Rashomon Style: Difference between revisions
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Inspired by the famous [[Akira Kurosawa]] film ''[[Rashomon]]''. This influential early example is a sophisticated use of the trope and provides no definitive answers as to the truth.
Basically, it's a cast full of [[Unreliable Narrator
A [[Sub-Trope]] of [[Separate Scene Storytelling]].
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* The movie ''Hollywoodland'' features a detective investigating the death of actor George Reeves. He goes through the many possible (and ultimately conflicting) theories on what happened.
* ''Gossip'' plays with this trope. The viewers ''think'' they know what happened at college party. Only as the movie progresses is it made clear that no character is entirely reliable in their account of things.
* ''[[Ghost Dog: The Way of The Samurai]]''. The mob boss is explaining to his fellow mobsters how he met the hit
* ''[[The Hole]]'' made use of this, but very early on in the story it is made abundantly clear that one of the two accounts of the events in the titular hole cannot be accurate, and is not believed by anyone.
* The [[Jet Li]] film ''[[Hero (film)|Hero]]'' used a variation of this trope. It opens with a Qin soldier being granted audience with the emperor to tell him of how he killed three notorious assassins. The emperor, however, doesn't believe the details of the account, so he tells what he thinks happened. The soldier admits that he wasn't telling the truth, and tells what actually happened. Meanwhile there are a few other stories going on, and they all fit together in the end. The really cool thing about the film is that each account is color-
* Happens in ''[[Jackie Brown]]''. The money exchange at the mall follows several viewpoints, each seeing different events and revealing what happens to each character in the same time frame.
* ''[[The End of the Affair]]''.
* The entire premise of ''[[Vantage Point]]''
* The song "Summer Nights" in ''[[Grease]]'' is this, with both Sandy and Danny recounting the events of their summer romance. While Sandy's version is less outrageous, the likelihood is that both of them are being equally untruthful.
* ''[[Wonderland]]'' depicts a true-life example, in which two different parties, one of whom is porn legend John Holmes, give detectives accounts of the events leading to a brutal multiple murder. Each party places the greater share of blame on the other, and as in real life, no definitive conclusion is reached; although a third account is introduced (again true-to-life, though it did not surface until after Holmes' trial) that indicates that not only was Holmes lying, he was (involuntarily) involved.
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* ''[[As I Lay Dying (novel)|As I Lay Dying]]'' by [[William Faulkner]] is told from the heads of something like fourteen narrators, and the only half-sane one in the entire book gets sent to an insane asylum for trying to burn his mother's steadily-decaying body in someone else's barn and while inside the asylum, ''goes'' crazy. Major points (and potentially a Ph.D) to whoever can actually figure out who's reliable and what's going on.
* ''[[Absalom Absalom]]'' - The true story of the Sutpens is pieced together from information given by three different tellings. Each of the tellers doesn't know the whole story, and may be changing or making up some of what they say. They don't call it a precursor of the modern mystery novel for nothing.
* ''[[An Instance of the Fingerpost]]'' by Iain Pears is an excellent Rashomon. It features four [[Unreliable Narrator
* Waved in the plot of ''[[Chronicle of a Death Foretold]]'': the narrator is trying to reconstruct the weird circumstances surrounding the honor murder of a childhood friend, so he investigates the surviving witnesses and the court records. While not made in the traditional way, only the main facts remain with each retelling, as people can't even remember what weather was that day, and it goes down from there.
* [[James Joyce]]: ''[[Finnegans Wake|Finnegan's Wake]]''.
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* Ken Kesey's novel ''Sometimes a Great Notion'' makes heavy use of this trope, weaving together the narratives of [[Unreliable Narrator|several warring family members and townspeople]] to illustrate the interpersonal conflicts surrounding a town-wide lumber strike. For added fun, sometimes POV shifts happen mid-sentence.
* Jeff Rackham's ''The Rag & Bone Shop'' tells the story of [[Charles Dickens]]' relationship with Ellen Ternan from three different points of view: those of Ellen, Dickens' sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth, and his friend and colleague [[Wilkie Collins]]. All three suffer from various degrees of self-delusion, especially Georgina.
* The first half or so of the ''[[Star Wars]]'' novel ''I, Jedi'' is one of these for the ''[[Jedi Academy Trilogy]].'' It gives a contrasting point of view of the events of that series without actually contradicting any of it, while simultaneously filling in a variety of [[Plot Hole
* [[Agatha Christie]] 's ''[[Five Little Pigs]]'' has [[Hercule Poirot]] solve a murder that took place sixteen years before by listening to the stories of the people involved.
