Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 7 No. 33, October 2003
Robert Castle
The Radical Capability of _Rashomon_
_Rashomon_ Directed by Akira
Kurosawa Japan, 1951 In Akira Kurosawa's
_Rashomon_, a bandit named Tajomaru apparently commits two
crimes, a rape and a murder. Only the second crime comes
under contention. In fact, all four accounts of the
husband's death in the forest resolve themselves
differently. Tajomaru's and the woodcutter's, the first and
fourth, nearly coincide in terms of the husband's death
coming at the end of the great sword fight. The second and
third, the wife's and the husband's, also coincide --
although at first glance this might not seem so. The wife
passes out and assumes she had impaled her husband with a
knife; her husband, through a medium, declares that he had
committed harikari. This pair of accounts shows the event
from outside and inside the marriage, with the greater
distortion apparently coming from the inside. _Rashomon_ creates doubt
for both its characters and audience. From a legal
standpoint, taking only the court's testimony, Tajomaru
gives the only direct evidence that he had killed the
husband. The woodcutter said that he had happened onto the
scene after the episode. It seems fitting that a film that
has given its name to testimonial unreliability for
eyewitnesses of the same event should have a doubtful
confession from the alleged murderer. We, like a jury, can
grasp disparate facts, like the actual murder weapon or the
state of mind of the participants, and it certainly is
possible to piece together the actual events from the four
major and two minor accounts. The fundamental uneasiness
about _Rashomon_ arises from the extreme disparity of the
accounts by its participants. At the same time the film does
not want us to dismiss the accounts. At the film's start, the
priest and the woodcutter look upset, unhinged. They have
sought shelter from a torrential rain under the ruined
Rashomon Gate leading to west Kyoto. The woodcutter (Takashi
Shimura) repeats several times: 'I don't understand it at
all', and 'I've never heard of anything so strange'. The
priest (Minoru Chiaki) says that he heard it with his eyes
and ears and has seen hundreds die like animals but 'never
heard of anything as terrible'. What is so terrible?
Something worse than plagues, earthquakes, and bandits! A
third man, the commoner (Kichijiro Ueda), arrives at the
shelter and, noticing how chagrined the other two are,
induces them to tell him what has happened. In a flashback
the woodcutter and priest alternate giving accounts of
testimony before a court of inquiry. The woodcutter later
delivers a second account of the incident, under pressure
from the commoner, who had sensed that the woodcutter knew
more than he was telling. The commoner exposes the base
motives behind the narratives but only in the sense that he
expects men and women to lie to protect their self-worth.
Upon such cynical principles, he will feel no compunction
later on to steal a cloak from an infant's back. However, the commoner's
indifference in the matter of the rape-murder doesn't
prevent him from missing the point, just as the woodcutter
misses the profounder meaning of what he has heard at the
court. What distresses the woodcutter when the commoner
arrives? He initially explains that he had stumbled upon a
dead body in the forest, and the camera follows him in a
scene famous for its long shot of him walking through the
woods with his axe over his shoulder. There's a long-take
deep into the forest, and point-of-view shots with branches
banging into the camera; the camera looks up and sees the
long limbs obscure the heavens. In a sense, the viewer is
literally commuted into the woodcutter's path and lost in
what will be a forest of truths. Yet the woodcutter, as we
will eventually learn, may be more deeply worried that he
had lied to the court and not really suffering from the
shock of having witnessed the rape and murder. He may even
be distraught over not having the courage to intervene. In
his book on Kurosawa's films, Donald Richie suggests in one
of his scenarios that the woodcutter himself may have killed
the man. As a human being, the woodcutter should have risen
above the commoner's baser standards and resisted being
(completely) a coward or a liar. For the safe world of
humanism and traditional standards has been shattered by the
bandit Tajomoru's actions. Any doubt concerning the
resolution of the episode dissolves the apparent ruins with
which we are left to deal, when the woodcutter finds an
abandoned baby and decides to take it with him, despite
having six children already, and restores the priest's faith
in humanity. In fact, what's in ruins,
and the cause of the woodcutter's cry 'I don't understand it
at all' and the priest's 'I never heard anything so
strange', is their (and by implication, our) conception of
reality. The matter testified to and witnessed in court has
shattered their basic understanding of the scheme of the
world. Shattered not by the rape and murder but by the
unreliability of the accounts of the incident themselves.
