Singapore
It has been over 30 years since I last viewed the Kurosawa-Miyagawa classic film, Rashomon. (1950). How can it be that people see the exact same events and interpret them so very differently, as is the case here in the rape of the woman and murder of her husband?
This question is certainly the scourge of courtroom lawyers and anyone else who tries to discern truth (or at least their version of it) from the same set of facts. Our personal ontologies blind us to reality and especially to the realities of other people’s lives. We see what we want to see and hear what we want to hear to avoid the hard work of rising above ourselves. This is why a liberal and a conservative, each of whom derives so much self-identity from their chosen labels and the lockstep theologies they require, will use a political speech only to validate their own beliefs and discredit non-conforming ones. The cognitive dissonance that the truth produces can be otherwise too painful to bear.
For those of you who know the movie, the woodcutter’s agreement at the end of the film to take the abandoned baby home to raise it as his own fills the priest with renewed hope for humanity. This provides a welcome metaphor for where we are today as a people. Getting to a better place, however, will require each of us to work that much harder to surrender clichéd views of the past and open wide to seeing and hearing the possibilities of some very different futures.
p.s. Rashomon is a classic, but my favorite Kurosawa film is the 1966 Heaven and Earth (aka High and Low) also starring Toshiro Mifune and set in mid-1960s Tokyo.
The Sri Mariamman Hindu Temple in Singapore's Chinatown, of all places.
It has been over 30 years since I last viewed the Kurosawa-Miyagawa classic film, Rashomon. (1950). How can it be that people see the exact same events and interpret them so very differently, as is the case here in the rape of the woman and murder of her husband?
This question is certainly the scourge of courtroom lawyers and anyone else who tries to discern truth (or at least their version of it) from the same set of facts. Our personal ontologies blind us to reality and especially to the realities of other people’s lives. We see what we want to see and hear what we want to hear to avoid the hard work of rising above ourselves. This is why a liberal and a conservative, each of whom derives so much self-identity from their chosen labels and the lockstep theologies they require, will use a political speech only to validate their own beliefs and discredit non-conforming ones. The cognitive dissonance that the truth produces can be otherwise too painful to bear.
For those of you who know the movie, the woodcutter’s agreement at the end of the film to take the abandoned baby home to raise it as his own fills the priest with renewed hope for humanity. This provides a welcome metaphor for where we are today as a people. Getting to a better place, however, will require each of us to work that much harder to surrender clichéd views of the past and open wide to seeing and hearing the possibilities of some very different futures.
p.s. Rashomon is a classic, but my favorite Kurosawa film is the 1966 Heaven and Earth (aka High and Low) also starring Toshiro Mifune and set in mid-1960s Tokyo.
The Sri Mariamman Hindu Temple in Singapore's Chinatown, of all places.
