Eric Jager, Nicole Holofcener, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, and Ridley Scott, 2021; #36, 2021 Skandies
So here’s a coincidence—my last article wrapped up with a brief discussion of Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, and now here’s a movie that shares its structure with Kurosawa’s famous film Rashomon. Rashomon is based on Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s short story “In a Grove”, which presents several mutually contradictory accounts of the events leading up to the death of a samurai, starting with some peripheral characters and moving to the testimony of the main three (including the dead samurai himself, contacted via séance). All three agree that bandit raped the samurai’s wife in front of him, but what happened next is a matter of dispute. The bandit says that he killed the samurai, despite having initially intended to spare him, because he wanted to marry the samurai’s wife, but she would only leave willingly with the bandit if no other living man knew she had been raped. The wife says that she killed the samurai because he’d looked at her with contempt following the rape, and had intended to kill herself next, but couldn’t bring herself to go through with it. And the spirit of the dead samurai says that after his wife had offered to leave with the bandit if the bandit killed her husband, the bandit was so disgusted with her that he freed him instead of killing him, but lost in despair after his wife’s betrayal, the samurai killed himself.
At the public high school where I taught for a few years, teachers had historically had a lot of freedom to design the curriculum for each of their classes, and during my student teaching year, my mentor teacher explained that he’d engineered his syllabus to give him lots of opportunities to expose his students to stuff he liked. He was a big fan of Akira Kurosawa, as the sophomores in his world literature classes soon learned. For the state-mandated Shakespeare unit, he picked Macbeth—that meant he could show Throne of Blood! The short story unit? Give ’em “In a Grove”, and he could show Rashomon! One problem that cropped up was that teachers who taught juniors grumbled that their classes often consisted of half a dozen groups who came in having been taught completely different stuff from each other the previous year: while this sophomore teacher did a lot of Kurosawa, another did Brave New World, and another did indigenous folk tales… there was no shared set of texts the whole class had covered in tenth grade that teachers could use as reference points in eleventh. To remedy this, a year or two before I arrived the department agreed that the teachers of the sophomore classes would use the same set of short stories, at least. So while teachers were under no obligation to show Rashomon, every sophomore class did get “In a Grove”. As it turned out, the first time I officially took over the class for the day to teach a lesson of my own design, that was what the class had most rcently studied. So to follow up from that, I showed them “Rashomon II”. That’s a Diff’rent Strokes episode.
To a certain extent I was trying to leave a sort of calling card: in college my area of specialization was American pop culture, and many of my classes were exercises in thinking unexpectedly deeply about works that a lot of people both inside and outside academia would consider, y’know, trash. So one the one hand, hee hee, we’re watching Diff’rent Strokes in school! But I also had an actual teaching point. The point of “In a Grove” is that the murder mystery cannot be solved. There’s no way to piece together the clues to determine the real course of events, no way to prove with certainty who’s telling the truth and who’s lying. You just have to live with the indeterminacy. Whereas in “Rashomon II”, Mr. Drummond gives his interpretation of the story, and Willis gives his, and Arnold gives his, all of which make the teller look great and the other two characters look like clowns… but then at the end, it turns out that the housekeeper saw the whole thing, and tells Kimberly what really happened. (And of course it makes everyone involved look like clowns.) So we do learn the truth—it’s a closed plot, not an open one. Because people don’t generally don’t tune into sitcoms to wrestle with ambiguity.
And in this respect, The Last Duel has more in common with “Rashomon II” than with “In a Grove”. It tells a true story from late medieval France, when a knight accused the local count’s right-hand man of raping his wife; it was one of the last cases of trial by combat, with the truth or falsity of the accusations to be determined by which man could kill the other in the arena. It’s the ultimate example of might makes right. As for who is right in reality: much as in “In a Grove”, we get the knight’s account, then the courtier’s account, and then the wife’s account. But unlike those in the Akutagawa story, these accounts don’t actually differ much—when we cycle through the series of events, it’s mainly to fill in what one character was doing while the other two weren’t around. Occasionally there are slight differences—how loudly does the wife scream, how angry is the knight, etc.—but the accounts largely agree about the facts of the case. So the courtier’s version of the rape is not portrayed as the consensual affair he verbally claims it to be. The only real difference between his version and the wife’s version is that in her version, we see him rape her and afterward she cries, and in his version, we see him rape her and afterward he tells the count she wanted it. And if even that feels like too much of a he said / she said, the title card introducing the wife’s version lingers on the words “The truth” to indicate that while the first two chapters may have distorted things here and there, the third is to be taken as gospel. Like the sitcom episode, this too is a closed plot.
Why? I think I learned at least part of the answer when I got hired for a full-time position and was contractually obligated to go the faculty meetings. There I discovered that a lot of the teachers in the department hated “In a Grove” and refused to teach it. Their argument: “In a Grove” is a terrible text to use to illustrate concepts such as unreliable narrators and literary ambiguity, because there is no ambiguity. Which character should we believe? The wife. The rule is simple: when a woman says she’s been raped, believe what she says. Any story that is not founded on this precept should be removed from the curriculum. And to hold a class discussion about whether we should believe the account of a woman who has been raped, as if that were a debatable question, turns the classroom into an even more hostile environment for young women than it already is. That point of view is also pretty much what we see in The Last Duel. Though set mostly in 1386, the film transparently addresses itself to the #MeToo era, with the rape victim giving speeches about how she cannot remain silent as the rapist, and society at large, had demanded. Her mother-in-law says that she too was raped in her youth, but she didn’t cry about it, and who does her daughter-in-law think she is to think she’s so special that she deserves justice, etc. Old men grill the knight’s wife about having once said she found the rapist handsome. One examiner argues, à la Todd Akin, that she can’t have been raped because the encounter left her pregnant, and if it’s a legitimate rape the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. The film uses an incident from distant history to inveigh against the rape culture that persists to this day, and has no interest in using rape to play philosophical games regarding epistemic incompleteness and the subjectivity of truth. The accounts of the knight and the courtier, in retrospect, seem to be included, yes, to fill in gaps that the wife doesn’t know about, but primarily to show how both of them distort the real story, which is hers. So I imagine that those dissenting teachers would probably be fine with this. They still probably couldn’t show it, though, since it earns its R rating the same ways the Polanski Macbeth does, and I discussed last time, that might have flown in 1989, but not today. I mean, this movie has an extended rape scene in it. I’m sure the administrators I worked with would find that almost as traumatic to students as a Poppy poster.
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