A Jet-lagged Hayride with Dracula: LOST IN TRANSLATION, THIS GUN FOR HIRE

"As for fidelity, should one not be faithful to all those whom one loves?" - Robin Wood  

By aliens I mean not in an extraterrestrial but in the alienation sense: foreigners in a strange land unable to shake their dreamy disconnected jet lag ennui except perhaps when they finally meet a fellow traveler, like Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) and Bob Harris (Bill Murray) in Lost in Translation (2003), unable to sleep, jet lagged in their ritzy Tokyo hotel, not speaking Japanese at all, or any other language (they're American!), their initial reason for being there not taking up much of their time, their gaijin height and features contrasting them from the rest of city as distinctly as giant Nephilim Nordic Vikings, they can either hang out together or with no one. But it's about soul connection, not some hook-up. They got their breeder spouses for that.


When I saw Translation at a Chelsea theater during its initial run on Thanksgiving in 2003 with a cadre of AA people, I was in the throes of something so similar to the doomed love of Bob and Charlotte I felt like the film was a continuation of my own life, with Manhattan doubling for Tokyo and Brooklyn for the States. I recognized too the dangers of the Murray-Johansson romance's leading anywhere largely from the cautionary example of Steve Buscemi and Thora Birch in Ghost World (left), in which Johansson also co-starred just two years earlier.  Birch initiates everything but the next morning the look on her face is such we realize Steve should have fought it just a little harder.

We all in that AA posse recognized the same lost soul magnetism between Murray and Johansson, the gorgeous ephemeral lost soul union known only to we who have heard the chimes at midnight fade into sirens and muffled EMT voices muffled across hurricanes of silence far over our heads as we leaned back against the numb sidewalk: "Sir? Sir? Can you hear my voice? Have you had anything to drink or taken anything tonight?" Taken anything... what a dumb expression.


 In other words, we were isolated in our space, cut off and adrift, like Raven, so when someone else comes along who gets that, who's also on that level, a sympathetic cute chick EMT rather than a suspicious cop eyeing your bag and fixing to drag you into the cop car of cold logic, well, she's too precious to throw away by busting even some advanced playa move because either it works and then you have to make out for hours and blah blah when you just want to get home, or it doesn't and she bails and you die on the street, the average folks stepping over you, looking down at you there dying, like you're just another vagrant.

People say men and women don't know how to be friends but what they mean is they don't know how. Love can flourish more profoundly in a platonic friendship, irregardless of genders, or numbers. You needn't be monogamous or cockblock or judge or restrict or allow those things to be done to you. But you need to know a few things about yourself first, you need to have achieved a few of your life's most cherished desires and so been able to savor the devastating emptiness that's the final result. Nothing's more revolting than when love leads to a family. Good lord, what's the use of being a hit man at all if they're just going to keep coming? There needs to be some peace! Doesn't anyone remember laughter? To paraphrase Jim Morrison, no earth-shattering orgasm or greaser high five will forgive you for the dawn you just wasted.


Breeder San Francisco homicide detective Michael Crane (Robert Preston - above) for example, wants to waste the dawn that is Lake's shimmering hair by turning her into a cop's wife ("I don't understand it, that girl is nuts about you," notes one of the showgirls. And we agree with her). When he asks her to surcease her chanteuse-ing, to perform instead for an audience of one, "darning his socks and cooking his corned beef and cabbage" I almost gag. All that horrid smelling steam will ruin her hair. Here's a putz to warm the Catholic Legion of Decency's heart, he sees Lake slink onto the stage and can only imagine getting her out of that shimmery gown and into an apron, sees her gorgeous hair and imagines how much better it will look wilted by leaning over a pot of fucking boiled cabbage all day. I can only presume we're supposed to think that, while at the same time Laird Cregar's referring to his main vice as "backing leg shows" hints at the job's essential tawdriness. At least he wants her looking glamorous!

Even if she didn't wind up in that kind of role in her subsequent films, and even if it would be the last time we have to have a square boyfriend for her (just noble dimwits or blustery gangsters) that's okay; more or likely she'll just be stringing them along. Her real love is always that lost cause kitten, even if he turns out to be a hit man with a smashed wrist. She looks at sweaty little crumb bums like Raven after she catches him stealing her dough on the train, or Sullivan in his best rags, not with disgust or judgment, but the same way Raven looks at that kitten. We don't often see that look again in movies, it's a look beyond sentiment, sympathy or some covertly judgmental altruism, but a real feeling of empathy, one right guy to another. The previous year's Sullivan's Travels was the best use of that hair, if she owes her career to anyone it's not Ladd or Raymond Chandler but Sturges, for throwing her into a pool in Sullivan's Travels (1941), that complex post-modern masterpiece that I wish had a making-of documentary extra, so we could see all these rich characters with expensive filmmaking machinery filming a bunch of extras as hobos running onto a train in a movie about how dumb it is for rich guys to film hobos running onto a train instead of Ants in Your Plants of 1941 (and filming that too anyway). 

