...to divert our attention away from atrocities being committed in the present that we should be doing something today about.
Not only is appearance inherent to reality – what we get beyond reality is a weird split in appearance itself, an unheard-of mode designating “the way things really 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, is it also that “reality” itself is ultimately nothing but a (self-)split of the appearance? However, how does this topos differ from the old boring Rashomon-motif of an irreducible multiplicity of subjective perspectives on reality, with no way – with no exempted position from which – to establish the one truth represented distortedly by these multiple perspectives?
What best 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 Kurosava’s Rashomon? As the legend goes, it was through Rashomon, its European triumph in the early 1950s, that the Western public discovered the “Oriental spirit” in cinema. The less-known obverse of this legend is that Rashomon was a failure in Japan itself where it was perceived as all too “Western” – and one can well see why.
When the same tragic event (in a forest, a 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 told four different subjective perspectives. However, what effectively distinguishes the so-called “Oriental spirit” from the Western attitude is that ambiguity and undecidability are not “subjectivized”: they should not be reduced to different “subjective perspectives” on some reality beyond reach. They rather pertain to this “reality” itself, and it is this ontological ambiguity-fragility of the “thing itself” that is difficult to render through the realism of the cinematic medium. What this means is that the authentic “Rashomon” has nothing to do with the 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 Rashomon is to avoid the formalist trap: what one is tempted to call the film’s formal-ontological thesis (the impossibility to arrive at truth from multiple narratives of the same event) should NOT be abstracted from the particular nature of this event – the feminine challenge to the 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 (the bandit’s) version, he raped the wife and then, in an honest duel, killed her husband. In the second (the survivor-wife’s) version, in the course of the rape, she got caught in the passion of the bandit’s forceful love-making and, at the end, told him that she could not live in shame with both of men knowing about her disgrace – one of them had to die, and it was then that the duel ensued. 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 tying the husband, and the husband furiously rejects his wife as a dishonored whore, the ecstatically furious wife explodes against both men, reproaching them with weakness and challenging them to fight for her.
The succession of the four versions is thus not neutral; they do not all move at the same level. In the course of their progression, the male authority is step by step weakened and feminine desire asserted. So, when we privilege the last (woodcutter’s) report, the point is not that it tells what “truly 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, or 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, a monk points out that the lesson of the events recounted is more terrifying than the hunger, war, and chaos that pervaded society at that time. In what does this horror reside? 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. The film is not engaged in ontological games about how there is no ultimate unambiguous reality behind a multitude of narratives; it is, rather, concerned with the socio-ethical consequences of the disintegration of the basic symbolic pact that holds the social fabric together. Nevertheless, the story – the incident retold from different perspectives – tells more than that: it locates the threat to the big Other, the ultimate cause that destabilizes the male pact and blurs the clarity of the male vision of a woman, of feminine desire. As already Nietzsche put it: in its very inconsistency and lack of any ultimate point of reference beneath multiple veils, truth is feminine.
It seems that Oriental spirituality, especially that of Japan and South Korea, provides a privileged site of superpositions. The definitive movie about superpositions is, without doubt, Monsters (Hirokazu Kore-Eda, Japan 2023). Here is the outline of the story.
Saori Mugino, a single mother, is raising her fifth-grade son Minato who begins exhibiting strange behavior (cutting his own hair, coming home with only one shoe). One night, Minato does not come home at all, and, after calling around, Saori finds him in an abandoned train tunnel. Saori begins to suspect her son’s teacher, Hori, is abusing him and confronts the school about it. She is treated coldly by the faculty, culminating in Hori making a disingenuous apology. When she confronts Hori directly, he asserts that Minato is actually bullying another student named Yori. Saori visits Yori’s house and discovers that Yori, despite his strange behavior, is fond of and concerned for Minato. Hori is eventually fired from the school, but returns there days later. Minato falls down a flight of stairs trying to escape from him. Hori later comes to Saori and Minato’s house during a rain storm, but Minato has gone missing.
At this point, a flashback brings us back to the beginning of the film from Hori’s point of view. He notices Minato exhibiting disruptive behavior, such as throwing other students’ belongings around the classroom and seemingly locking Yori in a bathroom stall. Hori too visits Yori’s house, where he discovers that his father, Kiyotaka, is an abusive alcoholic. When Saori begins inquiring about her son, the faculty requires Hori to resign. Hori returns to the school to confront Minato, and contemplates jumping from the roof. Back at home, Hori notices a pattern in Yori’s old homework that seems to spell out Minato’s name. Realizing the two boys were actually in love, Hori rushes to the Mugino household to apologize. When Saori tells him Minato is missing, they go to the train tunnel to find him. They find an abandoned railcar nearly buried in mud, but only see Minato’s poncho inside.
