Rashomon

Am I the only person who thinks the ending ruined such a great film? I mean seriously, the film is talking about these very dark themes, and these awful people doing awful things, then all of a sudden a magic baby appears and the whole world is saved.

It’s so ridiculous. Why didn’t Kurosawa just stick to the theme. He ruined such an incredible film. I can’t be the only one who thinks that, right?

i don’t know man, i think it may have simply been an easy way of telling its viewers that not all was bad in the world…

He could have said the same thing in The Lower Depths, or Ran, but he didn’t. He had an ending that fit the themes of the films, that’s what bothers me so much.

Though, I see what you’re saying.

there were moments of pure human created beauty such as the one from rashomon in the lower depths, just not at the end…the spontaneous, oddly vocalized musical number being the obvious scene that springs to mind…i used to love to drop that on mix tapes just to see my friend’s faces when it played.

I recommend you check out the donald richie commentary on this one. He explains it pretty well, and you’re not too far off about it showing up out of nowhere to show a different angle on humanity, and that Kurosawa hadn’t quite gotten to a point of despair with humanity, and still had some optimism. Essentially, he wanted to show that even though everyone in the film is lying and killing, etc., there’s still a side of humanity that can choose to do good too.

@ Troy In both The Lower Depths, and Rashomon there are beautiful moments, and comedic moments, and etc… but the overall theme of each film is dark. In The Lower Depths he has an ending that fits that overall theme, in Rashomon he has a ending that goes completely against the theme of the film.

@ Samurai… If he wasn’t willing to make an ending that was full of despair, he shouldn’t have a made a film that was full of it. Don’t get me wrong, visually it’s one of the most gorgeous films I’ve ever seen, and the story is perfectly written, until that end.

It just bothers me that he ended the film the way he did. I understand his intention, but it doesn’t fit. I can’t even watch it anymore, it’s so sad.

If you look at Rashomon, though, as being about the sudden dissolving of a marriage due to the violent intervention of sex and temptation (whether or not you think the wife is faithful or unfaithful), then the abandoned baby fits with that, in that it’s a metaphor for what is potentially sacrificed by that dissolving. I think the important thing is that it’s an abandoned baby, rather than a miraculously discovered one. Of course the men in the pagoda could have been more like Waiting for Godot, waiting for a sign that never arrives; but it’s more challenging in a way to have the film try to pull in a slightly different direction at the end. Rather than being academically bleak.

That actually makes sense. I’ll go re-watch the film with that in mind. Thanks, Justin, you may have saved the movie for me, maybe.

You’re welcome. I might not be right, but that’s just how I saw it when I watched Rashomon.

Rashomon is a good work, to be sure but I prefer other Akira Kurosawa films like his majestic The Seven Samurai, the classic Yojimbo, and even his Macbeth adaptation, Throne of Blood, which is haunting.

Dax, i had the same feeling for the end of Drunken Angel. We’re shown a dank and desperate city full of dank and desperate characters, and then suddenly we’re shown overt optimism in the final moment. It seemed so jarringly out of place, especially compared to Kurosawa’s later work.
I think perhaps Kurosawa was trying too hard to teach with these endings. He showed us how we saw us (as in humanity), all dank and desperate, then showed us there is a chance for redemption, there is cause to believe in the goodness of humanity. But through his film career we see that optimism leave almost entirely, i think best encapsulated by Ran, but you definitely see the shift with Lower Depths.

We are often redeemed in Kurosawa. Think Ikiru.

I think the only time he became completely despondent was times like Cushingura when his battle scenes are essentially reflecting on the destructive power of modern warfare.

Without wanting to generalize or stereotype, I think this is an eastern vs. western thing. We in the west tend to use all or nothing thinking. Either life is bad or it isn’t. In eastern cultures life has more balance, I think — it’s more circular, you moved from one state of being to another much easier. That’s actually why I find it hard to relate to a lot of Asian cinema. I’m the decline of the west. And my favorite Asian filmmakers are probably the two most westernized, Nagisa Oshima and Wong Kar-Wai.

