Cinema and Choric Connection

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Cinema and Choric Connection: Lost in

Translation as Sensual Experience
Brian L. Ott & Diane Marie Keeling
Published online: 06 Oct 2011.
To cite this article: Brian L. Ott & Diane Marie Keeling (2011) Cinema and Choric Connection:
Lost in Translation as Sensual Experience, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 97:4, 363-386, DOI:
10.1080/00335630.2011.608704
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Quarterly Journal of Speech

Vol. 97, No. 4, November 2011, pp. 363386
Cinema and Choric Connection: Lost in

Translation as Sensual Experience
Downloaded by [79.31.63.29] at 11:21 19 February 2015
Brian L. Ott & Diane Marie Keeling
The rise of the new information technologies, and corresponding proliferation of signs,
images, and information, has contributed to a growing sense of alienation and dislocation. For many, the contemporary moment is an unending and disorienting sea of
sensory-symbolic excesses. Lost in Translation is a film addressed to these anxieties.
Engaging the film as a sensual experience, we argue that Lost in Translation equips
viewers to confront the feelings of alienation and dislocation brought on by the sensorysymbolic excesses of (post)modernity by fostering a sense of choric connection. This sense,
we demonstrate, is elicited primarily by the films material (nonsymbolic, aesthetic)
dimensions. Drawing on an analysis of the films aesthetic elements, we conclude by
reflecting on the implications for film studies, rhetorical studies, and everyday life.
Keywords: Materiality; Semiotic Chora; Sensual Experience; Affect; Lost in Translation
Every work of art is the child of its age and, in many cases, the mother of our
emotions.*Wassily Kandinsky1
The most fundamental fear and terrifying truth of the human condition is that each of
us is alone. The fear of and, consequently, the anxiety over being (alone)*over
alienation*arises from our existence as discontinuous beings.2 If death affords the
ultimate confirmation of this discontinuity (ones death is decidedly ones own), then
life entails the unremitting desire to create a profound sense of connection, continuity,
and consubstantiality.3 [Life] is marked by a yearning for wholeness, explains Janice
Brian L. Ott is a teacher-scholar of media and rhetorical studies in the Department of Communication at the
University of Colorado Denver. Diane Marie Keeling is a doctoral candidate in the Department of
Communication at the University of Colorado Boulder. The authors gratefully acknowledge the assistance,
insight, and expertise of Raymie McKerrow, Thomas Frentz, Greg Dickinson, Thomas Rickert, and the two
anonymous reviewers. An earlier version of this essay was presented at the Western States Communication
Association annual convention in Phoenix, AZ, February 2009. The essay also benefited from our participation
in a panel on the chora at the National Communication Association annual convention in San Francisco, CA,
November 2010. Correspondence to: Brian L. Ott, Department of Communication, University of Colorado
Denver, Denver, CO 80217-3364, USA. Email: brian.ott@ucdenver.edu
ISSN 0033-5630 (print)/ISSN 1479-5779 (online) # 2011 National Communication Association
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2011.608704
364 B. L. Ott & D. M. Keeling
Rushing, [for humans] feel an undeniable, if unspoken, sense of fragmentation,

and separation*from their world, their fellow human beings, and themselves.4
For human beings, as symbol-using animals, rhetoric is the essential means by which
we both affirm and avow our discontinuity (division) and seek to negate or overcome
it (identification).5 The study of rhetoric, then, is above all else, at least for the
Burkean critic, an unending exploration of the paradoxical ways that human beings
repeatedly identify with and separate themselves from Others. The precise contours of
identification and division vary considerably, of course, by cultural and historical
context, making it the task of critics to evaluate and assess the situational vagaries of
these rhetorical enactments so that we might learn to live more humanely.
The contemporary moment, like many that have preceded it, is an intensely
alienating one. But unlike prior historical moments, which have accentuated our
discontinuity chiefly through industrialization, rationalization, and cultural difference, the sense of separation at the start of the twenty-first century is fueled in large
measure by the development and spread of new information technologies.6 The rapid
adoption of cell phones, video games, MP3 players, and the Internet, along with the
corresponding proliferation of signs, images, and information, all contribute, for
instance, to feelings of alienation and fragmentation by isolating and enveloping us in
technological bubbles (or to paraphrase Kenneth Burke, by separating us from our
natural conditions by instruments of our own making).7 Consider, for example, how
MP3 or cell phone users are routinely oblivious of others and their surroundings.8
But even as many twenty-first-century gadgets and their messages divide and
dislocate us, others provide resources for bridging the gulf.
In the Philosophy of Literary Form, Burke stresses that literature, and discourse
more generally, equips readers with symbolic strategies or stylistic medicines for
sizing up and thus addressing recurring situations or social anxieties.9 Since its initial
formulation, Burkes theory of literature as equipment for living has been expanded
by media and cultural critics to explain the resources that film and television furnish
viewers for confronting the unique challenges of our time.10 Cinema, as Barry
Brummett explains, serves people as equipment for living (1) insofar as it
articulates, explicitly or formally, the concerns, fears, and hopes of a people . . .
and (2) insofar as the discourse provides explicit or formal resolution of situations or
experiences similar to those which people actually confront, thus providing people
with motives to address their dilemmas in life.11 To date, analysis of how specific
films and television series function as equipments for living has focused almost
exclusively on the symbolic dimensions of rhetoric (form, narrative, myth, and
dialogue). But symbols*be they linguistic, imagistic, acoustic, or tactile*are
material as well as symbolic,12 and this study seeks to illuminate how the very
materiality of rhetoric (rhythm, sound, texture) may also equip audiences to deal
with the fear and anxiety surrounding alienation and disconnection.
Toward that end, this essay undertakes an analysis of Sophia Coppolas awardwinning 2003 film, Lost in Translation (hereafter Lost), which she explains is about
things being disconnected and our desire to find moments of connection.13
Though certainly not the only message or even film concerned with contemporary
Cinema and Choric Connection
365
14
anxieties surrounding discontinuity, it is an especially instructive one. In addition

