Couple of things that are making me a little uncomfortable intellectually right now.

• Implicit racism in Lost in Translation

  Lost in Translation was my favourite movie of 2004, easy. It was pointed out to me that people’s responses to the movie fall into two camps: some people find the film vaguely cute and “charming”, and some people find it fairly profound in a hard to articulate way. I fall pretty cleanly into the latter camp, I was still sitting in the theatre when the last credit rolled by, but I wasn’t reading the credits. It rang some bells in my head, tho it’s still hard to describe the sound they made.

  I remember somebody in Victoria pointing out to me that some of the humour in the movie derives from representations of Japanese culture. That’s not revelationary: anyone who has seen the movie knows that. What was suprising to me was that I hadn’t even briefly thought about it while I was watching it. My answer at the time was that it wasn’t really making fun of japanese culture, but rather rich, hotel japanese culture. But that’s probably a cop out.

  Since then I’ve read this article in the Christian Science Monitor about Japanese response to the film, and this good, critical blog entry on the subject, as well as some of the incredibly articulate, nuanced, and numerous comments after the entry.

  I’m still having a lot of trouble articulating to myself how I feel about it. I normally find myself playing the defender-of-PC role in conversations about the “censorhip” of culture, but I still have this suspicion that some of the films detractors would benefit from a little sphincter detuning. I would hate to think, though, that I had allowed the beauty of the film to distract me from racist elements that were subtley sneaking into my brain.

• The sweatshop debate goes on… and on… and on…

  I haven’t had a clear grasp on this one since a long time. Should you boycott clothing because it was made in sweatshops, or does that just encourage the collapse of local economies when the sweatshops pull out? Or, are sweatshops even a good thing, a necessary precursor step to a truley developed economy? Here’s some more fodder for the debate, a reasonably balanced assesment of things from somebody apparently on the pro-sweatshop, or at least anti-anti-sweatshop side.

  I can’t help thinking that people who argue that sweatshop boycotts cause the collapse of local industries are being selectivley blind to the larger market, but I can’t really say what the hell I mean by that. I dunno, I dunno.

  This was sparked by an interesting article in the interesting Reason magazine about a reasonably priced fashionable clothing brand that’s doing well by promoting itself on the grounds that it’s all union made. I dunno I dunno. The label does seem pretty smarmy, but I do like some of their clothes… they’re reasonably cheap. And maybe it’s just me being squeamish, but all my above mentioned uncertainy about sweatshops aside, I sure would feel better buying north american union made clothes. For some reason, the pictures of their models make me feel gross. I’m not sure why. I’m not sure about anything. At all. Ever.