The most interesting thing about Sofia Coppola's film, "Lost in Translation," has been the resulting discourse around that bugaboo of a question: Is this movie racist?

It is precisely the brilliance of "Lost in Translation" that warrants its unsentimental scrutiny. Understanding how media worms its agendas into the deepest levels of the subconscious is all we can do to inoculate ourselves against its relentless barrage. Questions more complex than whether the film is patently racist need to be asked. For example, what is the political and historical context of the film? What, and who, is not shown in the film? What implicit social conventions go unchallenged?

The film tracks, in heartbeat-delicate movements, mounting romantic tension between world-weary Bob Harris (Bill Murray as a version of himself) and Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) the soulful wife of a crass photographer. Bob's in Tokyo making commercials for a whiskey company. She's there as a desultory tag-along to a work-obsessed husband. Over the course of several days, they brush paths within the placid steel-and-glass hotel towering high above the chaos of Shibuya and Shinjuku (one shot poignantly references the Vegas neon in the elder Coppola's lackluster love story, "One From the Heart"). Finally, after a masterfully paced series of restrained encounters, Bob and Charlotte elegantly climax their relationship with a kiss.

Camps are generally divided between those who feel the film makes a mockery of the Japanese people, and those who defend the authenticity with which Coppola portrays the experience of dislocated foreigners bumbling in Tokyo. One group calls for fair representation; the other believes that political correctness shouldn't snuff out the rich humor and romance of an honestly wrought film.

The Japanese are presented not as people, but as clowns. And the performances are flawlessly comic. Yutaka Tadokoro, as the mop-headed hipster, directs Bob for a commercial with the precision exuberance of Seiji Ozawa conducting Stravinsky. Fumihiro Hayashi, as a call girl, plays hilariously off straight-man Murray, demanding that he "lip my stocking!" and in doing so, elevating the tired joke about how the Japanese confuse L's and R's to high comedy, not to mention the unbridled absurdity of her solo date-rape tussle on the floor of Bob's hotel room. And finally, Matthew Minami, real-life TV star of Matthew's "Best Hit TV", is disturbingly unforgettable as a dayglo, amphetamine-boosted update of a Japanese archetype–the silly, teahouse homosexual. The timing of all the lines, gestures, and editing is impeccable, but the hilarity is rooted entirely in the "otherness" of the Japanese people. We laugh at them, not with them. This is why the film is accused of being racist.

Even verité-style footage of authentic locals focuses on the Japanese as a sorry lot, preoccupied with cheesifying all things western (the spiky-haired youth thrashing a video-game guitar is shot with Arbus-ian detachment, for example). These scenes are occasionally "balanced" by appropriately reverent, but equally inscrutable, shrine-and-temple sequences. Moreover, the film is simultaneously scornful and smug in the knowledge that imitation, no matter how tacky, is the sincerest form of flattery. This sentiment is actually articulated in the dialogue, by Charlotte's husband, galled by a rock-band photo shoot: "Let them be who they are! They're trying to make them Keith Richards when they're just skinny and nerdy." The subtext here is when westerners ape the Rolling Stones, it's normal; but when Asian kids fall prey to the same media hype, they're pathetic wannabes. They should be meditating in a dojo somewhere, not playing rock and roll.

An important distinction needs to be made: it is not negative representation of the Japanese, but, rather, the shirking of responsibility to depict them as full human beings, either negative or positive, which constitutes discrimination, or racism.

To deprive a character of dimensionality is the true insult. Take, for example, the Mother Superior in "The Magdalene Sisters", one of the most loathsome roles to hit the silver screen. Because she's a full character, not a caricature, the film is saved from being a wholesale diatribe against the Catholic Church and nuns as a group. She's a villain, to be sure, but she's complex, multi-dimensional–that is, human. Then there's "The Quiet American," a scathing critique of U.S. imperialism, which, like "Lost in Translation" depicts only those of European descent as multi-faceted human beings. The Vietnamese love interest is a doll; the other Vietnamese characters are nearly invisible or melodramatically evil. In neglecting to craft all characters fully, including the Vietnamese, Asian "otherness" is perpetuated, and, as we shall see, imperialism is justified–the ironic opposite of the film's objective.

"Apocalypse Now", Francis Coppola's riff on Conrad's "Heart of Darkness", takes place in a land of exotic otherness–again, in Indochina. And, as with Conrad's classic, the film is about white men, though its African American GIs qualify for the "honorary white person" exemption specific to Vietnam war pictures. Take the black man off the streets of an American city and put him in the jungles of Cambodia, and, voilà, he's transformed from felon into one of "us."

