Still Life

by Fritz Brantley, '07

"Each of us is a kind of crossroads where things happen. The crossroads is purely passive, something happens there. A different thing, equally valid happens elsewhere. There is no choice, it is a matter of chance." Š Levi-Strauss "It was boring." "How could you find it boring?" "It just...sat there. Mooned over itself. It was talky." "It was...great. I dunno. I think it says something to people in transition." "Well, I'd hardly think of my life as...I don't know..." "Static?" "Right." My mother, my sister, my father and I walked two blocks, and took the subway back to our hotel. ** That wasn't the first time I'd seen the movie. The summer I learned how to wear cologne, I was burning my last bridge to the city of Los Angeles, one kiss at a time in a Venice Beach apartment. There was an early cut of Lost In Translation playing on a gaudy television, in a gaudy entertainment center, in a gaudy black leather-smeared den, in a rundown walk-up. You can see without seeing, obviously. I can certainly tell you the converse is true. I'd been working most of that summer as an overnighter in a chic department store catering to aging Westwood matriarchs, leaving the sales floor perfumed with my distaste for high fashion. But I remember, more than anything else from that last tango on Figueroa, Scarlett Johansson in a pink wig, singing "Brass In Pocket" to a dried-up matinee idol. ** "You know, looking back, I'm beginning to realize...those characters were assholes! How did we like them?" "Maybe they were but...I dunno. I just see something in Charlotte that's so...'I am trapped here, and I don't know it.'" "But Bill Murray! What a fuckin' dick!" "I don't see that. I just...Maybe this rings to me in a way it shouldn't." "I'm not trying to make fun of the movie, I liked the movie too, but you've got to--" "I know. You're very even-handed, Josh, and I'm putting on extra eyeshadow." "Fuck you, you know what I mean." "You workin' today?" "Shit, yeah. Call after you're out of seminar." "Cool." I walk home, and sure as silver, we meet at 7. ** He is certainly not wrong, but he forgets completely why I, and many others, are completely in love with these two unlikely friends. Chance. The best part of Lost In Translation is not what everyone points out - the imagery, the music, the acting, the sweetness and strangeness of the narrative, but it is how the viewer finds it. While certainly everyone heard about it and certainly it garnered the acclaim that it may or may not deserve, watching Lost In Translation is a cinematic experience akin to picking up someone's receipts: a candid set of shards, that offers more than complete truth, but completely mutable truth. One can reconstruct it to mean anything, and it cannot be any less right. Just as it weaves through Bob and Charlotte's crossroads, the movie spins you around to understand the luck that moves through you, whether or not that's actually true. ** "But how can it be a clichˇ if it never really existed?" asks Kat. "Maybe it's becoming one?" ** I think most everyone, at one point, has entertained some kind of bad girl/bad boy fantasy. To me, it speaks more to "who you are" to reveal what being bad is to you, than any other marker Š-what you want to be when you grow up, your favorite color, or when you were born. In truth, I can't tell you what "being bad" was to me. Okay, sure, I've done some things that I wouldn't reveal to my parents over Thanksgiving dinner. I was in a rock band. I color my hair quite a bit. But these are pretty tame signs of rebellion, especially since I can write you a list that would have you thinking I hand-starch my shirts and spend Saturdays balancing my checkbook. I mean, I had long ago always known that amorality and organization were never necessarily East and West. I just never knew people that could prove it to me, until I started working the night shift. The kinds of people who worked the night shift were at a precipice of believability. For whatever reason, we had been reduced to not being the superstars of the Fred Segal lineup - the associates. But as much as we scurried in and out like roaches, we clearly had some kind of edge on the Dayglo world of the sales floor. We knew how to use a matte cutter. We could match colors. Some of us went to art school, but "needed the money." Claire and I were at the time, heavy smokers (Parliament Ultra Lights, Marlboro Reds). Every night, at the very beginning, and at the very end of our six hours we would sit in the crisp West Hollywood air and add a cubic centimeter of smog to our 2 A.M. commute. We were the same age, we were bad drivers, and we liked the same taco stand. (17, still can't parallel park, the one three blocks up with the Thursday lunch special) We were both non-natives (St. Louis, Little Rock), and as much as we liked being somewhere where glamour ran hot, cold, and trashy, we knew something was missing. We both came from cities where you can't walk a block. No matter how rich or how poor, at the age of 16 you are driven to the DMV and promptly handed a set of keys. We both had found ourselves in our cars (1987 Tercel, 1990 Volvo 640), on our roads (the Harvester Beltway, the 7th Street Expressway), and we had, in essence, seen a good 70% of Los Angeles. Someone much smarter than me said that the communal secular experience in LA is the freeway. Why stop there? The communal experience anywhere is motion. The minute you realize it, I get the feeling, you become a night-shifter, a night person, a night anything, really. I'm reticent to name it, but if you must, borrow what the composer to the Lost In Translation soundtrack called Charlotte: "City Girl." You become like Claire and I were, at 17. The minute you realize this, you've become lost to everyone except yourself. Armed like this, you take long drives, pointed north on the Hollywood Expressway and you relish the wee hours when you can find stretches of it with few others on it. But what was missing, we didn't figure out until we saw that rough cut, no