to the appropriateness of Losts central theme,15 its execution of that theme privileges
rhetorics materiality over, though certainly not to the exclusion of, its symbolicity.
As such, Lost lends itself to a careful consideration of how film, as rhetoric, moves us
materially, sways us somatically. Our argument, then, is that Lost in Translation
equips viewers to cope with the feelings of alienation and dislocation fueled by the
rise of the new information technologies by (re)staging a sensual experience of choric
connection*a profound sense of oneness with the world. In support of this thesis,
our essay unfolds in four stages: the elaboration of a critical approach for evaluating
the material appeal of cinematic rhetoric; a consideration of the films unique
suitability to this approach; an analysis of the films tripartite mediation of mood;
and a reflection on the theoretical and practical implications of our analysis.
The Sensual Experience of Cinema
Attention to the symbolic or representational dimensions of cinema, though
invaluable, has tended to overlook the ways film also operates on a material or
nonrepresentational level that appeals directly to spectators senses. This is a
significant oversight, for as Vivian Sobchack insists, cinema mobilizes modes of
embodied existence (seeing, hearing, physical and reflective movement) as the vehicle,
the stuff, the substance of its language.16 Though numerous film scholars have
engaged cinema on a more material, bodily register,17 the treatment of this register, at
least with regard to film, as explicitly rhetorical is relatively recent.18 Historically, the
suasory, communicative character of films has been treated almost exclusively in
terms of symbolic (representational) structures and tropes (metaphor, metonymy,
synecdoche, allegory, etc.). Because such an approach obfuscates that film is a
powerful sensual medium . . . primarily apprehended through nonlinguistic channels
of communication,19 we turn to the work of Julia Kristeva for a model more attuned
to the materiality of rhetoric and an embodied understanding of signification.20
For Kristeva, signification or the signifying process entails two modalities; she refers
to the first modality*the one involving syntax and semantics*as the symbolic.21 But
there is a second, transverbal modality, the semiotic, which involves bodily drives
and energies that gives rise to the other side of meaning. 22 Elaborating on the
distinction, Kristeva explains, The semiotic is not independent of language, but
underpins language [along with visual, acoustic, and tactile signs], and, under the
control of language, it articulates other aspects of meaning which are more than
mere significations, such as rhythmical and melodic inflections.23 So, whereas the
symbolic concerns mere significations (referential symbolism), the semiotic is
about signifiance (note the absent c) or nonsignfying processes, ephemeral
pulsations and intensities, and the bodily sensations they generate.24 According to
Kristeva, the symbolic and the semiotic always function dialectically, for the dialectic
between them determines the type of discourse (narrative, metalanguage, theory,
poetry, etc.) involved.25
Kristevas distinction between the symbolic and the semiotic is a challenging one,
not least of all because the semiotic lies outside of language proper. To help clarify
this distinction, we turn to the concept of the chora, which Kristeva treats in tandem
with the semiotic. The concept of the chora finds its roots in the Greek Khora (xvra);
it originates with Plato who, in the Timaeus, treats it as a formless, fluctuating, and
generative place or receptacle. Adapting Platos conception, Kristeva understands the
chora as the undifferentiated state between mother and infant prior to the acquisition
of language and paternal law. It is a womb-like enclosure*a sonorous envelope in
which the prenatal and newborn infant feels at one with the sounds and sensations of
the mother. Somewhat loosely stated, the chora is the space of instinctual drives, the
realm where rhythms, vibrations, and other material, embodied experiences that
exceed the symbolic are registered.26 For Kristeva, the chora corresponds to and
enables the semiotic (or nonreferential) dimensions of rhetoric.27 The chora is of
rhetorical interest, explains Thomas Rickert, because it transforms our sense of
what is available as means for . . . rhetorical generation, in line with an expanded
notion of spatiality that complexifies traditional divisions among discourses, minds,
bodies, and circumambient environs.28
Because Kristevas notion of the semiotic chora*with its invocation of the
maternal*provides an explicit challenge to Jacques Lacans model of psycho-social
development in which subjectivity is tied to language and entry into the Symbolic
(the Law of the Father), it is often interpreted as a feminist intervention. But as
Kristeva herself has stressed: The distinction I have set up between the semiotic and
the symbolic has no political or feminist connotation.29 So, while film scholars such
as Kaja Silverman have appropriated Kristevas work in the name of feminism,30
Kristevas aim was simply to develop a set of critical tools for examining rhetorics
material dimensions.
Like the symbolic, Kristeva maintains that the semiotic chora is textualized
(discharged) in acoustic, visual, and tactile signs; 31 to clarify the ways in which these
modalities are textualized, she distinguishes between the phenotext and genotext.32
Since the phenotext, which denotes all the codes and features belonging to the
structure of discourse that allow it to express and communicate, has long been the
object of rhetorical criticism, our focus will be on the genotext*the semiotic
dimensions of textuality, or as Roland Barthes describes it, the space where
significations germinate.33 Engaging the genotext entails examining the transfers of
drive energy (sensations and affects34) elicited by a texts aesthetic elements.35 With
regard to cinema, this means attending to the ways that elements such as pacing,
movement, color, lighting, sound, and tactility invite particular affects or immediate
modes of sensual responsiveness to the world characterized by an accompanying
imaginative dimension.36 Though the aesthetic is not, strictly speaking, symbolic, it
is, as Deborah Hawhee observes, always and everywhere rhetorical*that is,
productive of effects*and crucially, these effects are produced on and through the
live and lively bodies in audiences.37 Our analysis of Lost concentrates on how the
aesthetic elements of the film foster sensual, affective experiences that cannot be
adequately accounted for by reference to the symbolic elements alone.
367
Since a genotextual approach to the semiotic chora is rooted in textuality, it

necessarily poses some of the same difficulties of interpretive validity that have long
haunted rhetorical critics concerned with more traditional texts such as oratory and
literature. While no textual critic can claim with certainty how an audience member
will respond to the symbolic or material dimensions of a text, the rhetorical critic can
investigate how films as social constructions invite shared experiences; as Thomas
Benson and Carolyn Anderson explain, The rhetorical critic inquires into that shared
experience, not by surveying audience response, and not simply by reporting the critics
subjective, impressionistic responses, but by interrogating the film itself, regarding the
film as a constructed invitation to a complex experience of thoughts and feelings.38
Aesthetics and Affect in Lost in Translation

All rhetorical forms are, at once, symbolic and material. Whereas the symbolicity of
rhetoric elicits primarily meaning effects, the materiality of rhetoric induces
principally presence effects*effects that touch and move bodies in sensory-emotive
ways.39 Though both types of effects are always present in texts, different rhetorical
forms vary greatly in the degree to which they privilege either symbolicity
(phenotext) or materiality (genotext).40 As rhetorical scholars of music are well
aware, for instance, musics material dimensions such as melody, tone, and rhythm
are typically more compelling and consequential to how audiences feel and respond
to a musical composition than the lyrical content.41 As we are specifically interested
in the material dimensions of cinema and how they function rhetorically, we have
strategically selected a film in which presence effects (sensation and affect) are
particularly salient.42
Unlike classical Hollywood cinema, which relies primarily upon narrational
principles and procedures to constitute a particular configuration of normalized
options for representing the story and manipulating composition and style,43 Lost in
Translation is, explained one critic, longer on atmosphere and observation than
story.44 Repeatedly described by reviewers as a mood piece,45 another critic
remarked of the film, While most directors use structure, plot and dialogue as their
storytelling building blocks, Coppola seems to work through her material by feel . . .
[H]er movies . . . zero in on emotions and moods, making them uncannily vivid.46
Indeed, not only is there a remarkable absence of dialogue in the film (the shooting
script was only 70 pages long),47 but the words exchanged by the two leading
characters in the films climactic scene are inaudible. This lack of dialogue led one
critic to conclude that, [Losts] resonance . . . comes from its visual images, not its
too spare writing.48 Lynn Hirschberg agreed, noting, [with] its strange, luminous
pictorial beauty (especially in its distillation of Tokyo) . . . and its dreamy intimacy,
the film summons place and sustains mood as few contemporary films do.49 But it is
not the stunning visuals alone that give the film its uncommon affective appeal.50
As a critic for the San Francisco Chronicle noted, the aural palette of Lost in
Translation is equally important as its visual scheme. Apart from knowing when
quiet is necessary, Coppola has impeccable taste in music and stocks her soundtrack
with moody pieces that recall Brian Eno.51
Lost in Translation provides an especially appropriate and profitable (geno)text to
begin examining the materiality of cinema (sensual experience), as it privileges the
semiotic chora (aesthetic elements) over more traditional symbolic structures
(narration and dialogue). Though our analysis concentrates on the films material
dimensions, we recognize and appreciate that they do not operate in isolation, and
thus, we begin our analysis with a brief plot synopsis as a context for understanding
the visual, aural, and tactile elements to which we refer.
Mood and Atmosphere in Lost in Translation

The basic plot of Lost in Translation is set in motion by a series of serendipitous
meetings between two disparate strangers in the decentered metropolis of Tokyo. Bill
Murray plays Bob Harris, an aging American movie star, who comes to Tokyo to
promote Suntory, a Japanese whisky. He is emotionally estranged from his wife, who
seems to be more concerned about carpet samples for the den than him, and from his
children, whose birthdays he tends to forget. His well-aged features are contrasted by
his youthful counter-part Charlotte, played by Scarlett Johansson. A 25-year-old Yale
philosophy graduate, Charlotte is in Tokyo with her frenetic and self-absorbed showbiz
photographer husband John (Giovanni Ribisi), who is regularly away on assignments.
Charlotte is disenchanted with her two-year-old marriage and uncertain about what to
do with her life. Both Bob and Charlotte are bored and suffering from loneliness and
insomnia when they discover each other. Their bond emerges casually after noticing
one another around the hotel on several occasions. Their initial attraction seems to be
based on recognizing their pain in each others eyes.52 Although the characters have
little in common, they enjoy the novelty of each others company and a friendship
rapidly develops. Bobs mock-suave antics complement Charlottes cool demeanor as
they dawdle in restaurants, clubs, karaoke bars, and hospitals to pass the time.
It is a minimalist story. But what Lost in Translation lacks in story, it more than
makes up for in mood*those affective states that are said to lack a specific object
and to be more lasting and diffuse than emotions.53 Coppola is not interested,
explained David Denby in The New Yorker, in tension leading to a climax but in
moods and states of being.54 As we demonstrate, Lost unfolds not by way of causeand-effect, but through its successive creation of three moods or states of being:55
alienation and dislocation, immersion and intensity, and choric connection. These
general moods are established and reinforced at a number of levels beyond narration
and dialogue, including pacing and camera movement (through shot selection,
framing, and editing), color and lighting, and sound and tactility.
Alienation and Dislocation
The mood that dominates the first third of the film is one of alienation and
dislocation. This portion of the film is structured around a series of uneventful scenes
56
369
whose focus alternates between Bob and Charlotte. Though the characters do not
meet in these initial scenes,57 they both experience isolation, insomnia, and a
profound sense of dislocation.58 As Stuart Klawans noted in The Nation, Lost in
Translation is about the dislocation of these two people*in Tokyo, but also in the
course of their lives.59 Given the unusual paucity of action in these early scenes, they
feel uncomfortably long*a feeling that is enhanced by the apparent lack of plot
progression. The length of the scenes, as well as the fact that they do not appear
formally to be leading anywhere, is disorienting for viewers. In denying viewers clear
temporal (and spatial) coordinates, the film and consequently the audience is invited
to feel directionless. The films early scenes, then, are isolated and isolating, providing
glimpses into the characters emotional states of being without tying those states to
narrative kernels.60 As we demonstrate throughout this section, the affective
experiences elicited by the film are homologous to those of the characters, thus
encouraging spectators to share in (rather than merely identify with) Bob and
Charlottes states of being.
The capacity of films to create strong identification with (and sympathy for)
characters and to suture spectators into the narrative through point-of-view editing is
well established in film theory. Point-of-view editing is one of the most widely used
film devices, notes Noel Carroll, for it provide[s] a means for advancing the story
line, as well as for informing the audience of the emotional responses of the
characters to what they encounter.61 Though this device is prevalent throughout Lost
and does foster identification with the characters, our concern is less with the
audiences affective sympathies for Bob and Charlotte, which are rooted in depictions
of their experiences, and more in the direct affective experiences of spectators. Like
the melody and rhythm of music, the pacing, camera work (shot distance, duration,
and angle), and editing of a film are nonrepresentational, but often elicit powerful
emotional responses.62 A sudden, direct cut in a horror film, for instance, may arouse
fear, but it does not referentially signify fear. Indeed, the same edit, in a different
context, could be humorous and prompt laughter. All of this suggests that spectator
responses to visual aesthetic devices are neither purely cognitive (learned) nor
instinctual (natural), but intertextual; they arise from the structured interplay of
signifiers. To understand how this process works, we undertake a close examination
of several key scenes.
The films second scene, Welcome to Tokyo, which spans nearly five minutes,
opens with Bob traveling in a limousine from the Tokyo airport to the posh Park
Hyatt hotel in Tokyos Shinjuku district. Bobs arrival at the hotel inaugurates an
alienating and disorienting experience for spectators that will extend over the first
third of the film (and return briefly just before the climax). The sequence begins with
a long, wide-angle establishing shot of the buildings entrance.63 After the limousine
transporting Bob enters the frame and comes to a complete stop, the camera cuts
abruptly to a close-up shot of a middle-aged Japanese woman; she greets Bob and
introduces him to a number of other hosts who present him with their business cards
and an assortment of gifts. Though Bob appears exhausted in this scene, he does not
appear disoriented. So, how then, are spectators invited to feel this way?
According to Susan Feagin, certain temporal features in a film*the duration of

