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The Rapist's Dilemma, Or, What I Didn't Know About Rashomon
So, what I DID know about Rashomon, which I went off to see tonight for the first time, is that it was a 1956 Japanese film directed by Akira Kurosawa, and that it practically introduced the concept of the unreliable narrator through the device of having four different witnesses relate their version of the events leading up to a murder. I've heard enough about the film, and its influence on subsequent movies, that when a friend invited me along to a showing at the Glasgow Film Theatre (one of Glasgow's neglected gems, our very own indie picture house in a lovely restored 1930's cinema) I signed up without a second thought.
So, things I didn't know. Well, a couple of minor points first. There's a framing sequence that makes "Waiting For Godot" look like "Some Like it Hot" in it's heavy-handed signposting of human frailty, and, talking of heavy-handedness, the score could be replaced with the sound of fingernails on a blackboard without losing any of its subtlety.
These pale into insignificance, though, besides the films multi-layered exploration of what I'll call the Rapist's Dilemma, which goes as follows.
(Oh, these are spoilers, but let's face it, the film is 54 years old - it's not like you haven't had a chance to see it.)
So, the Rapist's Dilemma:
1. If you are a hunky bandit and you rape a married woman in front of her tied-up Samurai Husband, she's going to fall in love with you and beg you to kill her husband, so that she can run away with you without worrying about being shamed in two men's eyes instead of just one.
Of course, this is only the Bandit's view of what happened - you can't rely on that, so...
2. If you have been raped by a Bandit, you must expect your tied up Samurai Husband to hate you so much for being raped that you must stab him (in a black out, of course) out of your deep sense of shame at having being raped.
But come on, that's only the woman's point of view and having just been raped (did I mention that?) and weaker than men (as we're reminded in the script) well what can you expect? Why not ask the spirit of the Samurai Husband, through a medium (no, really) who has been force-fed ham until she perfects a performance so over the top that it practically beats Sputnik into orbit
3. If your wife has just been raped by a Bandit you must call her a disgusting whore and give her to the Bandit, who refuses on the ground that she is so disgustingly weak that she hasn't killed herself after being raped. You can then kill yourself out of the shame of being married to a raped woman.
Ah, but this is all subjective, and we can't believe the participants' views - what we need is an objective witness, like, say, a woodsman, going about his daily tasks in the woods, and stopping to hide somewhere with a perfect view of the aftermath of the rape (did I mention the rape?).
4. So, after the Wife has been raped by the Bandit in front of the Tied-Up Samurai Husband, she is a bit miffed. Rather than do the decent thing and kill herself, she goads the two of them into fighting for her, since she can only be won by men's steel (I thought this might be a trenchant criticism of the misogyny seen before, but, no, she doesn't seem to care who gets killed, her husband or the bandit, so long as someone wins her. With steel. After a deliberately botched fight the Bandit kills the Husband and she runs off from him.
So, ok, the movie is a product of its time and culture, and yadda yadda yadda. Didn't stop it feeling like misogynistic bull-shit to me. Nothing about the narrative technique came close to overcoming my revulsion about the unquestioned assumption that a raped woman is a filthy whore who should have the decency to kill herself PDQ.
PS, of a sort.
I had just about calmed down from my anger over this movie (I may have called it misogynistic bullshit outside, when asked what I'd thought of it) by the time I got home, and was ready to consign it to history and a waste of part of an evening on my part. I'd sort of assumed that everyone would get that now, and choose to view the film the same way I do a John Buchan novel, or the Flashman books, with allowances for the time they were written and a full understanding THAT TIMES HAVE CHANGED, MOTHERFUCKERS, and it's not alright to point out that THE JEWS ARE BEHIND IT ALL or that rape is the sort of thing you can do without realising it (yes, Flashman does that). Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case. I clicked through to a review from the Google listing for the film tonight,on a site called Common Sense Media (am I right in thinking that's some sort of right-wing, God-bothering site, or am I confusing it with somewhere else?).
The review calls it a cinematic masterpiece, with no mention of the character's attitude towards rape. It even lets us know that Sex is not a problem in the move, and gives helpful suggestions about how you could discuss it with your family:
"Families can talk about the potential fallibility of the legal system in relation to absolute truth. What factors do you think played a role in the credibility of one witness's account over another? Have you ever been in a situation when you heard two different accounts of the same event? Which version did you believe? Why? How was it resolved"
Can we spot what's missing there? Maybe a little discussion on whether women who are raped are filthy whores who should have the decency to kill themselves?
