Encounterculture

Ordinarily I don't see the value in posting catalogued purchases that I make, but this one was kind of significant. Last night I went to see Lost in Translation, and I can't get the experience out of my mind now, and that's not necessarily a good thing.

Lost in Translation, for those of you who've been living under a rock for the last month or so, is the critical darling of the year, this year's Far From Heaven (and in more ways than one - LiT borrows TONS of stuff from older movies. The only thing separating the running-through-Tokyo scenes from the running-through-Paris scenes in Jules and Jim was a bridge and a freeze-frame). People, of course, have a tendency to like movies which allow them to vicariously live out their fantasies, and I don't think it's an accident that a bunch of people living here and now really love a movie about frightened, alienated people scraping by in an environment with a humongous gap between sign and signifier. It's the condition of the age, I guess; maybe I was just 22 at the wrong time, but whenever I see people walking around in their ironically-screenprinted t-shirts and oh-so-wry trucker hats, I kind of pity them for a second. Feelings of alienation only seem natural in a world where so many of the ways people like to express themselves have become fodder for business

In that sense, I guess that Lost in Translation is a fine movie. People all around me in the movie theater were laughing at the right times and going church-mouse silent at just the right times, and all of the other people who I saw it with apparently really liked it.

(slug of Jack)

Me personally, however; I haven't had a movie put me so ill-at-ease in years. Sometimes movies can cut very, very close to the bone, not just because they're drawing out things in your life, but because they've got it down. I can't imagine that it's just me, but it sure scared the shit out of me to see that the way I see the world is reductible to a two-hour movie. Worse, this particular movie happened to be exceedingly well-made - so well-made, in fact, that I couldn't identify with anything beyond the impulses beneath the surface. I'm sure, for instance, that Tokyo is exactly as shitty as Los Angeles if you go there, but you'd never tell from watching that movie; its Tokyo looks almost as fun as Playtime's Tativille (and let's not even get into the whole Scarlett Johansson thing). It's presented as this sprawling reflective neon-bedecked playground where these two stray dogs happen to run into each other, and the whole time I'm thinking "Oh Christ, that's tremendous." Not "Oh Christ, that's familiar" - the other one.

And I won't lie: it stung - a lot - to see it with a big audience. It's some cold-ass shit to see something that personally resonant with a theater full of people laughing it up at situations that cut REALLY close to the bone. I suppose it's karma, since I'm sure that I've done the exact same thing to people in the past (and I can think of plenty of occasions when I was a stupid punk kid, arguing with people why I Was Right and They Were Wrong about a movie, which is basically just that), but the fact remains: when the audience started laughing at Bob going to the fashion-designer party and being TOTALLY out-of-place, I died more than a little. Usually I have a pretty thick skin about things like this; I'm always pretty forthright about admitting to being a sensational fuckup whenever it comes up in daily exchanges. But there's a pretty significant difference between people laughing about how I'm socially incompentant and people laughing at a neutral image which pretty much typefies me in any situation where there's more than three people around.

Whenever people compare the theater to the movies, the point of divergence between the two always seems to be that the theater has "presence", because you're actually watching people move around and there's the distinct possibility that disaster could strike at any moment (if the actors pooch a line or the lighting guys miss a cue or whatever), as compared to the sterile end-product world of the movies. I would counter, however, that the difference between the two is simply that in the theater, the experience is shared, whereas in the audience, the believability of the world is so dependent on the psychology of everyone in the audience that it's sheer luck if there's a consensus. I have no problem in saying that movies have a presence of their own, distinct from anything else; I know intellectually that Hong Kong in the sixties wasn't really like In the Mood for Love, but you can draw a similar line of distinction between Orson Welles and Falstaff. At the end of the day, it's just lies; the "presence" is just the degree to which you're willing to suspend disbelief.

In that sense, it should be no surprise that I essentially had a bad trip with Lost in Translation. I mean, here's a movie based on a scenario I understand (if not frequently feel like I'm living out) on an elemental level, set in a spectacularly interesting location and starring an incredibly charismatic actor and an INCREDIBLY attractive actress, and I'm surrounded by people reacting not too dissimilarly from the audience I saw Titanic with. I know I'm just taking it too seriously, but if you genuinely can't understand why the experience freaked me out so much, I might suggest that you go somewhere else and clear your history file.

"Books, music, films," Rob Gordon said in High Fidelity, another case of art gloriously vulgarizing my life (although I mercifully saw it before I became a COMPLETE fuckup), "...these things matter. Call me shallow; it's the fuckin' truth." I think he's right generally, but more right specifically. There are some people who, thanks to a conspiracy between biology and the march of time, are hypersensitve to things, and for better or worse, I'm super-ultra-mega-mega-king-size-hypersensitive to movies. I've spent the last howevermany hours trying to think up a way to commit it to a review, but came up short every time, because I can't claim any conceivable grounds of objectivity. All I have with that movie are my experiences with it, and that's not always a good thing (viz. me at American Splendor, where some guy sitting directly behind me started laughing whenever Harvey was at his job, where he files documents for a hospital).

I can't say I'm going to swear off going to the movie theaters, because that would just be a damned lie (what with Kill Bill, 21 Grams, Eros, Oceans 12, and god knows what else coming out in the next few months). But it's important to remember that just because something can give you a thrill, that doesn't mean that that thrill can't go straight to hell with a change of scenery. When I saw Pulp Fiction for the first time, I went out and started reading everything I could about Quentin Tarantino and essentially took my first steps towards deciding that film criticism might be a good thing to do for the rest of my life. When I saw Lost in Translation, all I did was come home and drink.