and the durational relationships between and among images in a film*can affect
spectators emotional or feeling responses to a film in ways that enrich their
experiences of it.64 The lobby interaction, which lasts a mere 31 seconds onscreen,
consists of 14 separate shots. The rapid succession of shots, none of which are pointof-view shots, mixes close-up images of the Japanese hosts, medium-length images of
Bob, and extreme close-up images of the exchange of cards and gifts. Though the
overall pacing of the films first third is slow, steady, and methodical, the brevity and
varying distances of the shots in this scene, along with the absence of a fixed
(subjective) perspective, produces an intensely jolting visual experience. So, while
Bobs experience is one of tiredness, the aesthetic character of the editing fosters an
experience of disorientation in viewers. This sensate experience, albeit brief,
emotionally primes the audience for a series of upcoming narrative vignettes in
which Bob feels alienated and disconnected.
Following the introductions in the lobby, a hotel employee hands Bob a fax from
his wife, Lydia, informing him that he has forgotten his sons birthday. The extreme
close-up, point-of-view shot of the fax printout holds far longer than is needed for
viewers to read it. The cameras lingering gaze, in combination with nearby but
indistinct and indecipherable Japanese voices, charges the frame with feelings of
discomfort and unease. This sense of discomfort is diffused, if only temporarily, by
the ensuing shot of Bob standing in the elevator surrounded by nine uniformly
dressed and considerably shorter Japanese businessmen.65 The shot*a visual
synecdoche for Bobs alienating experiences throughout the first third of the film*
suggests he is out of place, a stranger in a strange land.66 Subsequent scenes
reinforce, often comically, Bobs sense of isolation and placelessness along with the
audiences feeling of discomfort. While shooting the Suntory whisky commercial, for
instance, he is unable to understand the stage directions of the all-too-intense
director (Diamond Yukai), leading to several humorous takes.67 Similarly, in one of
the films most famous scenes, a premium fantasy woman (Nao Asuka)*arranged by
one of the Japanese hosts*shows up unexpectedly at Bobs hotel room. As in the
Suntory scene, cultural and linguistic differences leave Bob baffled by the interaction.
These scenes foster a feeling of awkwardness in viewers not simply because they
depict awkward interactions, but also because Coppola allows such moments to
linger onscreen well past the point of comfort.68 While Bob deals with insomnia,
culture shock and Tokyos disorienting riot of sounds and images,69 all of which
exacerbate his alienation and amplify the audiences discomfort, Charlotte struggles
to find meaning and purpose in her life.
The opening shot of scene 5, Charlotte Wanders, could scarcely be a more
explicit symbolic representation of Charlottes affective state. She stands in the Tokyo
subway in front of a large and elaborate map of the subway system trying to
determine where to go. Seeing a character who is emotionally lost and having the
feeling of being lost are two different things, however. So, as with the sequence of
shots of Bob in the hotel lobby, Coppola employs creative camera framing and
editing in this scene to generate a sense of disorientation in the audience. The camera
371
cuts suddenly to a wide-angle shot of Charlotte standing on the platform waiting for
a train; she is at a distance, physically and psychically separated from viewers by the
depth of the shot. But before the audience can orient themselves, a subway train
barrels through the frame, leaving the audience (with)in a blur. The image of the
speeding train is replaced just as quickly by a shot from inside a train among the
other passengers. Then a shot exiting the train, being jostled by the crowd, followed
by a shot moving up the escalator, and finally a non-subjective shot at street level,
looking anxiously about. The entire sequence of shots (from subway platform to
street level) last only 30 seconds, and though it utilizes only half as many shots
(seven) as the lobby sequence with Bob, it is no less disorienting.
Like the lobby sequence, the subway sequence employs no point-of-view shots,
favoring a montage of objectivist shots, each of varying depth, distance, and angle of
elevation. But in contrast to the lobby sequence, in which a feeling of disorientation
arises primarily from rapid editing and assorted shot types, the subway sequence also
utilizes the movement of the camera to elicit feelings of disorientation. While the
lobby sequence employs a static camera in which the action and movement develop
in the frame, the action in the subway is shot in a naturalistic, cine ma ve rite style
using handheld cameras.70 Here, the audience identifies with the look of the camera,
which moves through its surroundings*all the while being bumped, squeezed, and
shoved by fellow travelers. The camera locates the audience in the scene not as a
spectator, but as a participant.
Consequently, when Charlotte visits a Buddhist temple in the ensuing sequence
and the editing style switches to alternating point-of-view and objectivist shots, the
audience already feels an embodied sense of her isolation and dislocation, making it
easier to identify with her alienating experience. Like her counterpart Bob, Charlotte
seems unable to understand or relate to the culture around her, leading to an extreme
state of ennui. Her dispirited boredom arises largely out of her relation to the city,
which is perpetually shot in a detached manner. In the sequence of shots at the
temple, Coppola employs no close-up shots of the chanting monks, which would risk
making them interesting and important to viewers.71 They, like the city, are held at a
distance by the camera. Tellingly, the sequence ends with a direct cut to Charlottes
hotel room and a point-of-view shot looking down upon Tokyo. Reflecting on this
shot, Jeffery Overstreet wrote, Dislocated and despairing, she [Charlotte] stares
down on Tokyo and weeps.72 The long, high angle shot of the city, one of many in
the first third of the film, homogenizes Japanese culture and walls it off as the foreign
Other. Throughout the films early going, then, the visual othering of Tokyo functions
rhetorically to foster a general mood of alienation and dislocation. This mood is
amplified by Coppolas use of film stock rather than digital video, which gives Tokyo
the seductive sheen of something exotic [and] just out of reach.73
Immersion and Intensity
After two brief encounters in the hotel bar, Bob and Charlotte cross paths a third time
outside the hotel sauna where they make their first plans to leave the hotel together.
This scene, Night Out With Charlie, constitutes an important shift in the films
central mood. The sense of alienation and dislocation that dominates the first third of
the film is replaced by a feeling of intensity, energy, electricity, and engagement,
which is sustained by total sensory immersion (envelopment). Though this mood,
which lasts only about 20 minutes, is the shortest of the films three moods, it is
central to the overall rhythmic and affective development of the film. In juxtaposition
to the generally slow pacing, lingering shots, lack of action, and interiority up to this
point, the film suddenly becomes fast paced, action-packed, and exterior. This key
transition involves the introduction of what film critics described as Lost in
Translations third significant character . . . Tokyo itself.74 Thus far, the city has been
framed primarily from a distance and often out of focus*a technique that also
disorients and unsettles*behind/beyond a glass window; it has been treated as inert,
as a lifeless and alienating backdrop.75 In this sense, Tokyo has functioned not so
much as a setting (and even less so as a character) in the film, but as a metaphor for
modern life,76 for the way in which we are alienated and dislocated by an endless
array of signs77*many of which are unfamiliar and indecipherable.
But as Charlotte and Bob set off together to experience the city, Tokyo is
transformed from a social metaphor into a pulsating environment*a universe
teeming with life, diversity, intrigue, and attraction. Rather than being held at a
distance, the audience is immersed in the city. Coppola lets the neon lights and everpresent LCD screens, the cacophony of street noises and overall electric energy,
explained Mark Caro in the Chicago Tribune, seep into your psyche. In a way you lose
consciousness that youre watching a movie and instead feel youve been immersed in
the wondrous, chaotic environment that the protagonists are trying to navigate.78
Consequently, for one critic, this scene was Lost in Translations most extraordinary
sequence . . . a midnight odyssey through Tokyos bars and karaoke parlors*a
sequence in which Tokyo comes to life onscreen in a way that it never quite has in a
movie, and in which the scenes and the performances seem to be developing
spontaneously right before our eyes.79 To account for the citys transformation and its
role in establishing a new cinematic mood, we explore a number of aesthetic elements,
namely color and sound, used throughout this portion of the film.
Though rarely studied from a rhetorical perspective, color is, argue Anne Richards
and Carol David, a complex rhetorical phenomenon . . . eliciting sensory feelings
and emotional reactions.80 In the case of film, according to Barbara Kennedy,
Colour functions as the main modulator of sensation.81 Among the most comprehensive treatments of the capacity of color to influence and move viewers is
Wassily Kandinskys Concerning the Spiritual in Art.82 From the outset, Kandinsky
acknowledges that the affective dimension of color is contextual; it is influenced by
form, the nature of the composition, the presence of and relation to other colors, hue,
saturation, and brightness, and the cultural associations one has internalized.83 Thus,
it is important to situate color carefully when trying to understand how it evokes
affective responses. Before looking at specific scenes, we first consider the palette of
colors that broadly frame the film.
373
Lost in Translation is a film of stark contrasts, such as slow and fast pacing,
soothing and stimulating sound, and interior and exterior spaces. In general, the
background in interior spaces is dominated by muted greens, browns, and grays.
According to Kandinsky, all three of these colors are disinclined toward movement,
meaning that they neither recede from the spectator nor reach out to the spectator.84
Consequently, they tend to be silent and passive, eliciting weariness and even
boredom.85 The interior spaces of the hotel, which dominate the first third of the
film, function to establish a mood that resonates strongly with Bob and Charlottes
individual experiences. The exterior spaces of the city, by contrast, are consistently
bathed throughout the film in bluish hues. Blue, unlike the earthly greens and browns
of the Park Hyatt, is inclined toward movement and draws away from the viewer,
creating a strong sense of depth. As a cool color, blue typically induces a sense of calm
and relaxation.86 But in the scenes Night Out with Charlie and Karaoke Time,
dazzling yellows, oranges, and reds abundantly spring from the deep blue ocean that
is Tokyo.
Bob, for instance, is wearing a bright yellow shirt, which, framed against the blue
background, seizes the viewers attention and approaches the spectator, seemingly
reaching out of the screen. The frequent juxtaposition of blue and yellow, which is not
limited to Bobs shirt in these two scenes, heightens the sense of depth onscreen,
breathing dimension and life into the city. Alternatively, the interior spaces of the hotel
are relatively flat and lifeless. Movement toward the spectator is one of yellows two
basic movements. The other, Kandinsky explains, is that of overspreading the
boundaries, which has a material parallel in the human energy which assails every
object blindly, and bursts forth aimlessly in every direction.87 This second movement,
this bursting forth, in combination with the myriad of orange lanterns, street signs,
and tail lights that populate the city, electrifies the scene, stimulates and arouses
spectators, and charges the frame with a creative, playful intensity. In this sequence,
writes Alice Lovejoy, atmosphere simply takes over*conversations are half-heard,
lights throb around the characters.88
The energy and mood elicited by the colors in these scenes is reinforced by fastpaced, upbeat pop songs such as the French band Phoenixs Too Young. Much of
the music in this sequence is diegetic; so, the characters and audience are having the
same aural experience*one of total immersion. Taking turns at karaoke, Bob and
Charlotte soulfully belt out their renditions of Elvis Costellos version of (Whats So
Funny Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding, The Pretenders Brass in Pocket,
and Roxy Musics More Than This. When the interaction of images and music in a
film is such that the latter heightens the effect of the former, it generates affective
congruence.89 In these scenes, the dynamic intensity of the musical soundscape, like
the vibrant use of color, contrasts starkly with the hushed interiors of a luxury
hotel,90 exciting the audience and raising expectations for the emerging bond
between Bob and Charlotte. Music does not simply suggest emotional states however;
it reproduces those states.91 The kinetic energy developed in this scene is shared by
the audience, and it injects, in the words of one critic, the longing for human
connection into your bloodstream.92
Choric Connection
For over an hour, Lost in Translation instills a deep desire for connection, for
communion, by first fostering an affective experience of alienation and dislocation,
and then heightening anticipation for overcoming such isolation and anxiety through
an electrifying and intense experience of involvement and immersion.93 Scene 16,
Are You Awake? sets in motion the resolution of these feelings through its
introduction of the films third major mood, choric connection. But to understand
this mood and how it functions rhetorically requires a short detour through
psychoanalytic theory. For psychoanalysts such as Freud and Lacan, human babies are
born prematurely. Not only do they lack basic motor control and the ability to care
for themselves, but they also and more fundamentally lack a sense of Self (the I),
for they have no sense of Other (a symbolic not-me).94 Prior to and following
birth, infants exist in a state of completeness or undifferentiated wholeness. Over
time, babies slowly develop a sense of Self through the process of abjection*the
casting out of the symbolic (m)Other.95 Kristeva refers to the abjecting of the
maternal as the thetic phase,96 and for her, it marks a threshold between the semiotic
chora and the symbolic.
Kristevas thetic phase is important for two reasons. First, from the moment of
rupture or separation (recognition of Self), humans both forever desire and dread a
return to the engulfing place/state of completeness and (contin)unity that existed
prior to entry into language (Lacans Symbolic).97 Humans desire such continuity
because they are inherently alienated by their existence as discontinuous beings, but
they fear it because they recognize that to return to such a place/state, or at least
to return to it in any lasting way, requires death.98 Second, humans link to that
place/state has been imprinted on them and continues to make itself felt (materially
and affectively) through the semiotic chora. In other words, the semiotic chora is
both the locality (undifferentiated place/state) to which humans wish to return and
the modality (genotext) that allows them to experience the fantasy of such a return
in their lives.99 Returning to the sonorous envelope*the locality of the semiotic
chora*is necessarily in the realm of fantasy because, as David Schwarz has noted, all
presymbolic experiences are retrospective reconstructions from within the symbolic
order.100
Our final analytical section demonstrates how Lost in Translation works to elicit a
sense of choric connection*our phrase for the overwhelming feeling of wholeness that
is experienced through the choric fantasy or the (re)staging of the sonorous envelope
(the place/state of oneness with the mothers sounds, touch, warmth, and bodily
rhythms). As with the other moods elicited by the film, this affective experience
depends crucially upon the modality of the semiotic chora. There are, of course, life
experiences in which humans enjoy the fleeting sensation of continuity, communion,
and wholeness. The most obvious of these is orgasm*what Georges Bataille
famously refers to as la petit mort or the little death101*because one, in sexual
climax, violently, spasmodically comes undone, trembles and quivers with excess,
loses themself in another. Such experiences, as Bataille examines in The Tears of Eros,
102
375
can also arise in relation to certain works of art. The remainder of our analysis
focuses on how Lost works to foster a sensual experience of total expenditure in which
meaning and Self dissolves into an enveloping mood of choric connection. As a
sensual experience, we consider visual, aural, and, in particular, tactile aspects of the
film. But we begin by demonstrating how a sense of choric connection is facilitated,
at least in part, by the allures of cinema itself.
The traditional view of cinema from a psychoanalytic perspective posits that
spectatorship is male and that the pleasure of viewing is linked to the Oedipal origins
of sadism and the desire to dominate the Other.103 This perspective, which is
grounded in Freudian and Lacanian theory, has been challenged by feminist film
scholar Gaylyn Studlar, however, who argues that cinema engages a masochistic
impulse for self-dissolution that originates from the subjects pre-Oedipal desire to
reunite with the mother.104 For Studlar, who draws on the work of Gilles Deleuze, the
pleasure of cinema arises from the symbiotic bond between child and mother rather
than from the sadistic pleasure of a dominating gaze. Such is the case with Lost, which
downplays sadistic regimes of looking in favor of primary processes and engulfment
in a state of selfless absorption.
Spectators return to the polymorphous, womb-like state of the semiotic chora is
initiated in the films opening shot.105 The Main Titles scene begins with a black
screen, which gradually fades into a close-up of Charlottes derrie`re barely covered
in sheer pink underpants. Lying in bed in a fetal position, she shifts almost
imperceptibly as the noises of the city faintly resonate in the background. Though
various critics have observed the similarity of this shot to the image of Bridgette
Bardots naked backside in the opening scene of Jean-Luc Godards Contempt (1963),
they have also noted that it invokes none of the voyeuristic tendencies of Godards
shot.106 Coppolas shot, which is still rather than panning, lacks context and elicits
not an objectifying gaze but a state of being with (not merely in) the world. The
image of Charlotte fades to black and then to an image of Bob asleep in the limousine
on his way to the hotel. Bob slowly awakens to a cacophony of flashing neon signs
and brightly lit billboards buzzing by his window. The visual array of Tokyos foreign,
semiotic-laden cityscape offers endless sensory stimulation. Meanwhile, the films
dream-pop score, produced by Brian Reitzell and variously described as melodic
and hypnotic,107 along with the ambient noise of the city and the sound of Japanese
voices in the background, generate an all-encompassing atmosphere not unlike that
of the pre-Oedipal infant who bathes non-verbally and uncomprehendingly in a
flow of word-sounds that are alien and strange.108
As the limousine navigates the wonderland of color, light, and sound, Bob notices
a Suntory whisky billboard with his image on it. He rubs his eyes as if trying to
understand what he has just seen, his double, his other. Hence, in the first few
minutes of Lost in Translation, Coppola has transitioned spectators from Lacans
prelinguistic, pre-Oedipal Imaginary and into the Symbolic, quite literally passing
through the mirror stage along the way. Indeed, it is precisely this entry into the
Symbolic that initiates the mood of alienation, dislocation, and otherness
experienced by the characters and the audience. The first few moments of screen
time, then, are a taunt, a tease, a transitory taste of the continuity to which viewers
wish to return not only in their lives, but also throughout the film. Kristeva argues
that the semiotic chora never fully dissipates with the entry into the Symbolic; rather,
it exists as a radical alterity always threatening to return and destabilize the subject.
How it returns in Lost is the question to which we devote the remainder of our
analysis.
Are You Awake? opens in Charlottes darkened hotel room with her still unable
sleep when she notices a note being slipped under her door. An equally sleepless Bob
has had the note, which inquires, Are you awake, sent to Charlottes room. A pointof-view shot in which she reads the note is followed by a direct cut to Bobs hotel
room, where the two are watching a movie together. As the scene unfolds, the duo
ends up lying next to one another in bed, meditating on life, marriage, and children.
The exchange, which at four minutes is the longest and only substantive conversation
in the film, is surprisingly uninvolving and unemotional for viewers. But in the final
few seconds of the scene, as Bob and Charlotte are both drifting off to sleep (the first
time viewers have seen either of them sleep since the opening shots of the film), Bob
slowly extends his hand and gently touches Charlottes foot (she is, once again, in a
fetal position). This touch, this visceral connection shudders through the body of the
spectator, who experiences the sensation of skin touching skin. But how is it that film
can elicit such a potent tactile sensation and corresponding affective response?
As film scholars have increasingly begun to acknowledge, visual media can appeal to
a sense of touch through haptic visuality in which the eyes themselves function like
organs of touch.109 Unlike optical visuality, which imposes distance between viewer
and viewed, haptic visuality collapses this distance, allowing film to touch its viewer
in physical and emotional ways.110 Haptic visuality, Laura Marks elaborates, is erotic
because it constructs a particular kind of intersubjective relationship between
beholder and image in which images encourage a bodily relation to the screen itself
before the point at which the viewer is pulled into the figures of the image and the
exhortation of the narrative.111 In light of its minimalist narration and dialogue, Lost
in Translation is uniquely suited for touching images. Bobs caress of Charlottes foot
functions erotically for both the characters and the audience, for as it dissolves the
distance between Bob and Charlotte, it also dissolves the distance between viewer and
viewed. In inviting viewers to feel the caress with their eyes, the film fosters an ecstatic
loss of the subject in a sexual or textual coming*a textasy.112
The pleasure of the touch*a pleasure without separation113*lasts only a few
seconds before fading to black. The camera then cuts abruptly to a point-of-view shot
(Charlottes) of Mt. Fuji and the Japanese landscape seen through the window of a
fast moving train. Spectators, too, are rushing forward. But the identificatory nature
of this shot creates a distancing effect (between spectator and image) that severs the
sense of continuity created by the previous scene and reminds viewers of their innate
discontinuity. The next two scenes, Kyoto and Matthews Best Hit TV, track
Charlotte and Bobs (newly alienating) experiences separately, returning them and the
audience to the films early mood of isolation. The unfolding form is typical of
Hollywood cinema: create tension (alienation and dislocation), heighten desire for
377
release (intensity and immersion), provide partial release (a brief moment of

