Desire and Longing

We returned home from a lovely dinner at a plant-based restaurant in Jaco. And settling in and down we thought to view again Sofia Coppola’s 2003 film Lost in Translation. I know that I had screened the film in the theater when it first opened, and Elizabeth remembered seeing it in the movie theater as well. In the film, Bob and Charlotte are booked into an expensive Tokyo hotel: they are not a couple but both have rooms. Bob has been hired for a Suntory whiskey commercial for a fee of two million dollars, and Charlotte is accompanying her husband who is a photographer on a job. Shae has recently graduated, apparently from Yale, as a philosophy major. But neither Bob nor Charlotte appear satisfied with their lives: Bob has apparently given up seeking parts in legitimate theater for the money he can earn in commercials. The scenes in which he sits for the commercial are humiliating, partly because the directors do not speak English and Bob doesn’t speak Japanese, and partly because the very idea of his commercialization evidenced in his bored and almost benighted expressions suggests the state of his disoriented state of mind. A great deal has been lost in translation. Charlotte has experimented with a number of vocations but has not felt empowered by or drawn to by any of them. She is lost herself in translation from college student to a passive and married adult. Bob has been married for 25 years and has two children, but when he calls home his wife is a bit too busy to talk with him, though she has sent carpet samples for his study from which he is expected to choose. Bob’s children, too, are not eager to talk with him and the time difference between the United States and Japan makes most communication difficult. Much is lost in translation. Charlotte, on the other hand, has been married for only two years but something is obviously lacking in the relationship despite the voiced expressions of love between she and her husband. Charlotte as yet is childless and there is no hint that she is anxious to begin a family. When she asks Bob what it is like to have children, he tells her that when he had children it was like he had lost his life. Charlotte doesn’t yet have a life to lose. Much is lost in translation.

I think this is a film about longing, a state I want to distinguish from Desire. The latter I understand as an energy that sends one out into the world to discover something for which one doesn’t yet know they are even looking. Bob is ordered to Japan, a city that from the beginning baffles him, and Charlotte, as I have said, just accompanies her husband for apparently having nothing else to occupy her. I have earlier defined Desire as the pilot light on a stove which existence is necessary to use any of the burners to cook anything, but that pilot light cannot be found in any individual burner flame. Or perhaps it exists unrecognized in all of the burners. Cooking requires that the pilot exist, but the pilot light is only valuable if there are burners it can ignite and food that can be cooked. Longing is blocked Desire. If Desire sends one out into the world, then longing keeps one fixed in place. Desire leads to creativity as it finds objects to realize, but longing, because it does not venture, finds no object. Desire is looking in the world. Greg Brown sings, “I’m looking for Rexroth’s daughter/And I guess I always will be.” What sends Brown out is Desire, but he knows that Rexroth’s daughter, a friend of a friend of mine, will never be found: the seeking for her is the motive for his life. But longing isn’t looking for an object. Sitting at a window overlooking Tokyo, Bob tells Charlotte that he had scheduled that day a shiatsu massage in which he experienced unbearable, excruciating pain. I am not certain that longing is exactly the experience of Bob’s shiatsu massage, but certainly longing is frustrative and extremely discomforting. Longing is to experience hunger but there exists no pilot light to light a burner to cook any food. Bob Dylan sings, “Well the sun went down a long time ago/And doesn’t seem to shine anymore/I wish I could have spent every hour of my life/With the girl from the Red River shore.” That sentiment represents what I define as longing: he would abandon the searching for the having.  Ironically, however, Dylan has created a song from Desire. The narrator admits, “Well I’m a stranger here in a strange land/But I know this is where I belong/I ramble and gamble for the one I love/And the hills will give me a song “ The longing is for the girl from the Red River Shore, but the Desire is where he belongs.