matter how little we actually watched. We never walked. The scenes that people seem to have trouble with in Lost In Translation are the fairly indulgent, gauzy shots of Charlotte roaming. As many as there are, it's a skillful method of characterization. In Shibuya, she roams through a veritable petrified forest of shattered dreamers; in Kyoto, she confronts marriage, life, and death in one of the Spring Gardens; and in Roppongi, she and Bob dramatize the dance that keeps the movie alive. This is where, more than anything, I think Sophia Coppola hits the mark. Walking. I mean, I've nothing to say about flaneurs or street-walkers, I just know that when you walk, there's chance. You can miss your train. You can turn the wrong corner. You could end up a girl in a tartan skirt, dropping her last drag before she takes the Red Line. You could be the boy in his blazer and tie, walking out of the turnstile. There's no chance anywhere on the 405, and there's no chance in an air-conditioned bubble going down it. Claire and I never knew where this fantasy came from, in retrospect. We always wanted to be city boys, city girls, but we never knew either end of the equation - where they came from, what they did. There are certainly antecedents, don't get me wrong: Peter Pan had his lost boys and girls, and after the Ramones, they certainly got a lot tougher, and a lot more glamorous. But it was traitless: it wasn't resourcefulness, urbanism, or glamour. For a lack of any words, they just had that something. An image makes things more real than Claire, or anyone else ever did. That's why I hate this movie. I hate it for making the multiplicity of me, Claire, and everyone else so very clear. ** DoubleDutch: I like it a lot, actually matte finish: ditto. my main concern is my incredible attachment to it despite my incredible mixed feelings about scarlett johansson DoubleDutch: bill murray's kind of an asshole, too and that seems important for a movie where the relationship is so key I tell him how I feel, but in ineloquent terms. Charlotte and Bob offered for me the chance to turn myself into what I wanted, whether or not he existed. I could be reckless, I could be selfish, I could be smart, I could be self-destructive and I would not be contradicting myself. Charlotte made my minimal acts of badness bigger, by making my more placid virtues appear like white diamonds studding my pores. She made me Zelda without ballet. She turned me from incurable to simply flighty. When I saw it the first time, I was a bit too busy playing out the great illness that everyone who has ever lived inside his head, or in Los Angeles, has experienced: I was playing a character in my own private movie. The story is less important than you or I would like to believe, but it is the one chance event that happened to me, that summer. I can gloss over this safely, because whether or not it has happened to you, it has been the way of life for boys and girls, before and after Charlotte. The choreography can never change - two boys, lost, find something. Whether or not it's what they were looking for doesn't matter, but how they found it is always in the hand of serendipity. For Claire, it was a fender-bender on North Crescent. It could have been the waiter who left his number on a receipt. It was a scrape, a step, but in the end, it was the customer I had to shoo out of the store, as I began rearranging the eye shadow display. There are steps: steps in between moving Cherry Blush next to Cerulean to a concert at the Echo to lots of car rides. It wasn't much different from Claire at all, except we'd learned to be alone. Learning to find someone you can be alone from can give you more than symbiosis ever will. I can't say if he was actually lost. I can tell you this: he was bumbling his way through art school, and his dad was a powerbroker in Marina Del Rey, who gave him the apartment to more cleanly throw parties. He spent most of the day tanning, getting high, and working at a Color Me Mine, which he seemed to enjoy a bit too much. I can tell you that he was at times charming, but mostly very sad, and ill-at-ease in his own skin. I can certainly tell you that's not much different than me and Claire. But I think the minute we tried to find if not a home, then a pied-a-terre in each other, something was lost. There is nothing of his I can show you, because he's as infinitely repeatable as anyone else I have done the same with. We met, we split. The names can change, but the song's the same, and the physical details fade with a morning shampoo. ** "What did you think of it?" "Fritz, did you ever think we were just swimming alone?" ** But to say we were lost is a vanity, and it's the vanity, I'm finding, that keeps me in love with and completely averse to Lost In Translation. Charlotte is not lost. She is hardly trapped. Claire and I were neither. We talked a while after I saw the movie in full, during Thanksgiving with my family. She met me on the corner of 54th and 5th, near my sister's apartment. We had both seen it, and I'd called her to tell her the importance of us discussing it. We ended up drawing many of the same conclusions - we were never trapped, we just never knew it. Being lost is certainly not the same as just wanting to find something else. Given a bit of desire, a bit of motion, we could have done something outside of our paths. We could shake the stars, as seen from an overpass. With a plane ticket, and a pair of sneakers, we could have been the girl and boy that haunted us so distinctly. What kept us in Los Angeles, though, was something that even I can't place my finger on. I imagine it's what made Charlotte take the plane back, and walk away from Bob, in the middle of Tokyo. Resignation? Common sense? Maturity? Charlotte did the two worst things a heroine could do. She showed us that we were nothing new, and she told us how to grow up. She did it in her silence. ** I left his apartment that night. I shook out my hair, and began the three blocks to my car. You can't walk anywhere in Los Angeles.