Ah, it stills bother me. That baby bugs me, it’s too out of place. Your interpretation, Justin, makes the film a bit more watchable, but I still can’t get over it.

Samurai… Kurosawa was very didactic in his career, I guess that’s what bothers me, he can’t just let a film run. Even in Ran, which I really dislike, he’s trying to teach me something instead of letting the film’s narrative just play out.

I guess I’ll just watch The Lower Depths, Ikiru, Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, Sanjuro, and Throne of Blood. The Kurosawa’s I really love.

Have you seen Hidden Fortress? That’s one of my favorites, and it won’t leave feeling like you’ve had your knuckles slapped with a ruler, that’s for sure.

I want to see The Lower Depths and The Hidden Fortress. I think 2009 is going to be the year I finally spend some time with Akira Kurosawa.

I remember seeing Hidden Fortress a few years ago and really liking it, but never seeing it again. I don’t know why, I should re-check that one out.

I think i might as well. It’s been a couple of years since i’ve seen it, and i always find myself thinking about it.

So what do you think about High and Low? That one’s got a particularly dark tone and theme, and seems to stick to it throughout, even with the ending.

These are the Kurosawa films I thought I would watch as I teach myself Kurosawa:

Stray Dog
Drunken Angel
Rashomon
Ikiru
The Bad Sleep Well
The Lower Depths
The Hidden Fortress
High and Low
Red Beard
Throne of Blood

The child is the only complete innocent in the film. Innocents appear out of blue and jerk us up back to who and what we are. The voyeuristic story is over; the listeners have participated in the ‘real tale’ just by telling and listening to the story. The child is a deus ex machina— it supplements the story and restores order.

I loved High and Low, it’s one of my favourites probably right behind Lower Depths, Ikiru, And Seven Samurai.

Disappointing in a lot of ways. The music and that terrible woman’s voice. Sensory overload.

I think the baby is there not simply to redeem the darkness of the picture but also to flesh out the character of the woodcutter. He may have stolen the dagger and it’s even possible that he killed the husband. Does he save the baby as an act of contrition? If so, for what? I enjoy the redemptive ending but I think it serves the mystery rather than detracts from it.

I’m not the biggest Kurosawa fan, although I do like the baby being saved. The only Kurosawas I really like is Yojimbo and High and Low. And maybe Seven Samurai.

Jay – I don’t see it as redemptive I see it as a cop out. I think it doesn’t work, the entire film is about the bleakness of life if man can’t tell the truth. The ending is not about truth, or lying, or reality or illusion, it’s about a baby that saves mankind, it doesn’t fit the entire theme of the film, that’s why it is a terrible ending, in my humble opinion.

I think that’s a valid opinion and I respectfully disagree, Dax. I felt that way about the ending to Mystic River. I thought most of the film was great and that it concluded with a cop out that ruined everything else for me. Film is a visceral experience and if the ending leaves you feeling cheated, then it spoils everything that comes before. I saw, or rather I felt, the film as more of psychological mystery than a tragedy. I saw the characters as being more weak than evil. So, for me the ending worked. For you, it was out of balance. I can dig that. I don’t think either view is wrong.

MERRILL: Hmmm. And then I think one problem that has presented itself over and over, usually in the case of a poem of certain length, is that you’ve got to end up saying the right thing. A poem like “Scenes of Childhood” made for a terrible impasse because at the point where my “I” is waking up the next morning, after a bad night, I had him say that dawn was worse. It took me a couple weeks to realize that this was something that couldn’t be said under any circumstances without being dishonest. Dawn is not worse; the sacred sun rises and things look up. Once I reversed myself, the poem ended easily enough. I had the same problem with “Urban Convalesence before writing those concluding quatrains. It broke off at the lowest point: "The heavy volume of the world / Closes again.” But then something affirmative had to be made of it.
McCLATCHY: You’re so self-conscious about not striking attitudes that the word “affirmative” makes me wonder…
MERRILL: No, think of music. I mean you don’t end pieces with a dissonance.
— from “Interview with J.D. McClatchy”, in The Paris Review no. 84.

