Lost In Trans

Feeling lost and wanting more

She has been feeling pretty lost lately, like running on autopilot. This is a typical example of the things we feel in life. Life often feels like a journey to everyone. Sometimes, the journey does not make sense or it does not go anywhere which then leads to our feelings of being lost, most of the time, confused. The bottom line is a lot of how we feel about ourselves stems from how you look at the world. As we see in the movie Lost in Translation, the two main characters fills the perfect mold of two people lost on their walk in life. There were many symbolisms that helped emphasize the feeling of confusion, lost, loneliness, but eventually these symbolisms change once they look at things in a different perceptive. Few words were used but many symbolisms were involved that helped emphasis the sense of loneliness. The struggles that we go through in life to find our purpose.

Why am I here? What is the purpose of life? What is the purpose of doing this? We spend a majority of our life questioning and trying to search for self understanding which often derives from self examination. We reach a point where we feel lost and confused and we lose the drive that we once have. The plot of the movie Lost in Translation is basically the plot of self understanding. The many symbolisms help emphasize and stress the feeling of confusion in the lives of the two people we see. It conveys a sense of loneliness the characters feel as they search for understanding in themselves and each other.

The movie is about two wanderers, Bob Harris and Charlotte, meeting to regain a purpose in their lives while visiting Tokyo. Charlotte, a recent Yale graduate, is married to a chic photographer for whom she is having second thoughts. Bob is an actor with a career that is heading nowhere and a wife who only seems to care about redecorating their home. Bob and Charlotte find each other at the hotel bar and become very close because of their mutual loneliness and stark boredom. Both are searching for the meaning of their lives, looking at the situation from different point of view.

In the beginning of the movie, we get the sense of confusion as Bob Harris arrives in Tokyo. We see that when he is sitting in the taxi looking at all the billboard signs. The mixture of colors and motion helps to create sense of confusion and alienation, which is what Harris is feeling, as he looks at all the flashing signs in a foreign language. The billboards are symbolic of Harris's confusion with his life. We also see that he is part of the billboards which represents how he is in the midst of the confusion. In the cast of Charlotte, we see that she sits on the window sill looking out into distance, looking out into the city lights. We get a sense of Charlotte's feeling of alienation from her surroundings. The scene of when she was in the hotel's indoor pool furthers accent her sense of loneliness. The triangular frame of the structure helps draw the viewer's attention to Charlotte's lonely figure. The horizontal and vertical support framing in the window is symbolic of entrapment, cause by her failing marriage. The blue color scheme further portrays the feelings of depression and loneliness. (Triangulate on her position)

Another scene that portrays the her alienation is the scene when she is walking across the pond from a temple in Kyoto. With her back facing away from the camera and her walking away, symbolizes her alienation and her struggle to get away from the things in her life that upsets her. In this case, we can say that she's trying to get away from a husband whom she doesn't love or we think that she doesn't love.

The very first obvious symbolism, we encounter, is the struggle to understand the language. Throughout the film, both Bob and Charlotte struggle to understand Japanese. This struggle is symbolic