From the Archive - Rashomon Vibration
The contradictory stories we tell about ourselves.
Toshiro Mifune and Machiko Kyo in Rashomon
We were fine. Then we started de-fining ourselves.
- Unknown
I'm sending off this newsletter from Casper, WY, where I'm staying overnight, halfway back to Boulder from Bozeman. For the last few years Casper has been an “in between” place for me, and I can't count the number of strange synchronicities and meaningful life insights I've experienced here.
I'm sure it has to do with being “betwixt and between,” in a liminal place where my stories about the past and future don't quite connect, and the open potential of the Now breaks through.
It is liberating to drop our self-stories. Acting from this place of freedom always yields fruitful results. It's good karma, or better yet, no karma.
I wrote the piece below nine or ten years ago. It talks about the flip side of this liberation: the way we're condemned to act out surreal conflictual dramas when for whatever reason we resist this openness, and insist on defining ourselves.
I hope you enjoy.
Paul
Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film masterpiece Rashomon is often cited for its compelling depiction of the tragic subjectivity of human experience. The tale of the rape of a samurai’s wife and the samurai’s murder by a bandit is told from four mutually contradictory perspectives, all of them psychologically astute, believable and ultimately self-serving to the teller of the tale. It's a profound dramatization of our self-mythologizing instincts.
The film features spectacular cinematography by Kazuo Miyagawa, with his radical use of light and shadow (he’s credited as the first to film directly into the sun); Toshiro Mifune’s scene-chomping as the bandit Tajomaru; and the incomparable Takashi Shimura as the woodcutter, our most humane observer of the brutal events we see, but as we come to find, an equally self-interested one.
Takashi Shimura in Rashomon
For decades Rashomon has been appreciated for how it vividly dramatizes the subjectivity of human experience: four accounts, each one entirely convincing. Which one is true? Are any of them? Can they all be true? How can we know?
The first time I saw the movie, I was really disturbed, like I’d been on a bad acid trip or I'd found out that none of my friends were who I thought they were.
The wisdom of Rashomon goes even deeper than “it’s all subjective”. In each account — that of the bandit, the samurai’s wife, and the dead samurai (told through the body of a medium) — the teller of the tale simultaneously plays the part of victim, hero, and perpetrator.
That’s right, in each account, the teller of the tale is the person responsible for killing the samurai, and in each case they do so for an honorable reason.
Now, it is reasonable to expect that each account would present the teller as either the hero or the victim of the tale. That makes sense. But the perpetrator?
Look closely at the drama, and you will see that each person creates a story in which they are not only the most aggrieved party (the victim), but are in fact the one who kills the samurai (the perpetrator). In the bandit’s account, he kills the samurai after honorably setting him free and dueling him for possession of the wife. In the wife’s account, she frees the samurai, but he looks at her with such loathing (the actor Masayuki Mori pulls out all the stops here) that she faints. With a fade from the wife’s hand holding the dagger to the dead samurai, it is clear that she plunged the dagger into his heart, and she is openly admitting it. Finally, in the dead samurai’s account, he is released by the bandit Tajomaru, but kills himself out of honor.
As a coup de grace, in the final account, the woodcutter watches while the samurai and the bandit stumble through a pathetic, cowardly battle, at the end of which the samurai is all-but-accidentally impaled. In this scenario, the woodcutter could easily have broken up the fight — both contestants are clearly terrified — but he lets the fight to proceed to its fatal conclusion. Arguably, he kills the samurai through his inaction.
What to take from this? Can we look at ourselves and see that our stories about our lives often feature us in all the major roles, victim, hero and perpetrator? This will be particularly true of those emotionally powerful events which touch our deepest dreams and fears: our successes, our failures, our fortunes and misfortunes, our pleasures and pains. These are where our strongest sense-making mechanisms kick in and orient reality in a form somehow palatable to the ego formation we call our self.
The conclusion of Rashomon has been much debated: some see redemption for humanity as the woodcutter walks off in sunshine with the orphaned baby left at the city gate. (Throughout the major action of the movie, the rain is unrelenting.) Others point out that Kurosawa was waiting for a cloud to appear before shooting the final scene, but the weather (and budget) were unaccommodating.
Regardless of the interpretation, the terrifying and inspiring vision I find in Rashomon has to do with emptiness. In Buddhist parlance, emptiness (sunyatta) describes the ultimate non-fixity of all phenomena. This applies especially to the psycho-physical collection-patterns that we call our self or ego. The vision is terrifying because at a subconscious level we all resist the inchoate and formless. Watching the film, we wonder how these incompatible stories can possibly co-exist, and we struggle because they all ring so true.
The marvelous thing in this dastardly play of forms is that there seems to be some order to it. Each character sees him or herself as all the main players in the drama. If we can truly see how our own psyches do this in our own lives, we can appreciate when and how it is happening in others as well, and we may bring some level of understanding and compassion to the whole show.
Another way of understanding sunyatta is not as “emptiness” but as “fullness”. This understanding sees our everchanging, non-fixed world as a constant play of forms transforming one into the other. In this sense, all phenomena exceed any given description or discrete identity, as one form turns into another. The semiotician would say that everything is “overdetermined”. The pre-Socratic philosopher says “all things are full of gods” (or “all things are full of water”, water being the divine element, with no fixed form). The poet calls it the “spring overflowing its springbox” (Rumi, Two Kinds of Intelligence).
When subjected to the self-interested distortions of the human ego, our shifting forms take on certain archetypal shapes such as victim, hero and perpetrator. Other than this sheer play we create, they are meaningless.
In other words — and I think Rashomon bears this out quite clearly — we are all “full of it”.