You know, the nice thing about buying food for a man is that you don't have to listen to his jokes. Just think, if you were some big shot like a casting director or something, I'd be staring into your bridgework saying 'Yes, Mr. Smearcase. No, Mr. Smearcase. Not really, Mr. Smearcase! Oh, Mr. Smearcase, that's my knee!'- Veronica Lake's character, a struggling actress who spends her last dime on who she thinks is a bum but is a slumming director who knows Lubitsch - Sullivan's Travels 1941

That's the same beauty Ladd and Lake capture, the Hawksian self-awareness finally being rewarded in a union of equals, the girl free from Mr. Smearcase and his grabby hands (in 1951's The Thing, Margaret tells Pat how much she likes him only when his hands are safely tied), but outside of a Hawks film (which neither Ladd nor Lake were ever in) there's not much of that going around, which is why Lost in Translation was as rare and precious as an intercostal clavicle. Even now, after so many people in my long life have whittled down to Facebook updates, no one left to stay or leave or not be here or not be not here, it doesn't even matter, because I love like an ocean, fluid in all directions, and am on meds now, so I don't want to hug Translation's pant leg and cry, to stop it from walking out on me yet again. I don't actually want to cry like that, just remember I might, were I not on meds. And now my crying comes out only like a sudden ungainly burst of water pressure through a dried-up backyard spigot, cathartic for the pipes, but not overwhelming. It doesn't cripple my artistic inspiration with a lot of mawkish Fordian blarney.

There's only one problem: there are only so many Hawks movies, so many Lake-Ladd noirs, and once you watch 'em all, where are you? A shivering alcoholic in the cold, sifting through your stacks of DVDs like they're a bunch of empty bottles, wondering if there's anything left, anywhere, for that sense of Hawksian bonding or Lake-Ladd alien frequency. But what is it that ended it all so soon? Did the Lake-Ladd thing need the war to survive, which is why the returning Marines coast on the its fumes in Blue Dahlia, the way Sturges maybe did with Eddie Bracken in Hail the Conquering Hero? A movie so good it makes me try to watch Miracle at Morgan's Creek but I'm so annoyed by Betty Hutton's Charlotte Haziness and Bracken's stuttering that I never can finish it.

"It's really the repression of sex (think of old stories like Brief Encounter and Love Affair) and the acceptance of a carnal boundary that can't be crossed that becomes, in their eloquent silence-filled rapport, a form of love more life-altering than the sexual contortions now monotonously de rigueur." - Molly Haskell (2003) 

The tragedy with the couple in platonic love orbit in Lost in Translation, is that each party has already 'settled' for an approximation of what they considered 'normal' - a bid to the animal. As if once doing that frees them from needing to drag the carnal along into it, as in courtly love which was never about breaking up the marriage. Sex was what triggered your disillusionment, not the other way around. It's the hesitant undeniable attraction of doomed lovers in the lost moment, sharing their loneliness, as well as the pain of remembering that loving bond, the pain of anyone who's fallen in love from a distance--all too common in the internet age, lack of earthly parameters freeing one to write acres of poetry and longing prose letters, vast forests of stanzas never needing to be printed out or even saved anymore than it needs to be concretized in the sack. In AA we say 'think the drink through.' So instead of just thinking of the drink and the sweet sudden feeling of completeness, of joy and fearless brio, the surge of coherence, confidence, inspiration, and jubilant love it brings, or we think it brings, we think past that to the need for the next one, twice as strong as the need for the first, but with only half the joy and completeness, and then the sodden depression when we're too drunk to do anything but drink more.

But it's the same for Bob as he's being drawn to Charlotte, that rapturous connection. If you don't make a first move you'll never lose her. Maybe she'll sleep with every single one of your friends, but in 20 years you will be the only guy she remembers without anger and remorse when she's making her qualification in Sex Addicts Anonymous. If that's not worth the sting, then you're a dirty dog who hasn't thought the drink through, doesn't want to be a DILF just some old lech who took advantage of her loneliness instead of buying himself a Porsche for his big midlife crisis (as she first suggests). But as the man, if you're not strong enough to resist, sublimate, and diffuse, you're not worthy of her, not try to send her back on the first stage out of Presidio, or plane out of Vichy-occupied Martinique. It's a Catch-22. It's like death, in fact, and like death you are officially permitted, by god no less, god your ever-alert audience, to laugh it off, sound in your Lacanian ideal and self knowledge, using her loveliness to fuel your art. There's no greater bond. If death chooses you, if death makes the first move, then okay. But you don't have to make it easy for her. She loves a good challenge! Pedro, did you put the girl on the stage or not??

It's that death drive as a platonic idea that is why Johansson was so well cast in Lost and later in Her and the underrated Lucy and why it was so important she wanted to fool around with Captain America in Winter Soldier and later Bruce Banner/Hulk in Age of Ultron, but they were both wary and held off. Natasha Romanov: it's great that she wants to fool around with you, it's bad if you allow it, because this is a girl so used to having men she wants, of using sex as a weapon, of being constantly ogled, seducing and destroying, that the only way to win her respect is to not be one of them. You can't risk the Hulk coming out when she dumps you, trashing the city in a drunken rage. In this way art thou noble, chivalrous, and tortured enough that your soul is forge-hot, ready to be hammered.



And if you love her, you want her respect more than the crushing pain of thwarted desire if she doesn't call you back some rainy Sunday night. I mean, I'd hope you do! Think the drink through!
Take it from me, the pain's the same either way. Things are only valuable when they're lost. So lose yourself and watch your price shoot up until your smack center in the comic store window.

On the other hand, if she moves in, goes for that first kiss, you may as well go along because it's even better if you help on the second. And then that's probably going to be it, onscreen, so make it count. What you do after the fade out or we pan to your buddies below the window wondering if they'll ever get to be sheriff or mind their own business, or pull away from your conversation so we can't hear it ---that has to be your affair for this all to work. There's only one solution to the bind Charlotte and Bob find themselves in at the end of Lost in Translation, to merge with the unseen spectator, for their final words together to be unheard by our corrupting ears. Like Schrödinger's cat heaven, those unheard words thrive on the edge, the line that ties the fish of Pisces, neither a promise nor a denial. Only through my all-consuming absence am I yours alone. And we'll always have Facebook. Here's looking at you/r, kid/s.

NOTES
1. Robin Wood, Sexual Politics in Narrative Cinema, (p. 82)