The narratives of the three participants have obliterated
the faith of the two men. The audience is spared their
particular despair, even after we have had the incident
deconstructed; our faith is more sophisticated and can stand
the rain of narratives. Our protective gate is the movie
_Rashomon_. We're sheltered but not unaffected. We must
overcome the feelings of the commoner, that everyone lies or
has some hidden motive to lie; we must have more than a good
feeling about mankind because the woodcutter saves the baby.
One imperative of a work of art should be that the level of
our realization and understanding of the meaning of events
must exceed the characters'. Besides the four major
narratives, two minor testimonies by the priest and the
constable support the general frame of events. The priest
passes by the husband and wife, and the constable tells how
he captured the bandit, who has a set of arrows that
belonged to the murdered man. Everyone is surprised by the
number of versions being told, especially the woodcutter.
Hearing the accounts of the bandit, wife, and husband, he
must be wondering what these people are experiencing. After
the recounting of the testimonies to the commoner, the
woodcutter insists that they're all lies. The commoner then
suspects the woodcutter knows more than he was telling
during the first account and pressures him to say what
really happened. While I don't want to
record each story, I must mention several well known details
to focus on each story's balance. _Rashomon_ can play tricks
on your memory and provoke one to misplace a detail to
another narrative. It's also necessary to emphasize the
factors guiding the narratives, if only to counter the
commoner's suppositions that humans are motivated solely by
ego, but I do not want deny the importance of each
character's sense of their own self and welfare. Appropriate
to the mentality of the Japanese culture, it would seem each
major narrative has a compunction to hide the truth because
the reality of their actions is too shameful to bear. The
western interpretation of shame, in relation to the
narrative accounts, imposes a selfish incentive. One could
interpret the respective storytellers' view of themselves as
'ego protection' in a normal sense. Tajomaru (Toshiro Mifune)
describes his actions cavalierly and, broadly speaking,
romantically. I'm thinking of one illustrious gesture: was
it not for a sudden breeze he wouldn't have bothered with
the man and his wife. By this observation, he leaves to
chance the catastrophe to come. As if one arbitrary action
of nature created an internal hurricane of emotion to
possess her. At the woman's behest, after the rape, he must
conclude the matter honorably and struggles mightily against
the husband. In court, Tajomaru deliciously details the
number of times he had crossed swords with samurai; in fact,
it's the greatest struggle of his life. During the
confession, he starts and punctuates his words with a
hideous laughter; one exaggerated so much that several
commentators have mildly disapproved of it saying that
Mifune goes too far. Indeed, the mocking laughter both
expresses his contempt for those who dare try to comprehend
his actions and would be silly were it not for the gravity
of his prior actions. Indeed, his laughter softens our
feelings for him, inducing pathos, precisely because his
actions were so horrible; his narrative must resist our
prejudice against him for committing the horrible crime and
retain validity. Mifune's performance strengthens the
romantic aspect of his viewpoint. Further, it helps that it
appears that he has no reason to hide anything from the
court. When we find out the truth, we can see clearly the
reason for his compunction to lie to himself. The wife, Masago (Machiko
Kyo) appears most equipped for psychological autopsy. Her
feeling of social banishment permeates her account of her
husband's reaction to her rape. Her shame is most apparent,
but what is shocking about her story is that nothing like
this occurred. What do we make of her 'lies'? She says she
can only survive the humiliation if her husband accepts her.
