The Rashomon effect

Two recent events- one professional and the other personal- reminded me of a movie I had seen some fifty years ago. It reminded me once again that oftentimes perspective is relative and that each person can see the same event, but perceive the details of the event completely differently and hence reach a conclusion which, while plausible, is not what the others have seen. Since the facts of the event are rarely in dispute, the fact that different eyewitnesses can reach profoundly different conclusions is one that should give us pause in our certainties of what we seen and know.

Kurosawa's (1950) Rashomon is a movie, which shows how any individual's perception and telling of an event can differ, often radically, from another's version. It tells the story, set in medieval Japan, of two men who have taken refuge from a downpour under the Rasho Gate in Kyoto who relate to a third the events they had earlier witnessed at the trial of a bandit. They tell of how a man and his wife, while travelling through a forest, were met by a highwayman, who murdered the man and raped the woman. Their presentations of the testimony of each of the persons involved in the crime make it apparent, however, that each of the individuals involved saw the events in which he was participating in a different way than had the others, or, at the least, represented those events very differently.

Kurosawa shows how people can perceive the same physical occurrences in radically different ways. Whether the film's characters, and human beings generally, merely interpret what they have seen or done according to their own opinions and assumptions about the world or transform the events themselves, molding them into whatever new narratives are required for their emotional well-being, their differing representations are not overt lies, that is, representations known by the given person telling them to be untrue, but can be, in fact, accurate reflections of that person's understanding of the events he has witnessed.

By so letting the moviegoer see the world from the perspective of each of the individuals around whom Rashomon revolves, Kurosawa not only reminds the viewer just how fluid reality is, but also allows him to engage with each of the film's characters. The viewer is, consequently, not simply affected by the tragic murder of a man, the rape of a woman, and the execution of their attacker, but also by an awareness of how human beings are unable to deal with the universe around them without imposing upon it whatever constructs are needed to make that world an easier place for them to inhabit. For example, in the story told by the murdered man, which is related by a medium, the viewer sees how the man perceives himself as a completely innocent victim, betrayed even by his wife, who is revealed as a faithless creature who callously begs the robber to murder her husband and take her with him. In the wife's tale, by contrast, it is the man who is cruel and heartless, who is ready to abandon a spouse he sees as being tainted by the rape she has suffered. Each person interprets the events occurring to him as colored by his own often selfish perspectives so that whatever wrongs are committed are always done by others and never by himself. It also shows what lengths people will go to protect their own self-image from lies and deceit to a sense of importance belied by facts.

A few weeks ago I was invited by the World Bank, my erstwhile employers, to visit Vietnam and write about the reasons for the success of their rural electrification program which had gone from 3 % to 98 % access in less than two decades. I had first visited Vietnam in 20 years ago, lived there for almost 8 years, written two widely acclaimed energy sector reports besides helping design and implement the rural electrification effort in the late nineties. The government had even bestowed two medals on me for my contribution to this effort. So I went in confident that I would be able to chronicle this effort with a degree of competence and personal knowledge that perhaps other lacked. But even as I completed the report I found two other persons with different perspectives, each profoundly convinced of the accuracy of his assessment. Since the events over the two decades were not in doubt, it was puzzling to find two professionals with such differing views which they held with equal fervour and conviction. How can people perceive the same physical occurrences in radically different ways, and, more importantly, how does one decide which version is the truth?

The personal story has a similar puzzling but somewhat more familiar event at its center. It is the age old conflict of a doting mother and an aggressive daughter in law fighting ever so gently, and sometimes not so gently, over the life of the son. Mild criticisms become slights not to be forgotten, little events balloon into full blown conflicts till it leads to an open confrontation with each one giving his or her own version of how it led to this. The same events once again are seen in completely different light – a version of where you stand depends upon where you sit. Tragically, sometimes these events tend not to get resolved as one's ego and bruised feelings make reconciliation impossible as no one outside can decipher the real truth of the matter to offer help and counsel.

And tragically, as in Rashomon, at the end, it still remains unclear which of the stories told is true. No one is willing to take that extra step of walking in the other persons shoes even for a while, which could lead to a happy conclusion for all.