I mean, really, is it just me?
So, things I didn't know. Well, a couple of minor points first. There's a framing sequence that makes "Waiting For Godot" look like "Some Like it Hot" in it's heavy-handed signposting of human frailty, and, talking of heavy-handedness, the score could be replaced with the sound of fingernails on a blackboard without losing any of its subtlety.
These pale into insignificance, though, besides the films multi-layered exploration of what I'll call the Rapist's Dilemma, which goes as follows.
(Oh, these are spoilers, but let's face it, the film is 54 years old - it's not like you haven't had a chance to see it.)
So, the Rapist's Dilemma:
1. If you are a hunky bandit and you rape a married woman in front of her tied-up Samurai Husband, she's going to fall in love with you and beg you to kill her husband, so that she can run away with you without worrying about being shamed in two men's eyes instead of just one.
Of course, this is only the Bandit's view of what happened - you can't rely on that, so...
2. If you have been raped by a Bandit, you must expect your tied up Samurai Husband to hate you so much for being raped that you must stab him (in a black out, of course) out of your deep sense of shame at having being raped.
But come on, that's only the woman's point of view and having just been raped (did I mention that?) and weaker than men (as we're reminded in the script) well what can you expect? Why not ask the spirit of the Samurai Husband, through a medium (no, really) who has been force-fed ham until she perfects a performance so over the top that it practically beats Sputnik into orbit
3. If your wife has just been raped by a Bandit you must call her a disgusting whore and give her to the Bandit, who refuses on the ground that she is so disgustingly weak that she hasn't killed herself after being raped. You can then kill yourself out of the shame of being married to a raped woman.
Ah, but this is all subjective, and we can't believe the participants' views - what we need is an objective witness, like, say, a woodsman, going about his daily tasks in the woods, and stopping to hide somewhere with a perfect view of the aftermath of the rape (did I mention the rape?).
4. So, after the Wife has been raped by the Bandit in front of the Tied-Up Samurai Husband, she is a bit miffed. Rather than do the decent thing and kill herself, she goads the two of them into fighting for her, since she can only be won by men's steel (I thought this might be a trenchant criticism of the misogyny seen before, but, no, she doesn't seem to care who gets killed, her husband or the bandit, so long as someone wins her. With steel. After a deliberately botched fight the Bandit kills the Husband and she runs off from him.
So, ok, the movie is a product of its time and culture, and yadda yadda yadda. Didn't stop it feeling like misogynistic bull-shit to me. Nothing about the narrative technique came close to overcoming my revulsion about the unquestioned assumption that a raped woman is a filthy whore who should have the decency to kill herself PDQ.
PS, of a sort.
I had just about calmed down from my anger over this movie (I may have called it misogynistic bullshit outside, when asked what I'd thought of it) by the time I got home, and was ready to consign it to history and a waste of part of an evening on my part. I'd sort of assumed that everyone would get that now, and choose to view the film the same way I do a John Buchan novel, or the Flashman books, with allowances for the time they were written and a full understanding THAT TIMES HAVE CHANGED, MOTHERFUCKERS, and it's not alright to point out that THE JEWS ARE BEHIND IT ALL or that rape is the sort of thing you can do without realising it (yes, Flashman does that). Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case. I clicked through to a review from the Google listing for the film tonight,on a site called Common Sense Media (am I right in thinking that's some sort of right-wing, God-bothering site, or am I confusing it with somewhere else?).
The review calls it a cinematic masterpiece, with no mention of the character's attitude towards rape. It even lets us know that Sex is not a problem in the move, and gives helpful suggestions about how you could discuss it with your family:
"Families can talk about the potential fallibility of the legal system in relation to absolute truth. What factors do you think played a role in the credibility of one witness's account over another? Have you ever been in a situation when you heard two different accounts of the same event? Which version did you believe? Why? How was it resolved"
Can we spot what's missing there? Maybe a little discussion on whether women who are raped are filthy whores who should have the decency to kill themselves?
I mean, really, is it just me?
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(Incidentally, though, the woodcutter never struck me as an objective storyteller, merely an outsider. He lies by omission about his theft of the dagger, keeping in with the movie's relentlessly crapsack world in which everyone alters the truth to make themselves look better.)
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*hands you the brain bleach*
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