Nothing stands out more in her memory than her husband's icy
stare. A stare of hate. It drives her mad. The cold stare of
society. Not just 12th century Japan but every society. For
men, rape destroys the illusions to which our love for women
is attached. While the woman's body is violated, it is the
men's whimsical affections to her that are
violated. The husband, Takehiro
(Masayuki Mori), represents men as his stare personifies the
intense betrayal a man feels when his wife or girlfriend is
raped. At least the wife expects her husband to feel this
betrayal, which reflects her own socially conditioned guilt.
There's little good or much worthy of respect in his
response, however. He's accusatory and hateful. He wants all
ties severed. At least, this is how the wife recalls the
aftermath of her degradation. Then she asks him to do the
humane thing and kill her. Before he can act, she collapses
unconscious with the dagger in her hand and upon waking
finds her husband with it in him. She's convinced she had
murdered him and hides. Her need to be cleansed of her
dishonor fits admirably with the bandit's sense of honor. A
test for any _Rashomon_ viewer would be to explain instantly
why we believe hers or the bandit's account of the
episode. Takehiro's story radically
opposes the bandit's and seemingly complements his wife's;
he could have taken up the knife after his wife fainted and
killed himself. Indeed, it seems miraculous to hear him
through the medium. The priest maintains that dead men tell
no lies, which may be the key statement in the film. Not so
much because we're going to know what really happened, but
it definitely establishes his story as truthful. The entire
testimony is haunting. The man is trapped in the darkness
and bewails his pitiful state. Honor and shame become
factors again. Duped by the bandit, and made to watch the
rape of his wife, he then bears the final indignity when his
wife, who is willing to go away with the bandit, insists
that Tajomaru kill her husband. The bandit partly redeems
himself in the husband's eyes by abandoning the woman. She
runs after him, and the husband takes up the dagger and
plunges it in his chest. He adds that during his last
breaths, he felt the dagger being pulled out by an unknown
party. * _Rashomon_ is a type of
film that effaces an author/director. The original story by
Ryunosuke Akutagawa, 'In a Grove', holds strictly to the
testimonies of the three participants in the rape and
murder: the priest who discovered the dead body, the
constable who captured the bandit, and, in addition, the
wife's mother. Akutagawa's other stories have remote air,
especially 'Rashomon', which was the other source for the
film. 'In a Grove', more than its filmed counterpart, leaves
one feeling the utter futility knowing what will happen
because Kurosawa adds the woodcutter's second story, which
alters everything regarding the search for a truthful
account, or as near as we'll ever get to one. However, the
lessons taken from Kurosawa's _Rashomon_ have tended to be
those which could have been elicited from 'In a Grove'
alone. The most thorough reading
of the film appears in Donald Richie's book. Much of his
exegesis preoccupies itself with reconciling the different
stories; [1] However, he finally concludes that the
main theme of the film is that no one lied: 'They all told
the story the way they believed it, and they all told the
truth. Kurosawa therefore does not question truth. He
questions reality.' [2] He goes on to say that the
film is about the reality of the events: 'Precisely, it is
about what five people think this reality consists of.'
