In a rainy Japanese forest, a samurai is murdered and his wife is raped. At the trial of the accused, several eyewitnesses, including the wife and the accused man, relate completely different versions of what they saw. This is the narrative of Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 cinema masterpiece “Rashomon.”
Opinion
Kurosawa’s film explores the phenomenon of multiple people seeing the same event, yet coming to very different conclusions about what they saw. It also examines the reasons for this disagreement about the truth among rational people.
“Rashomon” is good reference material for us when we think about and react to the killing of Renee Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, and the competing narratives that have arisen about what really happened.
During the course of the film, each witness and their individual backgrounds and beliefs are described, and questions are asked regarding those external effects on the witnesses’ perception of the crime. Each witness comes from a different level of the class system in post-feudal Japan, and each has their own experience with power and justice in their society.
Each witness is also motivated by personal imperatives like how their neighbors will perceive them after they testify, what they can gain from the outcome of the trial and what they will put at risk by telling the truth. Personal animosities, affections and grudges also weigh heavily on each person’s testimony.
Even a mystic Shinto monk, who claims to channel the voice of the murdered samurai, is called to testify, and that testimony widely diverges from all the other perceptions of the event. In “Rashomon,” even the victim has his own unique understanding of what happened to him based largely upon a lifelong devotion to the samurai code of Bushido.
No cell phones or body cams digitally recorded the murder in that rainy forest, so there’s no record, other than human memories, of the event. In fact, I don’t recall a single example of technology in the whole movie. No telephones, televisions or automobiles, just human beings with their widely varied ideas about the truth of what happened.
But there exist many recorded images of Renee Good dying at the hands of an ICE agent, and it seems like a new recording emerges daily with a different angle of the killing. Video recordings don’t lie. A camera has no cultural bias nor a political bone to pick. It just captures an event that can be viewed over and over again.
And yet, with all of the photographic and video evidence available to us, there is still an argument raging over what really happened in that cold Minneapolis street. The videos and pictures, which should have answered everyone’s questions, seem to have instead intensified the debate.
Why is that?
Because each person seeing the video isn’t seeing it objectively, but rather through the subjective lens of their own lifetime of experience, cultural and religious teaching, political bias and all the other factors coloring the witnesses’ testimony in “Rashomon.” In short, we see what we want to see.
That is precisely how different viewers of the same video can claim it offers different “proof.” The ICE agent was the aggressor. Renee Good was the aggressor. It was self-defense. It was murder. And so on.
The viewer’s societal and political biases paint the picture the viewer wants to see. In the case of this killing in Minneapolis, millions of different viewers reach wildly different conclusions for different reasons based on the same visual evidence.
Cognitive traps such as these biases are incredibly difficult to overcome because they make up so much of how we think of ourselves as good citizens. But they cloud the world before our eyes, and make objective truth hard to see. And I don’t mean just what happened on the street in Minneapolis, but everywhere around us.
I don’t believe in a magic wand that can instantly correct our collective myopia and remove the scales from our eyes, but I do think that, once we understand that our biases distort what we see, then we can take steps to correct our own vision.
And once we see more clearly, we can act more intelligently.