Later, Bob sends a message from the hotel lobby in the middle of the night to see if Charlotte is awake and she joins him in his room to morosely watch movies and drink. They continue in the manner of lovers, recalling the first times they had seen the other. In a shot of their reflections over Tokyo, Charlotte says morosely, “Let’s never come here again because it would never be as much fun,” before revealing that she is professionally adrift and unsure what she’s “supposed to be.”
After Bob has a one-night stand with the hotel’s lounge singer, Charlotte comes knocking on Bob’s door to invite him to sushi. When Charlotte hears the jazz singer in the shower, she becomes despondent and jealous. “Maybe she liked the movies you were making in the seventies when you were still making them,” she says with a smirk over an awkward lunch. Nowhere in the critical discourse around the film does anyone wonder why this stunning and smart young woman cares about the sex life of this morally flailing and physically declining man, nor is it clear why a gentle and sad young woman whose negligent husband appears to be the primary source of her isolation is enamored with a man neglecting his wife far away.
I watch Charlotte watching him throughout the film, and I wonder what it is I cannot see. I watch Bob look at her with something akin to pity, and I am angry that it is she who is pitiful. I watch the final scene in which they bid farewell as Bob leaves for home, and I am heartbroken. We know from an earlier conversation that Bob is going home in time for his daughter’s ballet recital. We know he is going home to a $2 million paycheck for acting in the Japanese whiskey company’s commercials, which is why he came to Tokyo. But we do not know where Charlotte is going or what she is going to do. We do not know where her husband is. As her eyes grow teary as they bid farewell, there is a single moment where she looks panicked. It is as if she’s realized she will be trapped in Tokyo forever, stuck alone on the set of the whimsical few days she’s just shared with Bob. We never learn when Charlotte gets to go home.
Thirteen years and even more films later, the shadow of the accommodating Charlotte still lingers over Johansson’s career. She has been reimagined as a hollow avatar animated by the desires of strangers. Though this is the case for many celebrities, hers is an especially storied history of being the object of such projections. She generated a minor scandal when she revealed in 2006 that she was tested for sexually transmitted infections twice a year. Rather than seeing this practice as an admirable commitment to safe sex, the public responded with outrage. “Scarlett Johansson takes two HIV tests a year but says she’s not promiscuous,” read the headline of the Daily Mail’s article on her remarks, delicate as ever.6 Globe magazine called in a self-described “sex expert” to remark on Johansson’s testing frequency, who concluded, “‘It tells me that although she is in a steady relationship, she may be having sex with other partners. Or she suspects her significant other may be straying.’”7 Unlike Britney Spears, Scarlett never tried to sell the story that she was a virgin. The public was instead sold the perhaps more insidious fantasy that Scarlett was their girlfriend, which enables people to feel justified in being possessive of Scarlett’s fidelity more than merely lustful for her physical body.
In a 2013 profile for Esquire, which had just named Scarlett “Sexiest Woman Alive” for the second time, Tom Chiarella describes walking behind Johansson and notes, “And I didn’t look at her ass. I don’t know that she wanted me to. Probably not. Surely not. In any case, I didn’t.” It is obnoxious that a professional journalist cannot get through the story without making note of her ass, but Chiarella’s acknowledgment that Johansson does not actually want to be objectified by men lusting after her is more self-aware than many. This self-awareness becomes more evident later when Chiarella is talking to Johansson during her beach vacation. “The sunglasses are big enough that I realize I haven’t really gotten a look at her. And then, for some reason, I’m suddenly about to ask her to take them off so I can see her face. I’m about to tell her what I want, making it a demand, an assertion, rather than a request. So dumb, so overly familiar, so wildly inappropriate that I don’t have time to think of better things to say. So I choke back the words. Inexplicably I say ‘Sunglasses,’ just that, as if making a note in the afternoon air between us.”8 The only thing unique about the incident is that Chiarella actually caught himself experiencing the myths projected onto Johansson before his sense of entitlement to her image.
That same year, French novelist Grégoire Delacourt released The First Thing You See to much critical acclaim in his home country. It is the story of a handsome mechanic named Arthur Dreyfuss in the sleepy town of Long, France, who encounters a distraught Scarlett Johansson at his door one night, setting in motion a tender and apparently humorous series of events between a working-class sad sack and an international sex symbol. But it is soon revealed that the woman is not in fact the American starlet but a simple French woman named Jeanine who bears the burden and blessing of having a face identical to Johansson’s. The book is a manifestation of the impulse to take Johansson’s face and assign a new identity to the person behind it.