[3] Here's where Richie and I diverge, nor am I
satisfied with the conclusions of Parker Tyler, in
'_Rashomon_ as Art', which attempts to place _Rashomon_ in a
modernist context by comparing its many narratives to modern
art. Parker directly compares _Rashomon_ to Picasso's
_Guernica_, stressing the idea that we are watching a social
cataclysm. The analogy to art is useful, especially when
Parker likens the total psychological space of the film to
Picasso's _Girl Before Mirror_: 'The mirror of the movie
screen is like the mirror in the painting as telescoped
within the image of the total painting; successively, we see
people as they think of themselves and as they are to
others; for example, at one point during the woman's story,
the camera substitutes for the viewpoint of her husband
toward whom she lifts the dagger: we see her as conceived by
herself but also as she would have been in her husbands
eyes'. [4] In conclusion, he
writes: 'As gradually accumulated,
the sum total of _Rashomon_ constitutes a time mural whose
unity lies in the fact that however different are the
imaginations of the four witnesses, whatever harsh
vibrations their mutual contradictions set up, the general
design (as the film-makers have molded it) remains and
dominates the work's final aspect of great beauty and great
truth.' [5] _Rashomon_ attempts to
deal with reality's chaos, people trying to make sense of
the chaos. Yes, there can be no final objective
understanding of reality. Human perspectives are
pathetically limited. Truth is relative to the individual's
understanding of what happens in reality. The film's four
basic accounts of the rape and murder reveal this clump of
truth startlingly and disturbingly so. Further,
self-interest and the peculiar psychology of the
participants affect each account of the episode. More
lessons can be extracted: each individual view of the world
is unique, undeniable, and must be respected; hence these
views perpetuate a rash of excuses to save individual egos
from the prospect of ever being wrong -- especially when it
comes to interpreting _Rashomon_. I want to move outside
perspective and relativist readings without displacing their
importance. Further, Kurosawa's film supports a more
profound view whose implications are larger than have been
given to it thus far, and is capable of a philosophically
metaphysical reading with respect to the reality of
life. The film's multiple
perspectives are the basis of the film's international
notoriety and artistic immortality. Its renown has spilled
over such that an event having several contrary eyewitness
accounts of the same 'facts' is called 'the Rashomon
effect'. It has become a truism that eyewitness testimony is
less reliable than one might suppose. Elizabeth Loftus has
made a career of debunking eyewitness testimony and, in her
book with Katherine Ketcham, _Witness for the Defense_, they
chronicle many episodes of faulty observation and memory.
Two of their examples involve bad memory and the
misperceiving of an object. In the first case two witnesses,
out of sixty interviewed, reported that a plane had crashed
straight down into the ground when, in fact, it hit flat and
skidded. They explains that mistaken details are 'not the
result of a bad memory but the normal functioning of human
memory' (22). [6] In the second case two men were
hunting bears and fired at what they thought was a bear but
turned out to be a tent with two people inside making love.
They killed the woman. The importance of the episode for us
is the example of a reality of an event connected to states
of mind. According to Loftus and Ketcham, it wasn't the
men's psychology that had caused them to see a bear but
because they had for hours been talking thinking about
bears. For the former I would stress the normal malfunction
of memory of witness not under stress to emphasize that the
narratives of the bandit, wife, and husband were not
extraordinary or exceptional. Many films have had
_Rashomon_ elements, the most obvious being the numerous
films that deal with testimonies in court, as well as two
conspicuous films, _JFK_ (Stone, 1992) and _Courage Under
Fire_ (Zwick, 1996). The latter was called a 'Gulf War
_Rashomon_' and contains several accounts of a military
engagement during the Persian Gulf War from which one man,
with psychological and bureaucratic pressures, must
determine the truth. In this case, the truth refers to the
actions of a potential female Congressional Medal Honor
nominee, Capt. Emma Walden (Meg Ryan), who died during the
fighting. The fact that the film's primary agenda dramatizes
the political fallout from the controversial nomination
dilutes the analogy to Kurosawa's film. Ignoring this for
the moment, we would still see cracks in the narrative
structure when Manfriez (Lou Diamond Phillips) lies and when
he gets Ilario (Matt Damon) to lie. Finding out the lies,
Lt. Col. Nathaniel Sterling's (Denzel Washington) job
creates a satisfying closure antithetical to the ethos of
_Rashomon_. Superficially, Mafriez's lies might seem to
match the three principals' accounts about the rape and
murder, especially to those who characterize the plot of
_Rashomon_ as the search for truth or reality. The stories
