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Lost in Translation is a very good movie, but I do not see the appeal for non-travelers. It tells so well what words alone fail to about the subtleties of life in the Orient. But if you’ve never been a Westerner living in the East, I fail to see the appeal.

People sometimes ask me: What do you do when you travel?? In the movie Scarlett Johanssen often walks around aimlessly, stumbling from one disconnected event to the next, always looking around, slight puzzled, slightly overwhelmed. That is what you do when you travel: You wander around puzzled and overwhelmed just sort of waiting for something to happen. And it often does.

In the first scene of the movie there is an off-handed comment by a Japanese man getting on the elevater. He says to Bill Murray, “Please to welcome you to Japan.” It’s little things like that on eternal repeat that turns life abroad into a carnival.

The movie captures so much of the irreality of travel, the circus atmosphere. So often while living in Taiwan I caught myself thinking: “Is this for real? People aren’t like this. The game is up. I know the cameras are hidden somewhere.” But they never are. And so very slowly the ridiculous bleeds into your daily life until it becomes normal….and at that point, when abnormal becomes normal, you’ve lost your grip on reality.

There are the lights of the city, sensory overload. And the people, billions of them, all short with black hair. And the stares you get, like you’re being asked one long unanswerable question. And the odd requests: “Please take a picture with me…” as if I were famous, or “Can I touch your face?” What is my reply to that? Soon you wonder when people don’t want to take pictures with you; you expect little kids to pull at the hair on your arms.

And the conversations with other Whiteys….there is so much to talk about, the country, the people, why you came, the locals, the beer, the women….but no one ever asks the question we usually ask first: “So, what do you do?”

Why not? Well, if you’ve felt the need to go to the other side of the planet chances are you don’t do anything. If you did something you’d be doing it back home and not seeking your proverbial fortune in the Orient. In the past Americans went West in search of something new. The Orient attracts those who felt the West just wasn’t quite far enough away.

I love those odd moments, like when you’re at some buddhist shrine and monks are chanting and praying, the incense is burning and some old woman shuffles by picking her nose and trips over a stray cat scrounging for the food. In life there are no second takes. Your preconceptions are nearly always less than the reality.

And through all that you catch those brief moments when you turn the corner and the sunset breaks through the smog and you hear birds chirp in the park over the din of scooter noise….and it all seems amazing and worthwhile…but still unreal.

The rice loving vertically challenged locals are trumped only by the foreigners, your bretheren. To be so far away from home one must rightly ask: “What the hell are you doing here?”

If you are in Europe perhaps the desire is to become more worldy or cosmopolitan, but as a Westerner in the East you are not running towards, you are running away. The question could be rephrased: “What was so bad at home that you felt you needed to run all the way around the world to escape?”

And those are the people you meet, the ones who are your buffer against the endless bowls of rice, days of rain and russian roulette traffic jams.

And so it becomes given that you are lost…if you were not lost before you came, you certainly have forgotten the reasons….adrift in a sea of karaoke bars and neon lights, a country-wide circle jerk of neurotic, worldy twenty-somethings desperate for something to hold on to.

There are no more anchors. Reality shifts below your feet. Everything is up for reexamination. There was a day in Greece 9 years ago I remember I wanted to call my mom to make sure everything was still real.

So there you are alone, making your way down the street by the polluted river watching the rats scamper along the docks. You stop by your favorite street vendor to order some yummy, but unidentified, treat cooked in a rusted wok from a tired old man with 3 long hairs growing out the mole on his face, handing over some monopoly money currency and wondering what the fuck you’re doing on the other side of the planet.

And so where do you go? The locals are pulling the rug out from under everything you once considered normal, your fellow Westerners are all fleeing the fallout of their former lives and alone you simply turn inward and feed on yourself, running around inside your head like a mouse on a treadwheel locked inside in a never ending b-rated kung fu flick.

That is life in the East. That is how one gets Lost in Translation.

Here is an insight. The movie does a terrific job of illustrating one of the great and secret draws of travel: Escape. Not necessarily escape from something or somewhere, but mostly an escape from yourself.

Escape from yourself….we do it through TV and alcohol, through sex and work, through religion…even gardening or sewing. Its like a temporary reprive from the weight of life. Don’t you ever get tired of being you? Are you really that great that you require your undivided attention every second of your entire life??

Travel is an extended vacation from that life. You cover more ground but skim across the top, a spectator, untouchable….you watch yourself like a movie, star in a few scenes and then dip out and show up a week later in Malaysia.

Travel is not your life. Travel is the life you want, the person you think you are. You are now the star of your life as a movie: exotic locales, lonely women with foreign accents, white beaches, cheap liquor and an overall sense of lawlessness. Don’t like the script? You’ll have a chance to rewrite it tomorrow in another equally exotic locale with cheaper liquor, even farther away…..

How far is far enough?? How many times do you escape before the escape itself becomes your new life….from which you would presumably need to escape again?? Can you take a vacation from your vacation from yourself? Am I really so self-loathing that I need such a vacation?? I never thought of myself as very self-loathing at all.

My past is a weight I cannot put down. Travel is the ghost that haunts my head.

Anyway….it was a good flick and reminds me why I don’t often do stuff that reminds me of travel.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 5th, 2004 at 2:55 am and is filed under My Love of Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.