Self-Healing in Cinema: Part 2 of the Introduction to

THE BIG PICTURE: A POST-JUNGIAN MAP OF GLOBAL CINEMA

by James Whitlark, Ph.D.

RASHOMON

Rashomon won the Grand Prize, Venice Festival, 1951, and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, 1952. As the first Asian movie to garner such attention, it generally opened European and American markets to non-Western movies, thereby accelerating the tendency of cinema to seek materials from around the world. Despite (or because of) this, Rashomon has upset those auteur critics who expect linear consistency. Instead, Rashomon’s very essence is a collage of viewpoints further complicating its already intricate source “In a Grove” (Yabu no Naka). Typical of reductionist criticism of the film, Akira Iwasaki objects: “It was the nihilism and mistrust of humanity apparent in the tale that were to drive the original author, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, to despair and suicide. Unfortunately, they are utterly at variance with the outlook of Kurosawa himself, who is a humanist at heart” (Richie 1972 25).

The truth is less simple. Not entirely an expression of personal nihilism or the supposed decadence of his times, Akutagawa’s story draws on the eleventh—century Konjaku Monogatori (Richie 1972 118). The first draft of the film script (entitled “Male—Female”) was not by Kurosawa but Shinobu Hashimoto (Goodwin 117). Kurosawa expanded the part of the Woodcutter and worked with Hashimoto on additional dialogue. At this point, the script lacked the optimistic, humanistic ending that Iwasaki attributed to the personality of Kurosawa. He, however, liked the pessimism and wanted to start shooting. At the last minute, though, the Toyoko company canceled a contract for it (Anderson and Richie 231). When Kurosawa moved to Daiei productions, he tried again and was once more met with incomprehension. Only then did he add the frame story and relatively cheerful conclusion (Richie 1972 97-98). Although Daiei became neither understanding nor enthusiastic, these revisions (and Kurosawa’s persistence) did secure funding. Without Daiei’s initial reluctance, the movie would have been more consistent but not have constituted in any sense a big picture. It would certainly not have been Rashomon, for both frame narrative and title come from another story adapted by Akutagawa from the same medieval source. These centuries of development culminated in what the next chapter will explain as the sixth Graves stage of complexity: empathizing with multiple perspectives. It produces an anomie that could only be remedied by what Jung considered an archetypal process–the search for a unified Meaning behind disturbingly manifold points of view.

“[D]emons of the gate fled because of man’s horror”

As the film starts, sheltering from the downpour, a Buddhist Priest, a Commoner, and a Woodcutter stand under a ruined city gate called “Rashomon.” That Japanese word changes meaning depending on the Chinese characters (kanji) used for it. Of the many punning alternatives, perhaps the most apposite to its devastation is Gate of Naked Life–the impoverishment from which the action develops toward a humane elaboration.

In Far-Eastern metaphysics, gates image both the points on the body where energy should stream (but may become blocked to ward against imagined dangers) and the gaps in walls that also may lock defensively. Rashomon’s metaphor of restricted action (e.g, the tied Samurai or the deliberating court) pervades the movie. Its characters are physically stalled by the flooding rain, emotionally divided by their misunderstandings and/or lies, and collectively obstructed by the social chaos surrounding them.

A caption describes the period as “in the twelfth century, when famines and civil wars had devastated the ancient capital.” That era saw the rise of belief in the doctrine Mappo Shiso: Buddhism and civilization are collapsing as part of a cycle that will eventually bring a new Buddha to restore the law, but not for centuries (McDonald 24). Typically, Dengyon Daishi’s Mappo Tomyoki (The Light of the Latter Days) predicts that anomie will increase until the lawful become as out of the ordinary as the lawless are in an age of order: “If [in the Latter Days] there should be such [as follow Buddhist precepts], they will be as rare as a tiger in a market place” (Charles Eliot 424). Buddhism believes that everything is composite–even Buddhism itself. All falls apart in a way that is not entirely random, but has identifiable patterns of dissolution and reconfiguration. Undergoing this “chaos” eventually erodes the emotional boundaries between people, thus developing Buddhist compassion: recognizing connection to others, even those very different from oneself.

Rashomon’s cycle of entropy and restoration conforms not only to Buddhism but other influences on Japanese attitudes, such as Taoism. Chapter 21 of the Tao Te Ching begins: “That thing which is the Tao is chaotic/ Chaotic! Yet within it are forms” (Girardot 65). The verses were composed about twenty-five hundred years before complexity theory started graphing the harmonious interpenetrations of order and disorder. Consequently, in China and Japan, Taoist insights about chaosmos have had time to pervade popular assumptions. Lacking monotheism, East Asian culture never gave all authority to one religion; no single “Orderer” had the power to dispel chaosmos, conceived as the “sum of all orders” (Girardot 3). In Japan, Buddhism, Shinto, Taoism, Confucianism, and myths both local and Chinese coexist with one another and with various animistic and shamanic beliefs. Typically, the Japanese have a Shinto wedding, a Buddhist funeral. In between, Japanese traditions combine many sources–as does Rashomon (which, thus, however crudely, may predict a direction Occidental cinema could take if it continues to incorporate more and more of life’s tempestuous complexity).

