I confess I have never seen more than few snippets from the legendary 1950 film Rashomon, but I have seen it referenced a number of times. Now seems like one of those times where it is of increased relevance.
To reduce the plot to its essentials, a terrible crime is committed. The story is retold from four different viewpoints — each shaped by the teller’s own self-interest and motivations. They all conflict with each other, although they are all supposed to be about the same event. The viewer is left with the challenge of trying to determine who is telling the truth — and all of them are telling some version of the truth by their lights.
The movie ends with a resolution of sorts; many still argue over what is the ‘real’ truth in the tale.
Now imagine what Rashomon would be like if the participants had been wearing body cams or had had cell phone videos. Would it make a difference? One of the story tellers claims to be a witness who was not directly involved. What credibility should/would he have been given without a recording to back up his account?
Welcome to the Rashomon Election
Here we are in 2020 facing dueling narratives about what is the real truth* about America. The Biden campaign has used the metaphor about the choice facing voters as choosing either Light or Darkness. The Trump campaign has embraced Darkness — and is working to project it all onto the Biden campaign while proclaiming Trump as the one person who can keep America safe — America’s ”Sun King” wannabe as it were.
(* And I of course am totally objective about this and would not knowingly lie to you.)
Rashomon narratives seem to be popping up all over the place.
Jacob Blake gets shot in the back in Kenosha, WI by police and video captures the moment. What is the real story? The police say he was violently resisting arrest and was reaching for a weapon. A Facebook commenter describes him as a criminal offender with an arrest warrant out on him, someone who was not just asking to be shot but begging for it. He got what he deserved. Others see him ignoring police attempts to restrain him and walking away rather than fighting. The video clearly shows a police officer sticking a gun in his back and shooting him multiple times — in front of his children.
George Floyd’s last moments are captured on video by bystanders and police body cams. What began as an alleged complaint about a counterfeit $20 bill turns into a struggle by multiple officers to physically restrain Floyd, ending with him lying on the ground with an officer’s knee on his neck and the rest holding him down while he chokes out he can’t breathe — and dies.
Reports claim he was high on drugs, and had multiple offenses in his background. The police claim they were following procedure. Others claim that this is another incident involving a Minneapolis police department with a long history of discrimination and violence against people of color, and the usual ‘blame the victim’ response.
Kyle Rittenhouse travels to Kenosha, WI with an assault rifle for ambiguous reasons. He is an avid supporter of police and Trump. He shoots and kills two protestors and seriously wounds a third. The police ignore a 17 year old walking around with a rifle while rushing to confront protestors. Some claim one of his victims had multiple criminal offenses — “he had it coming” in other words. Others describe Rittenhouse as a public-spirited person appalled by the destruction, who was simply acting to defend himself.
Aaron Danielson traveled to Portland, Oregon as part of a large counter-protest against people protesting the violence against blacks and numerous other issues. Hundreds of pick up trucks drive into the city; the people in them target people with paint ball guns and mace type chemicals; they are met in return with thrown objects. Words are exchanged on both sides.
Danielson is later shot and killed that night, allegedly by Michael Reinoehl, who is reported to have described himself as a dedicated Antifa advocate. He has a number of issues in his background, including legal problems and estrangement from his family. He was carrying a gun; he claimed he had been shot in a previous encounter with right-wing protestors, and he too was a public-spirited citizen responding to violence. He has now been reported dead after being shot by police officers trying to arrest him. Few details have come out on that yet.
Video shows the moment Danielson was shot, but critical details are not clear. Reinoehl is reported to have said he fired in response to a perceived threat from Danielsion, who he said was trying to use bear spray on him. Photos show Danielson had been wearing some kind of holster, possibly for the bear spray.
So, in a heated confrontation — they were supposedly exchanging words — Danielson makes a move that could be mistaken for pulling a gun, and Reinoehl shoots in self-defense. Or was Danielson reaching for the bear spray because he thought Reinoehl was an immediate threat to him? Or was he just going to spray him because that’s what he and his associates had been doing all day? Both of them are dead so we can’t get their stories. The full truth may be impossible to ever know — but that won’t stop people from making up their minds.
Rochester, NY is in turmoil today because of police body cam videos released 5 months after a police encounter that left Daniel Prude, a man with mental health problems, dead. The videos show what appears to be appalling indifference to the man’s state. Yes, he is confused, combative, and fearful. He was also in serious need of medical attention. Was there no better response? And should it be controversial to ask that question?
