The Infuriate: Cultural Hegemony in Coppola’s Lost in Translation
Artsy dramatic representation, melodic indie-instrumental music, and two Hollywood A-list actors are a combination that should make a great movie; but sadly, Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation failed to impress, while succeeded in offending. I even tried to watch it over with a nameless ex-boyfriend who was completely obsessed with the movie because he claims it to be a masterpiece of an honest representation of multi-culturalism. Lost in Translation not only blatantly operates through the western gaze to fetishize cultural hegemony, but it fueled an entire following of viewers that buy into the film and take this creative work of unconscionable racism as representative of cultural diversity. I honestly do not know what angers me more: the movie or the people that love it.
The film follows two displaced white Americans finding their way through the culture shock of Japan that feed a budding indie-film romance. But the depiction of Japan and Japanese culture is through a strong lens of othering, placing the west above the ridiculed East. Although it is granted that there is the reality of strong cultural hegemony that pervades the commercialism and materialism of urban Japanese culture, the domination of western culture over the ever-willing Japanese society is a phenomena that is fetishized and glorified by the central characters of the film and its large population of fan-viewers.
Perhaps the film’s most infuriating hypocrisy reveals itself through its depiction of characters trying to “find themselves” by getting lost in another culture that is so vastly different than their own, but they are truly only giving the illusion of immersion. They somehow go through some personal, individual growth in character, at the expense of othering a culture in which they are the “other”. However, to be outnumbered does not necessarily determine otherness. Here we see that even when surrounded by a culture in which they are completely out of place, it is still the Japanese that are subordinate, secondary, marginalized, ridiculed, and made to be the “other”. Viewers who accept the romanticized experience of false cultural immersion fetishize the hegemonic structure and internalize this racist gaze into their own body of cultural understanding.
This fetish hype has encouraged a trend of white Americans to rush to Japan to live out their dreams of false immersion, of teaching English in another country to perpetuate another hegemonic structure, and to romantically “find themselves” while in a culture in which they cyclically reaffirm a western dominant cultural hierarchy. One such example is the aforementioned ex-boyfriend: a white male from the U.S. that now lives in Japan, immersing himself in a privileged class while swimmingly enjoying the appearance of multiculturalism.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with international travel and gaining new experiences in foreign countries. I am a strong proponent for enriching one’s global understanding, but one must be conscious of the structures we operate within and be accountable for the consequences of propagating problematic social phenomena. We must we conscious participants in our increasingly globalized world, for hegemony itself is cyclical and shifts are inevitable.