Rashomon’s first impressive image, a storm battering the broken gate, continues until the last few moments of the film. (Massive firehoses provided the effect.) Coupled with the Priest’s religious musings on disasters, which lead the Commoner to complain of a sermon, the unnerving intensity of sustained rain may awaken mythical resonances. “[In a] whole series of Chinese myths concerning a deluge or great flood … the term hun-tun is related to the notion of a watery chaos condition: and generally the idea of the ‘flood’ may be seen as one of those periods of return to the primordial watery condition. . . .” (Girardot 94-95).

Adding to the heterogeneity, the Priest’s morbid ruminations (“each new year is full of disaster”) recall the first act of T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. Therein, gathered at an entryway, medieval characters complain of having suffered every tribulation and expect each new season to bring them worse (T. S. Eliot 175-76). Both works ponder a murder that cannot be resolved and thus lead the characters to difficulty finding Meaning itself, which starts to seem like one more fiction.

“Everyone wants to forget unpleasant things, so they make up stories”

A Commoner arrives and callously tears boards from the once-beautiful gate. Hoping for advice from this stranger, the Woodcutter begins narration. Background music shifts from Gagaku (Japanese court music) to a dissonant, Occidental theme by Fumio Hayasaka. At Kurosawa’s suggestion, he imitated the Bolero. In this manner, Kurosawa suggests that the incomprehensible murder affronts Japanese values as thoroughly as Occidental intrusion. James Davidson sees the whole movie as a metaphor for East/West contact. In his interpretation, the bandit Tajomaru represents the American occupation of Japan: “He appears the least Japanese of all the characters, and a sort of incarnation of the oni, or ogre, of Japanese folklore, which has often been interpreted as a representation of the foreigner” (Kurosawa 215). Although Davidson does not mention it, Hun-tun (“chaos” personified) appears in myths both as barbarian and monster (Girardot 190). Thus, beyond any topical reference to America, Tajomaru has a perennial significance as the inevitable entry of disorder into human plans, with the potential to restore humanity to a more—caring condition as all boundaries, including those between people, begin to dissolve in a clash of perspectives.

The flashback introduces a woodland scene. Historically, Japanese depictions of the landscape carry Shintoist connotations, according to which intense beauty may suggest the hierophany (divine manifestation) of a kami (spirit or god)–another bringer of a larger Order, disrupting the human. This mingling of environment with their local deities has made the Japanese acutely attentive to natural configurations, so Japanese painting techniques–an influence on Kurasawa’s cinematography (McGuire 111)–anticipate systems dynamics.

Glinting in the sun, the Woodcutter’s ax sways to the Bolero-like melody. The tune generates a mood of gradually accelerating wildness through sheer iteration up to the threshold when he runs in panic. This flight marks, in the jargon of systems dynamics, a “cusp”–a point where linear order breaks. Before running, however, he notices a symbolic object, an amulet case. Japanese “protective amulets” are apotropaic images of chaos (Girardot 26). Fetishes often proliferate in turbulent periods, so it is one more mark of a time in transition (Tambiah 1984 344).

After a Priest who could not see the woman’s face testifies, a police agent sermonizes that, through karmic retribution, the murderous bandit was captured because the very horse he stole threw him. Angry perhaps both at this questioning of his horsemanship and at the pious interpretation of his fall, Tajomaru gives his version. He decided to rape the wife because she looked to him like a “Bodhisattva” or “angel.” According to the Commoner’s account, Tajomaru murdered two women at a temple sacrilegiously, thus shocking a society inured to ordinary crimes. Maliciously, instead of raping the wife immediately, he waits to do so in front of her husband. Both in Akutagawa’s original and the film, he seems to have a personal grudge against anything pure, pious, or moral. Repeatedly, he denounces the respectable for alleged hypocrisy. His portrait repeats a stock image of chaos, as in Chapter 10 of the Taoist Scripture Chuang Tzu, where a robber condemns all righteousness and benevolence as deception. Boasting of rape and murder, Tajomaru also makes certain that the court understands the Samurai was ready to profit from the desecration of a tomb.