connection), and introduce an obstacle prior to full resolution. In the case of Lost,
this obstacle comes in the form of the second-rate jazz singer (played by Catherine
Lambert) from the New York Bar in the Park Hyatt Tokyo. After a series of
particularly isolating experiences, Bob ends up sleeping with the singer, which
Charlotte learns about the next morning when she knocks on Bobs hotel door to
invite him to lunch. By briefly delivering the continuity the audience so deeply desires
only to temporarily suspend it again, the film further intensifies the audiences
longing for connection.
Final fulfillment and release will not come until the films final scene, Hey, You!
after a disastrous lunch and a disappointing goodbye between Bob and Charlotte. As
Bob travels in a taxi to the Tokyo airport, he spies Charlotte walking down a crowded
Tokyo street. He instructs the cab driver to stop and chases after her. The noises of the
crowd and the bustle of the city are at their most pronounced points in the film as
Bob approaches Charlotte. But as he hails her, she turns, they embrace, and he
whispers (inaudibly) in her ear, the city noise dissipates or, more accurately, their
separation from it and one another dissolves. There is no longer time or place, scene
or setting, viewer or viewed*only an indescribable sensation of completeness toward
which the whole film has been moving (us) rhythmically, ineluctably. If speech is the
stuff of the Symbolic, of Self and Other, then its oppositenot writing, as is often
supposed, but silenceis the stuff of the semiotic chora, for silence is the language of
the body, the word activated as flesh, the mutiny of the (m)Other tongue.114
On Sensing Rhetoric
The anxiety of alienation, the undeniable, if unspoken, sense of fragmentation and
separation*from their world, their fellow human beings, and themselves,115
brought on by humans existence as discontinuous beings and repeatedly affirmed
through the Symbolic and hence language is anything but new. What changes over
time are the rhetorical modes and messages by which we negotiate this primal
anxiety. Ever transforming technologies of communication are, at once, at the heart
of the varying articulation of this anxiety as well the means by which we address it. As
a way of understanding the contours of the contemporary moment and the rhetorical
resources available to us for negotiating that moment, we undertook an analysis of
Sophia Coppolas film Lost in Translation. We selected this film for its unique
modality (primarily material) of delivering those resources, and indeed we did not
quote (or analyze the meaning of) a single line of dialogue. Based upon an analysis of
the films genotext, the sensual and affective experiences fostered by its aesthetic
dimensions, we argued that Lost in Translation equips viewers to confront the
alienating and dislocating character of (post)modernity by returning viewers to a
rapturous state of choric connection. In this concluding section, we reflect on what
an analysis of this sort stands to teach scholars of film, students of rhetoric, and
practioners of everyday life.
With regard to the study of film, our analysis suggests three modest implications.
First, it provides additional support for Studlars view that cinematic pleasure arises
from a masochistic aesthetic associated with the pre-Oedipal phase of infancy (rather
than a sadistic mechanism rooted in the figuration of genital sexuality)116 by
demonstrating how that aesthetic is materially affirmed. Second, it highlights that the
relation of spectator to image can vary greatly within the same film depending upon
how haptic visuality is mobilized. Affective involvement (material appeals) and
identification (symbolic appeals) interact in complex, and sometimes contradictory,
ways. Identification with characters onscreen is never total, and thus viewers may feel
quite differently than characters. More attention needs to be paid to the ways in
which viewers and characters affective states converge, diverge, and interact.
Third, and most critical for our purposes, attention to Losts material dimensions
suggests that rhetorical scholars have a unique and valuable contribution to make to
film studies. Utilizing Kristevas understanding of the semiotic chora, this essay has
demonstrated that the aesthetic elements in film function rhetorically to elicit
identifiable sensual and affective experiences. Since, as rhetorical scholars are well
aware, rhetoric is a fundamentally public and political activity, rhetoricians are well
positioned to help film scholars appreciate and assess how the affectivity of cinema
operates in the public sphere, shaping policy, constituting publics and counterpublics, enabling or disenabling civic engagement, and equipping humans to live
their lives. In the case of Lost, for instance, we have shown how the material
dimensions of cinema can be mobilized to assist viewers in addressing the alienating
aspects of (post)modernity.
Though this essay focuses on cinema, the implications of our analysis extend far
beyond film. For students of rhetoric, our analysis signals two important interventions. First, it urges rhetoricians to take seriously the other side of meaning, to
attend to the material (semiotic) as well as the representational (symbolic) dimensions
of rhetoric. It may seem odd that an essay so concerned with materiality opens with
the theories of Kenneth Burke, who perhaps more than any other twentieth-century
rhetorical theorist has been association with symbolic action. But recall Burkes own
(re)definition of rhetoric and the stress he places on consubstantiality, which is rooted
in shared substance, in common sensations, concepts, images, ideas, attitudes.117 For
Burke, rhetoric is material, and not just in the Marxist sense that Michael McGee
makes this claim (it constructs our reality),118 but in the phenomenological sense that
rhetoric itself (not merely what it does) has concrete, observable, physical facets.119
Rhetoric directly engages our senses; we can see (images), hear (speech and music),
and touch (memorials and museums) it. And when the way rhetoric looks or sounds or
feels to one person is similar to the way it looks or sounds or feels to others, it creates
common sensations*embodied rhythms, resonances, and energies*and thus consubstantiality. Despite decades of public address scholarship, few scholars of oral
rhetoric have attended not just to the content and form of the speakers message, but
also to the very sound of the speakers voice.120 Voices are more than just pleasing or
displeasing, however. The rhythm, tone, and timbre of a voice are sensual experiences
that, like a films aesthetics, elicit affective responses, which are themselves rhetorical.
379
Taking seriously rhetorics materiality necessitates engaging the semiotic chora,

