Rashomon

-Slavoj Zizek, "The Parallax View" (on Rashomon)

So not only is appearance inherent to reality: what we get beyond this is a weird split in appearance itself, an unheard of mode designating "the way things appear to us" as opposed to both their reality and their (direct) appearance to us. This shift from the split between appearance and reality to the split, inherent to appearance itself, between "true" and "false" appearance is to be linked to its obverse: to a split inherent to reality itself. If, then, there is appearance (as distinct from reality) because there is a (logically) prior split inherent to reality itself, it is also that "reality" itself is ultimately nothing but a (self) split of appearance? But how does this topos differ from the boring old Rashomon theme of an irreducible multiplicity of subjective perspectives on reality, with no way (no exempted position from which) to establish the one truth represented in a distorted way by these multiple perspectives? What better way to clarify this point than to refer to the very film (and the short story on which the film is based) whose title was elevated into a notion, Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon?
According to the legend, it was through Rashomon, its' European triumph in the early 1950's, that the Western public discovered the "Oriental Spirit" in the cinema; the little-known obverse of this legend is that this same film was a failure in Japan itself, where it was perceived as much too "Western" - and it is easy to see why. When the same tragic event (in a lonely forest, a notorious bandit rapes the samurai's beautiful wife and kills the samurai) is retold by four witnesses participants, the effect (pertaining to the very Western realism of the cinematic image) is simply that we are shown four differnet subjective perspectives. What, in effect, distinguishes the so-called "Oriental Spirit" from the Western attitude, however, is that, precisely, ambiguity and undecidability are not "subjectivized": they should not be reduced to different "subjective perspectives" on some reality beyond reach- rather, they pertain to this "reality"itself, and it is this ontological ambiguity-fragility of the "thing itself" that is difficult to express through the realism of the cinematic medium. This means that the authentic Rashomon has nothing to do with pseudo-Nietzschean perspectivism, with the notion that there is no objective truth, just an irreducible multitude of subjectively distorted biased narratives.

The first thing to do apropos of Rashomon is to avoid the formalist trap: what I am tempted to call the film's formal-ontological thesis (the impossibility of reaching the truth from multiple narratives of the same event) should not be abstracted from the particular nature of this event - the feminine challenge to male authority, the explosion of feminine desire. The four witness reports are to be conceived as four versions of the same myth (in the Levi Straussian sense of the term), as a complete matrix of variations: in the first (bandit's) version, he rapes the wife and then, in an honest duel, kills her husband; in the second (surviving wife's) version, in the course of the rape she gts caught up in the passion of the bandit's forceful lovemaking and, at the end, tells him that she cannot live in shame with both men knowing about her disgrace - one of them must die, and it is then that the duel ensues; in the third version (told by the ghost of the dead husband himself), after the husband is set free by the bandit, he stabs and kills himself out of shame; in the last version (told by the woodcutter who observed the events hidden in a nearby bush), when, after the rape, the bandit cuts the rope binding the husband, and the husband furiously rejects his wife as a dishonored whore, the ecstatically furious wife explodes against both men, accusing them of weakness and challenging them to fight for her. The succession of the four versions is thus not neutral, they do not by any means move at the same level: in the course of their progression, male authority is weakened step by step, and feminine desire is asserted. So we privilege the last (woodcutter's) report, the point is not that it tells us what "really happened" but that, within the immanent structure that links the four version, it functions as the traumatic point with regard to which the other three versions are to be conceived as defenses, defense formations.

The "official" message of the film is clear enough: at the very beginning, in the conversation that provides the frame for the flashbacks, the monk points out that the lesson of the events recounted is more terrifying than hunger, war, and chaos that pervaded society at the time - in what does this horror exist? In the disintegration of the social link: there was no "big Other" on which people could rely, no basic symbolic pact guaranteeing trust and sustaining obligations. Thus the film is not engaged in ontological games about how there is no unambiguous reality behind the multitude of narratives; rather, it is concerned with the socio-ethical consequences of the disintegration of the basic symbolic pact that holds the social fabric together. However, the story - the incident retold from different perspectives- tells more: it locates the threat to the big Other, the ultimate Cause that destabilizes the male pact and blurs the clarity of the male version, in a woman, in feminine desire. As Nietzsche puts it: in its inconsistence and lack of any ultimate point of reference beneath multiple veils, truth is feminine.