Surfin' the drift

Beyond the Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche

Remember I said I hated the film Lost in Translation?

Well, I still hate it quite a bit - I still think Scarlett Johannson was weak and I still don't think Bill Murray was particularly good in this (sorry, Anna). Nor does it really show Tokyo for what it is (yes, Mark - they really should have included a scene featuring your favourite wine shop and no, Chas - Muse is not a suitable location for the various scenes in the film you would like to see).

However, a couple of things have come to light in the last couple of days which, if nothing else, makes me think about the film again. First of all, I was looking at the website of the film and noticed that one of the taglines for the film was "Sometimes you have to go halfway around the world to come full circle". Which is logically a ton of codswallop but, coincidentally, not entirely dissimilar to the title of the last blog I posted.

Intrigued and slightly spooked, I got out the DVD and watched the documentary of the "making of" the film which was called, rather unimaginatively, Lost on Location. These days you have no choice in the matter - buy a DVD and you get all the "extras" bundled together with the film. Some of these extras are far better than others - like who would want to turn on the director's commentary or read that as subtitles while the film is being played out? Anyway, back to the documentary.

I'll have to admit I enjoyed the documentary much more than I did the film. The documentary showed the real Tokyo as I remembered it to be - the experience of having to explain something a couple of times to an English-speaking Japanese who would then have to instruct the masses. A couple of times, repeatedly. Walking down narrow streets in Tokyo past impossibly small restaurants and shops. Sofia Coppola does not come out well in the documentary (for which I am glad and I have never forgiven her for ruining The Godfather, Part 3) - in fact, she shows herself up as what she really is. A Hollywood princess - but even she has to struggle with the Japanese and I rather think the score at the end of the production was Nippon 1- Hollywood Princess 0.

Then there were the various synchronicities - not the album of the same name by The Police but as in Carl Jung, the phenomenon of the collective unconscious and the meaningful coincidences connected in such a way that seemed to defy probability. The crew of the film (but not the big stars) stayed at the Oakwood in Tokyo, I stayed at the Oakwood in Tokyo (a couple of months later) - in the same way that when Ocean's Twelve was filmed in Rome, the big stars (but not the crew of the film) stayed at the Russei (where I stayed a couple of months before).

And then there was Shibuya Crossing - this has always had some inexplicable iconic significance to me and it was one of the places that I made a special pilgrimage to on my recent trip to Tokyo. At one level, it's just a pedestrian crossing but on another level, that is the soul of Tokyo to me (more so than Senso-ji or Tokyo Tower) - even before I visited the place. So it was very gratifying to watch the film crew in the documentary sneak up to the Starbucks to film the crossing when just a couple of weeks ago, I was standing on street level staring up at the Starbucks and thinking of the Japanese girls who had been seduced by heartless Caucasian gaijin gaikokku bengoshi in that very place.

I have said in an earlier blog that I have always associated certain places in the world with certain people - in the same way that Columbus Circle in New York and the Lumiere cinema on the Champs Elysee in Paris are different people and special to me, Shibuya Crossing is and always will be a special person. Perhaps that is the message of Lost in Translation - something I never got the first time around. That within the confines of space and time, some experiences are life-changing and even if we have to go back to our normal lives or at least, a life we thought we had to go back to, we will never be the same people again.

Then again, perhaps we can never go back again.

posted by porcorosso @ 2:25 AM