Rashomon

I finally saw Akiro Kurosawa's 1950 masterpiece, Rashomon. It's one of the (many) films that I'd been embarrassed to admit that I hadn't seen yet, especially since it appeared often in critical theory and philosophy articles I read back in my student days.

Better late than never....

Since it's a Kurosawa film, it's a priori worth seeing. The cinematography is brilliant. The half-destroyed temple (pictured on the cover of the Criterion Collection edition, above) is stunning, both visually and conceptually. And I'm still baffled as to how he pulled off some of the tracking shots in the dense forest. Brilliant stuff.

But the film is known primarily for its epistemological challenge. Netflix offers this summary of the film: "four witnesses to a rape and murder report their versions of the attack, leaving the viewer to decide what really happened." As a general outline, this works fine, but the film's genius arises from the specific ways that the four stories are incompatible. At the very least, the notion of the eye-witness account, which we Americans are so (unjustifiably) fond of, is called into question. But—and the film draws attention to this several times—Kurosawa's interest goes far beyond courts of law, raising questions about the consequences of human uncertainty more generally. Indeed, one character, a priest (Buddhist? not Catholic, anyway), finds his very faith in humanity shaken by the confusion caused by the conflicting accounts.

The movie is sixty years old, but Kurosawa's critique still resonates. Not long ago, a colleague of mine asked how I get up in the morning, since I don't believe in... well, I'm not really sure what I was expected to believe in. Something transcendent, I suppose. The notion that there is an Absolute, Captial-T Truth that grounds our knowledge and being still holds sway, whether that Truth comes in the form of God or science or reason or....

How do I get up in the morning? Well, I cut my philosophical teeth on the post-modernists—Lyotard, Baudrillard, Jameson, et al.—who for all the nihilism attributed to them are actually quite playful. I enjoy the uncertainty in the cracks—the "interstices," as they say—among les petits récits, those "little stories" undermining the metanarratives that shape so much of so many of our lives.

And since so much of man's inhumanity toward man is grounded in the great metanarratives, I find the interstices to be valuable places as well.

"Four witnesses to a rape and murder report their versions of the attack, leaving the viewer to decide what really happened..." I said above that this summary might work as a general outline, but in fact there's a sense in which it doesn't work at all. I could sift through competing motives, compare similarities in stories, weigh circumstantial evidence, etc., and come up with a reasonably satisfying solution to the crimes. But I'd probably be wrong—not least because the question of what really happened isn't, in the end, what matters. I won't spoil the ending, in case there are others like me who are late to the film. But it's pretty clear to me that what happened, and even what we believe about what happened, are in the end not that relevant.

And, as far as I'm concerned, the value of the film lies in the way the epistemological questions are raised—and dismissed.

A quick note: This was the first film I used Netflix to stream. It worked beautifully. Two thumbs up for Netflix...