Screenshots: Crooked Bridge & the Rashomon effect of truth

UPDATED VERSION. Yesterday, in discussing Brendan Pereira's insistence of a 'deliberate policy of openness' currently being practised under the Abdullah administration vis-a-vis the crooked bridge debacle, I talked briefly about truth, or fragments and layers of it, as presented in Rashomon style.

I said the mainstream media shouldn't gag former Prime Minister Dr Mahathir's Open Letter in which he reiterated that the government had failed to defend the nation’s sovereignty. I said Mahathir is 82 years old, and he professed that he had penned the letter as a Malaysian who loves his country. That said, I asked that let's allow truth, even fragments and layers of it in Rashomon style, to have its final say.

In simple English, I mean don't gag Mahathir in the mainstream media.

In articulating my standpoint, I fear Rashomon, as a term and as a movie classic, may have flown over many heads. Please allow me to give it a clearer context.

Rashomon ( 羅生門 ) is a 1950 Japanese motion picture directed by Akira Kurosawa, starring Toshiro Mifune. Its theme deals with the impossibility of obtaining the truth about an event from conflicting witness accounts. Or what I call the fragments and layers of truth, much like the 'Crooked Bridge' debacle that Dr Mahathir and the Abdullah administration are at odds with. None of them has yet to reveal the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

You only see layers and fragments of it, depending on who speak, and who you speak to. That's Rashomon 101.

A rape, a murder, four witnesses and messy truth

Kurosawa's movie was based on two stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa -- Rashōmon provides the setting, while In a Grove provides the characters and plot.

At the centre of the story is a rape and murder narrated through the widely differing accounts of four witnesses, including the perpetrator and the murder victim, a samurai who 'spoke' through a medium.

The story unfolds in flashback as the five characters: ( 1 ) the bandit Tajōmaru, ( 2 ) the murdered samurai Kanazawa-no-Takehiro, ( 3 ) the dead samurai's wife Masago, ( 4 ) the priest, and ( 5 ) the nameless Woodcutter, who took turns to recount the sequence of rape and murder that took place one afternoon in a grove.

The plot thickens as the story unfolds into a flashback within a flashback, where each individual involved in the incident has testified the court. However, each of their stories is self-serving, and all are mutually contradictory, leaving the viewers in a jaw-dropping dilemma, unable to determine the truth of the events.

Even the Priest, the symbol of truth and altruism in the story, had his faith in humanity shaken after enduring all deceptions and lies uttered during the testimony.

Wikipedia gives the whole Rashomon syndrome a better context.

In English and other languages, "Rashomon" has become a by-word for any situation wherein the truth of an event becomes difficult to verify due to the conflicting accounts of different witnesses. In psychology, Kurosawa's film has lent its name to the Rashomon effect.

The impression I got from the players involved in Crooked Bridge debacle -- Mahathir, Abdullah, Syed Hamid, Lee Kuan Yew, Goh Chok Tong etc -- is akin to this Rashomon effect I studied during my varsity days.

How true. How unsettling.

Because, unlike movie plots, there's no redeeming factor in this Crooked Bridge debacle.

UPDATE: I'm glad to know that The Star became the first English paper to carry Dr Mahathir's Open Letter online, verbatim. theSun, likewise, has acknowledged the existence of Dr Mahathir's Open Letter by carrying a concise version today.

Why is The NST, whose Group Editor insisted on the prevalence of 'a deliberate policy of openess', so slow in upholding its own belief?

Conflicting witnesses' account of the rape and murder in Rashomon

The Woodcutter The unnamed Woodcutter claims he found the body of the victim (the Samurai) three days ago while looking for wood in the forest.
The Priest (who acted as medium for the dead samurai)
The traveling Buddhist priest claims that he saw the Samurai and the Woman three days before the murder happened. (Since his report does not tell anything about the murder, and does not contradict the other reports, he is presumably telling the truth.)

The Bandit
Tajōmaru, a notorious brigand, claims that he tricked the Samurai and his wife to step off the mountain trail with him and look at some swords he was selling. When he had them far off the trail, he separated them, and tied the Samurai to a tree. He planned to rape the woman, but she willingly gave in to him instead. The woman, filled with shame, then begged him to either kill her or her husband, to save her from the guilt and shame of knowing two men. He honorably set the Samurai free so they could duel. Tajōmaru was the victor and the woman ran away.

At the end of the story he is asked about the dagger: he says that, in the confusion, he forgot all about it, and that it was foolish of him to leave behind such a valuable object.

