Every once in a while my connection to the Internet, and thus the world outside of this campus, is lost, and I am too in a way; and a little frightened at how dependent I have become on the technology. Not knowing what to do, I took a walk just now and thought to myself how sad it is that both my work and my leisure times rely so heavily on the web. I needed it tonight to research a presentation I am preparing, from which I would probably procrastinate and play guitar, having downloaded the chords from www.ultimate-guitar.com. So here I am – typing this in Word, not listening to Internet radio, or instant messaging ‘buddies’ but feeling positively 1995. No Internet access? Now there’s a blast from the past.
It is indeed a sign o’ the times that ’95, that version of Windows, O.J. Simpson and the Ebola virus seem eons away, although admittedly all still (and sadly) exist on older PCs, in obscurity and in the Congo. Cast your minds back a further four years if you can and you might remember a book called Generation X by Douglas Coupland, the subject of the aforementioned presentation. It concerns itself with three twentysomethings suspicious of the consumer society consuming society who, having quit their careers, hide away in the California desert and tell stories. These Xers, born roughly between 1965 – 1975, are characterized by an amorphous sense of irony and the material reality of being the first generation fiscally worse off than its predecessor. They are also, a Newsweek review of the book suggests, “a bunch of whiners”.
My analysis of the book led me back to Ernest Hemingway, writer of the ‘Lost Generation’ and an inevitable reference point for Coupland and his Xers, also blessed with spiritual alienation, self-exile, and cultural criticism. It is by sheer coincidence that my last act of web mastery was to illegally download a crisp copy of Oscar darling Lost In Translation, in which Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson play two lost souls rattling around a Tokyo hotel much like Hemingway’s puppets in Paris. The strangers in a bar, who might have sex at anytime, fall into conversation about their marriages, their unhappiness and the meaning of it all.
Murray and Johansson reminded me of the Lost and X Generations, whether in Paris or Palm Springs, or Coppola’s Japan, unified by their ultimate emptiness, and skating the ice border of being “a bunch of whiners.” In Lost In Translation however, our couple might not solve their problems, or those of their generations, but feel a little better all the same. Although I didn't think the film was great, perhaps a little too self-important, it was sweet in that sense. And Tokyo’s high-rise, high-speed, tech world, I guess, is not so far removed from ours…Oh, looks as if the Internet is back on. Phew! I can instant message my friend in Japan now. ‘Til next time.
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