And now the latest incident comes from Times Square, where people were protesting Prude’s death — and a Pro-Trump protestor drove his car through the BLM crowd. There’s no word of anyone being arrested yet, and rumors that it was an NYPD unmarked car. The video shows the event, but doesn’t answer any questions.
How many police have killed someone who later turned out to be unarmed, because they thought they were in imminent danger of physical harm? What about stand your ground laws that allow the use of deadly force in self defense — if someone thinks they are in danger? Who decides if the threat was real — after the fact — and if only one person is left standing? Police body cam footage is making a huge difference today, as are cell phone videos — but sometimes even that is not enough.
One of the critical issues of our time is the failure of the mainstream media to distinguish between different narratives. Rashomon may have its impact because of the deliberate ambiguity in the story — but it’s a work of fiction. There are real-word consequences when the media treats all narratives as simply one side — other side. That’s even more of a problem when one side is doing everything it can to put its thumb on the scales of equivalence, and they let it happen.
Further, one of the problems is that what gets our attention is not always the whole story. The violence that shows up on the news is far more riveting than thousands of people demonstrating peacefully. Background, nuance — there is less and less time and bandwidth to provide them as things heat up and tempers rise. And then there is deliberate manipulation.
Gaslighting On Steroids
There’s truth and there’s perception and there’s trust; they seldom map one to one. Umair Haque and Farhad Manjoo both are suggesting we can’t recognize what is right in front of us because we lack the background to understand the full context of what’s happening. But even background isn’t enough for those who regard the truth as whatever they want it to be.
Charlie Pierce observed a while back that a fact is whatever someone wants to believe, and truth is measured by how strongly they believe it. Stephen Colbert gave us “truthiness”. Ron Suskind back in 2004 obtained the following quote from the George W. Bush White House, regarding the reality-based community.
The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'.[2]
That was, in case people have forgotten, the administration that lied about being warned about 911, lied us into war, and lied about making us a torture state. Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.
We’ve gone every farther downhill from that point. Jamelle Bouie at the NY Times observes The Conspiracist in Chief Will Save Us All — Republicans have a QAnon problem, which means the rest of America does too.
The “new” conspiracism, by contrast, is conspiracy without any discernible theory of the world. It rejects explanation, however distorted, in favor of disorientation and delegitimization. It is the difference between a conspiracy that tries to make sense of an otherwise incomprehensible reality — however anomalous that sense might be — and one that doesn’t care for the real at all. The “new conspiracism” is certainly partisan, but it isn’t especially political. These conspiracists, Muirhead and Rosenblum write, “offer no notion of what should replace the reviled parties, processes and agencies of government once covert schemes are revealed. They are without political prescriptions or an ounce of utopianism.”
It is not a coincidence that “gaslighting” is getting a lot more use these days. It has always been the business model of rightwing media, but under Trump (and Putin), it is being rolled out in industrial strength.
Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation in which a person or a group covertly sows seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or group, making them question their own memory, perception, or judgment, often evoking in them cognitive dissonance and other changes, including low self-esteem. Using denial, misdirection, contradiction, and misinformation, gaslighting involves attempts to destabilize the victim and delegitimize the victim's beliefs. Instances can range from the denial by an abuser that previous abusive incidents occurred, to belittling the victim's emotions and feelings, to the staging of bizarre events by the abuser with the intention of disorienting the victim.
The only quibble with that definition is that they are no longer being covert about it like they used to be. They are in your face about it.
Trust
What it ultimately comes down to is one thing: trust. Whom do you trust to give you the truth and and the facts? Do you trust your own senses, your own experience, your own judgement? Do you trust others to agree on, let alone act on, the truth?
David Brooks is putting his trust in something he calls “realist militants”. That they supposedly reject the left and right fringes says more about Brooks than it does about reality, IMHO. Spencer Bokat-Lindell warns We Are Not Going to Fact-Check Our Way Out of QAnon. It reinforces what Bouie is talking about,.
Timothy Zahn’s 1990 science fiction novel “War Horse” has a key plot moment that turns on the issue of trust. [Spoiler alert] One of the protagonists comes to the realization that most of what he knew was wrong, incomplete, and had been deliberately distorted to manipulate him. So what does he do now? Who does he believe?
“You do what all the rest of us have to — In the absence of proof, you have to decide whose word you’re going to trust.”
That is the eternal decision facing us every election.
Choose wisely.