* An odd variation on this concept is used in [[Quills Window]]. Events are portrayed objectively as they happen- the important change, however, is that different characters interpret these events in different ways. We'll see the event in question from the point of view of one character in the book, but later on it will be referenced by other characters as having had entirely different personal connotations.
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** Nathaniel's [[Badass Longcoat]] outfit at the beginning of the second book. Whereas Nathaniel thinks that it is, well, badass, Bartimaeus finds it completely ridiculous and Kitty proclaims it kind of stupid, though it is not clear if she just says this because she hates magicians in general or because the outfit really is stupid.
** [[Unreliable Narrator|Bartimaeus']] illusions of grandeur are dashed by the third-person (and therefore more accurate) narration of Nathaniel or Kitty, though of course he's always damn cool, whether he calmly asks the whiny boy to "please be quiet" or shrieks at him to "shut up!".
* ''The Spoon River Anthology'' has this as one of its main conceits. Unusually for this trope, we generally get an idea of what's
* ''[[The Slap]]'' by Christos Tsiolkas.
* ''The Moonlit Road'' by Ambrose Bierce.
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* ''[[Carrie]]'' by [[Stephen King]] contains many versions of the same events by different characters, and, in some cases, by newspapers.
* ''[[Only Revolutions]]'' has one side of the story by one protagonist, the other side of the story by the other protagonist. Given the sheer length of time that the story covers, it makes sense for there to be discrepancies. However, there are more than just discrepancies, as both sides tell it in a way to make themselves look good at various points and have different recollections altogether of certain events.
* The Egyptian novel ''Miramar'' (by Egypt's only Nobel Laureate for Literature, [[wikipedia:Naguib Mahfouz|Naguib Mahfouz]] is told four times in the first person from the perspective of four lodgers at a ''pension'' (a kind of boarding house) in 1960s Alexandria: the aging intellectual and former journalist Amir Wagdy; the young, wealthy, well-connected, and self-destructive scion of a once-noble family Husni Allam; the elegant broadcaster Mansour Bahi; and the factory manager and Party functionary Sarhan al-Beheiri. All four men pursue the young, uneducated, but [[Plucky Girl|plucky]] peasant woman Zohra, newly arrived from the countryside. All four stories end with the
** Mahfouz used the same technique in ''Akhenaten: Dweller In Truth'', which tells the story of Pharaoh Akhenaten's short reign and scandalous behaviour from the POV of more than a dozen different characters. Most of them agree on ''what'' happened, though ''why'' is another matter... The only thing [[Dramatic Irony|most of them agree on]] is that this monotheism business [[Foregone Conclusion|died with the Pharaoh]].
* In his memoir Hitch-22, [[Christopher Hitchens]] [[Discussed Trope|discusses]] Rashomon Style when recounting an event he shared with good friend Martin Amis, who had recorded his version in his own prior memoir.
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* ''[[Frasier]]''
** "Perspectives On Christmas". In this example, the characters' perspectives differed mainly in what they were able to see and how they interpreted certain lines of dialogue (as is the norm for misunderstandings on this show), rather than blatantly skewing things in their favor as in most comedic examples.
** "Shrink Rap", in which both brothers undergo 'couples' counseling and outline the events which have led to their most recent relationship collapse. In general, they have a tendency to present themselves as being a bit more wise, thoughtful, and put-upon than they probably would be in the real
{{quote|'''Frasier''': '''''Hold it'''''! Niles, you know full well that Daphne merely ''told'' us that story, she did ''not'' act it out!
'''Niles''': ''[Genuinely confused]'' ... [[Covert Pervert|Didn't she]]? }}
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{{quote|'''Hawkeye''': The Major's version of what happened was, to say the least, fascinating. It was, to say the most, perjury! No, to be fair, I have no doubt that he remembers it that way. More's the pity. And there was ''some'' truth to the story. It ''was'' October 11 and we ''were'' in Korea. Other than that...}}
* ''[[Boomtown]]'' was built entirely around this concept, although it was abandoned shortly before cancellation. The hook was you needed everyone's perspective to know what happened, but once you had that there was no argument over what really happened. Boomtown would be better described as objectively following various characters in overlapping timelines rather than showing their subjective perspectives on a single event, as in [[Rashomon]].
