A translation of the novel was released in the United Kingdom in September 2015 after Johansson’s legal team failed to get an injunction against its release in English. It is notable because Johansson is not an actress who hoards elements of her own image. And though she’s filed lawsuits against tabloids before, she is not especially well-known for protesting against the invasiveness of celebrity culture. Yet many scoffed at Johansson’s attempt to thwart the efforts to bring the novel to a wider audience. They argued that it is just her face in the book, after all; it is not meant to be an account of any real activities. When the book was initially released, Delacourt himself unironically told media, “I thought she might send me flowers, as it was a declaration of love for her.”9 He even thought Johansson would perhaps be excited to play the role of Jeanine in a film adaptation. Like many before him, Delacourt was perplexed about why his imaginary girlfriend Scarlett wasn’t tripping over herself with gratitude at the opportunity to bask in his own genius.
A decade after Lost in Translation, Johansson would work on the film Her with Spike Jonze, the very man whose apparent negligence had inspired Coppola’s first film. After filming of Her had wrapped, Johansson was brought in to replace Samantha Morton’s voice on an adaptive artificial-intelligence companion, Samantha, that Joaquin Phoenix’s disillusioned loner, Theodore, quickly falls in love with. Samantha is endlessly accommodating, always at the ready with compliments and a cheery commitment to organizing Theodore’s files and sorting through his feelings with him. “I mean, I’m not limited—I can be anywhere and everywhere simultaneously,” Samantha says of not having a body, blissfully disregarding that she is trapped in a device. But she is not just anywhere and everywhere; she is also anyone and everyone. When Theodore asks if she talks to other people while talking to him, she reports that she talks to 8,316 others. He asks if she is in love with any others, and she hesitates, ever gentle with how to handle him. “How many others?” he asks, to which she replies 641. That is a lot of love to have to give. Just as Coppola won an Academy Award for the screenplay to Lost in Translation, Jonze won the same award for Her. It is rewarding indeed to put words into Scarlett Johansson’s mouth.
Lost in Translation’s last scene contains one of cinema’s most discussed mysteries, the question of what Bob inaudibly whispers into Charlotte’s ear and to which she replies simply, “Okay.” I, too, have wondered about what he says, if only because I hold on to some hope that I can get closer to understanding the appeal of this character and the film. I want to know what Charlotte is agreeing to after already agreeing to so much. I want to know the next words we hear come from the closing track, “Just Like Honey,” by the Jesus and Mary Chain. It is a lush, feedback-heavy lust song that starts, “Listen to the girl / As she takes on half the world.” We can’t, of course, because the film is over, and as the credits roll, everyone is already asking aloud about somebody else’s last word.
No She Without Her
On Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen and the Singularity
THE FIRST TIME I HAD (and likely the only time I’ll ever have) a penthouse address was from 2004 to 2005 during my sophomore year at NYU. The student housing on Lafayette Street boasts several penthouses that are mostly reserved for fraternities and sororities, but my unaffiliated friends and I lucked out in the housing lottery when we landed a two-floor, four-bedroom penthouse overlooking the Hudson River. We promptly decorated it in oversized posters featuring a zoomed-in image from The Garden of Earthly Delights painting by Hieronymus Bosch and David Bowie’s album cover for Ziggy Stardust.
Greek life at NYU was something of a joke to those of us who did not partake, but the memo seemed to have been lost in the mail to those young men and women who did. Members of the fraternity who lived on our floor swaggered through the hallways and looked at us like outsiders in our dark blazers and silk camisoles, when they were the ones wearing Lacoste and popped collars in downtown New York City. But a night of drunkenness crumbled the barriers between our two camps, and some fraternity brothers invited a friend and me over to their penthouse for drinks and some low-quality cocaine.
I don’t recall what we drank exactly, but I can assume it was some variety of middle-shelf liquor (any would do) mixed with Diet Coke. The fact that these young men kept Diet Coke on hand for female company charmed me, even if it was mostly for the purpose of intoxicating girls for nefarious ends. I recall how our decorating tastes differed: Their living area was bare save for some football paraphernalia, and the shared boys’ room we entered was decked out in wall-to-wall photos of Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. This would be unremarkable were it not for the fact that the two were enrolled at NYU that semester, making the shrine to the famous teens more unsettling because they were not just celebrities now, they were our classmates.
In the year prior to their enrollment, somewhere far from NYU, an enterprising man with a pervy streak named Chase Brown started a countdown clock to the girls’ eighteenth birthdays that referred to when they would be “Playboy legal.” Brown’s adorable little shrine to predatory imaginary coitus was picked up by the E! network, and then several entertainment outlets followed suit. The web was soon littered with men on forums and comment sections frothing in eager anticipation of June 13, when the girls would reach the age of consent. They wrote as though the only thing in the way of unbridled passion between ordinary sleazes and billionaire teenage performers and entrepreneurs was a pesky statutory rape law that would soon be irrelevant.
The boys I knew who partook in the countdown were not more ghoulish than any other undergraduate men I knew. They were no older than twenty-two and most were younger still. Their desire for Mary-Kate and Ashley was age-appropriate, and though the countdown to legality was vulgar, I am not especially precious about the consent of seventeen-year-olds to give to partners two or three years their senior. But the anonymous hordes of much older men awaiting a Playboy shoot to which neither of the Olsen girls had given any hint of participating in, much less sex with strangers, was something more sinister. There was something darker than sexual attraction in it. The whole spectacle carried with it a sense that these men had been waiting for these girls to grow into adults since they debuted on television as infants on Full House in 1987.