shep.ca: the writing work of Matt Shepherd

Today I received an e-mail in my inbox from Bell Canada.

Bell has been my cellular telephone provider for over a decade now. I haven’t always been thrilled with their services or hidden fees, but they’ve generally been pretty good about not calling me in the middle of the day to tell me about new features, or try to upgrade my account, or whatnot. Then again, I’ve been fairly firm in the past about telling them that I don’t want such communications. Still, it’s nice to see my wishes honoured.

Today, though, I got an e-mail from Bell, telling me that — heck, I’ll just let you read the thing, with annotations. There are two broad things to discuss here: the ethics of this message, which is full of what are at best half-truths, and the ethics of how it got to my inbox.

Dear Customer,

Help stop your TV fees from increasing.

CTV, Global and the CBC have recently
asked the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) to
significantly increase TV taxes.

True so far. Television networks across Canada have taken umbrage to the fact that specialty channels (Food, Showcase, Life, etc.) get money directly from cable companies — money the companies collect from subscribers — but the networks, despite providing tons of content to cable companies, get nothing from the cable providers (except, arguably, greater reach and therefore greater audiences than would be otherwise available to them). So they’ve gone to the CRTC, the federal legislative body for radio and television, to ask them to make the cable companies pay them as well.

The CRTC has been asked to do this by having Bell and the other operators pay
more, which would result in higher fees for you.

Here we leap feet-first into what could at best be called a half-truth, or uncharitably, a flat-out lie. “Which would result in higher fees for you,” specifically. This gets repeated further down the Panic Letter, so we’ll dig into it when they flip it over again.

We don’t think that’s right, you shouldn’t either.

Please don’t tell me what to think, Bell.

So please speak and have your
say (with a link here to a Web site).

This link leads to a page called “Stop the TV Tax,” which uses the same alarmist language to inform people that a “new TV tax” is going to be levied on them. This is, again, a half-truth at best. The page, incidentally, is funneled through a Bell page so that they can keep track of how many hits the “TV Tax” site gets via Bell vs. via Videotron, Rogers, etc.

*This is what’s happening. *

The CRTC has told satellite and cable companies to hand over $100 million a year
as of September 1, 2009. These fees are being passed on to you.

Note that at no point has it been stated that Bell is a satellite company, or that part of this $100 million will come directly from Bell’s coffers. This isn’t dishonesty, per se, but there’s some deliberate obfuscation of what Bell’s stake in this is. Bell’s concern is not for you, the consumer: Bell’s concern is for Bell’s profits. I’m not saying this from a “dark and evil megacorp” perspective but rather a position of practicality: Bell is not writing letters and placing ads and creating Web pages because their CEO is losing sleep about consumer rights.

It’s the last sentence that’s troublesome, and it’s there that we leap into cunning language with both feet. These fees are being passed on to you.

By who?

By Bell.

There is nothing — nothing — in any tabled legislation that says that Bell is required to bill subscribers more as a result of this law. The compression of “The CRTC has told…” and “…passed on to you” is a deliberate conjunction meant to imply that the CRTC is mandating that consumers pay more to cover the additional distribution to local networks, but it is not mandatory.

Bell is, in effect, telling me “If the government makes us share our profits with local networks providing content, we’ll pass those expenses on to you so that our profits” — which are, incidentally, substantial — “won’t be affected, and you should be outraged.”

Well, I’m a bit peeved, yes. But not at the government. At whoever at Bell thought this up.

This money is passing through something called the Local Programming Improvement
Fund (LPIF) – straight to media giants like CTVglobemedia and Canwest Global,
straight to the CBC.

Bell is, of course, a media giant in their own right. They’re working here to position themselves as the “little guy,” which is flat-out bizarre given that they’re probably the most ubiquitous name in telecom across the entire country.

No new local programming, no improvement to anything other than the bottom line
of broadcasters.

I’m working hard on not taking a side in the greater debate itself, and to focus just on this letter — since it was put in front of me, unsolicited, for reasons we’ll discuss later. But as somebody who’s worked in media — newspapers and radio — I know that local content is hemmorraghing money right now, and I strongly suspect that nobody is rolling naked in their vaults of cash a la Scrooge McDuck.

You are now likely paying for this on your TV bill.

Because Bell has chosen to pass the expenses on to us.

You should also know that hot on the heels of that campaign, CTV, Global and the
CBC are now lobbying for even more.

Each year, satellite and cable companies pay hundreds of millions of dollars to
broadcasters. We contribute to the CRTC’s operating budget. Although to date
these fees have not been broken out on monthly bills, you need to know they
exist – especially because the TV networks still want more.