in _Rashomon_ defy easy categorization and their
implications, as the woodcutter attests, are infinitely
troubling. _JFK_ proves the more
interesting possibility for both aesthetic and historical
reasons despite director/writer Oliver Stone's didacticism
and factual paroxysms. Additionally, Stone himself, via his
movie, stands as one of the 'witnesses' to the historical
event of John Kennedy's assassination. Unlike Kurosawa, who
distances himself from all versions of the story, Stone
apparently sides with one of the narratives. Why else would
he spend two distinct parts of the film, first with Colonel
X (Donald Sutherland) and then with Garrison (Kevin Costner)
in court, detailing the 'hit' on the President? In a
_Cineaste_ interview, Stone defends the 'truth' of his
project by saying that his is one of the many valid views
(only more valid) and skirts accusations of his own
distortions, as if it has no relevance to the fact that he
criticizes the Warren Report for its many inaccuracies. He
wants his counter-myth to the Warren Report to serve as the
catalyst for opening up a new investigation -- an
investigation heavily weighed down by the conspiracy
apparatus. In a sense, his work wants to supplant the Warren
Report almost by sheer will; emblematic of this wish, I
believe, is his sardonic gesture to have Jim Garrison play
Earl Warren. _JFK_ ultimately simulates
Akutagawa's 'In a Grove'. Not so much that the search for
the truth is abandoned or deemed fruitless, but that the
film teaches us nothing about the truth. Stone's narrative
presents many conflicting witnesses and becomes another
story about the assassination. Furthermore, _JFK_ offers
evidence of its own deconstruction by trying to supplant the
Warren Report's view. It has been noted that the
Kennedy assassination has all the elements of a postmodern
event, starting with the innumerable conspiracy narratives
and the concurrent diminution of the assassin's identity and
reality (e.g. his multiple aliases and the spotting of many
Oswalds). In critical works of deconstruction the 'official'
versions of western life -- capitalism, patriarchy,
Christianity -- are broken down to oppressive components of
conspiratorial proportion and supplanted by the 'new'
official versions. Deconstructionists enter their projects
as did Stone _JFK_, with a narrow cognizance of the reality
of their operation; the temptation to believe oneself right
is inevitable. However, Stone's work has an aesthetic
sensibility that allows its own deconstruction. One can see
this working when one analyzes some of the choices he made.
Foremost, the choice of Jim Garrison as his hero defies all
logic, starting with the utter absurdity of prosecuting Clay
Shaw. How can anyone walk away from the movie and not wonder
why the jury took forty minutes to acquit Shaw? It makes one
question the disparate evidence thrown at the viewer during
the three hours of the movie and examine where Stone's
narrative itself relies strictly on guilt by circumstance --
remote circumstance at that. What he doesn't produce is
something analogous to the woodcutter's versions of events,
which alone doesn't clear up everything, an impossible task,
but gives us a plausible version to examine the other
versions critically. Stone's Garrison is a romantic blur
compared to the real thing and never acquires palpable
authority; _JFK_ doesn't offer a moment of clarity. I'm not
arguing that the film wants to do this, but neither does it
earn _Rashomon_'s sense of the truth. * The more we hear, the less
we can put together any of the pieces of _Rashomon_'s
narrative. But also remember that the woodcutter agonizes
not from uncertainty but from the apparent impasse because
all three participants had thought they had told the truth.
How can we reconcile these separate truths? Here, Kurosawa has
established an exemplary philosophical dimension that
deserves examination. _Rashomon_'s conundrum strikes at the
heart of our perception of human reality and, implicitly,
makes a statement about reality in terms similar to the
metaphysical arguments of Jose Ortega y Gasset. Ortega y
Gasset is best known for _The Revolt of the Masses_, but his
early and most important book, _Meditations on Quixote_, can
be used to clarify not only how we can deal with the
different versions of the events but also explain the source
of the woodcutter's anguish. Ortega's metaphysical
innovation rests on his overcoming of philosophical
idealism, specifically Cartesian idealism, which places the
essence of our individual self in the mind (*Cogito ergo
sum* claims that our self originates in the ability to
think). Ortega does not necessarily dispose of idealism so
much as show that it is simply the flip side of realism.
What is real is situated outside the individual. His
consideration of reality becomes germane to a discussion and
understanding of _Rashomon_ because the film dramatizes the
Ortegan view of the individual in the world: 'I am myself
and my circumstances.' It dramatizes what an Ortega scholar
calls 'the transparency proper to the presence of life', one
that has made it 'difficult to notice or 'see' life as the
originary and 'non-mediated' radical reality it is'.
