Weekly Zephyr #125: Roe v. Wade v. Rashomon

The day after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade,

my oldest son and I watched “Rashomon” while my youngest son enjoyed his new phone nearby.

I hadn’t seen Rashomon before and I didn’t know what the plot was. I only knew what the description said with the rental. We have, in the film, a crime and three different accounts of the crime.

I knew that Rashomon was considered to be one of the best films of all time so I wasn’t too worried about the nature of the crime. There’d been swords, daggers, blades of all stripes in the Kurosawa films we’d been watching—and I have a blade phobia—but I was able to manage all the violence by looking away or peeking through my fingers or letting the black-and-white film de-blood the blood for me. I figured whatever this crime was, I could turn away when necessary and come back fine.

I was wrong, of course.

Where do I start?

With a spoiler, I guess.

The movie’s been out since 1950 so you have had time.

Revealing the nature of the crime to people who have not seen Rashomon is a public service, frankly, depending on how sensitive you are to rape, and I hope you are sensitive to that. I hope you’re always worried by the depiction of rape, never unworried.

There’s murder, too. Or death. I was not as troubled by the murder or death.

The movie is brilliant, no surprise. Beautiful, visually, almost heavenly so. The performances, the script, all undeniable.

Such cognitive dissonance, watching something so ravishing with such crushing unhappiness all through my being, there with my innocent sons who are not worried yet, who don’t know yet, who may never know no matter what I do to help them know and understand about this great unhappiness.

Rashomon, all right. The story, the crime.

A woman and her husband are moving through a forest and they meet a bandit. The bandit rapes the woman. Her husband is killed. All accounts of the story agree on these facts and otherwise they differ.

One other part of the story remained stable through all the tellings and it was this part that I couldn’t bear.

The woman, having been raped, was now an object of shame. The woman, having been so gravely harmed, was diminished to the point of worthlessness. Her husband was diminished, too, but that was a side effect of his wife’s new worthlessness.

Her rapist was undiminishable, somehow.

The woman’s new worthlessness was at the heart of all the dilemmas in all the accounts. Even, somehow, her own.

Toshiro Mifune—so handsome and charismatic and irresistible, upon whom I’ve recently developed a furious crush—plays the bandit. I read that he modeled his characterization of the bandit on a lion. His performance was wild, skillful, yes, completely. This made watching the movie worse, and better, and worse.

The woman’s new worthlessness. See, well. There’s the great unhappiness. Our worthlessness is built-in from birth and it’s just waiting to be activated.

Even as the woman rode through the forest, as yet unraped, in her magnificent white veil, on her magnificent white horse, a goddess to behold, she was already worthless inside. Her worthlessness, with the rape, was merely uncorked.

What is true for me—my worthlessness, as a straight, cis, white woman—is doubly, triply so for people of color, for people who are trans, for people who are poor, for people who are gay, for all the combinations thereof. The unhappiness, the grave danger, it multiplies.

I cried and cried and stopped the movie twice, apologizing for doing so*, trying to explain. I told them about what the Supreme Court ruling would mean, did mean. I told them about children who would be raped and impregnated by their fathers and who would have to carry the baby to term.

*I did, I apologized to my sons for crying and stopping the movie. My unhappiness compounded as I did. How pathetic to apologize for this particular crying.

I did not tell them what I must still tell them, about mortality rates for white people bearing children vs. mortality rates for Black people bearing children. I didn’t tell them about how race and wealth and access to abortion intersect. I didn’t have it together.

I will tell them everything. I will lead my white sons to water and pray they drink, do my best to ensure they drink, even though the world will keep telling them they don’t have to.

Rape has been sitting at the middle of today’s Zephyr only because of Rashomon, and the timing of our viewing. Now’s the time where I say unequivocally that the danger and burden of pregnancy, the reality of birth and beyond, this is enough. Pregnancy is a grave state, period. An unchosen, unwanted pregnancy is dire. Access to safe and legal abortion belongs to all who need and want it.

What now? What today? What do I type next, I mean?

I’m the storyteller within these walls and I have a choice to make.

Akira Kurosawa had to figure this out, too. Rashomon is framed with a woodcutter and a priest waiting out a torrential rain in a temple, telling this story in all its variations to a cynical passerby. Akira Kurosawa had to make a call about whether or not life was hopeless and humans beyond repair. He had to figure out how to end the movie. This part I will not spoil.

I don’t want to rush us to hope.

I don’t want to leave us without hope.

I don’t want to be glib.

I want us to enjoy being alive while it’s also terrible to be alive. I want us to enjoy the lighting, the other actors, the wildness of the script.

The film we’re watching through our own eyeballs, the film we’re participating in, is going to end at a mysterious time and we are directing the film, even if we are not the ultimate or final screenwriters.

It’s a relief to only be directing this one film, even while I’m acting in several others, even while I’m writing a line or two, plot-wise, in some others, or contributing a word, or just standing at the shoulder of the other screenwriters, making urgent suggestions, which may or may not be taken up.

I don’t want to make a choice, a statement, about hope or no hope. I think agency is more relevant and more important.

Agency is artistry. All of our films intersect. We will only ever see one film in real time but we’re truly, deeply involved in the production of so many.

May we make the best art we can.

On subscriptions, paid and unpaid, and on sharing the Weekly Zephyr:

Usually I skip variations on this footnote because I’m fussy and I like to make a clean experience for the reader. It doesn’t feel artistically charming to arrive at a final chord and then bust in with an advertisement for the thing you just consumed, you know? Feels like wrapping a present and then stapling a receipt to the ribbon.

But I made the choice, when I started offering paid subscriptions to the WZ a couple of months ago, that I wouldn’t differentiate, content-wise, between the paid and unpaid subscriptions. Everyone receives the same Zephyr. This is what feels the most right to me. If I have something to give, I want everyone to be able to get it.

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