Again, an odd bit of positioning. Yes, Bell pays licensing fees, as does every other telecom and broadcaster (with the exception of community media, where fees are waived if they meet a “breadth requirement”), which is probably what Bell means by the “CRTC’s operating budget.” Beyond that, though, there’s a murky sense of what they mean by “hundreds of millions of dollars to broadcasters” and “fees have not been broken out on montly bills.”

As far as I can tell, that means that these fees have not been itemized on monthly bills. We don’t know what percentage of our monthly bill is going towards Bell’s licensing fees, because it’s not particularly relevant. We also don’t know what percentage goes towards heating their underground parking garages and what percentage covers business lunches, nor what part of our monthly bill is converted into advertising expenses. But to boldly claim that every cent they pay out to content providers, and for licensing, is not factored into what subscribers pay at the end of the month? Deceptive and baffling.

If the CRTC gives in to the broadcasters’ latest demand and lets local TV
stations charge for their currently free over-the-air local signals, it would
more than double the portion of your Bell TV bill going to government fees – and
into the bank accounts of the broadcasters, like CTV, Global and the CBC.

Again, some dubious language here. “Currently free over-the-air local signals” is a key example of a Catch-22 for whatever flacks (a term I use with love, being a flack myself) wrote this letter. On the one hand, you have to position the enemy as charging for something that — God almighty — they’re giving away to other people. On the other side of the coin, you’ve just told people that a key part of your service is available for free, which is never smart. And again with the “into the bank accounts.” I’ll admit I have a soft spot for local media and think it should be protected and supported, but I think even a neutral observer can recognize that there are actually operating expenses associated with running a television station.

In fact, if the CRTC lets broadcasters have their way, then government-imposed
fees will be just shy of /one *billion* dollars/.

It’s time to say enough. Help make it stop. Let the CRTC know what you think
about new TV taxes — have your say.

And then a bunch of links.

There’s a lot wrong with that letter.

First, it basically says this, in paraphrase: “A neutral governmental body decided that we owe money to some other companies. We’re passing that expense directly on to you instead of shouldering it ourselves. Be furious with the government!”

Second, it assumes that the words “tax” coupled with some clunky phrasing will dupe the reader into thinking that Bell is the plucky little guy with the nerve to stand up to the bad, bad government and those nasty, nasty television stations. It’s not up front about its stake in the decision, and greviously misrepresents how and why this will “cost me more.”

Third, it won’t “cost me more.” Note, above, that I said that I’ve been a cell subscriber with Bell for over 10 years. Note also that I didn’t say I was an Internet or satellite TV subscriber. Never have been. Probably never will be.

So why am I getting e-mails from Bell about how the bad, bad government and nasty, nasty television stations are threatening “me” with a “TV tax”?

I’ve given Bell my e-mail address exactly once. In fact, I generated a specific e-mail address to give Bell, which redirects to my main e-mail address, because I can do that sort of thing and because I like to know where my spam is coming from.

I gave Bell that e-mail address when modifying some things on my cell phone account. I also — and I’m very careful about these things — made sure not to give Bell permission to send me “special offers” or “important news” or “offers from third-party affiliates”.

And here I am, getting propaganda — poorly worded propaganda that insults my intelligence — in my inbox.

This is, to my mind, as much of an ethical breach on Bell’s part as the dishonest phrasing in their letter.

The contact information I gave Bell was given to them with the confidence it would be used appropriately: given to them in relation to my cell phone account, for use (presumably) to give me crucial information about said cell phone account.

So why am I getting — again — poorly worded propaganda from an e-mail address provided to Bell for a service I do not subscribe to, wholly unrelated to the service I do subscribe to?

Because somebody at Bell made a decision.

A decision to effectively spam every address they had in their database, regardless of how appropriate it was, with propaganda about a CRTC decision regarding licensing fees for the redistribution of TV network broadcasts via for-profit cable and satellite entities.

So not only am I insulted by this poorly worded propaganda, I also feel violated: I entrusted Bell with contact information to be used appropriately, and it was abused to spam me.

We’re vaultin past the usual grey of marketing ethics here and into something a shade darker: abusing information given for one purpose, to spam people for another.

Poor ethics; also poor marketing. Does this inspire me to trust Bell with my business for things other than my cell phone? No.

Does it inspire me to cancel my cell plan with Bell and move to a provider who uses my contact information appropriately and ethically at the earliest possible opportunity?

Yes.

