Seems to me that, as a society, we've gone off the rails with this "real/real" stuff... Even our "fantasy worlds" (like Tolkien's) are so carefully planned out that they might as well be "real". But that's just not what's happening in Lost in Translation... Bob & Charlotte don't "sneer" at the people in their neighborhood, they simply exist on a different frequency... Each of them goes into that bar looking to pick up a broadcast that will make them laugh, or smile, or think... and most of it comes in as gibberish... Not because it really is gibberish, mind you--it just so happens that it's in "real audio", it's "social static"... you really have to fiddle with your mental tuner if you want to interact with a person on the "fantasy level", and that's what Lost In Translation and Punch-Drunk Love show us! I just don't see the "sneering" and "haughtiness" in LIT that people are talking about... You can't give detailed psychological profiles of every character in a film/novel/comic book, and it's a terrible mistake to try, a hangover from naturalism/realism... The fact that we do seem to expect this explains why mainstream rom-com has declined so precipitously in the past fifty years--and it also helps to clarify why hollywood no longer places the premium on "character actors" that it once did! All "naturalism/realism" (I sound like Dave Sim on "Marxism-Feminism", somebody kill me now!!) does is show us where various far-from-unique individuals fit into the social matrix anyway. What's the point of that?
"A sinister cabal of superior writers."
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