without which the symbolic would lack any form of materiality.121 In this essay, we
approached the semiotic side of rhetoric through the genotext. Though useful, this
approach is not without its limitations*limitations that suggest a second key
intervention. The treatment of cinema as text, even genotext, continues*despite
our best intentions*to subtly privilege interpretive processes (reading) over
sensory experiences (perception),122 potentially constraining a full understanding
of rhetorics materiality. For us, thinking about rhetorics materiality in terms of the
genotext is an intermediate step between interpretive knowing and experiential
knowing, and we urge rhetorical critics interested in materiality to continue
developing critical practices that attend to how sensory systems such as sight,
hearing, smell, taste, and touch operate experientially. One potential avenue in this
regard is to abandon the interpretive practice of reading, which involves distance,
passivity, consumption, and disembodied ways of knowing, in favor of the perceptual
practice of sensing, which entails immediate, engaged, producerly, and fully embodied
ways of knowing. Regardless of what terminology and techniques are employed,
however, critics need to insist on an understanding of rhetorics essential materiality
and of its (revolutionary) capacity to destabilize subjectivity.123 As useful as we hope
these interventions are, the most important lesson to arise from a sensual analysis of
Lost in Translation concerns daily living.
Lost in Translation ends by returning viewers to a state of choric connection, to a
unified sense of oneness with the world. But what of viewers when the credits roll and
the lights come up? What happens to spectators after they exit the theater and
face the warmth and brilliance of sunlight? Lost is a temporary medicine for (release
from) the alienation and dislocation of our contemporary moment. But does it offer
viewers anything more? We believe it does, at least if viewers are willing to see, hear,
and feel their world anew. Lost presents a map, a model, a mode of being-in-theworld that need not be restricted to ones time with the film. It admonishes us that
the path to connection*to an overpowering feeling of continuity*requires only one
thing: a willingness to lose ourselves (our sense of Self) in others and to give in to
being lost in translation.
Notes
[1]
[2]
[3]
[4]
Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. M. T. H. Sadler (Mineola, NY:
Dover, 1977), 1.
Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City
Light Books, 1986), 12.
As Deborah Caslav Covina elaborates, Identification is most usefully understood in terms
established by Kenneth Burke, as motivated by the desire for consubstantiality, or shared
substance. Consubstantiality is, for Burke, a compensatory motive that arises out of the
human aversion to division. Deborah Caslav Covina, Amending the Abject Body: Aesthetic
Makeovers in Medicine and Culture (State University of New York Press, 2004), 33.
Janice Rushing, ET as Rhetorical Transcendence, Quarterly Journal of Speech 71 (1985):
188.
[5]
[6]
[7]
[8]
[9]
[10]
[11]
[12]
[13]
[14]
[15]
[16]
[17]
Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969),