[7] The events of _Rashomon_ correspond to life;
however, its participants mediate those events and we cannot
exclude as part of the reality their narration of events.
Reality is the film itself with all the stories about the
rape and murder. No interpretation can grasp what actually
happened. Julian Marias, Ortega's favorite student,
amplifies this point and goes a step further by saying that:
'Human life is not possible with perception alone nor with
description; it needs the apprehension of reality in all its
connectedness'. [8] Kurosawa could have
tormented us, left the film in the approximate state of
Akutagawa's short story, and not offered the second
narrative by the woodcutter. This story casts into the
fullest light the absolute vanity of human affairs. But
Kurosawa doesn't stop with this Biblical insight. Nor is he
going to make _Rashomon_ a game of connections leading to a
satisfying resolution. Our task is to apprehend the meaning
for his unfolding of these particular events. I am not saying that
Kurosawa intentionally dramatizes Ortega's metaphysics. Yet,
the film displays essential Ortegan principles and imagery.
The aforesaid trek into the forest finds a parallel to
Ortega using 'the image of an 'intricate forest' in order to
characterize' life's complexity. [9] The events in
the forest as narrated by the characters are necessary for
our understanding of reality because, according to Ortega,
'reality, just because it is reality and exists outside our
individual minds, can only reach us by multiplying into a
thousand faces or surfaces' (_Meditations on Quixote_, 171).
[10] Our civilization has dealt with perspectivism
since the Renaissance, and, as was pointed out by Tyler
Parker, _Rashomon_ has much in common with modern art.
Moreover, there are many films that have dealt with diverse
and contradictory perspectives. Yet, more than attempts like
_Citizen Kane_, _Rashomon_ 'opens our minds to the
conviction that the ultimate reality of the world is neither
matter or spirit, is no definite thing, but a perspective'.
[11] Kurosawa's framing device of putting together
the three men seeking shelter under the Rashomon gate
enables the viewer to transcend the confusion of the
conflicting stories, to understand the circumstances of the
events and the participants' stories, and, ultimately, to
glimpse the radical reality of life. This reality could be
called the 'complication of everything', [12] only
Kurosawa's film doesn't allow the complication to remain a
muddle. * Why the title, _Rashomon_?
It was one of the two stories, 'Rashomon' and 'In a Grove',
that Kurosawa used to create the film, and a footnote in
'Rashomon' tells us more about that gate to Kyoto, more than
anything mentioned in the film version. '[It] was the
largest gate in Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan. It was
106 feet wide and 26 feet deep, and was topped with a
ridge-pole; its stone-wall rose 75 feet high. This gate was
constructed in 789 when the capital of Japan was transferred
to Kyoto. With the decline of West Kyoto, the gate fell into
bad repair, cracking and crumbling in many places, and
became a hideout for thieves and robbers and a place for
abandoning unclaimed corpses.' [13] A samurai's servant seeks
shelter there from a torrential rain. Besides the name,
location, and the rain, little else from the story
'Rashomon' survives. Only once in the film is there a
mention (by the commoner) of corpses in the upper portion of
the gate. In effect, the ruined gate stands for nothing else
but the place where the stories and stories within stories
are narrated. Having it as his title, Kurosawa accentuates
its importance over the story that contains most of the
film's content, 'In a Grove'. From this cue, the final
(thought not the only) meaning of the film rests
here. We stressed the
woodcutter's state of mind at the film's start, saying over
and over that he doesn't understand. It can be inferred that
his distress relates directly to the reality of the events
he witnessed and the utter dissimilarity of that reality for
the event's participants. At some level (a social level),
the woodcutter feels the potential upset of what he had
witnessed in the court; namely, the apparent basis for
social order seems to have been compromised. There is no
absolute reality or absolute truths. At the level of the
woodcutter's soul, he has seen a world fall apart in late
12th century Japan and the experience has unnerved his faith
in believing he knows what's right. He can't say what really
happened anymore. Possibly, his confusion reflects the
Japanese world falling apart after World War II; Kurosawa
uses the present conditions for an entire world lost in a
metaphysical crisis. Once this truth seeps into the
woodcutter, like a heavyweight's punch to the solar plexus,
he or anyone would lose his bearings. Thus, it seems
appropriate to locate the film amidst ruins and death. The
gate despite its dilapidation still offers protection.
