By Stephanie K. Hopkins
In Lost in Translation, Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) floats through Tokyo, trapped in her own internal world. She doesn’t speak Japanese and so language becomes noise, part of the wall of city and sound she can’t penetrate. Voices—sometimes laughing, sometimes urgently repeating themselves in an attempt to be understood—take on the mocking tenor of honking horns, slot machines, screeching tires, beeps and pings, bells and whistles.
Left alone for long hours by her photographer husband, Charlotte moves from inside space to inside space: hotel room, hallway, cab, elevator, hotel lounge. At night, she perches on her hotel room windowsill, watching the tease of the skyline, with its infinite inaccessible possibilities, the quiet of her room an extension of the internal space she can’t break out of. “I didn’t feel anything,” she tries to tell a friend on the phone after visiting the Heian Shrine in Kyoto. But the friend can’t talk, and Charlotte is left to wipe her tears and gather herself.
Then she meets Bob Harris (Bill Murray), an older movie star shooting whiskey commercials, whose wife and kids are back in the States, and who is also floating and lost. Amidst the noise, a small pocket of intimacy opens up between Charlotte and Bob.
These days, we might be tempted to think of intimacy as disclosure. We seek each other out through flippant confessions via status updates and tweets; we write and read so many that they threaten to become meaningless: “I’m eating a donut,” “Feeling blue,” “Really hating Facebook right now.” Our private spaces have been infiltrated by the imagined audience of everyone we ever knew, so that when we do anything, we are already thinking about what we’ll say about it. We float amidst the white noise of information and its technological soundtrack: fingers on a keyboard, the cacophony of intonations for text message, Facebook update, email, phone call.
When words become noise, when information builds an impenetrable wall, where do we find each other?
Charlotte and Bob find each other in quiet moments outside the fray. They feel no urgent need to speak or explain themselves to each other. They spend long moments looking into each other’s eyes or moving through the city side by side. They find each other in the subtle but powerful force of human touch—not sex, but care—they hold hands as they run across a busy street; Bob carries Charlotte to her room after a party and tucks her into bed; they sit on a hallway bench after Karaoke and she rests her head on him; they watch movies and drink sake out of beautiful wooden boxes and lie on the bed fully clothed. “Does it get easier?” Charlotte asks Bob. She’s curled in a C shape toward him, with bed between them, her toes just barely tucked under his leg. He lies on his back. “No,” he says. “Yes. It gets easier.” There is no need to clarify what “it” is. His hand moves to her feet, rests against them and taps lightly. Slowly, the lonely kind of quiet turns into a shared reprieve.
Charlotte’s relationship with Bob opens the city up for her. She returns to the shrine in Kyoto but this time, she is receptive to its vibrant red, the lush green trees, the landscape’s artistic palate. She observes a wedding and sees the bride slip her hand quietly into the groom’s. Charlotte ties a white paper fortune on a soft, snow-like paper-covered tree. We can feel Charlotte’s openness in this return trip to the shrine; she is more relaxed, at ease. She is able to connect to what previously excluded her.
When we pause, when we step outside the noise, we find each other where we’ve always been but where we didn’t think to look because we were too urgently trying to reveal ourselves. Instead of trying to explain or perform or display ourselves, what if we try to see?
There’s a whole big world out there.
This Valentine’s Day, what if we took a break from the noise and spent time long-looking at a lover, a parent, a sibling, a friend? What if we were to lose ourselves in a quiet connection with another person and see how the world unfolds?
We can write the status update later: Today walked through the world like an open window and fell in love with everything around me…
Stephanie writes short stories, non-fiction, and young adult fiction. She recently finished a young adult novel, "Edge of Seventeen," and is working on a memoir about her adventures as an ex-professor turned bartender. You can reach her at stephaniehop@gmail.com and follow her on Twitter @stephaniehop1.
More Love Notes:
This Valentine’s Day, Get Lost