The Samurai's Wife
The Samurai's wife, Masago, claims that after she was raped by Tajōmaru, who left her to weep, she begged her husband to forgive her; but he simply looked at her coldly. She then freed him and begged him to kill her so that she would be at peace. He continued to stare at her coldly, and then she fainted with dagger in hand.

She awakens to find her husband dead with the dagger in his chest, supposedly an accident that happened when she fell over. She recalls attempting to drown herself some time later by a nearby lake.

The Samurai who 'spoke' through a medium
Through a medium, the deceased Samurai, Kanazawa-no-Takehiro, claims that after he was captured by Tajōmaru, and after the bandit raped his wife, Tajōmaru asked her to travel with him. She accepted and asked Tajōmaru to kill her husband so that she wouldn't feel the guilt of knowing two men.

Tajōmaru, shocked by this request, grabbed her, and gave the Samurai a choice of letting the woman go or killing her. The woman fled, and Tajōmaru, after attempting to recapture her, gave up and set the Samurai free. The Samurai then killed himself with his own dagger. The ghost then mentions that somebody removed the dagger from his chest; upon hearing this, the woodcutter is startled, and claims that the dead man must be lying, because he was killed by a sword.

The Woodcutter (again)
The woodcutter then confesses that his earlier view was a lie and says that Tajōmaru raped the Samurai's wife, and then begged the weeping woman to marry him. She instead freed her husband and asked the two men to duel, saying that she would go with the victor.

The Samurai called her a coward, and she replied that the two men were cowards for not fighting. Tajōmaru and the Samurai fought, but the struggle only showed how clumsy they were. Nonetheless, Tajōmaru won the duel, and the woman fled as he chased her.

The woodcutter, priest, and commoner are interrupted by the sound of a crying baby. They find the baby abandoned, and the commoner takes the baby's clothing. The woodcutter reproaches the commoner for stealing from the abandoned baby, but the commoner retorts that he knows the truth: that the woodcutter, too, is a thief, having stolen the dagger used in the murder of the samurai.

Redemption
These deceptions and lies that originally shake the priest's faith in the goodness of humanity. However, his faith is restored, after the guilty woodcutter, seeking redemption, offers to raise the baby as his own.

Comments

Thanks Jeff for a good intro to Rashomon effect.
In the present Crooked Bridge still developing and enveloping story, I would bring in another scenarion easier to vuisuaise: Shakepeasre's famous "The world's a stage..." from As You Like It.

All the named parties -- past PMs Dr Mahathir, Lee KY (now mentor minister still!), present PM Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, his Sinland counterpart Jr Lee, Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong and NegaraKu's FM Syed Hamid, and a whole cast of other minor minsiters/officials ...they are all Players and acting out their parts. According to their own interpretations, plus self-interests.

You can only get approximations to certain truths and NOT the whole truth, especially when lawyers like Mattyhias Chang get into the Act -- Secnes 1&2 already over, Scene 3 coming? And how many more Acts? -- that's the Q!
These are all well-paid and instructed actors; most Joepublic will stand entertained -- free opera. We may even have a play to enter the London stage as a year-long festival is ongoing to commemorate The Bard. Note it's not nursery rhyme here -- It's politics-business nexus all over again, and all over the place-- because of the Changing of the Guards in both countries.
Rashomon, I'd like to see if any Geisha would keep me company to watch through the intrigues -- any ER care to play the part? No, not Rashomon, Da Geisha.

Posted by: desiderata | April 26, 2006 02:24 PM

It used to be that things weren't this complicated. Something's to be done and it was done right the first time. The political elements didn't get into the amalgam and the malaysian spirit was unalloyed. Communities gave and took in a sense of fairplay, and government service was, given the times, somewhat synonymous with value-for-money quality delivered with confidence.

That has gone, replaced by cronyism and corruption, followed by mistrust and disillusionment, now left with the residue of some bad taste and a painful concern as to how to go forward when we have been receding too much too fast at too great a price.

Against this backdrop, we have M2 whose two decades of administration emptied this country of three things:

transparency,
checks-and-balances,and
integrity.

Without transparency, checks-and-balances cannot be operated; without checks-and-balances, integrity cannot be maintained.

And once you lose integrity, transparency gets muddied again, so that a vicious cycle is created.

Therefore the recent heartaches are the result of a loosening-up in the way this country has been run for so many years.

But lest the present administration of Badawi think they're doing enough, too many of the rakyat think they're not.