1923.
See Lauren Langman and Devorah Kalekin-Fishman, ed., The Evolution of Alienation:
Trauma, Promise, and the Millennium (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.,
2006).
Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 13.
See Joshua Gunn and Mirko M. Hall, Stick it in Your Ear: The Psychodynamics of iPod
Enjoyment, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 5 (2008): 136.
Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University,
1941), 64, 293304.
Regarding film, see Barry Brummett, Electric Literature as Equipment for Living: Haunted
House Films, Critical Studies in Mass Communication 2 (1985): 24761, and Brian L. Ott
and Beth Bonnstetter, Were at Now, Now: Spaceballs as Parodic Tourism, Southern
Communication Journal 72 (2007): 30927. Regarding television, see Brian L. Ott, The Small
Screen: How Television Equips Us to Live in the Information Age (Malden, MA: Blackwell
Publishing, 2007); Brian L. Ott, (Re)Framing Fear: Equipment for Living in a Post-9/11
World, in Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica, ed. Tiffany Potter and
C. W. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2008), 1326; and Daniel J. Lair, Surviving the
Corporate Jungle: The Apprentice as Equipment for Living in the Contemporary Work
World, Western Journal of Communication, 75 (2011): 7594.
Brummett, Electric Literature, 248.
Claiming that rhetoric is material as well as symbolic is quite fashionable today. But despite
its fashionableness, there are surprisingly few examples of criticism that actually analyze
rhetorics materiality. In fact, many of the scholars who make this claim then proceed to
analyze symbolicity. The few critical examples that do exist mostly concern the built
environment (museums, memorials, shopping centers, coffee shops), not media. So, while
highlighting rhetorics materiality is hardly novel, carefully attending to its materiality,
especially with regard to cinema, most assuredly is.
Quoted in Anne Thompson, Tokyo Story, Filmmaker: The Magazine of Independent Film,
Fall 2003, http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/issues/fall2003/features/tokyo_story.php, 4.
The characters, elaborates Turan, definitely yearn for something . . . essential: simple
human connection. Kenneth Turan, Movie Review: Lost in Translation, Los Angeles
Times, September, 12, 2003, http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/reviews/cl-et-turan12sep12,
2,5245235.story, 16. Lost in Translation was nominated for four Academy Awards: Best
Picture, Best Director, Best Actor in a Leading Role, and Original Screen Play. It received the
Oscar for Original Screen Play.
Other recent films to take up the alienating and dislocating character of technology include
Jonathan Mostows Surrogates (2009) and James Camerons Avatar (2009).
Observed one critic: Though the year is 2003 and the world is, in so many ways, at its
smallest, with cell phones and e-mail binding us inextricably to one another, we are, this
extraordinary new movie reminds us, ever more diffused, ever less able to make meaningful
connections. Scott Foundas, More Than This: The Road Unexpectedly Taken in Lost in
Translation, LA Weekly, September 18, 2003, http://www.laweekly.com/2003-09-18/news/
more-than-this/, 2.
Vivian Sobchack, Phenomenology and Film Experience in Viewing Positions: Ways of
Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williams (Piscataway: Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey,
1995), 37.
Barbara M. Kennedy, Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2000); David MacDougall, The Corporeal Image: Film,
Ethnography, and the Senses (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Brian
[18]
[19]
[20]
[21]
[22]
[23]
[24]
[25]
[26]
[27]
[28]
[29]
[30]
[31]
[32]
[33]
[34]
381
Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2002); Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image
Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
One of the few recent examples is Brian L. Ott, The Visceral Politics of V for
Vendetta: On Political Affect in Cinema, Critical Studies in Media Communication 27
(2010): 3954. For a notable, though older example, see Martin J. Medhurst and Thomas
W. Benson, The City: The Rhetoric of Rhythm, Communication Monographs 48 (1981):
5472.
Carl Plantinga, Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectators Experience (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2009), 112.
John Lechte and Maria Margaroni, Julia Kristeva: Live Theory (New York: Continuum,
2004), 1112.
Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. M. Waller (New York: Columbia,
1984), 24.
Julia Kristeva, Europhilia, Europhobia, in French Theory in America, ed. Sylve`re Lotringer
and Sande Cohen (New York: Routledge, 2001), 36. Kristeva is using semiotic in a very
idiosyncratic way that differs from more familiar uses of the term (to mean the science of
signs) by linguists such as Charles Sanders Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure.
Kristeva, Europhilia, Europhobia, 3637.
The term signifiance has the advantage of referring to the field of the signifier (and not just
signification) and of approaching, along the trail blazed by Julia Kristeva, who proposed the
term, a semiotics of the text. Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on
Music, Art, and Representation, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1985), 43.
Kristeva, Revolution, 24.
Rickert describes the chora as the matrix or mother of all becoming. Thomas Rickert,
Toward the Chora: Kristeva, Derrida, and Ulmer on Emplaced Invention, Philosophy and
Rhetoric 40 (2007): 255.
Julia Kristeva, Revolution, 2527.
Rickert, Toward the Chora, 253.
Kristeva, Europhilia, Europhobia, 36.
Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988). That Silverman and Kristeva are
working at cross purposes*a point that Silverman appears to recognize*explains why
Silvermans own film critiques are primarily concerned with symbolicity.
In keeping with Kristeva, we utilize the metaphor of textuality here, but we do so somewhat
reluctantly, as we recognize that this metaphor has contributed to the dominance
of hermeneutics over phenomenology in contemporary cultural theory. See Thomas
J. Csordas, Introduction: The Body as Representation and Being-in-the-World, in
Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self, ed. Thomas J.
Csordas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 11.
Kristeva, Revolution, 8687.
Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977),
182.
We understand affects to be extra-discursive moments of intensity, a reaction in/on the
body at the level of matter. We might even say that affects are immanent to matter. They are
certainly immanent to experience. Simon OSullivan, The Aesthetics of Affect: Thinking
Art Beyond Representation, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 6 (2001): 126.
Affect refers to the manifestation of the inner drives and energy that psychoanalytic theory
identifies at work within the subject. Noelle McAffee, Julia Kristeva (New York: Routledge,
2004), 23.
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Kristeva, Revolution, 86. We understand aesthetics to refer to those artistic practices that
make themselves present to sensual or sensory-emotive experience.
Charles Altieri, The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2003), 2.
Debra Hawhee, Moving Bodies: Kenneth Burke At the Edges of Language (Columbia:
University of South Carolina Press, 2009): 13.
Thomas W. Benson and Carolyn Anderson, Reality Fictions: The Films of Frederick Wiseman
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), 23. Our own interrogation of Losts
constructed experience is further buttressed by the responses of other critics of the film.
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford,
CA: Standford University Press, 2004). Note that touch and move(ment) are terms that
refer to affect as well as sensation (e.g., That film was especially touching or I was
profoundly moved by that film.).
Gumbrecht, Production of Presence, 109.
Deanna Sellnow and Timothy Sellnow, The Illusion of Life Rhetorical Perspective: An
Integrated Approach to the Study of Music as Communication, Critical Studies in Mass
Communication 18 (2001): 395415, and D. Robert DeChaine, Affect and Embodied
Understanding in Musical Experience, Text and Performance Quarterly 22.2 (2002): 7998.
See also Medhurst and Benson, The City, 63, and Gumbrecht, Production of Presence,
1089.
Affects (understood as moments of intensity), no matter how closely allied with linguistic
expression, exist on a nonsymbolic level. See Brian Massumi, The Autonomy of Affect,
Cultural Critique 31 (1995), 83109. In Burkean terms, there is no (symbolic) action
without (nonsymbolic) motion, which names, among other things, the realm of sensory
perception (Hawhee, Moving Bodies, 157). We are more than a little bit skeptical of any
attempt in the field to read or interpret (already problematic concepts) affect without
careful attention to the material dimensions of rhetoric.
David Bordwell, Classical Hollywood Cinema: Narrational Principles and Procedures, in
Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press,
1986), 17.
Ty Burr, In Lost, dislocated, lonely lives merge in a lovely limbo, The Boston Globe,
September 12, 2003, http://www.boston.com/movies/display?display movie&id 2795, 6.
See, for instance, David Edelstein, Prisoner of Japan: Bill Murray Opens up in Lost in
Translation, Slate, September 11, 2003, http://www.slate.com/id/2088215/, 2, and David
Rooney, Lost in Translation Variety, August 31, 2003, http://www.variety.com/index.asp?
layout review&reviewid VE1117921663&categoryid31&cs1, 8.
Mark Caro, Movie Review: Lost in Translation, Chicago Tribune, September 11,
2003, http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/movies/mmx-030911movies-reviewmc-lostintranslation,0,5755934.story, 1.
Thompson, Tokyo Story, 9. A typical film script is 120 pages. See Tony Bill, Movie
Speak: How to Talk Like You Belong on a Film Set (New York: Workman Publishing, 2008),
204.
Dan Schneider, DVD Review of Lost in Translation, Hackwriters.com: The International
Writers Magazine, June 2004, http://www.hackwriters.com/Lostintransit.htm, 2.
Lynn Hirschberg, The Coppola Smart Mob, The New York Times, August 31, 2003, http://
www.nytimes.com/2003/08/31/magazine/31COPPOLA.html?pagewanted 1, 2.
By visuals, we are referring not to the content of the images so much as to the experience
of visuality*to the rhythm and pacing of the shots/editing. As Medhurst and Benson
explain, the meaning of an image in the film is constructed by the viewer not only from
the content of the shot but also from the situation, the structural relation of shots to one
another and to other dimensions of the film, and from the rhythm of the cutting (58).

