Rush-moron

I was listening to NPR this morning, again, and they were discussing a case. I can't recall what case it was, but it started me thinking about Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon. This is one of his most famous movies, ever, and any film afficianado knows about it. Whether it's his best film ever, that's a different story.

Rashomon, for the unenlightened, is a black and white pic by the Japanese master, Akira Kurosawa. Kurosawa is perhaps more revered by Western critics than by Japanese critics, who prefer, Ozu and Mizoguchi. Part of that is because Kurosawa looked to the west for inspiration. Several films (Ran, Throne of Blood) draw inspiration from Shakespeare. Some films (Seven Samurai, Yojimbo) were remade back into Westerns.

This one is about a nobleman and his wife travelling in the woods, when a thief, played by Toshiro Mifune, comes and kills the nobleman and possibly rapes the woman. He is later caught and put on trial. In the trial, there are four versions of what happened. The thief, the woman, a woodcutter who passes by the scene, and the dead man, whose tale is told through a medium, who can invoke the dead.

The idea of truth being unknowable, and that each of us perceives truth through our own eyes is the lesson most take from Rashomon. I disagree. Each witness in Rashomon has a motivation to present their version the way they do. They look the best in the version they tell. Kurosawa doesn't tell us who did it because he's interested in truth, but there's also the very human way that we present our version of the truth, where indeed, we bend the truth to our liking.

However, what had me thinking of Rashomon wasn't the four versions, but that it was a trial. A trial is, in principle, a search for truth, but in reality, the defense and prosecution present their own version of what's going on. I was listening to some case about Merck and Vioxx. These were the first trials about whether Merck knew the dangers of the drug.

Each side was going to present a different view of Merck, and that's when I realized that trials present at least two views of the truth, and they do it all the time. This is why a trial is perfect for dealing with issues of truth. There's a quest to seek truth, but also a desire to shade it to the best advantage, and when the incentive is to win a case, truth is bent to those who desire a certain outcome.

Oh yeah, traffic was horrible.