8/1/07: Rashomon (1950)There’s a reason we don’t list “Journalist” as our job occupation while filling out our tax forms. We want the IRS to believe our claims. The rightfully maligned news biz has certainly seen plenty of recent embarrassment, from aspiring novelist Scott Thomas Beauchamp to
Penelope Trunk's laziness to
the latest example of the
New York Times surrendering any sense of the truth. It’s not just truth that’s suffered for decades, though. A nifty little film has also ended up besmirched by relativist douchebags.
There’s nothing more irritating than hearing some creep—typically a Leftist—dismiss the retelling of an event as being like
Rashomon. Anyone who invokes the film in that manner is immediately suspect. Akira Kurosawa’s drama (and, in its own trashy way, a pioneering erotic thriller) was one of the first Japanese productions to get treated like a big deal in the West. Most of the film’s fans had a good reason to celebrate Kurosawa’s device of telling a story of rape and murder from four separate viewpoints. The intellectuals walked away with the reaffirmation that there’s no absolute truth. Things have gotten so bad that a few Leftist film critics dismiss
Rashomon as a latecomer in explaining the obvious truth that there’s no truth at all.
Rashomon is not about the lack of truth.
Rashomon is, in fact, about absolute truth. A woodsman arrives at the scene of the rape and murder, and is presented with four different tellings of the event. The whole point of the film is that one thing happened in the woods.
Rashomon doesn't solve the crime, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a solution. The truth is simply lost to different viewpoints—and, in Kurosawa’s greatest contribution, those different viewpoints are revealed to have no value.
Leftists can’t stand the idea that a point of view can be totally useless. When they make
the rare exception, it’s usually hilarious. Grown-ups know better. Just ask any baseball umpire who’s ever had to call a foul ball.
Kurosawa was even visionary enough to add a twist where we can’t trust the woodsman’s recounting of the stories he heard. The character who serves as our reporter has his own agenda. See, we didn’t post a spoiler warning there because that’s no surprise nowadays.
Kurosawa, incidentally, had to deal with a lot of confusion while shooting
Rashomon. His crew was baffled to keep shooting the same scenes with no sense of continuity. Today, they could’ve prepared by contrasting the articles and editorials of the
New York Times. That wouldn’t have taught them anything about the truth, but it’d make a fine crash course in delusion.
Make it your own: It’s never been hard to see
Rashomon. As you can imagine, the film’s always been popular on college campuses. There’s a fine
Criterion Collection DVD, or a
less-expensive edition that doesn’t have all the essays—although, of course, the thoughts that matter the most are Kurosawa’s own.