Update: Within the two days that I was writing this, I have also been sent a text message on my cell phone from Bell. So now we’re compounding the breach of ethics stemming from abusing my e-mail address to abusing a system I am paying them for, doubly so because I pay for texts.

I’m going to do my level best to cancel my Bell contract today.

Long live the “TV tax.”

While the laudable writers at the AV Club hit my major problems with the ham-fisted writing and hammier-faced acting, they’ve sort of glossed over why this entire series just doesn’t work for me.

The premise is as dumb as a bag of really dumb hammers.

Okay, so I black out, and have a vision of the future that lasts as long as the Beatles’ “Can’t Buy Me Love.” Were I listening to “Can’t Buy Me Love” precisely six months in the future, that would occupy the entire vision envelope, which is a good way to wrap your head around how long this vision lasts. A fairly long time.

There are, at this point, two possibilities.

1. The future I have seen is mutable and changeable. In which case, well, nothing has happened. Everyone has had a super weird dream. That’s it.

2. The future I have seen is immutable and unchangeable. In which case, assuming I have seen myself as healthy and sane (and the length of “Can’t Buy Me Love” should be ample time to pick up little cues about my health and mental wellbeing), I am for the next six months completely goddamn indestructible. I mean, think about it: I have a vision of myself, hale and hearty, six months from now. I have ample proof to show that this is something that will come to pass. Not may, will. Which means I can bungee jump without a cord, can make myself a steak-suit and leap into the tiger cage, can decide to become a one-man army waging war on the forces of evil… and six months from now, I will be exactly where I’m supposed to be, in mint condition. 

That’s sweet. And yet, nobody seems to twig to it, except for the one guy who doesn’t see the future and therefore assumes he’s going to die. Were I playing the other agent in that scene, I’d be all sympathetic, and then probably figure the whole thing out, and be all like “sorry you’re gonna croak, sucker, and enjoy the next six months and all, but if you’ll excuse me I have an urgent need to dive out of this 32nd-storey window. Woohoo!” And then I’d, I don’t know, bounce off a flagpole and land on a canopy, or get rescued by Spider-Man, or something. Doesn’t really matter, because for the next six months I cannot die or even be significantly hurt.

And watching the universe reshape itself to save me as I engage in lunatic suicidal behaviour day in, day out would be AWESOME.

Other odd notes:

• Nobody, apparently, is asleep at 10 p.m. Which seems kind of odd. My household, for instance, would either have a bunch of null-visions, like John Cho, or dream-visions, which would scuttle the versimilitude of the series PDQ. “I was riding on a mule and fighting Dracula with a lightsaber” does not a chilling vision make.
• I suppose that tearing the friendship bracelet off and burning it in front of your weeping child might be a little over the top, but you can’t tell me that even among a cast of a mere dozen characters, none of them are even the least bit tempted to fuck around with the future. I sure would be. Maybe people trying to break the pattern will be a future plot element, but every frustrated attempt to change the future would further establish the fact that you are, effectively, indestructible until at least the time of your “flash forward.”
• It would be awesome if John Cho’s vision of the null-future is because he gets so freaked out he drinks himself into a coma after five months, thirty days.

Nirvana was a really good band.

So, here’s hoping that this really is Jaycee Lee Dugard, and that she was reasonably well-treated during her 18 years in captivity.

But you know who I kinda feel bad for?

Steve.

Steve, of Steve’s Paint Shop.

Steve, of Steve’s Paint Shop, who in June of 2008 signed an affidavit confirming Phillip Garrido’s ability to control sound with his mind.

Garrido is, by current indications, responsible for Dugard’s kidnapping. He is also crazy to Time Cube proportions, as the above Web site will affirm.

I mean, the poor dude is probably just trying to run his business, humour the nut to get him off his case so he can get back to painting cars, and now he’s on the Web site of the person most likely to be America’s Most Famous Kidnapper in about… well, right about now, actually.

Not only on the Web site, but on the Web site with address, signature and business card, signing off on this:

This document is to affirm that I Phillip Garrido have clearly demonstrated the ability to control sound with my mind and have developed a device for others to witness this phenomena. by using a sound generator to provide the sound, and a headphone amplification system, ( a device to focuc your hearing so as to increase the sensitivity of what one is listening to) I have produced a set of voices by effectively controlling the sound to pronounce words through my own mental powers. (…) in the month of June 2006, I witnessed Phillip provide a demonstration at my place of business, controlling a voice or set of voices that are unearthly in nature. I have signed this affirmation to confirm my witnessing of this event.