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383
Edward Guthmann, The message is loud and clear in Lost in Translation: Director Sofia
Coppola knows what shes doing, and Bill Murrays performance is a subtle miracle,
SFGate.com, September 12, 2003, http://articles.sfgate.com/2003-09-12/entertainment/
17506814_1_sofia-coppola-translation-scarlett-johansson, 8.
Edelstein, Prisoner of Japan, 4.
Plantinga, Moving Viewers, 131. Moods are modes of feeling where the sense of subjectivity
becomes diffuse and sensation merges into something close to atmosphere, something that
seems to pervade an entire scene or situation (Altieri, The Particulars of Rapture, 2).
David Denby, The Heartbreak Hotels, The New Yorker 79 (September 15, 2003): 100.
The links in the story are indeed there, only theyre not typical cause-and-effect
connections. Theyre formed by the emotions that gather at the end of one episode and
pour into the next. Steve Vineberg, Jet lag, Christian Century (October 18, 2003): 60.
Coppola has no fear of being undramatic in showing these two characters alone, Peter
Travers, Lost in Translation, Rolling Stone, October 3, 2003, http://www.rollingstone.com/
movies/reviews/8550/49463, 4.
Bob and Charlotte do not meet for the first time until more than 30 minutes into the film,
and it is several days after that initial encounter (about 41 minutes into the 102 minute
film)*following a happenstance meeting outside the hotels sauna*that the unlikely pair
decides to venture into the city together.
Locating her American characters as visitors to Tokyo, Coppola is able to depict a sense of
alienation that is highlighted by existence in a foreign land. The two protagonists find
themselves in a different time zone, dislocated in time as well as space. Their temporal
dislocation is emphasised by Charlotte and Bobs jet lag and insomnia, conditions that
ensure that they are out of step with their surroundings. Wendy Haslem, Neon Gothic:
Lost in Translation, Senses of Cinema 31 (AprilJune 2004): 9. Another critic put it this way,
As the title indicates, Lost in Translation is a film about dislocations and disorientations.
Turan, Movie Review, 4.
Stuart Klawans, Tokyo Story, The Nation (September 29, 2003), 34.
Kernels are those plot events that actively contribute to the storys progression, while
satellites are the more minor and routine events (see Seymour Chatman, Story and
Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978,
5354). The first third of Lost in Translation is made up almost entirely of satellites.
Noel Carroll, Engaging the Moving Image (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003),
45, 46.
Ann Marie Seward Barry, Visual Intelligence: Perception, Image, and Manipulation in Visual
Communication (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 13437.
The building is the Shinjuku Park Tower, of which the Park Hyatt Tokyo occupies the top 14
floors. Much of the film is shot in the hotels famed New York Bar on the 52nd floor
overlooking the city.
Susan L. Feagin, Time and Timing, in Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion, ed.
Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999),
168.
Towering over an elevator full of salary men, Bob is a one-man alienation effect. Jim
Hoberman, After Sunset, The Village Voice, September 9, 2003, http://www.villagevoice.
com/2003-09-09/film/after-sunset/1, 4.
Hoberman, After Sunset, 2; Travers, Lost in Translation, 4.
Joe Queenan, A Yen for Romance, The Guardian, January 10. 2004, http://www.guardian.
co.uk/film/2004/jan/10/features.joequeenan, 4.
Maria San Filippo, Lost in Translation, Cineaste 29.1 (Winter 2003): 27.
Ken Fox, Lost in Translation: Review, TV Guide, 2003, http://movies.tvguide.com/losttranslation/review/136955, 1.
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Cinematographer Lance Acord used an Aaton 35. With the lightweight camera Acord was
able to shoot in locations that would otherwise prove to be impossible. Lost in Translation
gives Charlottes journey the feeling of a personal documentary travelogue (almost guerilla
filmmaking) by following her throughout Japan, across the crowded Shibuya Crossing,
underground in the Tokyo subway and along the shinkansen track to visit temples in
Kyoto (Haslem, Neon Gothic, 15).
See Barry, Visual Intelligence, 137.
Jeffery Overstreet, Lost in Translation, Pastemagazine, December 1, 2003, http://www.
pastemagazine.com/articles/2003/12/lost-in-translation.html, 3.
Travers, Lost in Translation, 4. Despite the growing popularity of digital video, Lost in
Translation was shot on high-speed film stock (Kodaks 5263).
Filippo, Lost in Translation, 28. See also S. Brent Plate, Film Review: Lost in
Translation, The Journal of Religion and Film 8.1 (April 2004): 4.
Japan is not Japan itself, but rather a canvas onto which these Americans emotions
are mapped, Alice Lovejoy, Two Lost Souls Adrift in Tokyo Forge an Unlikely Bond
in Sophia Coppolas 21st Century Brief Encounter, Film Comment 39 (JulyAugust
2003): 11.
Coppola has hit on a metaphor for modern alienation. Peter Rainer, Sleepless in Tokyo,
New York Magazine, September 15, 2003, http://nymag.com/nymetro/movies/reviews/n_
9178/, 3.
See Jim Collins, Architectures of Excess: Cultural Life in the Information Age (New York:
Routledge, 1995).
Caro, Movie Review, 9.
Foundas, More Than This, 4.
Anne R. Richards and Carol David, Decorative Color as a Rhetorical Enhancement on the
World Wide Web, Technical Communication Quarterly 14 (2005) 31, 38.
Kennedy, Deleuze and Cinema, 115.
Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual, 24.
Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual, 2829. See also Richards and David, Decorative
Color, 39 and Barry, Visual Intelligence, 128, 130.
Richards and David, Decorative Color, 39.
Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual, 37. Barry, Visual Intelligence, 132.
Lovejoy, Two Lost Souls, 11.
Jeff Smith, Movie Music as Moving Music: Emotion, Cognition, and the Film Score, in
Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion, ed. Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 162.
Filippo, Lost in Translation, 28.
Maureen McCarty Draper, The Nature of Music: Beauty, Sound, and Healing (New York:
Riverhead Books, 2001), 11.
Edelstein, Prisoner of Japan, 5. Importantly, this confluence of speeds, lights and sounds
do not affect the protagonist or viewer as an ego, a person with sharply delineated, stable
characteristics, but, rather, they combine as a body of affects that impact on the anonymous
human body. These affects speak to the body through sensation before being recognised
rationally. It is a primordial connection with the world that is shown and felt here. Anna
Rogers, Sophia Coppola, Senses of Cinema 45 (OctoberDecember 2007): 16.
This movement is indicative of Burkes notion of form or the arousing of an appetite. For
Burke, the appeal of form is not just a symbolic process, but also one closely allied with
bodily processes that are exemplified in rhythm. Kenneth Burke, Counter-Statement,
2nd ed. (Los Altos, CA: Hermes Publications, 1953), 14041.

