Lost in Translation and the Idea of the Problematic
“Problematic” ranks highly on my list of least favorite words in the English language. For one thing, it feels new. Words and people should both wear their origins like vintage clothing; you should be able to imagine how good it looked in the eighties–1880s for words, 1980s for people. The problematic is an entity both hysterical and sullen; magnetic and sanctimonious. And it is one that, for several years now, has been absolutely inescapable in discussions of art. You can understand the problematic almost as a refuge from the mandates of rigor and emotion–by invoking it, you conjure up an intractable standard of decency. The problematic is hard to dismiss–even harder because, in many cases, its advent is a relief.
Lost in Translation (2003) is, I think, as good an example as any of the problematic. Bob, as played by Bill Murray, is a middle-aged actor who suffers from chronic curmudgeon syndrome. Scarlett Johansson’s Charlotte is a recent college graduate married to a vacuous photographer. The two Americans meet at a hotel in Tokyo and, overcome by jet-lag and tenderness, become friends. It is pretty plainly a love story. Only at the end, as Bob steps out of a cab on his way to the airport, do they kiss. You can easily indict this movie on the grounds of morality contemporary and, we pretend, eternal. He is probably thirty years older than she; most contemporary viewers would agree that the approach to Japanese people and culture in the film is at best obtuse and at worst racist. If the movie were made today, it would be made differently. The kinds of audiences interested in anxious, intellectual young women tend also to be quite sensitive to the permutations of intersectional identity. The cheap cultural misunderstandings of Lost in Translation only disrupt the pleasure to be had from it. But there wouldn’t be much of a movie without the relationship between Bob and Charlotte; and furthermore, despite our habitual obeisance to the dictates of the problematic, I wouldn’t change it a bit.
Perhaps the trouble is that adherence to the cultural values of the problematic requires an intolerance of ambivalence. Art, I mourn you. It might be gross that Bob kisses Charlotte; it is also true that she has wanted him to do so for much of the film. To say that their interactions are problematic is either to impute the intensity to his predation or to label her inclination as somehow illegitimate. The first judgment is incorrect; the second leaves behind the banal and descends to the condescending. The film makes an entirely compelling case for Charlotte’s feelings. If anything, Bob is the more ambivalent of the two. The most painful scene takes place in a restaurant, over lunch, after he sleeps with a woman his own age. Ostensibly, this one-night stand is perfectly permissible. It’s the kind of consensual, frank sexual encounter between adults that you’re supposed to like. But you agree with Charlotte that he has committed a grave sin. At this point, even before the perfect kiss, you realize that you can no longer genuflect sincerely to the standards of 2025.
What, then, is the difference between the movie’s racial and psychosexual transgressions? Each touches a universal theme; the former represents the problem of the unknown as the latter messes around with father and daughters, middle-aged men and young women. If I would call Bob casually racist, a grown-up would lament the brusqueness with which he dismisses the sophistication of Japanese culture. What was forgettable in 2003 now makes my middle-aged mother profoundly uncomfortable. We can agree, in a broader sense, that it is wrong to discriminate against the unknown, wrong to let the limitations of your mind circumscribe the richness of other people and places.
If the film’s racial insensitivity sins against the unknown, then its psychosexual complexity operates comfortably within what you do know. Everyone has family friends with an age gap; fathers hate boyfriends all the time. Discussions of Lost in Translation often begin and end with an assertion of the problematic; it’s racist and just weird that she’s so much younger. But, as I have heard it, race is often the first and easiest ground on which to dismiss the film and from which to retreat from further consideration of it. To call the movie problematic is to avoid what makes it so enjoyable. You are loath to admit that, despite the extreme clarity of your moral vision, Charlotte and Bob seem to fall genuinely in love. Power dynamics, passing time, perversion–nothing but love explains it adequately.
That is the point, then, of the problematic. Its invocation allows you to escape real discussion. And this is crucial because, if you really talked about the movie, you would either have to indict the relationship or beat an ignominious retreat into the trenches of ambivalence where, confronted by empiricism and by aesthetic, you might be disturbed to find, as I have, that you did not object to it at all. Any contrived conclusion, well-rehearsed and yet completely new each time, is permitted in a world you do not know. That is why, to the adherents of the problematic, the film’s cultural insensitivity is its primary offense, even though the relationship is both more engaging and more disruptive. When you bask in the problematic, you give yourself a world you cannot know, one defined by the self, by its preferences and boundaries. And so the problematic ultimately imparts a way of thinking that keeps you from knowing yourself because the point is not to know but to recognize and to dismiss–and then to be certain. Bob whispers in Charlotte’s ear after he kisses her. We do not know what he says, but we recognize, and we accept.