Concerning the state of Phillips’ mindfulness and his freedom to conduct himself appropriately: I will confirm that out of the many years I have interacted with him, business or otherwise, he has always acted mature and intelligent. He has had a steady personality throughout the many years I have known him and is fully capable of handling himself respectfully regardless of the possible out come of any given event. He has never displayed an unsuitable, incoherent or improper cognitive behavior all the years I have known him, nor has he ever mentioned the subject of him hearing voices to my staff or me.

I don’t know Steve from Adam, but I’m reasonably sure that he’s just a guy that paints cars. Just running his business and living his life, and some nut wants him to sign off on his power to use his mind to control noises with his mind, and he just won’t leave and eventually Steve says “fuck it, give it here” just to get the guy out of his damn shop. I’ve been there, more or less, working in community media. Sometimes you just want to make the crazy go away, and testifying to their amazing mind powers may seem like the shortest route to goal.

And then the nut turns up on the news, and you find out he’s not just some nut, but King Nut Supreme; Lord Mayor and Grandmaster of the John Fowles Fan Club.

And there you are, on the Internet, signing off on Frederick Clegg’s ability to control ghost noises with his face.

Oh, Steve. You poor, poor bastard.

Brent Erwin at Ape Entertainment has sent us code to embed some sort of crazy comics viewing software on our blogs (we/us/our being Ape creators). This thing is awesome! Thrill to the incredible adventures of The Black Coat!

As written on MetaFilter recently; I’m not going to reproduce the original quote I’m responding to (I think it’s a bit rude to purloin somebody’s in-thread words in my personal blog) but it’s there if you click on the link.

Quick context: NY library has put Tintin in the Congo, Hergé “troubled” Tintin volume, under lock and key so it’s only viewable upon request. A debate ensues about censorship and racial sensitivity, in which Huck Finn among other things is brought up, as well as Hergé’s mid-career change from casual racist to thoughtful world observer. “Liza” is incensed that “racist” Tintin is getting an action movie made about him, while Huckleberry Finn is several orders of magnitude better than Tintin.

Yours truly:

Liza, I don’t think anyone is proposing a last-man-standing Huckleberry Finn vs. Tintin cage match, where the Southern Scamp and the Belgian Brawler are both given switchblades and forced to throw down like in the “Bad” video. Besides, Tintin has Captain Haddock backing him up, so you know somebody’s gonna get glassed in that fight.

There’s room for both to exist in the world, and while I agree that Congo is irredeemably racist, it’s valuable context for how the Hergé books themselves change from being thoroughly colonialist to well-researched, world-embracing volumes. I don’t think Hergé ever got entirely past his racism — I don’t think anybody does, really — but I find, as an adult having read the Hergé books as a child, and having looked into Hergé’s life story, that the Hergé story of transformation from blithe racist to thoughtful creator is as fascinating and valuable to me as Huckleberry Finn’s journey.

Whether or not that justifies keeping Congo on the shelves — or the equally execrable Tintin In The Land of the Soviets, which exudes Ignorance On Parade just as much as Congo does — is obviously a tough call. Aside from this current library issue, both of those books have a history of being dropped from publication periodically, and brought back in. Personally, I prefer the “stick a note in there if the Introduction doesn’t cover the book’s troubled past” approach.

Given how Hollywood treats such things, I’d imagine you’d be glad that nobody is turning Huckleberry Finn into a “fucking action movie” — it’s eerily plausible to envison Huck Finn (Spackle Culkin, the as-yet-undiscovered Culkin brother) and Disenfranchised Jim (Cedric the Entertainer) rocketing down the Mississippi on their rad steampunk raft, joined by hip con men Duke and King (Johnny Knoxville and Dane Cook), fighting racist Klan robots invented by evil cotton baron Maximillian Sherburn (Al Pacino). In the last five minutes, Huck discovers that racism is caused by an evil giant spider from space (voiced by Nathan Lane, who camps it up maybe a little more than necessary), and a dying Disenfranchised Jim tells Huck that the magic was inside him all along and Huck destroys the spider with a hadouken made from pure American exceptionalism. Racism is solved and nobody speaks of it ever again.

Michael Bay produces, Stephen Sommers directs. Released on the third Monday of January. FINN!

So yeah, I don’t think a Tintin movie is really something to get that outraged about.

It’s been a while since I mentioned RPM on this blog, but it’s ticking along really well, with weekly updates going up at the ApeCMX site, well into the first issue at this point and with some interesting developments shaping up.