It's not enough for it to require a prime minister of a country to be the one who calls for an ACA investigation into a megabuck prison quarters project; in the first place, if he didn't inspect the site, would he have known? in the second place, why should the ACA wait for him to give the go-ahead? in the third place, why wasn't the construction given payment-holdback project quality assurance at each stage? and, therefore, in the fourth place, how many more of such types of derringdoes are sitting out there waiting for life and financial disasters to strike?

By the same token, how was the negotiation and contract award for this new bridge done that can result in this mega-snafu where the contractor can extract punitive damages amounting to so many millions, a situation one would consider galling not just for the loss of rakyat money, but that, for the marvellous final result of all that money burnt, you get another phallic symbol sticking to the sky ...while people have died, run over by trains..because paltry sums were not around for so long...when miraculously they were able to be called upon for this mega-project. Oh, like metramac?

Yes, this loosening-up must continue, escalate, propagate, until it is strong enough to support the tripartite of transparency, checks-&-balances and integrity.

And towards that, M2 should be given every opportunity to say whatever he wants to say, and be read so. Especially in voluntary blogs.

For that would be the ultimate swing - he who nullified checks-and-balances now becoming part of the tour-de-force to initiate it. It can only happen in this country.

So far each time he said something contrarian to the very cabinet he legacised, a new loosening-up reaction ensued.

The media need to push themselves for their final reorientation. Headline what's wrong and pursue what needs to be righted. One or two have been doing this, and should be applauded.

Sharpen the pens even more, for as has been said, implementation's the problem.

Like this case of the low-cost terminal being disconnected from KLIA that someone should answer whether they really had thought more carefully about what will happen to KLIA when most of the traffic move 20km away. Did they do their arithmetic right? What's going to be done next?

Roll up the sleeves further, for if the present PM says his direction for the nation is the 9MP, and industry can no longer expect their profits to be privatised but their debts to be nationalised, there's more underneath that has not been revealed on what has been happening all these years.

And Pahang should be helped - you can't out of the blue caveat its land for reservoir and environmental reasons, and then keep quiet about helping maintain that state's revenue.

More loosening-up will cast away the inscrutabilities of the rashomon effect.

Posted by: Neil | April 26, 2006 02:30 PM

When Tun spoke for his truth, the conflict is when other people speak
of their truth, that we want their truth to be our truth or vice versa.

There is no absolute, everyone speaks from his or her own truth. The point is you speak from your own beliefs, your own expressed beliefs.

Posted by: mwt | April 26, 2006 02:57 PM

In Rashomon...the real fact is the Samurai being murdered.... The Wife being rape....

In our version the truth is damage.... screw up.... embarrase... pointing fingure....has been done!

Posted by: bmart333 | April 26, 2006 04:18 PM

I really cannot understand what Brendan means by "deliberate openess". Openess or if you wish to all it transperancy is every citizen's right and it is not a prevelege the past and sitting governments of Malaysia bestows on the citizens. It is lack of openess that has brought the country to the present disgraceful state of affairs.The media especially the Straits Times and The Star had a role to play. But all the newspapers in the country are owned or controlled by political and vested interests who will naturally spin the stories to their advantage and deliberatelly withhold the truth from the people.Coupled with all the repressive laws ,like the Printing Act, what can they do. We elected the same governments election after election and who should take blame if they chose to be corrupt, inefficient, practise cronyism,play racial politics.We put them that position and let us down.The question is how long can the country take it in resources and patience.The stupid bridge controversy etc has to be seen in this light.God save us and the country from the idiots who rule us.

Posted by: ksn | April 26, 2006 04:22 PM

I don't know if the cart before the horse syndrom would aptly describe how the media floundered. My sister who insists Malaysiakini and the like are all a bunch of louts and never read them must have had a hard time wondering what the Ambassador at large of the Foreign Ministry for the bridge was blabbering such a long recital of the bridge and who exactly or what exactly prompted it. Maybe by today she might now realise that it was all because of Mahathir's ealier letter of almost a week ago!...Its like putting on a plaster and then going out to get yopuself wounded....then the plaster makes sense.

Posted by: Observer | April 26, 2006 07:16 PM

Neil,

M2 actually emptied this country of four vital values:

M eritocracy
A ccountability
T ransparency
I ntegrity

Posted by: TheWrathOfGrapes | April 26, 2006 09:56 PM

Folks

Truth is with UMNO.

All others are speculations and rumour mongering. Period.

Posted by: Frank&Honest | April 27, 2006 03:23 AM

And to add:

When you leave UMNO, you lost the ownership of truth.

That's what happened to Dr M. and Anwar.