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Kamolnat Tabattanon
Senior Seminar P7
Mr. Clover
21 September 2010
Morris on Rashomon
People are mistaken to expect truth to take a particular form or be presented in a
certain fashion. Errol Morris, a famed documentary director, argues that truth is a
characteristic of the entity rather than the style. Believing such material, he claims, is the
foundation of sheer gullibility, for there is only one truth (Believer). I fully agree with Morris
in that there is only one ultimate truth, especially as it pertains to Rashomon; we as humans
simply choose not to accept it. There is an absolute reality that engulfs us all; despite our
expectations claim that only what coheres is true, relative truths are, as Morris would claim,
illogical.
According to Morris, there is only one absolute truth that exists in reality. He states,
“I am a realist”, a believer in one sole truth (Believer). To Morris, the concept many truths to
one reality is obviously a flaw in the human thought process. Like Plato, Morris believes that
truth must be public, eternal, and independent of opinion; this means that an absolute truth
applies to completely everyone, that the truth cannot be altered, and that it is as it is,
regardless of any claims otherwise. Reflecting on Rashomon, a movie that presents four
‘truths’ to one murder, Morris still stands firmly on his belief of Realism. Even though four
stories were presented in court, only one event occurred and it could have only occurred in
one way; it is common sense to reason that there is only one truth behind every crime,
therefore it begs to reason that Morris is correct in his argument that, even in Rashomon,
there is only one absolute truth. He explains the fallacies of the characters of Rashomon by

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observing that people typically see the true nature of things, but they have a tendency to alter
this reality into something else, something more favorable to their own tastes.
Sometimes our perceptive minds guide us to more appealing aspects of reality than
what is true. When this happens we are at the mercy of our subconscious expectations and
the coherence, whether or not given circumstances fit a logical prediction, of materials
presented. Morris logically argues that from one truth, many pseudo-truths are born, since
we as humans screen and pick up only certain aspects of our world. This is known as
selective perception. What we look at and what we see can be staggeringly different. In a
sense, we have the ability to control our personal reality, shaping it to match what we expect
it to be, but we can never, as Morris would undoubtedly agree, redesign truth. Our individual
realities are careless glimpses of the true nature around us, and only when something seems
out of place, when it fails to cohere with the outlines of our minds, so we stop to reexamine.
That is the point of Rashomon (Believer). After the first story is presented, we automatically
decide that it is feasible, and we think nothing more of it. However, once the second view is
given, we, not expecting two polar opposites of a single occurrence, begin to reflect on what
the truth can be. As viewers we start to formulate our own opinions on what happened, using
our expectations of character behavior that coheres with past experiences. Morris is no
different; he stated that the truth of Rashomon was blatantly clear. These different opinions
create a realm of truths that coexists with that of the realist.
A truth that applies to only one individual is known as a Relative Truth. According to
Morris, these are simply defective clones to Absolute Truth; he accepts that different people
will have different perceptions of one event, but the Absolute Truth is not altered by these
Relative ones. Morris’s view is simple: there is only one truth, no more, no less; “there [is]
no objective truth” (Believer). Rashomon has one solution, and it is our obligation as an
educated viewer to identify it rather than to brood over multiple variations of it. I do believe,

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however, that Morris overlooks a certain flaw here. As correct as I consider him to be,
Morris cannot possibly be asking a human audience, the exact type of audience that he has
chastised for being individualistic in assigning traits to one absolute entity according to what
they meekly expect, to create a single truth out of the four presented in Rashomon. Surely
this will craft, not one, but countless ‘truths’, one for each follower that accepted Morris’s
challenge, only a handful, if any, of which could possibly match up to Morris’s own theory of
what really happened in the Rashomon murder. The only method in getting a sheep-like
audience to follow on a single theory is to present material in a way that each one of them
expects to hold the truth. Nothing is available to back up such a claim, only the opinion that
the style of which the documentary was filmed seems truthful. In this argument, audacious
lies can pass for truth. It makes sense that Morris would come to despise such a discrediting
technique in his field of work.
I believe that Morris is verging on understanding truth and perception. His claims are
logical, and even a believer of relative truths will not be able to resist such obvious ideas.
The realist that he is, Morris stands his ground that only one truth exists above us; even
Rashomon could not prove to be a loophole for relative truth followers. The four stories
offered in Rashomon were simply each characters perception of a single event, and hidden
among them is the Absolute Truth. No matter how convincingly each story is presented,
imaginative inventions of truth cannot replace the real thing.