I’ve already plotted to the end of RPM05, and finished the script for RPM04 last week. It’s — wild. David and Brent have pretty much given me free reign to write the series as I see fit, once we got our ducks in a row in terms of general series notes, and the watchword for me has been awesome.

That may not sound like much of a watchword, but it’s been my functional guideline to date: find my inner 10-year-old, plunk him down in front of the 13″ colour television that my parents had for 20 years, and which now exists only in my memory, and give that kid something awesome to watch. Fast cars? Yeah. Motorcycles? Yeah. Jets? Yeah. Have them transform into robot warriors? Heck yeah. Evil global conspiracies with evil robots? Hell yeah. Monsters and lasers and alien artifacts and foreign locales and boats and explosions and radioactive racecourses and ruined buildings and giant serrated blades and cybernetic hands and flying cameras and pretty girls? YES TO ALL OF THOSE THINGS PLEASE.

Basically, my inner 10-year-old is sitting at the editor’s desk of my brain, looking at ideas I’m throwing in there on scraps of paper. And if that kid doesn’t say “awesome!” when he reads something, it doesn’t go in the book.

The comic is updating in fits and starts on the ApeCMX site, but to be honest, I can’t wait for print. When I was 10, I read comics lying on the couch in the living room on Saturday mornings, with a stack of back issues beside me and the sun streaming in the window. That’s still the best way to read them, I think.

I love a mystery.

And I acknowledge, right off the bat, that this is possibly the worst possible way to approach one of Kurosawa’s classics, and one of the best films of all time, Rashomon.

But I’m a pedant, and a bit of a jerk, and Rashomon gave me an itch that, over the next few days, I found myself compelled to scratch. I just can’t abide the idea that there is no story, or some sort of fluid story, behind the events of the film.

I need closure. It’s a flaw. I’m okay with it.

So, with all that in mind, and retaining at the forefront that this is not the point of the film, here’s a ton of rambling bullcrap about what might have been going on in the movie.

To keep things simple, I’m going to use archetypes rather than proper names: Bandit for the Toshiro Mifune character Tajômaru, Wife for Machiko Kyô’s Masako Kanazawa, Husband for Masayuki Mori’s character Takehiro Kanazawa, and from there they’re actually called Woodcutter, Priest (Monk in my subtitles) and Policeman, so my bases are pretty much set.

On to business.

First and foremost, the question is that of the murder. Whether the Bandit rapes the Wife, or whether she reciprocates his affections and has sex with him willingly, informs the motivations for the murder, but doesn’t change the fact of the murder itself.

And, once honed in on the murder, we have three possibilities:

1. Bandit kills Husband (Bandit, Woodcutter)
2. Wife [presumably] kills Husband (Wife)
3. Husband commits suicide (Husband)

Among the three perpetrators, there’s a tidy knot: each admits to the crime (mostly; the Wife leaves some room for doubt, but not much). But, presuming that Japan was not chock-a-block with compulsive liars, they must have had some reason for making these stories up.

The simplest reason is love: each of our three murderers is trying to cover for another person, and the best reason to do that is that they are trying to shield them from the consequences of the murder.

From there, we can eliminate probabilities until we arrive at a satisfying reason for one story being more plausible than the others.

Let’s see how this works if we map it out. Click on the image for a full version (1500×1500 px):

Pretty. If you have Adobe Illustrator and want to mess around with my RashoGraph, this is the source file.

Now let’s talk motivations.

1. Why would the Bandit lie and assume blame? Assuming he is telling the truth about having fallen in love on sight with the Wife, as occurs in an uncontested segment of the movie, he would lie to protect the Wife. Would he lie to protect the Husband? Perhaps, were he gripped with remorse or empathy over the event, but that doesn’t seem likely. So, of the two parties he would lie to protect (the Wife and himself), he protects the Wife and assumes blame himself. This would suggest that the Wife is the murderer; were the Husband to have committed suicide, there’s no reason for the Bandit to cover that up. There’s one opening for doubt in his love for the Wife — the Wife’s story — but she may have a compelling reason to lie on this front. And, if the bandit has left early — as he does in the Wife’s version of events — he may lie in order to protect the Wife because he assumes it was her that killed him.

2. Why would the Wife lie and assume blame? That answer depends on the truth about her allegiances: if she has fallen in love with the Bandit, she would lie to protect the Bandit. If she continues to love the Husband, she would lie to protect the Husband. If she loves both, she would lie to protect both. She has potential motivation to protect all three players — the Husband, the Bandit and herself.