* ''[[ER]]'' - "Four Corners" was hyped as being in the style of [[Rashomon]], but ended up being more of a [[Perspective Flip]], as rather than subjective perspectives on one event, the episode followed four separate characters (Kerry, Benton, Greene, and Carter) in separate storylines that happened to overlap at certain points. The different viewpoints were
* ''[[Smallville]]'' used this trope in the third season episode "Suspect". [[Magnificent Bastard|Lionel Luthor]] is shot at the Luthor mansion and the prime suspect is Jonathan Kent. After investigating a lot of people, Clark finds out that {{spoiler|Sheriff Ethan did it.}}
* The ''[[Veronica Mars]]'' episode "A Trip to the Dentist", the penultimate episode of the season, was about Veronica hearing differing accounts of the party where she was [[Rape as Drama|date-raped]].
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* The last ''[[Small Wonder]]'' episode (by production sequence) had Brandon, Harriet, and Jamie telling different versions of a foiled robbery. Although she can no longer talk, Vicki provides the real story when Ted connects her to the hotel TV set.
* ''Thunder Alley'': Gil and his daughter argue over who owns some rare baseball cards. Their respective flashbacks to when Gil supposedly gave them to her contradict each other.
* ''[[CSI]]'': "Rashomama". This was a hilariously well-done episode. Nick's car is
* In ''[[My Name Is Earl]]'', one story tells how four main character tricked each other on some stolen silverware, each "part" told from a different character's view. Interesting in that none of the accounts conflict with each other, only differing in events that the character telling the story couldn't have known about. They form one long storyline with each account following the previous instead.
** Creator Greg Garcia's next series, ''[[Raising Hope]]'', did a similar episode, where the family recall the story of how Burt was kidnapped. Each person's story isn't so much changing the perspective as adding on facts that only they could've known.
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* The ''[[Star Trek: The Next Generation|Star Trek the Next Generation]]'' episode "A Matter of Perspective" was a holodeck-aided version of this trope. Riker has one story; the people who think Riker murdered one of their scientists have another; and Deanna Troi tells Captain Picard that both sides are telling the truth, or rather what they believe is the truth. The actual truth does come out, but only because the holodeck recreates the crime scene almost exactly and is left on "crime scene."
** While Riker is absolved of the murder, exactly what happens between Riker and the scientist's wife is left nebulous. The possibilities left open being her seducing him, him trying to rape her, and them mutually throwing themselves at each other. Sure, we know Riker as a ladies man, but you never know...
** Or Riker and the wife simply misunderstood each other due to each perceiving the other's body language through their alien cultural
* ''[[Star Trek: Voyager|Star Trek Voyager]]'' episode "Living Witness". We see an alien race's holographic simulation of their contact with Voyager seven hundred years ago. A combination of cultural bias and historical distortion results in the crew being portrayed as violent, immoral thugs responsible for slaughtering innocents, including a heroic leader. It falls to a copy of the Doctor to set things straight.
* ''[[The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air|The Fresh Prince of Bel Air]]'' - "Will Goes a-Courtin'", where Will and Carlton refuse to pay Uncle Phil his rent because the air conditioner was broken. They end up having a pool party without Uncle Phil's permission, and Uncle Phil takes them to court about the whole ordeal. In court they tell outrageously different versions of the pool party:
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** The episode is named "I Saw What I Saw". The facts are consistent, but the opinions are often at odds (pointed out repeatedly via [[Ironic Echo Cut]]). For instance, Alex appeared to be shaky after donating blood, but it was later revealed that he left before donating, and was actually shaky because of a phone call from Izzie.
* Used in the ''[[A Different World]]'' episode "The Cat's In The Cradle", in which Dwayne and Ron are arrested by campus police for brawling with three white students from another college.
** There is a twist on the [[Rashomon]] style in that audience gets to see what happened right
* The television series ''Fame'' had an episode involving a student being injured during a stage performance, and the teachers of the School of the Arts questioning different eye-witnesses. Toward the end of the episode, two of the teachers are standing near a movie theater, questioning if they would ever know the truth. The theater marquee clearly shows, "Now Playing, Rashomon"
* ''[[Series/Players|Players]]'', "Rashocon". Before ''SVU'', Ice-T was in a 1997 [[Reformed Criminal]], [[Boxed Crook]] series about con men using their talents for good. This episode self-consciously used the Rashomon multi-perspective narrative structure to conceal the truth of what was happening until the surprise ending.