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385
See Joshua Gunn, Refitting Fantasy: Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity, and Talking to the Dead,
Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 5.
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1982), 1213.
The thetic stage corresponds loosely to Freuds Oedipal stage and Lacanmirror stage.
Regardless of their terminological differences, Kristeva*like Freud and Lacan*believes
that awareness of self depends upon separation. Thus we view the thetic phase, explains
Kristeva, as the place of the Other, as the precondition for signification, i.e., the
precondition for the positing of language. Kristeva, Revolution, 48.
Lacans Symbolic (with a capital S) is the outcome of the dialectic between Kristevas
semiotic and symbolic modalities (Lechte and Margoroni, Julie Kristeva, 14).
Continuity is what we are after, explains Bataille, but generally only if that continuity
which the death of discontinuous beings can alone establish is not the victor in the long
run (Erotism, 1819).
For more on this dual meaning of the semiotic chora, see Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror,
102.
David Schwarz, Listening Subjects: Semiotics, Psychoanalysis, and the Music of John
Adams and Steve Reich, Perspectives of New Music 31 (1993): 27.
Bataille, Erotism, 239.
Georges Bataille, The Tears of Eros, trans. Peter Connor (San Francisco: City Light Books,
1989).
Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Screen 16 (1975): 618.
Gaylyn Studlar, In the Realm of Pleasure: Von Sternberg, Dietrich, and the Masochistic
Aesthetic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 3940.
This state corresponds loosely to Lacans notion of the Imaginary. But in contrast to Lacan,
for whom the imaginary order functions only on a visual register, Kristeva stresses all the
sensory registers. The imaginary is not only a visual order, it is also, Kristeva claims,
organized by voice, touch, taste and smell. Madan Sarup, An Introductory Guide to PostStructuralism and Postmodernism, 2nd ed., (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993),
12223.
See Filippo, Lost in Translation, 26, and Haslem, Neon Gothic, 3.
Travers, Lost in Translation, 1; Rooney, Lost in Translation, 12; Paul Julian Smith,
Tokyo Drifters, Sight and Sound 14.1 (January 2004): 13.
Charles D. Minahen, Specular Reflections: Rimbaud (Lacan, Kristeva) and Le Stade Du
Miroir in Enfance, Neophilogus 89 (2005): 222.
Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2002), 2; see also Jennifer M. Barker, The Tactile Eye: Touch and the
Cinematic Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), Mark Paterson, The
Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technologies (New York: Oxford, 2007), and Steven
Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 5055.
Barker, The Tactile Eye, 31.
Marks, Touch, 13, 17.
Robert Young, ed., Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader (Boston: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1981), 32.
Barthes, Image, Music, Text, 164. The pleasure of the Text is not the pleasure of consumption, for the text is bound to jouissance, which unlike plaisir, is marked by loss of
cultural identity. Sharon Meagher, Spinning Ethics in Its Grave: Tradition and Rupture in
the Theory of Roland Barthes, in Signs of Change: Premodern-- Modern-- Postmodern,
ed. Stephen Barker (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 212.
See Hwa Yal Jung, Writing the Body as Social Discourse: Prolegomena to Carnal
Hermeneutics, in Signs of Change: Premodern-- Modern-- Postmodern, ed. Stephen
[115]
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Barker (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 26465. By silence, we mean the
absence of communication, not the total absence of sound (or ambient noise). In silence,
one becomes (at)tuned to the pounding of the heart and other bodily rhythms. We have a
strong tendency to imagine Silence as the absence of sound. This imagination deprives
silence of being anything in itself and makes it an emptiness, a void in what should be the
norm. But silence was here before anything else, and it envelops everything else. It is the
most primary phenomenon of existence, both palpably something and seemingly nothing.
Silence is prior to sound, not the cessation of sound. Robert Sardello, Silence: The Mystery
of Wholeness (Berkeley, CA: Goldenstone Press, 2008), 78.
Hocker Rushing, E.T. as Rhetorical Transcendence, 188.
Bill Nichols, Movies and Methods: Volume II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985),
602.
Emphasis added. Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives, 21.
Michael Calvin McGee, A Materialists Conception of Rhetoric, in Explorations in
Rhetoric: Studies in Honor of Douglas Ehninger, ed. Ray E. McKerrow (Glenview, IL: Scott,
Foresman, 1982), 25.
On this distinction, see Richard A. Engell, Materiality, Symbolicity, and the Rhetoric of
Order: Dialectic Biologism as Motive in Burke, Western Journal of Communication 62
(1998): 126, and Joan Faber McAlister, Material Aesthetics in Middle America: Simone
Weil, the Problem of Roots, and the Pantopic Suburb, in Rhetoric, Materiality, and Politics,
ed. Barbara A. Biesecker and John Louis Lucaites (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 1012.
Roland Barthes, The Grain of the Voice in Image, Music, Text, 17989.
John Lechte, Julia Kristeva (New York: Routledge, 1990), 130.
See David Howes, Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Cultural and Social Theory
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 1728.
See, for instance, DeChaine, Affect and Embodied Understanding.

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