The Asians, needless to say, are not. They are "them." Anyone who has seen "Hearts of Darkness", a documentary by Mrs. Eleanor Coppola on the making of "Apocalypse Now" (not to be confused with "Heart of Darkness"), has seen the bravado with which the patriarch Coppola beseeches that no detail be overlooked in a scene re-creating a French colonial dinner in Vietnam. Even the wine has to be the correct temperature, he implores. The obsessive lengths he went to make a scene which didn't even make it into the final cut stand out in insulting relief to his highly inaccurate depiction of the "natives" up-river. Just smear some mud on 'em and make 'em shake their spears, appears to be all the preparation made for the scene. Does Coppola really care about these "primitives"? It's hard to believe. Though he, and his muse Conrad, mean to critique imperialist aggression, the fact that it is done entirely through the prism of European self-absorption undercuts the sincerity of any intention.

Creating a universe in which one group is singled out and represented as dolls or cartoons (or not represented at all) has political impact. It is arguably the most effective means of driving home a message of the group's "otherness." (Incidentally, at the 1998 Los Angeles Asian-Pacific Film and Video Festival, a statistic cited that, in the mainstream media, there were more representations of extra-terrestrials than of Asians.) And once this "otherness" is established, any violation against that group can be justified. This is summed up by Gen. William Westmoreland in the 1974 documentary "Hearts and Minds" where he dismisses Vietnamese casualties, saying, "Life is cheap in the Orient." In other words, "they" experience death differently than "us." It's not that big a deal for them.

"Otherness" can justify any incursion, occupation, or subjugation, because implicit in the myth of otherness is its corollary: "We know better." The idea is, they can't fend for themselves so they need our help. They need our military to install democracy since they can't do it for themselves, our genetically modified crops since they can't feed themselves, our economic models because they can't uphold a decent standard of living by themselves, and in the vein of a "softer" imperialism, our NGOs because they can't organize for themselves. To be acted upon and spoken for is to be "the white man's burden."

"Lost in Translation" relies wholly on the "otherness" of the Japanese to give meaning to its protagonists, shape to its plot, and color to its scenery. The inaccessibility of Japan functions as an extension of the alienation and loneliness Bob and Charlotte feel in their personal lives, thus laying the perfect conditions for romance to germinate: they're the only ones who understand each other. Take away the cartooniness of the Japanese and the humor falls flat, the main characters' intense yearning is neutralized and the plot evaporates.

Granted, the "otherness" is an innocent construction, intended only to set up dramatic tension, not to subjugate a people. But art does not function isolated from political context. We live in an era when "otherness" logic makes the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive strike and expansion perfectly acceptable, regardless of reason.

One of the most insightful thinkers on race politics was the late Edward Said, whose "Orientalism" and "Culture and Imperialism" have become defining works in the canon of writings on the subject. He focused on the ecology of art and politics. After all, the geopolitical landscape can't be successfully conquered, through guns and tanks, without first conquering the landscape of the mind, through culture. Look at Iraq–people can't be bombed into subjugation. But they can be brainwashed into it. This is where art comes in.

The "otherness" logic has been a convention in English literature for centuries and has also informed cinematic storytelling. In fact, it's so deeply rooted that even in "Lost in Translation", a film which takes place in a country of superior technological prowess, superior social conditions (crime and homelessness are nearly nonexistent) and superior politesse, the ethnic European protagonists cop the same arrogant attitude found in the jingoistic characters of Kipling. "East is east, and west is west, and never the twain shall meet" could've been Lost in Translation's publicity campaign tagline. The Coppola adherence to the convention of the superior westerner remains steeped in the era of sahibs in pith helmets. It's the classic schism between cinematic virtuosity and political cluelessness.

"Arrogance" is the operative word here. In "Lost in Translation," not a single attempt is made by Bob or Charlotte to communicate in Japanese. It's as if it were beneath Charlotte to respond with a simple "Konichiwa" when warmly welcomed by an ikebana matron. Worse yet are Bob's bursts of jokey invective directed in English at uncomprehending bystanders, whose only crime is their Japanese-ness. Sure, Americans aren't exposed to the same diversity found in polyglot Europe. But does that justify linguistic arrogance? Imagine French tourists in New York refusing to speak English, deriding waiters in French, and wondering amongst themselves, eyes rolling in disgust, why the few Americans who make efforts to speak their language make such idiots of themselves. No, even the French aren't that arrogant.

This is behavior unique to the imperialist worldview. It's the linguistic equivalent to what one-time currency speculator George Soros recently observed about the current global power dynamic: "In the Roman Empire, only the Romans voted. In modern global capitalism, only Americans vote." "Lost in Translation" illustrates how Americans have made the peculiarly imperialist combination of ignorance and arrogance a national identity.

E. Koohan Paik is a filmmaker and film historian living in Hawaii.