Dark Sky Magazine | Issue 10.1

(Directed by Akira Kurosawa)by Kevin Murphy1950, Japan. The sky churns with swollen clouds. Rain has soaked the earth, incapacitating man and all his scurrilous vices. An apocalyptic feeling of desolation smears the landscape.Rashomon, an abandoned and dilapidated temple, lends shelter to three men. They are waiting for the weather to turn. They are passing the time with talk. They talk of murder, and truth, and faith in mankind. They wait for answers. They wait for the rain to break. They wait for salvation. But nobody’s quite sure such things will ever arrive.Here, in Akira Kurosawa’s renowned movie, the concept of truth is taken to task. The men waiting at Roshomon serve as the movie’s ethical arbiters.A husband and wife are traveling through the woods. The husband is murdered, his wife raped. When the culprit is apprehended, a trial is prepared. The wife, the murderer, the witnesses, and even the dead husband are called to testify. One by one the participants give their accounts, offer explanations, and swear they speak the truth. But as these accounts unfold, each person contradicts the other, and what’s left is a moral mystery that examines the many shades of honesty, the motives for deception, and the capsizing effect of human weakness.The movie is a current of visual stimuli that shifts and swells as the promise of drama heightens. In one scene we follow the Woodcutter (Takashi Shimura) as he moves through the dim, mysterious woods. The camera follows him, shifting below, above, ahead and behind. The camera is close, like we are following along. We are whacked with branches and swathed with leaves; we feel the sun through the trees and the dirt underfoot. Camaraderie is evoked and onward we trek.At this point, it’s as if the woods start to make music. The trees hum and the leaves rattle. The sun shrieks and the dirt drums. From it comes a writhing, propulsive beat that ushers us deeper into the woods, to a darker place, a place from which we cannot escape, a place where mankind is challenged, and is shown to flounder.Rashomon sings without using much dialogue. It confronts the human condition not with slick storyline devices, but by adhering to the instinct of man.At the murder trial, the judge is not shown or heard from. The courtroom seems to be on a windswept rooftop. The witnesses explain themselves to the camera. So it’s as if we, the audience, are judging them. Even though we’ve heard all the accounts, there’s no omnipotent judicial insight here. In fact, as we listen to the testimony, we’re moved further from the truth and grow more confused. It’s a testament to the script and the actors that with each version of the story we are convinced once again of the latest speakers sincerity. These people have too much conviction, too much at stake, too much to resolve for them to be lying. Or perhaps that’s exactly why they continue to do so.For these reasons Rashomon remains an accessible movie. Other reasons, however, might keep a contemporary audience at bay. For instance, the acting is of an era now gone. Exaggerated crying, maniacal laughter, sporadic slips and clumsy falls give the characters the spoof and crackpot tenacity of an ill-trained theater group performing with unrestrained ambition. Because performance acting is a part of their culture, a Japanese audience may still be able to appreciate and understand this approach. American viewers, I’d say, will not.Overall, though, Rashomon is a classic movie, directed by one of the twentieth century’s masters. It is a movie that examines the hard questions, and how we respond to them. It is a movie in which the characters defy loyalty and create sabotage, endure shame and seek glory. They wrench with envy and burn with hatred. And though there’s plenty of dated drama and moral dilemmas, quick summation and finality, Rashomon remains timeless. It does this by asking itself the same questions it asks of its characters. And in response we receive the most human of gifts: flawed beauty.So even if the rain never breaks, and even if we never know who killed the husband, and even if everyone has trouble with the truth, we do have one singular possession that helps us to navigate these deep, drenched woods. But to succumb to flawed beauty, just like this movie, you’ve got to decide whom you want to believe.