[To celebrate one of our strangest holidays, Groundhog Day, I’ll be AmericanStudying that film as well as four others in the long and unique career of Bill Murray. Leading up to a crowd-sourced post featuring your takes on these and other Murray classics!]
On a beloved
character who both embodies and challenges the “ugly American abroad”
stereotype.
When an actor
has worked for as long and as well as Bill Murray, the list of most
famous and beloved scenes is of course quite competitive, and I’m sure every
fan would have their own choices. But I’d say high on that list for most
viewers would have to be the sequence in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003) where
Murray’s fading movie star Bob Harris is doing his best to record a TV commercial
for Japanese whisky Suntory (a
real product, which I wouldn’t have expected until researching this post) with
sincerity. Well, maybe not his best, but perhaps the best he can do at that
moment—which is what makes the scene and performance so iconic, as Murray truly
captures the falling star’s bitterness and self-loathing (and barely contained
sarcasm) through the smallest of choices as he struggles to record the ad and its
famous catchphrase.
Much of that
might be the same if the scene were set in Harris’s native United States—the timing
of this stage of his career would be the same anywhere, after all—but I’d say
it’s all amplified by the fact that he’s recording the commercial in a foreign
country, for a product with which he assume he’s much less familiar, working
with a director and crew who speak a different language than he, and so on. Some
of that is specific to the acting profession, and specifically the longstanding
image of actors who need money (or just work) performing
in ads in other countries (or, in one recent
famous headline, turning down a stunningly large such paycheck for ethical
reasons). But it also plays into another longstanding image and narrative: the “ugly
American abroad,” the way in which American travelers or tourists can treat
everything about the countries they’re visiting—including their whiskeys,
presumably—as at best a step down from what they’re used to in their “exceptional”
home country, and at worst deserving of thinly disguised scorn.
As I mentioned
above, however, the true object of Bob Harris’s scorn is clearly himself, a
fact which differentiates him from the unwavering and undeserved
self-confidence that’s typically part of the ugly American’s attitude. And
while there are various ways to interpret the movie’s central, deeply ambiguous
relationship and arc between Harris and Scarlett
Johansson’s young newlywed Charlotte, I would say that one layer to their
dynamic is the way in which both Charlotte and Japan offer Harris a chance to
reflect on where he’s come in his career and life and, potentially, chart a new
course from this moment forward. It’s quite telling, after all, that the movie’s
other, far more serious
and moving most famous scene takes place at that most Japanese of institutions,
a karaoke bar. Harris’s performance there of Roxy Music’s “More Than This” (to
my mind one of Murray’s single best moments as an actor) starts as another
moment of silliness and self-parody but turns into something quite different and
far more sincere, which could describe his entire experience of Japan (thanks
in no small measure to Charlotte, of course).
Last
MurrayStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Takes on other Murray films?
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