The final flashback begins from Minato’s point of view. Yori plays with Minato’s hair, which the latter then impulsively cuts off. The two boys grow close and Minato begins defending him from other bullies, which Hori confuses for bullying. As the two become closer, Minato is distressed that his feelings are becoming romantic and that he is not a worthy son to his father. One night when he goes to Yori’s house, Yori and Kiyotaka declare that Yori has been “cured,” though Yori quickly recants, which incites his father’s wrath. During a rainstorm, Minato finds Yori fully clothed in his bathtub, covered in bruises, and the two escape to the abandoned railcar, which has become their hideout. After the rain subsides, they emerge from the bottom of the railcar and question whether they have been reborn, and run through a field together.
Monsters is a movie about neighbors in the strict Judeo-Christian sense of the term. One should oppose here neighbor to a fellow man: fellow men are those who are like us; we immediately recognize in them the common ground that we share. Fellowmen are friends, members of my family, co-workers, those whom I think I know intimately. A fellow man transforms itself into a neighbour when I detect in him a feature or a gesture which makes him a total stranger to me: “How could he do THAT? I never expected this from him. Is he one of us at all or an alien monster?” It is on account of this monstrosity of the neighbour that Lacan applies to the neighbor the term Thing (das Ding), used by Freud to designate the ultimate object of our desires in its unbearable intensity and impenetrability. One should hear in this term all the connotations of horror fiction: the neighbor is the (Evil) Thing which potentially lurks beneath every homely human face. Just think about Stephen King’s Shining, in which the father, a modest failed writer, gradually turns into a killing beast who, with an evil grin, goes on to slaughter his entire family. But a neighbour can also imply an unexpected positive surprise: a fellow man whom we considered just an ordinary person with all his weaknesses becomes a neighbour when he displays unexpected courage or honesty.
In Monsters, we see how, first, Minato becomes a monster for his mother due to his weird acts, and, to account for his weird acts and simultaneously de-monstrify Minato, she projects monstrosity onto his teacher Hori. In the first flashback, Hori is de-monstrified: we see him from his own standpoint as a modest and compassionate teacher who perceives a monstrosity in Minato but is then compelled to see the inner tension of Minato who is not able to come to terms with his affection towards Yori. The interest of the film resides in the fact that it repeatedly performs the operation that is the exact opposite of a fellow man becoming a monstrous neighbour: when we shift the perspective to the inner experience of the monster him/herself, we see s/he is really a fellow human being like us…
The obvious lesson of the film is that the ultimate monster is patriarchal order itself, and for that reason, the only person who remains a monster is Kiyotaka, Yori’s abusive and alcoholic father who wants to brutally “renormalize” his son and make him act as it befits a boy. We never see the other side of his character that would have made him more sympathetic since he is reduced to a ridiculous embodiment of the patriarchal stance. This fact indicates the limit of the film’s ideological coordinates: the opposition of patriarchal culture and gay love is unconditional; there is no process of de-monstrification of patriarchy and of monstrification of gay love in this universe. (One should add here that the couple Is not yet sexualized, so that the love of the two boys is asexual – a further compromise, because the asexual character of their love makes this love pure and innocent. Sexualization always implies duplicity, deceit and a kind of monstrosity.)
The multiple standpoints of the film’s narrative, whereby flashbacks make us see the same events in a different light, are a strategy to de-monstrify someone who is perceived/constructed in the eyes of the others as a monster. What I find problematic here is the underlying premise that comes close to the utter fatuity masquerading as a deep wisdom: “An enemy is someone whose story you have not heard.”[1] Are we also ready to affirm that Hitler was our enemy only because his story was not heard? Is it not that the more I know about and “understand” Hitler, the more Hitler is my enemy? Not to mention the fact that the stories we ourselves are telling to ourselves are as a rule a lie manufactured to justify the horrors we are doing to others – the truth is out there, in what we are doing in reality. All aggressors present themselves as victims reacting to an aggression. That’s why my motto is “no ethnic cleansing without poetry”; that’s why wars are sustained not only by industrial-military complex but also by what one should call the poetic-military complex. We saw this complex at work in the post-Yugoslav war in the early 1990s, but to avoid the illusion that the poetic-military complex is a Balkan specialty, one should mention at least Hassan Ngeze who, in his journal Kangura, was systematically spreading anti-Tutsi hatred and calling for their genocide. Foundations for the genocidal war are there.
