Ranting to /dev/null

Babies and Bathwater

The Weekly Standard has an article by one David Skinner. Normally, I kind of like the Standard, as it tends to sound opinions that I find myself holding, among them the idea that while an eye for quality in culture is a good thing, elitism in culture is generally not. Skinner writes about Sophia Coppela's Lost in Translation with this in mind. And I think he's taking things too far.

Skinner says that Lost wasn't the best film he saw last year. Okay, I can grant him that. He also says it wasn't the best small, independant film he saw last year. I can grant him that too, though it was the best small, independant film that I saw last year. I have a harder time granting him some of his criticisms of the film.

Skinner doesn't seem to like Charlotte's character all that much. "Props like the American actress, her husband's work, a lounge singer's bad taste, though entertaining in themselves as objects of derision, also bring attention to Charlotte's own lack of, well, depth and fine taste." Perhaps. But there's a more charitable way of reading her and Harris' reactions to the things around them than cynicism and elitism. They could really be befuddled, alienated, and, well, lost. Granted, Charlotte is a Yale philosophy grad, so some elitism on her part is probably warranted. But I don't think the fact that she doesn't identify with the other American tourists or her husband's friends (whose idea of a good time is *ahem* "dancing lessons") makes automatically means that she's looking down her nose at them.

Concerning some of the press that surrounded it he said, "It's more than enough to make any good anti-royalist sneer." He asserts that Coppela was "born lucky," being the daughter of Francis Ford, and intimately connected with the inner workings of the film industry. Hard to argue with that one, actually, but there are dynasties for a reason, you know?

But deeper down, Skinner's article seems to be a form of elitism in and of itself. It's the elitism of those who reject the Hollywood elite: "I'm too good to believe your claim that you're too good for me." This gets circular pretty fast.

I say as I have said before: If you haven't seen Lost in Translation, do so. You don't have an excuse anymore, because it's out on DVD. Just because it's made by the cream of the Hollywood crop doesn't mean that it's not a damn fine film. Sometimes the establishment does good work in spite of itself.