Rudy Giuliani And The Rashomon-Trumpomon Effect

Rashomon Poster

Sometime in the morning of August 19, 2018, on the set of a news program, America was inadvertently cast into a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s groundbreaking 1950 film Rashomon, in which the account of the murder of a samurai is told by several witnesses, including the dead samurai himself. The plot is from a 1922 classic Japanese short story, In a Grove, by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. This is a must-see movie for any true motion picture student or aficionado, and I recommend it as a study in what happens when the bright beam truth is projected through the prism of confusion, the three sides of which are denial, self-protection, and ulterior motive. The resulting spectrum has no rainbow color spread; it is only shades of gray cast between the purity of truth, and the deep black of the unknowable.

Rudy Giuliani’s assertion and follow-on defense of, “Truth isn’t truth,” serves well as the forest in which the samurai was murdered, but by whom we are not ever certain to know. According to the witnesses—a woodcutter who found the body, the samurai’s wife who may or may not have killed her husband, a recently-released criminal who confesses he killed the samurai in self-defense after raping the samurai’s wife, the young woman’s mother who testifies as to her daughter’s purity, a Buddhist priest who saw the criminal before the murder, and the samurai himself (as his ghost), who claims he committed suicide as a result of the dishonor cast upon him after his wife’s rape. 

The film is much deeper, of course, and to know more, you simply should see it. I guarantee you will not look at the truth behind anything with the same eyes. You may walk away from the book or the movie convinced that “truth isn’t truth.” Don't be deceived by your own conclusion...in the end, truth is not so easily pigeonholed.

This passage from the story, a conversation among the commoner, woodcutter, and the priest, says much about where we are today: 

Priest: If men don't trust each other, this earth might as well be hell.

Commoner: Right. The world's a kind of hell.

Priest: No! I don't want to believe that!

Commoner: No one will hear you, no matter how loud you shout. Just think. Which one of these stories do you believe?

Woodcutter: None makes any sense.

Commoner: Don't worry about it. It isn't as if men were reasonable.

The brilliance of the film and book as metaphors for the confusion that surrounds any horrific or inexplicable event cannot be overstated. When Rudy’s bizarre assertion first projected on the multi-screen walls of social media, network news, cable news, and print papers, I began to look for the samurai’s avatar, and found it soon enough in the combined tally of lies, innuendo, obfuscation, dissembling, distraction, and the contents of Trump’s closet of shiny objects awaiting only Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ word to be thrown out to the news media.

Imperfect witnesses abound in the White House’s Rashomon—maybe we’ll call it Trumpomon. As the 21st century story will be studied and re-written, we will have witness statements from myriad players in this Trumpian tragedy. There will be facts. Hard, ineluctable, incontrovertible, damning facts. And there is your truth. The facts are truth and you are not entitled to your version of the facts, and you are not entitled to your version of the truth based on those facts. Trump and Rudy and Sarah and Kellyanne and all the White House minions who wish us to believe their “truths” or alternate facts, cannot, in the end, escape the facts that are collecting in Mr. Mueller’s office. And those are the only facts that count; his is the only truth that will, in the end, condemn or vindicate the president. Sorry, Rudy, the truth is the truth; you may believe your version of events constitutes your truth, but the events happened, and, therefore, there are facts to be gleaned from everything Trump, his sons, his extended family, his circle of enablers have done, and those facts are not versions of the truth, they are the truth.

Ultimately, the facts will tell us a riveting story, I’m sure. Even for his supporters, there will be no assurance of Trump’s reliability, and by the end of the tale (should there ever be one) what we glean from all the accounts may help shift our national perception of the events toward the light of truth. The sad fact is, even though the President himself has tainted the paper upon which the truth of this White House’s Rashomon will be written, a certain portion of the American public will believe nothing of whatever truth is revealed. For Trump’s supporters, all is Rashomon as told by the Deep State.

Unlike Rashomon and In a Grove, in which the audience or reader is left with questions to ponder on their own, coming to terms with the nuances of multi-witness accounts that vary widely, and have their own subtexts unknown to other witnesses (and even the audience or readers), the story of Trumpomon is already being grossly misinterpreted by non-participants in the story, people who have no idea what any witness saw, or what any witness will recount. There is a national outpouring of comment about Trumpomon, and the story hasn’t even been published. So typical of our “story-first, truth-later” culture today.

The news media was not in Trump Tower during that crucial meeting with the Russian lawyer, Mueller was not in Trump Tower, you and I weren’t in Trump Tower, and yet opinions abound about the event, everyone seems to have their own “truth” about it. Every talking head, every expert, every lawyer who can be dragged to a cable news “Breaking News” studio, has an opinion about the Trump Tower meeting, and about the plethora of events before and after. What did Trump say to Kim, what did Trump say to Putin, and so on. And yet, there still are no revelations of the facts, no dumps of the truth to look at and examine under the public’s microscope. But do we care for such an examination? 

Commoner: Well, men are only men. That's why they lie. They can't tell the truth, even to themselves.

Priest: That may be true. Because men are weak, they lie to deceive themselves.

Commoner: Not another sermon! I don't mind a lie if it's interesting.

I have a friend who was in the Ia Drang Valley in Vietnam…a respected war correspondent…and even today, 50 years later neither he nor any of the Ia Drang survivors or anyone in the chain of command can completely describe what happened there…for each man, it was Rashomon times a thousand. Their only common truth was that something horrible happened to them. And that truth is a hard and fast truth.

So how can any of us offer opinions or any certainties about what did or did not happened in Trump Tower, or Helsinki, or in Singapore or anywhere else Donald Trump hides his conversations and spreads his tweets? We can’t. And we must stop doing so. In reality, we weren’t there. All we know is something horrible is happening to America. Everything else is Rashomon. And that’s the truth.