1. Salvador Ortega
Period 5
Rashomon Essay
Rashomon is a Japanese film that was directed by Akira Kurosawa in 1950. It is
considered to be a genius film because there are several people who confess to
committing a murder, and in the end Kurosawa does not tell the audience who committed
the murder but rather he leaves it for the audience to decide as to who they think
committed the murder. Errol Morris and Roger Ebert are two movie critics that have two
very different ideas about perception and truth. Morris believes that there is only one
truth no matter what people believe, in this way he is like Plato and Plato’s Justified True
Belief theory. Morris also believes that people have to look for the truth because it is
usually hidden and that people need to look for that one absolute truth. On the other side,
Ebert believes that truth is subjective to each individual. He believes that everyone has
his or her own truth and that truth is very real for each person, even if it’s not the same
truth. Although Morris’s ideas about perception and truth being absolute tries to help
solve the crime, Ebert’s ideas that truth is subjective to each individual is better suited for
Rashomon since there are multiple people being convicted of the same crime, and they all
believe that their version is the truth.
Morris claims that there is only one truth and that that truth is the same for
everybody, everywhere. He says that he does “not believe that truth is subjective”
because “just thinking something does not make it so.”Therefore he clearly summarizes

2. up Rashomon by saying that there is only one true killer, because only one person could
have possibly killed the samurai. Morris’s beliefs correspond with Plato’s Justified True
Belief theory because Plato says that in order for something to be true, it will be true now
and in the future, regardless of what other people say or believe. He argues that the idea
that truth is subjective is absurd because in Rashomon even though everyone believes
what they are saying is the truth, there is still only one absolute truth because only one
person could have committed the murder. The idea of selective perception helps to cause
the characters in Rashomon to see what they want to see and remember what they want to
remember. This can be seen when the wife claims that the bandit raped her and the bandit
claims that the wife had sex with him willingly. Morris would say that in this scenario
there is only one absolute truth. However this example helps to show that Eberts view of
how truth is subjective is better for discussing Rashomon because there is no way to what
the absolute truth is about that example.
Unlike Morris, Roger Ebert believes that truth is subjective to each person.
Everyone has their own version of a mental map and it made up by how each individual
perceives the world and how they learned what they know. This helps to make up each
individual reality and how their intake and interpret information that they gather. This
goes with Ebert’s idea that truth is subjective because depending on how each character
in Rashomon interpreted what they saw, that is what their truth is. In the example that
was used earlier, the wife claims she was raped and the bandit claims it was consensual.
Both believe their story to be the truth and so technically they are not lying. However, the
reason as to why they both have different perspectives of the same incident has to do with
how they interpreted their experience and what actually happened. This example helps to

3. show Ebert’s belief that multiple truths can exist where two individuals can possess
different truths because they differ in their perceptions. When Ebert talks about
Rashomon he says, “all of the flashbacks are both true and false.” and this shows that
there can be more than one truth and that the truth is subjective to the person.
Since Rashomon is about multiple perceptions with relative truths, and each
character holds their own view of the truth, Ebert’s theory can be better applied than
Morris’s theory of absolutism. After watching the film we discover that each account of
the murder is incredible plausible, thus making it impossible to find an overall truth for
the crime. Each perspective of the case is true since they portray an accurate account of
what each eyewitness encountered. However, Ebert also claims that they are false to an
extent since Kurosawa stated that he believes that “Human beings are unable to be honest
with themselves about themselves. They cannot talk about themselves without
embellishing,” therefore, each account is not actually the truth since it has been tampered
with based on personal embellishments of the self-convicted murders. Robert Ebert’s idea
about subjective reality accompanied by relative truth is the best theory to represent the
varying perspectives of Kurosawa’s film, Rashomon.
When discussing the views of truth and perception in the film Rashomon, Roger
Eber’s idea of truth being subjective to each person applies better that Errol Morris’s idea
about an absolute truth since there are multiple contradicting perceptions of the same
incident. Each of the recounts of what happened were true, or what each teller believed to
be true, and so Ebert’s theory is better applied here because it is impossible to discover an
absolute truth, which is what Morris believes.