Moreover, what may be ruins in the present will become the
gate to the future. An uncertain future, yes, but one built
upon a more solid foundation. For human beings, this means a
foundation that lessens our instinct for destruction of
others and ourselves. Ortega's philosophical innovation
tries at an elemental or radical level to undermine the
uncertainty associated with the call for the end of
absolutes in thinking and morality, while _Rashomon_
dramatizes this innovation. * The incapability of
distinguishing fact from fiction in _Rashomon_, brings us no
closer to understanding Kurosawa's radical representation of
reality. To discern this radicalism within the film, we must
understand the film's framing devices. The woodcutter's
second story doesn't end the film. The commoner says that he
can't be expected to believe another version, then a baby's
crying interrupts them. The commoner wants to take the
wrapping and amulet left to protect the child from evil
spirits. The woodcutter attacks the commoner, who then
accuses the woodcutter of being no better than he is for
taking the amulet; the knife with a jewel inlay was
unaccounted for and the most likely thief was the
woodcutter. The commoner leaves and the woodcutter tries to
take the baby from the priest. The priest recoils, thinking
the man was going to kill the baby, and then feels badly
when the woodcutter says that he will take care of the
child. The cycle of stories and the apparent lowly behavior
of all the people in the film have had their noxious effects
on the priest. He then states a plainly optimistic if not
humanist statement that his faith in mankind has been
restored. And so the saving of the
baby might have meant something to these characters in
_Rashomon_. The significance of the baby's sudden appearance
at the end primarily has cinematic intentions and explaining
its sudden arrival (why hadn't they heard it earlier or seen
someone put it there?) will need cinematic logic. The presence of the baby
can be misleading when viewed or interpreted as a message of
hope, humanity, and sentimentality. It may even appear to be
awkward and tacked on, a humanistic *infans ex machina*.
However, we might take its appearance, cinematically, to be
a continuation of events previous in the film, in
particular, the bandit's rape of the woman. Logically, the
baby couldn't have been born three days after the forced
sexual intercourse. Symbolically, or better, swiftly within
the course of cinematic time, the woman, who had initially
disappeared from the scene of the crime and wasn't found
until two days later, delivered the baby. Born out of pain
and despair, this baby awaits to live or die. And if you
think this too farfetched, we would draw your attention to
the amulet left with the baby and taken by the commoner. The
woman is seen earlier in the film with an amulet case.