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* The ''[[Leverage]]'' episode "The Rashomon Job" is [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin]]: a news broadcast on a famous antique dagger leads Sophie, Eliot, Hardison and Parker to realize that they were ''all'' at the museum on the night it was stolen five years earlier. [[Hilarity Ensues]] as they each recount their version of events, and their recollections of each other on the night in question are somewhat skewed (Hardison seems to remember "Dr." Eliot as a psychopathic killer, and no one is able to get Sophie's accent straight), but they all ultimately agree on the sequence of events, and in the end, none of them came away with the dagger. Nate then reveals that ''he'' was there on the night in question as an investigator for the insurance company; the dagger literally fell into his hands by accident, and it provided the evidence he needed to prove that the museum owner was committing insurance fraud. The dagger had been ''reported'' stolen so the fence he had been using wouldn't spook and run. (And the tenacious security chief who threatened to bring the Leverage crew's efforts to ruin was actually a lovestruck buffoon upset with himself that he missed his chance to confess his feelings to the disguised Sophie.)
** One twist used in this version is that the actor playing each character doesn't appear in any of the retellings until that character tells his or her version of events. So, for example, there's a blonde waitress who appears in every version of the story who turns out to be Parker, but before Parker tells her version the waitress isn't played by Beth Riesgraf.
** They also all have different perceptions of Sophie's [[Fake Brit|accent]]
** Also for extra credit, consider the order in which the stories are told and the dagger's location determined. Sophie explains that she had the dagger sent to her safe house in London, but never got it. Eliot explains that it never got there because he was driving the truck it was supposed to be on, but also never got it. Hardison explains that he had the dagger moved to storage, but never got it himself. Parker then explains that she snagged it from storage, but lost it while duct-crawling. Then Nate explains that it dropped into his hands, and he also proved that {{spoiler|the dagger was never there to begin with.}}
*** Nate also manages to spin the fact that they all foiled each other as an [[Aesop]] about how his crew is better working with one another than against, as the team was starting to crack under the larger [[Story Arc]]
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* Used in ''The Master Builder''. Ten years before the play takes place, Solness (the title character) finished building a church tower in Hilde Wangel's hometown. After its dedication ceremony, ''something'' happened between them. Hilde says Solness basically made out with her ([[Unfortunate Implications|she was 12 or 13 at the time]]); Solness says he doesn't remember anything like that happening. He later agrees that it happened, but it's not clear if it really happened, or if he's just agreeing because she's a [[Yandere (disambiguation)]].
* There is an improv game that involves characters acting out a scene multiple times. Once normally, and then from a "character's perspective". The character will be portrayed as sympathetically as possible, while the others become caricatures.
* Used in ''[[The Merchant of Venice]]'' to [[Playing with a Trope|play with]] the [[Greedy Jew]] trope. Launcelot, Shylock's servant, complains to his father that he's so starved in Shylock's service that his ribs are visible. However, Launcelot just spent the whole scene practicing deceptions on his father's
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* Virtually the entire middle of ''[[Grand Theft Auto IV]]'' has turned into this, with two expansions telling side stories about the characters Niko meets. Interestingly, as all three protagonists are killers, the [[Player Punch]] deaths in one game are missions in the other.
* ''[[Ever 17]]'' has two protagonists, The Kid and Takeshi. Each one appears highly competent in their own route while the other is a scared kid or a buttmonkey. There are also some subtle differences in the way events happen and are perceived. {{spoiler|Or so it seems. They're actually narrating two entirely different stories, and the protagonists of each route aren't whom they appear to be in the other's route.}}
* [[Escape Velocity|Escape Velocity: Nova]] has an interesting method of this. By the time the player arrives on the scene, a good amount of the story has already happened, and the only way to learn all of it is to play every faction's storyline... But since you can only play one faction per playthrough, the only way to learn the full story is through [[Alternate Universe
** Throwing a spanner into it is the fact that [[Schrodinger's Gun|not all facts learned during a storyline applies to all the other storylines]].
