Roshomon Film analysis

Roshomon Film Analysis
True beliefs portray the world as it is; false beliefs portray the world as other than it is. A straight ruler appears bent when half-submerged in a glass of water. What is the truth of the matter? Truth’s character is both logical and empirical. The logical ‘principle of non-contradiction’ ensures that the contradictory propositions ‘the ruler is straight’ and ‘the ruler is not straight’ cannot both be true at the same time, and in principle observation should settle which is the case. In practice, things are not so simple. The observable truth would seem to change as the ruler enters the water. Perhaps this is to be expected? After all, if true beliefs describe the world, and the world changes, then truth must change too.
The film Rashomon is based on all of the different perspectives varied among the four characters in the story. All the flashbacks are both true and false. True, in that they present an accurate portrait of what each witness thinks happened. False, because as Kurosawa observes in his autobiography, “Human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves. They cannot talk about themselves without embellishing.” The wonder of the film is that while the shadow play of the truth and memory is going on, we are absorbed by what we trust is an unfolding story. The film’s engine is our faith that we’ll get to the bottom of things even though the woodcutter tells us at the outset he doesn’t understand, and if an eyewitness who has heard the testimony of the other three participants doesn’t understand, why should we expect to?
In the story True enough, John Kerry, the Massachusetts Vietnam veteran is perpetrated by his fellow men back in service during the war, words like traitor and criminal come to mind. His old companions planned their effort, there emerged among the men a disagreement concerning the fundamental nature and scope of Kerry’s Vietnam-era sins. The veterans lacked any compelling evidence to support their claims, yet they managed, anyway, to plant a competing narrative, a kind of alternate version of reality, into the minds of small but important slice of the electorate. “For any issue, we find a set of such basic shared truths, a view of the world that is largely consistent regardless of partnership. At least, it has been this way now” Pg.23.
The film initiates the different perspectives of truth in a universal way. Everyone defines the “truth” through their own eyes, “Think of it as a parallel universe of fact: a place at once a part of the mainland but profoundly distant from it, a place where another truth…a truth packed with holes, but own just “true enough” to do damage hold sway” Pg.6. Humans process information in the face of many choices; how we interpret documentary proof in the world now glutted with media; how does anyone decide on one truth when we live in an era in which “experts” of unknown quality dominate every source of news and communication. The version of reality they sought to propagate in the film Roshomon, and in the book, True enough, where the very idea of objective reality is under attack. No longer are we merely holding opinions different from one another; we’re also holding different facts. Increasingly, our arguments aren’t over what we should be doing but about who we think is right. Truth is analogical, there will never be a right or wrong answer it’s all just a parallel universe made up of People who live in the same place but see the world so differently.