Stiens Caps #2

How often does culture affect us? In day to day activity we do not really pay attention to culture but if we stop to think about it culture is what shapes us as people. It changes our style, actions, and personality. We go through day to day activities not realizing the culture around us. But what would happen if we were submersed in another culture? We would definitely notice a change. We would notice those differences of style, actions, and personality. If submersed in it long enough we may learn to love it or on the other hand we may become a little homesick and miss the culture we were raised in.

This is exactly what happens in the movie Lost in Translation. The two main characters are both living kind of as lost souls in Japan. Bob, a famous actor, is flown over to Japan to shoot a new commercial for a new brand of whisky and Charlotte, a recent Harvard grad, has gone to Japan with her recently wed husband who is in Japan shooting photography. Neither Bob nor Charlotte sleep well at night and they often run into each other down at the hotel bar. The two befriend each other and find comfort in having someone they can relate to.

Since the setting of this movie is in another country there are many different cultural patterns shown throughout the movie. Right off the bat one of the first things I noticed is the language difference. This difference comes up many times throughout the movie. One of the main characters, Bob, specifically has a hard time with it. For example, in one scene of the movie Bob is shooting the new commercial for whisky. The director speaks Japanese and Bob must have a translator. Bob has a hard time figuring out what the director is asking of him. It often seemed like the director was angry and asking a lot of Bob but when the translator translated what he was saying he was only asking for small changes and was just being enthusiastic. We learn in this scene that Japanese is a much more complex and intense language.

Below is a clip from the movie where Bob is literally lost in translation.

Another example of a cultural difference I noticed was age. Bob was an older man who had a wife and children back home in the United States while Charlotte was a young woman who had just graduated from college and had just gotten married. We see this difference in age have an effect in the scene where Bob and Charlotte are lying in bed. Charlotte is telling Bob how she is lost with her life. She doesn’t know what to do. She said she tried went through a photography phase like every girl does at some point and she tried writing but she didn’t like anything she wrote. Bob gave her advice. He basically said keep writing. Keep doing the things you enjoy. You’ll figure it out eventually.

A third example of a cultural difference in the movie that I noticed was race. The people of Japan have a similar look. They are all a little bit shorter, have dark hair color and have a fair almost porcelain skin tone. An instance in the movie where race is pointed out is early in the movie when Bob and Charlotte are both in the elevator along with quite a few other Japanese people. This is the first time Bob notices Charlotte because he could tell she was of the same race as him. Bob even later on in the movie makes a reference to how he noticed Charlotte the first time by saying something about how she “didn’t exactly blend in on the elevator”.

The interpretive perspective to intercultural communications allows us to observe how people act in their own environments. It allows us to see exactly how people of the same cultural identities influence each other and it allows us to establish our own opinions about a certain cultural identity. However, since the interpretive approach is based on observation, it does not allow us to dig deeper into the meaning behind such cultural aspects. People can sometimes have tunnel vision and see the things they want to see. This approach does not allow us to establish one main conclusion. Instead we develop many different possible conclusions which can have both positive and negative aspects.

Coppola, S. (Director). (2003). Lost in Translation [Motion Picture].