McDonalds makes people unhappy? Please!

On Thursday, we began watching Lost in Translation. We were supposed to look at it through the frame of Augé’s nonplaces. According to Augé, a nonplace is a space that lacks connections through history or identity. People in these nonplaces are using the spaces simply as means to an end—for instance, an airport is just used for transit. A Starbucks is used to get coffee and get the hell out of there (at least, it is for many people). For Bill Murray’s character, Tokyo was definitely a nonplace. He didn’t want to be there; he was just there to make a quick buck filming a commercial. Whether it was a place or a nonplace for Scarlett Johansson’s character is a bit less clear. She had no obvious purpose for being there; she was just following her husband for his work.

A possible argument one could make with respect to the film is that the nonplaceness of Tokyo adds to the characters’ feelings of sadness and being alone. The city is very commercial; the characters move around it, seeing all of the people and all of the lit up signs, without really understanding what is going on—they don’t know the language or the people. One could argue that globalization and commercialism isolates the characters further and takes away feeling. However, this is not necessarily true. For example, when Scarlett Johansson’s character visits a Buddhist temple, she later calls her friend (or family member) and tells them that she felt nothing in the temple. If a Buddhist temple is not a place by Augé’s definition, I don’t know what is. One could argue that the effects of globalization were lasting on her, and rendered her unable to feel even when she left the nonplace. That argument seems grossly unfair, however. If one could use that argument, then how could one ever possibly disprove the hypothesis that globalization leads to these characters’ malaise?

Ignoring globalization, one can develop a reasonable theory as to why Scarlett Johansson’s character is unhappy. First of all, she is a recent college graduate with a major that offers little opportunity to find a job that is as intellectually satisfying as the field itself. It seems a little strange, given that the character seemed quite intellectual, that she did not continue on in graduate school intending to do academia. Now, I’m not a psych major, but I am inclined to say that she is very much not self-actualized. First of all, she is only 22 or so, and she has been married for 2 years. If my math is correct, that means she got married when she was a sophomore or junior in college. Now, I know this works fine for some people, but it is incredibly dangerous to get married at such a young age if you don’t know who you are. Judging by the fact that she doesn’t know what she wants to do with her life, I would guess she doesn’t know who she is. So, getting married at 20 was a bad idea. And she seems to be thinking so herself, based on her phone call to her friend in which she said “it’s like I don’t even know the man I married.” No wonder she seems unhappy—and it doesn’t matter if she’s in a Buddhist temple or in the biggest McDonalds in the world, she’s still going to be plagued with these problems.

Her attitude in this, and the overall tone of the movie, reminded me a lot of a poem by Charles Baudelaire called Spleen. In it, he expresses feelings of ennui and unhappiness with no obvious origin. The narrator in this poem says it is Nature herself who seems to be pressing upon him and causing his unhappiness. Now, to be fair, he had no globalization to blame—this was written in the 1800’s. I’m just using this as an example of my overall theory (which agrees with what I think John said in class) that people make their own unhappiness. They just also look for something convenient to blame.