3. Why would the Husband lie and assume blame? The Monk expresses concern over the very possibility; he says that considering the dead lying would shatter his belief in the human soul. But the Monk assumes that the Husband would lie out of malice; I think the possibility of the Husband lying out of love might give him some wiggle room to retain belief in human decency, and since that seems to be the ultimate message of the film, let’s give the Husband the benefit of the doubt, and assume a spirit can lie for good reasons.
Would the Husband lie to protect the Wife? While the Bandit’s love seems to be unconditional, there are different accounts of the Husband’s reaction to the rape: in the Bandit’s tale, he is a victim, and may still love her; in the Wife’s tale, he loathes her; in his tale, he is shocked by her but there is still room for love (were he to truly loathe her, why kill himself in despair over her betrayal?); in the Woodcutter’s final tale, he rejects her. If the Wife’s account is true, then the Husband may also lie to protect the Bandit, who has earned his respect.
The Bandit, however, has no reason to protect the Husband. His story is more self-aggrandizing, yes, but he still acquits himself well and nobly in the Husband’s story, and there isn’t much of a reason for a cunning Bandit to throw his head on the chopping block just for the sake of a better-told tale. If we assume the Bandit is not lying to protect the husband (or is telling the truth), we can discount the Husband’s account of the murder as an utter lie.

The Husband did not kill himself.

4. But why would the Woodcutter lie? This is the trickiest part of the tale, and makes us lean overwhelmingly towards the Woodcutter’s interpretation of the story: unlike the three possible murderers, he doesn’t have an overt stake in which one takes the blame. There are, though, motivations in play:

• He may fear reprisal from the Bandit, who is notorious in the region, if he blames the Bandit and the Bandit does not wind up in prison.
• Having stolen the dagger with the pear inlay (as mentioned in an uncontested part of the story by the Woodcutter himself), he needs to concoct a story that diverts people from the missing potential murder weapon. Note the ferocity in which he insists the man was murdered with a sword.
• The wife’s beauty has already made a battle-crazed legendary womanizer fall head over heels in love with her; having the Woodcutter also develop a crush on her doesn’t seem outside the realm of possibility.

Obviously, the “fear the Bandit” scenario doesn’t seem likely, as he blames the bandit. The other reasons, though, dovetail nicely together, again towards the WIfe being the murderer and the others covering for her.

EDIT: There’s a further problem with the Woodcutter’s stories, too: the timeline. Piecing both his narratives together, it’s clear that the Woodsman finds the Wife’s hat and still arrives at the scene in time to witness all the action. He doesn’t find the horse, which means it is gone by the time he finds the hat, and yet he still arrives at the rape/murder scene in time to see how it all goes down. But if he was close enough behind the Bandit/Wife (yet not quite close enough to hear them running through the woods ahead of them) to not miss any of the crucial events, how could he have found the hat after the Bandit has stolen the horse?

Solution One: The Wife Told The Truth Theory
The Wife’s story is true, and both the Bandit and the Husband are lying to cover for her.

This makes sense for a number of reasons:

• The Husband, without the medium to interact for him, cannot hear the Bandit’s “confession,” and doesn’t know the blame has already been taken.
• The Woodcutter has stolen the murder weapon [established], and wants to lie to divert attention from its absence.
• The Wife’s story is the best engineered to engender sympathy for her: she was raped against her will, her husband rejected her in a madness-inducing way, she doesn’t recall the murder, she was overcome with remorse afterwards.

But — as asked by modern poet/philosophers The Black-Eyed Peas — where is the love? If we move to a simple Wife True, All Else False theory, it holds up except that the story itself removes the motivation to lie from the other two players. The Brigand leaves her in the dirt following non-consensual rape, the Husband loathes her and drives her to insanity with his cold indifference. So why — if the Wife’s story is true — would the other two lie to cover up for her, to say nothing of the Woodcutter?

Something stinks here. Let’s move on to another possible solution.

Solution Two: The Bandit/Woodcutter POV Theory
The Bandit’s story is mainly true, partially exaggerated by him and partially misinterpreted by the Woodcutter.

This works on a few levels as well:

• There’s enough commonality between the two stories to make this a bit of a whisper game, where the Wife falls for the Bandit, she encourages a battle between Bandit and Husband, battle occurs to a varying degree of skill, the Husband dies, the Wife flees in shock/remorse, and the Bandit leaves with the horse.
• The Wife would still lie to protect the Bandit.
• There’s still a huge opening for the Woodcutter to have stolen the knife.