* One of the more hilarious quest lines to come out of ''[[World of Warcraft]]'''s ''Cataclysm'' expansion is "The Day That Deathwing Came" series, concerning the dragon's attack on the Badlands. After asking some NPCs about it, you play through three reenactments of their stories: a dwarf claims that he punched his way through a rain of burning boulders to sock Deathwing right in the face, but a gnome interrupts and describes how he used a device to make himself big enough to snatch the dragon out of the sun and hurl him into Kalimdor. And then an orc explains that he was showing off his motorcycle to a bunch of lovely ladies (and a [[Bishonen|blood elf male]]) when the dragon came, then rode his ''flying'' bike to the top of a mesa to duel Deathwing in a knife fight, at which point the other characters interrupt and it all dissolves into chaos.
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*** One of the kids' story was what happened (according to his uncle), which was told in the style of comic book artist Dick Sprang and the 60's ''[[Batman (TV series)|Batman]]'' show, while the others are their own theories on what Batman looks like (with one of them being a retelling of ''[[The Dark Knight Returns]]'').
*** The other kid thought Batman was a bat-like creature that snatches criminals, similar to post Post-''[[Zero Hour]]'' interpretations of Superman's first encounter with Batman, whom he thought to be some kind of [[Differently-Powered Individual|metahuman]].
** Interestingly ''Batman: Gotham Knight'' has the same effect overall, with different artists portraying the Caped Crusader in different
* ''[[The Powerpuff Girls]]'' used this one in "The Bare Facts", where the three girls tell The Mayor their versions of what happened while he was blindfolded and kidnapped by Mojo Jojo: Blossom tells a version that focuses almost entirely on her, Bubbles tells a cutesy version depicted with crayon drawings, and Buttercup tells an action-packed ''film noir'' version. None of their versions explain {{spoiler|that [[Tomato Surprise|The Mayor is naked]] because Mojo stole his clothes when he kidnapped him}}.
* ''[[Kappa Mikey]]'' episode "Splashomon" presents an utterly and hilariously absurd version of this.
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* The ''[[Arthur (animation)|Arthur]]'' episode "Arthur's Family Feud". Also, "D.W.'s Snowball." The snowball one is especially interesting, because the most outrageous version of events (Buster's story that D.W.'s snowball was stolen by space aliens) actually turns out to be the correct one.
* In the ''[[Rocko's Modern Life]]'' episode "Speaking Terms", Rocko and Heffer are on a trashy talk show discussing how Heffer forgot Rocko's birthday.
* ''[[Clerks the Animated Series]]'' occasionally features Randall recollecting how the duo gets into a certain situation, usually involving Randall dressed as a gentleman, or being absurdly intelligent, while Dante is in a diaper, swinging a cat around by its tail, saying things like "I'm the biggest idiot ever!"
* In one episode of ''[[Aaahh Real Monsters]]'' the viewfinder the Gromble uses to read the students' memories of their scares breaks down, so he just tries asking the [[Power Trio]] how they managed to scare everyone at the opera. Ickus recounts the story as a [[Film Noir]] (with him as the hero) while Oblina recounts it by casting herself as an imperturbable [[Mary Sue]] superheroine. The Gromble, annoyed by their blatant fabrications, asks the less egotistical Krumm what happened, but he narrates a childish, simplistic set of events that only clearly indicates that Ickus and Oblina spent most of the assignment arguing. Finally the viewfinder is fixed and he forces all three of them on it to determine the true course of events - {{spoiler|it turns out that the three kept screwing up the basic parts of the plan until they accidentally landed in the middle of the concert floor, at which point they panicked but fortunately so did the humans they landed in front of and soon the entire building was evacuated}}. Needless to say, the Gromble was <s>not</s> [[Sadist Teacher|only too happy]] to punish them for lying.
* One episode of ''[[The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy]]'' open with the Trio and Irwin dangling from a rope over a pit. Irwin asks how they got into that mess and the others conclude that it was due to them meeting Grim. Billy and Grim's versions are radically different with the former's portraying him and Mandy as Space Rangers who go on an adventure across the earth to gather Grim's skull, robe, and scythe to fully summon him who then agrees to be their friend for summoning him. Grim's is sympathetic and portrays himself as a hotshot in the underworld who lost to an evil Mandy in a duel and had to be her friend/servant as a result. Mandy of course gets fed up with their tall tales and briefly sums up the first episode as it happened while clips play. Grim dismisses her version saying "[[Lampshade Hanging|Oh please, that didn't]] [[Art Evolution|even look like us]]" Irwin is amazed at the stories but then says he was asking how they ended up hanging on the rope. It acts like a lead in to another one but the episode ends as they fall or get eaten by whatever they're hanging over.
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