction, force, and fate are as unknowable as the words Bob whispers to Charlotte.
Justin Horton is correct: the scene is “flagrant” for its violation of the convention of totalization, for the way in which it makes it impossible to totalize the Bob-Charlotte assemblage. In the final consideration, in the absence of language no decisive reading of the scene can be advanced. All that is known is that a new path for these two nomads is being constructed in this scene: a relay to a point undefined, unvoiced, in a form yet inchoate. This unvoicedness is dangerously, “flagrantly” destabilizing; yet it is only in this arrangement that the Bob-Charlotte assemblage can continue on as a potentially liberatory line of flight, in the technical sense of ligne de fuite, a receding line of the kind seen in perspective drawing. its very incoherence protecting it both from the viewer’s gaze and the various compulsions of capital, state, and territory.
This essay continues in Part 3:
[1] Lost in Translation, 2003.
[2] I mention the aromanticism (aro) spectrum and non-monogamy only in passing but maintain that assemblage theory is a valuable (yet underutilized) critical theoretical methodology that can and should be used to explore all kinds of intimate relational difference, including aro and ethical nonmonogamy/polyamory.
[3] Such projects also often involve the analysis of phenomena like queer coding, subtext, and queerbaiting which further problematize the relationship between popular media, fan communities, and queer communities.
[4] “Fundamental Theorem of Calculus,” in Wikipedia, August 17, 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fundamental_theorem_of_calculus&oldid=1170910663.
[5] Justin Horton, “The Unheard Voice in the Sound Film,” Cinema Journal 52, no. 4 (Summer 2013): 3–24, https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2013.0031. The scene doubtless recalls the unheard exposition in North by Northwest; but where Hitchcock’s intent is to build dramatic tension, Coppola’s intent is to point that directed tension into the space of unbound possibility and potential.
[6] Desson Howe, “‘Lost in Translation’ Finds the Right Words,” Washington Post, September 12, 2003, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/2003/09/12/lost-in-translation-finds-the-right-words/de74cb29-2cf7-4d87-b313-0f6d2b4768b8/.
[7] It is more than a little jarring that the white characters in Lost in Translation repeatedly mock, commentate, and express mystification over the well-known tendency of Japanese speakers to confuse the English /r/ and /l/ liquid phonemes. Perhaps this is merely an unfortunate, poorly-aged racist tic in the script. On the other hand, it may be more constructive to read this phenomenon as emblematic of the characters’ shortsighted, all-too-human tendency to overfocus on the superficial qualities of difference while ignoring more substantive sites of connection and disconnection.
[8] Sorina Diaconescu, “An Upstart, Casual but Confident,” Los Angeles Times, September 7, 2003, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-sep-07-ca-diaconescu7-story.html.
[9] Marlow Stern, “Sofia Coppola Discusses ‘Lost in Translation’ on Its 10th Anniversary,” The Daily Beast, September 12, 2013, sec. entertainment, https://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/09/12/sofia-coppola-discusses-lost-in-translation-on-its-10th-anniversary.
[10] John Kacere, Jutta, Oil, 1973, https://www.meiselgallery.com/artwork/jutta/.
[11] “John Kacere | Artnet,” accessed September 30, 2023, https://www.artnet.com/artists/john-kacere/.
[12] Later and less iconically, but perhaps more significantly for this essay, Johansson would play Major Motoko Kusanagi in the 2017 live-action remake of Ghost in the Shell (1991/1995 etc.)
[13] James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).
[14] Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street,” Putnam’s Magazine, December 1853.
[15] Peaches, Fuck the Pain Away, The Teaches of Peaches (The Rivoli, Toronto, Ontario: Kitty-Yo, XL, 2000).
[16] Carly Simon, Nobody Does It Better, Single (Elektra, 1977).
[17] Lost in Translation (Screenplay) (Lost in Translation, Inc., 2002).