The predominance of religiously (or ethnically) justified violence can be accounted for by the very fact that we live in an era that perceives itself as post-ideological. The large majority of people are spontaneously ‘moral’: killing another human being is deeply traumatic for them. So, in order to make them do it, a larger ‘sacred’ Cause is needed, which makes petty individual concerns about killing seem trivial. Religion or ethnic belonging fit this role perfectly. Of course, there are cases of pathological atheists who are able to commit mass murder just for pleasure, just for the sake of it, but they are rare exceptions. The majority needs to be ‘anaesthetized’ against their elementary sensitivity to the other’s suffering. For this, a sacred Cause is needed.
More than a century ago, in his Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky warned against the dangers of godless moral nihilism: “If God doesn’t exist, then everything is permitted.” The lesson of today’s terrorism is, on the contrary, that if there is a God, then everything, even blowing up hundreds of innocent bystanders, is permitted to those who claim to act directly on behalf of God, as the instruments of His will, since, clearly, a direct link to God justifies our violation of any “merely human” constraints and considerations. “Godless” Stalinist Communists are the ultimate proof of it: everything was permitted to them since they perceived themselves as direct instruments of their divinity, the Historical Necessity of Progress towards Communism. Religious ideologists usually claim that, true or not, religion makes some otherwise bad people to do some good things; from today’s experience, one should rather stick to Steven Weinreich’s claim that, while, without religion, good people would have been doing good things and bad people bad things, only religion can make good people do bad things.
This is why the shifting perspectives in Monsters tell only half of the story. In the film, all characters (except Kiyotaka) are ethically rehabilitated when we hear their side of the story. Even the headmistress of the school who treats Saori in a polite but brutally dismissive way, ignoring her pain, is rehabilitated when we learn about the tragic accident that ruined her life. But one should still insist that this inner experience of trauma in no way justifies her brutal treatment of Saori: whatever her inner experience, the truth is that she acted in an ethically unacceptable way – or, in quantum mechanics terms, a superposition of two stances irreducibly marks her life.
There are some unexpected parallels between Monsters and Handmaiden, Park Chan-wook’s 2016 South Korean movie based on Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith, a 2002 novel with a similar plot set in Victorian time which, prior to Chan-wook’s movie, was already twice adapted: a BBC TV adaptation in 2005 and a stage adaptation in 2015. Handmaiden also uses shifting perspectives (the same event, depicted from a different perspective, appears in a wholly new light), plus it praises homosexual (here lesbian) sexuality as a resource against violent patriarchy. The difference is that same-sex love is here fully sexualized (some critics accused the film of getting too close to pornography), going beyond a pre-sexual gentle feeling of affection (as is the case in Monsters). What makes the movie interesting is that its shifts of perspective work in the opposite direction with regard to Monsters: the two women who first appear as naively innocent are revealed to be involved in almost diabolically evil plots (their naivety was a fake), while the two main masculine persons are from the beginning presented as almost ridiculously evil, and in the course of the film their evil gradually gets even more diabolical. (There is no radical shift of perspective here, no other view that would at least partially justify their acts – to make a more general point, it is as if there are not enough flashbacks here, not enough shifts of standpoint.)
What redeems the two women is that, although each of the two is involved in a deadly plot against the other, they fall passionately in love with each other, and this love allows them to exit the vicious cycle of evil, while the two men both end up dead. One has to add here that the way the two women exit the circle of male domination is no less criminal – they both act in a brutal manipulative way against others. The world we end up in Handmaiden is thus a world of global violence, manipulation and exploitation: there is no way out of it. The escape of the two women is limited to their sexual intimacy, while in their relations to others they remain fully within the world of corrupted manipulation. What if they – the two woman – are the paradigmatic subjects of our time (with “authentic” intimate experience somehow justifying their social behaviour), is one of the men at least (the fake “Count”) not much more honest in his open admission of total corruption not justified by any inner authenticity?
Surprisingly (or not so), this brings us back to our first case, Rashomon. As we have already seen, the succession of the four versions is not neutral: in the course of their progression, male authority is step by step weakened and feminine desire asserted. This brings us to Lacan and his theory of feminine sexuality (and subjectivity): the multiplicity of superpositions is not a formal scheme indifferent with regard to sexual difference. The (irreducible) multiplicity of superpositions is as such, in itself, feminine, and its collapse into a single point is masculine. This in no way implies that femininity is reduced to a confusing ground, which is magically turned into a single consistent order through the intervention of a masculine Master-Signifier (S1). Quite on the contrary, the imposition of a single Master-Signifier obfuscates the multiplicity of Master-Signifiers themselves… But this is another story.
Notes:[1] Epigraph of “Living Room Dialogues on the Middle East,” quoted from Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
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