There’s a huge motivational knot in this one, as well: why would the Husband lie to protect the Bandit? One compelling reason might be that he felt so betrayed by his wife’s rejection of him for the Bandit that he invented his story to illustrate how his wife’s betrayal hurt him (Shot through the heart! And YOU’RE to blame!), while letting the Bandit off the hook (the Samurai code: you can’t really hate a guy for beating you in a square fight, and the fight was square).

It’s still not entirely satisfying.

I still like the Wife as the murderer, with the dagger, as she’s the only person present where all other players have a compelling reason to take the fall on her behalf. The problem with her account being true is that it removes their motivations to intervene on her behalf.
But what if everybody is lying?
If there’s no choose the right answer motivation to sift through the stories, we are left with the option of sifting through the motivations to find out the most probable chain of events, given (a) the fact that the stories are fundamentally quite the same, and (b) if you look at who’s motivated to defend who, you get some interesting pathways.

So let’s recap:
The Woodcutter will support theories that do not involve dagger murder (and the Wife and Husband versions feature the dagger as the murder weapon).
The Woodcutter may protect the Wife (if the love theory holds).
The Bandit will protect the Wife, but not the Husband.
The Wife will protect the Bandit or the Husband, and perhaps both.
The Husband may protect the Wife (strong), and may protect the Bandit (weak).

With all that, I give you:

Solution Three: The Some Jackass On The Internet Thinks He’s Clever Theory



In this version, the Bandit/Woodcutter (2) story is true to a point; about 90% accurate. We follow the story up to the point that the Wife has succumbed to the Bandit’s affections, fearful that if she does not respond, he will murder both her and the Husband. The Bandit, after the rape, begs her to join him, and she — confident in the Husband’s prowess as a samurai — demands that he liberate the Husband and kill him. The Bandit does so, and the Husband, in a cold fury (being slightly dense, he doesn’t understand the Wife’s motivation), rejects his wife, and agrees to duel the Bandit. The Bandit aquits himself surprisingly well, and the Wife, realizing the Husband may well lose, attempts to help the Husband by stabbing the Bandit with her dagger. The Husband sees this, and knows that the Wife is, in fact, on his side.

The Bandit, however, dodges — and the Wife plunges her dagger into the Husband’s heart. The Wife, in horror, flees to attempt suicide, and the Bandit, seeing that his intended has apparently gone mad and there is nothing here for him, flees as well. The Woodcutter, having seen the whole thing, decides to pinch the dagger for himself and takes off to warn the police.

Am I fanwanking over Rashomon? Abso-freaking-lutely. I am writing Rashomon fan fiction, and nobody is more embarrased about that than I. But as far as, well, solutions go, this one is pretty airtight. It offers truth for all characters, in varying degrees, and supports everyone’s reasons for covering up, including the Wife’s reason for lying — she couldn’t stand having killed her husband, even in accident. The Bandit gets to embellish the battle, and the Woodcutter tells the bulk of the truth, changing the end of the battle to draw attention away from the purloined dagger.

But why would the Husband cover for the Bandit? Why not say the Bandit did it as a cover?

Because the Husband was in limbo during everyone else’s testimony. He arrives in the middle of a trial courtesy of Dial-A-Psychic, and has no clue what’s happened except that he’s being asked about the circumstances of his murder. So he tells the only thing he knows is certain to clear his wife — he committed suicide. It’s the sanest move, given that the Bandit might be pinning it all on the Wife, and the Wife might well be confessing to it. Rather than muddy the waters, he takes it on himself.

So that’s my goofy Rashomon fanfic.

But wait! There’s more!

In working on this, I stumbled across an interesting note in a review of the film, which leads to:

Solution Four: The Adapted Hal0000 Theory

Essentially, Hal0000 posits that the Wife and Husband versions converge: that she moves to stab him and passes out and he, upset at her willingness to do him in, kills himself with the dagger. She awakes, sees him dead, assumes she did it, and flees to attempt suicide.

This doesn’t address a number of things, but is an interesting read of the Wife and Husband’s stories, and would probably stand up if you applied some of my loosey-goosey fanfic stuff to it.

Finally, one must always consider the metaphysical, which leads us to:

Solution Five: The Steve Gerber Giant-Size Theory-Thing Theory

What if all their stories were true?

“Unpossible!” you cry. Not so, through the magic of Marvel Comics Science, particularly when one takes into account that the events under contention occured in a forest, which is quite like a swamp, which is of course also the location of the Nexus of All Realities. For those who read Steve Gerber comics in the ’70s, it is not a far cry to imagine that perhaps these events occured at the Nexus; the point at which convergent dimensions meet.

