‘For me it represents the death of the future’: Johny Pitts on Lost in Translation at 20
If you’re a geriatric millennial, as I am, the news that Lost in Translation is 20 years old will probably make you feel, simply, geriatric. When you think about it, though, the plot feels its age. An overprivileged middle-aged man (grumpy about earning $2m for a week’s work in Japan) having an affair in a five-star hotel with an overprivileged woman half his age (fresh out of Yale, cadging a free ride to Tokyo from her celeb photographer boyfriend) hardly screams Hollywood zeitgeist in 2023. Bill Murray is no longer the cool ironic choice for a younger generation, but a problematic old man, and when Lost in Translation was made, he was 52, feasibly old enough to be Scarlett Johansson’s grandfather; “Charlotte” is placed in her 20s, but the actor was just 17 at the time of filming. Not to mention the scenes in the movie in which Japanese people are mocked and reduced to such an extent I can’t believe director Sofia Coppola let the actors carry them out: “short and sweet – very Japanese”, Murray’s Bob Harris patronises after a brief greeting by his business associates, and, after seeing Charlotte’s bruised toe, suggests serving it up in a restaurant; “in this country? Somebody’s gotta prefer a black toe – haaa brack toe!”. Just a couple of cringey moments amid a litany of “Japanese people are small and can’t pronounce English” jokes.
Lost in Translation is, however, more than the sum of its parts and, try as I might, I cannot un-love it. As a child, I was lifted from a terrace house in Sheffield and transplanted to Tokyo for the best part of a year during its infamous bubble economy of the late 80s, when my dad had a role in the Japanese tour of Starlight
Express, and the culture shock in the film rings true. As in Lost in Translation, we were given Japan’s five-star treatment, and surrounded by a veneer of subservience which, actually, concealed a quiet power. “Charm,” as the psychologist and author Kevin Dutton once wrote, “is the ability to roll out a red carpet for those you cannot stand in order to fast-track them, as smoothly and efficiently as possible, in the direction you want them to go.” In the end it’s Harris’s Japanese colleagues who get what they want. The 20th anniversary of Lost in Translation has prompted some grappling with the recent past, taken me down a generational rabbit hole back to the decade in which I came of age, and back to Japan with my Konica 35mm film compact, to peer behind the curtain of Sofia Coppola’s magnum opus.
I’d been keeping an eye on the 2000s for a while, wondering when they would begin to assume a shape, like the 80s, or the 90s, did, and there is now enough distance to recognise the contours of a decade that began with 9/11 and ended in a global financial crisis. Think about the humongous sociopolitical shifts since the film’s UK premiere in October 2003. Back then, MySpace was a month old, Tony Blair was halfway through his second term as prime minister and seven months into the Iraq war, R Kelly’s Ignition (Remix) remained one of the most played tracks in nightclubs, and Vladimir Putin may have been toying with the idea of Russia joining Nato. If I was still subconsciously associating Coppola’s Oscar-winning breakthrough with all things youthful, subcultural and hip, its portentous birthday was my wake-up call. People don’t call things hip any more, for a start, and the hipster, so personified in its proto-iteration by Scarlett Johansson as Charlotte, is a decidedly 00s phenomenon.
Lost in Translation appeared in the first half of a decade in which the left had power and lost touch, and gen Xers who’d modelled themselves as countercultural drifters and ravers in the 90s sold out and bought up east London, to let at inflated prices to the generation who missed the boat, us millennials. Multiculturalism wasn’t a dirty word then, and while the year 2000 promised a new dawn of peace in an increasingly globalised planet, it grossly failed to deliver. By the end of the decade it seemed to me, a young man then in his 20s, that the world was in ruins. The failures in those years, while we were averting our eyes and reading Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, listening to Chilled Ibiza and Air’s Talkie Walkie, paved the way for the dystopia that was to follow: the crippling age of austerity, Trump, Brexit, the Windrush scandal, Covid, growing awareness of the climate crisis, the war in Ukraine, the fractures on social media, mumble rap.
Conversely, perhaps it’s precisely this sagging weight of 20 disappointing years that makes Lost in Translation as compelling as ever. The late scholar Mark Fisher pinpointed the year he believed the future died as 2003, the year the film was released. “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world,” he wrote,“than the end of capitalism.” According to Fisher, the 2006 film Children of Men, which is set two decades into the future and depicts a society in which no children have been born for 20 years, is really asking: “What happens if the young are no longer capable of producing surprises?” And by the “young”, he means my generation of apolitical, celebrity-obsessed zombies whose only rebellion was to reach outside our era to obscure references of the past and wear them on a T-shirt. Its sterility was summed up well by the critic Mark Greif, who wrote, of the era of the hipster: “It did not yield great literature, but it made good use of fonts.” The thing is, as a generation we knewthings were shit (there was even a book published in 2005 called Is It Just MeOr Is Everything Shit?The Encyclopedia of Modern Life), but anything that kicked against the prevailing system was swallowed up by it; the 2000s were the age of “Che [Guevara] chic”, activists jobbing as corporate diversity consultants, and music genres formerly born of protest transfigured into Lily Allen’s ironic, reggae-tinged mockney 50 Cent cover Nan You’re a Window Shopper.
It’s a dramatic and depressing thought, but for me, Lost in Translation represents the death of the future; the last time I remember seeing something that genuinely surprised me. It didn’t scream newness, or protest, but the subtly transgressive configuration of ingredients produced something the world had never seen before. It was the understated apex of a great flourishing of gen X genius that runs through a postmodern collection of films as wide-ranging as Donnie Darko, One Hour Photo, Kill Bill1 and 2, Fight Club, Memento, anything that Gaspar Noé, Michel Gondry or Spike Jonze made, Amélie, American Beauty and American Psycho. Whatever you think of those films, they turned audience expectations upside down.
The director of photography onLost in Translation (and Being John MalkovichandAdaptation) was Lance Acord. He tells me that, comparing the amazing array of creativity in cinema in the five years between 1999 and 2004 with the output of the past five years, it’s difficult not to find the current era lacking. “But it’s hard for me to fit Lost in Translation into the context of the early 2000s, or any period, or genre. It’s timeless. For me, as a cinematographer,