Next, the wife testifies that not Tajomaru but she killed her husband then tried to drown herself in a lake. An analog of her mood, its disturbed surface appears against the sunset. The Tao Te Ching repeatedly links both water and femininity to the anarchic, mysterious Tao. First seen beneath a veil, she, her motivations, and actions remain significant mysteries of the drama.

The Priest’s and Woodcutter’s religious quarrel over the possibility of ghosts’ lying evokes another flashback. Circling an altar, a shaman shakes a ritual bell while dancing in trance. Possibly of shamanic origin, Taoist chaos personified, hun-tun, engaged in similar dances (Izutsu 379-441). In the frenzy, canceling her own personality, the shaman acts as if possessed by the samurai’s ghost. Sometimes laughing fiendishly, s/he explains that the Samurai is presently in a lightless hell, but recalls committing suicide. To prove that the supernatural source lied (thereby undercutting belief in transcendent authority), the Woodcutter admits his own testimony was perjured. Now, however, he says that Tajomaru killed the Samurai, who pleaded to live. If, however, the Woodcutter always recognized the truth about the incident, why, at the beginning of the film, was he agonized by his inability to understand? He was either ignorant or in a religious search for meaning (since the traditional, secular Japanese attitude has been to construe events according to their social context rather than seek deeper significance.)

Gateless Gate

The Priest wants to believe the Woodcutter’s new version (that the Samurai was a murder victim rather than a suicide), because it simplifies the situation, though a Buddhist Priest should not expect such simplicity. The very first Noble Truth of Buddha teaches that life is radically unsatisfactory, because all is composite and subject to dissolution.

While Priest and Woodcutter talk, the Commoner finds an abandoned baby and tries to steal the clothing. Objecting to this, the Woodcutter pledges to adopt the infant. In an interview with Kurosawa, Chiyota Shimizu complained: “I think that episode with the baby is wrong–it sounds like a lesson in Christian charity.”

One of the most controversial endings in cinema, it actually has a closer analogy to Japanese traditions than to mercy for the sake of Christ (who is never mentioned in the film). In Zen, for instance, enlightenment comes characteristically after a period called the “Great Doubt,” a loss of faith in everything coupled with a passion to understand. This may arise from the torment of trying to solve a koan (insoluble riddle) such as those in the most famous collection, the Mumonkan–“Gateless Gate.” It has this name because, paradoxically, the frustration of not passing into a higher state of consciousness eventually alters consciousness into that state. Disharmony, thus, contains within itself a potential remedy for the seeming impasse it constitutes. That is also why Taoists are willing to trust to chaos rather than to the virtues inculcated artificially by civilization. The Woodcutter is not the only character confused by the events but he is the only one who truly faces the existential doubt engendered by them.

Analogues of his courage may occur in such Japanese martial arts as Aikido, which teaches that being obsessesed with details breeds fear. During a knife attack, for instance, a novice who stares at the blade becomes too fixated to move fluidly. Instead, the trained fighter watches the entire scene. For the Woodcutter, who has opened himself to an experience as intense as combat, the mystery is a training (shugyo) drawing him beyond his daily drudgery. Because of his enlarging experience, his sufferings appear sufficiently petty so that he dares risk a few more trials by letting his family and life grow.

Kurosawa wanted storm clouds in the heavens when the Woodcutter takes the child, since continuing difficulties are likely. The clouds never came. Daiei pestered him to finish as soon as possible (Kurosawa 1975, 120). Ultimately, the twin disorders of Japanese weather and studio economics shaped the conclusion of Rashomon–not inappropriately, for the film emphasizes the function of chance. According to the bandit, he only attacked because a breeze caught his attention. Also random are the Priest’s and Woodcutter’s being drawn into the action as is the finding of the baby. For the moment at least, the key characters wander homeless, outside a social order itself fragmenting, the precarious balance of philosophies shaken, evolving.

What makes Rashomon in many senses a big picture is its not settling for one of its component ideologies but moving the audience through them toward a more inclusive view–a process that some of the audience will inevitably protest as many people always resist intellectual and psychological change. Such change, though, is the proper function of an ota. Just as ordinary dreams are a bricolage, where only the underlying process or pattern is usually significant, a cinematic ota spreads not as contents (which keep shifting during development), but as a way of processing conflicting traditions. Admittedly, in Japan, Rashomon brought a proliferation of professional interpreters trying to reabsorb it into the culture, yet the movie itself modeled a new and necessary skill for a post-traditional society, which must hear many sides of enigmatic problems and wait long in courageous suspense for solutions. Literary and cinematic critics have long drawn from Jungian theory an obsession with specific contents (e.g., the Wise Old Man or Femme Fatale); instead, post-Jungian theory should reveal the developmental processes that shape them.

CONTINUE TO: THE BIG PICTURE CHAPTER 1 PART 1

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