This theory, in turn, is the simplest of all: the story proceeds until the Bandit leads the Wife into the woods, and then, stumbling across the Nexus, all the characters (including the Woodcutter) enter divergent realities in which their stories are true. Shortly after, reality reconverges, and they find themselves shunted together onto one plane again, with a series of conflicting stories that cannot make sense together.

There are several pieces of evidence to support this audacious theory:

• The Bandit, upon the shore, shows the delerium and confusion common among those who have transitioned between dimensions. Poisoned spring or thrown from horse? Why not both — and neither?
• Rashomon, according to the Monk at the end of the film, was once the home of a demon, who was driven from the gate by man’s ferocity. When one thinks “demon” and “nexus of all realities,” only one conclusion may be drawn — the globetrotting, swamp-dwelling monster that guards the Nexus of All Realities: Man-Thing.
• This, in turn, sheds light on this inexplicable figure seen in various screencaps of the film:
  

  

And suddenly, through the magic of Mr. Steve Gerber (RIP), it all makes sense:



So what have we learned? Well, first of all, it would be a wise move to keep me the hell away from Primer.
Secondly, there is no psychologically sound “solution” to Rashomon: no one version of the tale both hangs together and provides a plausible reason for all other parties to lie.
Third, I have time on my hands and piss-poor Adobe Illustrator skills.

Rashomon was not, obviously, a “solvable” movie. It’s not Memento, where the joy of the film is in reaching the end and piecing it all together; it exists to be ambiguity, to illustrate the power of the unreliable narrator. And I apologize again for treating it as a puzzle that can be solved, against the intent of Mr. Kurosawa and the original author of both Rashomon and In A Grove, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa.

But — as somebody who frets over the timeline of the Terminator movies, and gets in protracted arguments on the Internet about what “I’m in insurance” meant at the end of 12 Monkeys, this has provided me with some measure of peace of mind. Thanks for indulging me.

Addendum: this has been posted to MetaFilter, and there are a lot of great comments/theories in the thread over there as well.

What a night.

It’s been a busy week, so I haven’t really had time to talk about it yet, but I was blown away by the amazing night I had on July 18, when friends and family from literally across Canada came together at my cousin Andrea’s tango studio in Montreal to celebrate the much-delayed Canadian half of our wedding celebration.

As with many things in my life, I half-assed it; as with many things in my life, wonderful friends and family members pulled together to provide a seamless and incredible evening despite my best efforts.

And what an evening it was. Our (Kali and I) best efforts were put into making it a simple and stress-free evening, and it all came together marvelously, thanks in no small part to a number of people who really went above and beyond — and this is not an exhaustive list:

• My cousin Andrea and her partner Wolf, who not only provided the venue — Montango, a drop-dead gorgeous tango studio serving all of the NDG area and beyond. Not only that, but they also graced us with a jaw-dropping demonstration of how beautiful the tango can be.
• Michael, Leah, Jake and Katya, who provided a staggering amount of food, including my bride’s taste of home, red velvet cupcakes (also a feature of Original Wedding).
• Cousin Hugh and his partner Sandra, who served as all-round stuff-getters and troubleshooters.
• Aunt Jean and Uncle Harvey, who provided a fantastic brunch for family the next morning.
• Uncle Stuart

, who composed a fantastic wedding march-slash-tango to top off the evening on the perfect note (pun intended, forgive me)

And everyone that came, really. People from New Brunswick, Kingston, Toronto, Ottawa, Oshawa, the States, all across Quebec; married people, single people, Francophones, anglophones, older people, younger people, pregnant people — holy cats, a lot of people.

My one regret is not being able to spend more time with everyone. At one point, my friend Josh did me the invaluable service of tugging my sleeve and telling me to just calm down and not try to make sure everyone was having a good time all at once.

Which I tried to do, but man, it was hard. People I haven’t seen since, well, high school were there, old colleagues, former co-workers, current friends… it was like a buffet of the greatest people in the world, and I wish the evening could have gone on forever.

Well maybe not forever because that would involve a lot of cupcakes.

Thanks so much to everyone that came, and for making Kali feel welcome and loved here in her new home.

Apologies for the lack of photos. That’s… er, just how I roll.

Due to various reasons — Marisa preparing for a trip, a visit from my parents, and just being kind of emotionally overwhelmed by the thing — I haven’t written about the Canadian Wedding Celebration yet.

In the interim, please watch the most awesome wedding video ever.