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Are abandoned babies a motif of Asian literature? If so, the ending might appear less of a deus ex machina to a Japanese audience and more a familiar literary convention. A baby is abandoned in The Joy Luck Club (if I remember), and another example that comes to mind is a passage from Basho’s The Records of a Weather-exposed Skeleton:

As I was plodding along the River Fuji, I saw a small child, hardly three years of age, crying pitifully on the bank, obviously abandoned by his parents. They must have thought this child was unable to ride through the stormy waters of life which run as wild as the rapid river itself, and that he was destined to have a life even shorter than that of the morning dew. The child looked to me as fragile as the flowers of bush-clover that scatter at the slightest stir of the autumn wind, and it was so pitiful that I gave him what little food I had wth me.

The ancient poet
Who pitied the monkeys for their cries,
What would he say, if he saw
This child crying in the autumn wind?

How is it indeed that this child has been reduced to this state of utter misery? Is it because of his mother who ignored him, or because of his father who abandoned him? Alas, it seems to me that this child’s undeserved suffering has been caused by something far greater and more massive — by what one may call the irresistible will of heaven. If it is so, child, you must raise your voice to heaven, and I must pass on, leaving you behind.

If you see the message of the film as “people lie, cheat, and kill, deal with it.” then the baby definitely doesn’t fit in with that message. However, another view is that Kurosawa is trying to show that people can’t help but lie, no matter who they are, and the commoner is the voice of this in the movie.

“It’s human to lie. Most of the time we can’t even be honest with ourselves.”
“Well, men are only men. That’s why they lie. They can’t tell the truth, even to themselves.”
“Women lead you on with their tears. They even fool themselves.”
"We all want to forget something, so we tell stories. It’s easier that way. "

In this light the baby makes a lot of sense. We can’t help but lie, but we also can’t help but take care of something helpless. By showing that our inability to escape our humanity is both our downfall and our strength, Kurosawa makes a much more interesting statement than he would have only showing the negative side.

As pointed out in the Criterion essay by Dan Jardine, something should be understood about Nietzche’s assertion that “God is dead” when watching this film, because it most certainly defies faith in absolute truth. By the time the child makes its appearance on screen, our emotions have been sapped by the powerful testimonials from each of the involved at the trial. We have been completely unable to come to any conclusion by an inability to empathize with any specific version of the events that transpired in the forest clearing. Take the scene in which the struggle is most descriptively portrayed. Regardless of what went down, the emotions involved seem to be so strong and fearful that they absolutely cannot be translated into rational explanation. This is the basis behind the post-trial conversation at Rashomon. The baby has no point of view, no incidental tone. What I get out of it is that the baby represents the idea that innocence is only relative to time in the realm of being human, and it acts as a reminder to the men fighting at the temple.

Having just re-watched Rashomon today (and getting caught up in the sheer voyeuristic thrill of it) I think I can address this issue of the ending a little better. There is an ongoing debate in the pagoda about the nature of evil, are all men bad, etc. The holy man is devastated by the idea that there is no more good in the world; the pragmatist is more like go-along-to-get-along. At one key point the pragmatist talks about how all people lie, even to themselves — they tell themselves what they need to believe. The tentative contract which is forged between the two men at the end, with the one carrying the baby away in a bewildered state and the holy man staring after him questioningly, is for me not s fully resolved ending but another case of people “telling themselves what they need to believe.” Is it better to die for a truth than live for an illusion? The bandit and the samurai also speak at different times about what they consider worth risking their lives for. So I see man as still alone at the end, content to the extent he is deluded and can forget, but really unable to square it with his experience of life.

Am I wrong or is this one of the first films to really revolve around the favorite literary trope of “fate”? So much woiuld have never happened if the breeze had not lifted the woman’s veil as she rode past Mifune. Maybe Bicycle Thieves deals with fate, but I think Kurosawa was maybe the first auteur to present a largely fatalistic, hence non-instinctive view of life. In most movies people react based on instinct and if they have to think about what they do, it’s rarely to repudiate their own self will. But in certain films the characters acknowledge the hand of fate in their lives — Rashomon is one such film.