Again, the causality is purely cinematic but reasonable and
marks an optimistic note for the future; a new and open
future based on new premises for life. Indeed, this baby
cinematically resembles the Star-Child at the end of _2001:
A Space Odyssey_ (Kubrick, 1968), who is also not easily
explained on a literal level. Yet, _2001_ amply prepares the
viewer for this baby who, significantly, gazes at the world,
and symbolically represents an attentive viewer. Throughout
the film, _2001_ refers to birthdays and birth imagery:
Heywood Floyd's daughter; Frank Poole's parents and HAL wish
Frank a happy birthday; Bowman jettisoned into the ship from
the space pod; in the Star Gate sequence appears the trail
of sperm as well as the fertilization of an egg. There are
also many images of *eyes* and *seeing*. Just as Kubrick's
entire cinema is devoted to mindful approach film, rejecting
passivity in the theater, so too does _Rashomon_ demand a
radically new focus upon reality. Likewise, both movies
spawn multiple viewings because their content lends itself
to multiple and unresolved interpretations. The Monolith's
four appearances in _2001_ are matched by the four main
stories in _Rashomon_. Watching these films pulls us
futilely toward deciphering monoliths or the stories of the
rape-murder in the hope that we will find an ultimate
truth. _2001_, especially,
invites more interpretations than it can handle. However,
should we take the invitation to interpret seriously, we
could come to terms with the film, just as we can take all
the narratives of _Rashomon_ seriously. By 'seriously' we
mean that no interpretation is right exclusive of other
interpretations; no interpretation is a lie except,
possibly, to itself. That's exactly where
_Rashomon_ takes us. The baby in _Rashomon_
represents the birth of a new consciousness of the radical
reality of life, explicitly spelled out in Ortega's
metaphysics; the Star-Child in _2001_ serves a similar
purpose. To echo the priest's affirmation of the
woodcutter's action of taking the baby, I want to affirm the
burden for mankind, symbolized by the child, resides in a
new order of life that shakes the foundations of
civilization. Again, we go back to the basic fear and
confusion inhabiting the priest and the woodcutter at the
beginning. _Rashomon_ offers, albeit in swaddling clothes,
life beyond absolutes, beyond ancient objectivity and
Cartesian idealism. A perilous path, but what alternative is
there? It's not enough to praise individual visions and
still cling to the absolutes of morality, law, and God; yet
it is the very fear of losing these absolutes and plunging
life into chaos which finally blot out _Rashomon_'s radical
capability. Collingswood, New Jersey
USA Notes 1. See ibid., pp. 71-76,
especially pp. 72-74. 2. Ibid., p.
75. 3. Ibid. 4. Tyler, '_Rashomon_ as
Art', p. 208. 5. Ibid., p.
210. 6. Loftus, _Witness for
the Defense_, p. 22; my emphasis. 7. Huescar, _Jose Ortega y
Gasset's Metaphysical Innovation_, p. 94. 8. Marias, _ Philosophy as
Dramatic Theory_, p. 88. 9. Huescar, _Jose Ortega y
Gasset's Metaphysical Innovation_, pp. 97-98. 10. Ortega y Gasset,
_Meditations on Quixote_, p. 171. 11. Ibid., pp.
44-45. 12. Huescar, _Jose Ortega
y Gasset's Metaphysical Innovation_, p. 95. 13. Akutagawa, _Rashomon
and Other Stories_, p. 26. Bibliography Akutagawa, Ryunosuke,
_Rashomon and Other Stories_, trans. Takashi Kojuma (Tokyo:
Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1952). Huescar, Antonio
Rodriguez, _Jose Ortega y Gasset's Metaphysical Innovation:
A Critique and Overcoming of Idealism_, trans. and ed. Jorge
Garcia-Gomez (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1995). Loftus, Elizabeth, and
Katherine Ketcham, _Witness for the Defense: The Accused,
the Eyewitness, and the Expert Who Puts Memory on Trial_
(New York: St Martin's Press, 1991). Marias, Julian, _
Philosophy as Dramatic Theory_, trans. James D. Parsons
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
1971). Ortega y Gasset, Jose,
_Meditations on Quixote_, trans. Evelyn Rugg and Diego Marin
(New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1961). --- Some Lessons in
Metaphysics_, trans. Mildred Adams (New York: W. W. Norton
and Company, 1969). --- _What is Philosophy?_,
trans. Mildred Adams (New York: W. W. Norton and Company,
1960). Richie, Donald, _The Films
of Akira Kurosawa_, 3rd edn (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1996). Tyler, Parker, '_Rashomon_
as Art', in Julius Bellone, ed., _Renaissance of the Film_
(New York: Collier Books, 1971). Copyright ©
Film-Philosophy 2003 Robert Castle, 'The
Radical Capability of _Rashomon_', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 7
no. 33, October 2003
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n33castle>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
salon, and receive the journal articles via email as they
are published. here
Save as Plain Text Document...Print...Read...Recycle
Film-Philosophy (ISSN 1466-4615)
PO Box 26161, London SW8 4WD, England
Contact: editor@film-philosophy.com
Back to the Film-Philosophy homepage
