The Ballad of Alice Without Wonderland

Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”

Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson); Through the Looking Glass

"Of all the stories you told me, which ones were true and which ones weren't?"

"My dear Doctor, they're all true."

"Even the lies?"

"Especially the lies."

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (episode written by Robert Hewitt Wolfe)

Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (which I presented last week) is often cited as one of the "greatest films ever made". 

I'm not normally a fan of describing things in superlatives like that (I consider it the worst thing ever!) but it has to be said that when social anthropologists name an entire psychological phenomenon after your movie, it's a cinch you're in with some pretty exalted company. You don't hear them talking about the "Jaws Principle" or the "Dr. Strangelove Proposition" or the "Godfather Assertion". But there is an "Oedipus Complex" and there's "Munchhausen's Syndrome"... and there's the "Rashomon Effect". (To be fair, there are also "Tom Swifties" so I guess there's no accounting for taste...)

"I am a Camera," snapped Christopher, reflexively.

When Christopher Isherwood made his famous "I am a camera," comment, he was suggesting that he was striving to record Reality without judgement or interpretation. He wasn't putting his own personal spin on anything, and he certainly wasn't inventing; he was just observing and repeating, for posterity. 

The Rashomon Effect says that Christopher Isherwood is full of shit.

Okay, okay, it doesn't actually say that, but it does say that everyone puts their own personal spin on everything, all the time. They can't help it; it's built into the system. To recount an event is to re-interpret that event: the Reality and the description of Reality are two completely different things, and they exist on different planes. One is a sequence of events, while the other is a sequence of words.

Rashomon of course presents a single incident as described by several different witnesses, each of whom gives a radically divergent account of the event in question. Such a set-up was hardly unique to Kurosawa's movie, and indeed many a classic murder mystery has featured exactly this structure. Any actor who has ever played the victim in an Agatha Christie adaptation has been obliged to "die" over and over again as the audience is treated to multiple (hypothetical) versions of the murder, committed by each of the suspects in turn. The intrepid detective then ingeniously figures out how it "really" happened, and the true murderer is revealed.

It's that final, crucial step that sets Rashomon apart from, say, Death on the Nile (and is why it's the Rashomon effect and not the "Agatha Christie" effect). A murder mystery will show us many possible scenarios (usually involving many different possible murderers) but the true events are always revealed at the end; usually presented by the smug detective in front of an assemblage of all interested players.

Rashomon doesn't do that.

By the time Kurosawa's movie comes to a close, we have seen four completely different accounts of the events in the forest... and we still don't know what "really" happened. The implication is strong that none of the witnesses are being completely truthful (even the dead guy, who gives testimony through a medium) and Kurosawa chooses not to end with a conventional "but here's what really happened" finale.

In subsequent years, many other writers and film-makers have sought to emulate the "Rashomon" format, and popular entertainment franchises seem to regard it almost as a rite of passage. Television shows from Star Trek to All in the Family to the Dick Van Dyke Show have all done a "Rashomon" episode - and there's even a Cole Porter/Gene Kelly musical (which I may very well include in this series at some point). 

The Marvel Cinematic Universe and The Simpsons (both pop-culture behemoths) have managed to slip a little Rashomon-inspired humour into their respective proceedings; clearly the "Rashomon effect" casts a long and illustrious shadow.

                        

What is Truth?

In Les Girls (the Cole Porter/Gene Kelly musical I mentioned a moment ago) an anonymous Londoner silently punctuates the proceedings with a sandwich board that cogently asks "What is Truth?"

He appears throughout the film, as if asking the foundational question of every Rashomon-inspired script: What really happened?

But this question is a trap: it implies the existence of an objective Reality. That's a mistake. Fictional characters don't have objective Realities; that's what makes them fictional.

What does it actually mean to be a fictional character? When an author creates a character in a narrative, he or she is effectively creating a person from the ground up. The author decides what kind of person that is going to be; how they will appear, how they will behave, what they will say and do etc. A well-written character will have substance, emotional depth, plausibility. This is going to sound like a cliché, but the character will live in the minds of the readers.

But that character, no matter how well constructed, is still assembled from letters of the alphabet. Fictional characters don't have memories, they have a back story. They don't have a home town, they have the words HOME TOWN. Language is a medium, and a fictional character has been sculpted from that medium. Words are the Reality of fiction.

What the Rashomon effect shows us is that "truth" need not apply to fiction. "Telling a story" is literally an act of creation, and the limits of that Creation are simply the limits of language to express ideas. Just because something is impossible in our Reality doesn't mean it needs to be impossible in fiction.

But this is where it gets really interesting. Because language doesn't actually care whether the character you are writing is "real" or not. When created with words, a fictional character (wholly invented) and a real character (based on a flesh-and-blood individual) look much the same. That's why it's impossible for us to separate truth from fiction in a Rashomon-type story: the distinction doesn't apply when there was no "real" event in the first place.

Consider Lewis Carroll's "Alice" stories for a moment.

Everyone is probably at least passingly acquainted with the (clearly fantastical) adventures of little Alice: her trip down the rabbit hole; her encounters with the March Hare, the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat et al, her somewhat ill-advised willingness to drink the strange and random beverages she happens to encounter in her psychedelic travels (really, kids; don't do that).

If I were the kind of guy who went in for careless superlatives, I would say that Alice might be the most famous 10-year-old in the history of the English language. (I'm not, so I won't.)

Of course the Alice of the Wonderland stories is not a flesh-and-blood little girl; she is the literary creation of Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll, to his readers) and so it's perfectly reasonable for her to experience all sorts of "impossible things" that would have no place in our Reality. Her Reality is words on a page, and the "truth" of that Reality is whatever Dodgson/Carroll wishes it to be.

Those of us who have encountered Lewis Carroll's Alice can recognise her by those experiences. We know who she is, and what she's like. We know how she speaks, and what has happened to her. We can comprehend her "Alice-ness": those characteristics that identify her as Alice, as distinct from, say Peter Pan, or Little Nell (both of whom have been assembled, needless to say, from the same twenty-six letters of the alphabet).

There's only one problem with all this: Alice wasn't a fictional character; she was a real, non-fictional little girl who was the inspiration for Charles Dodgson and his writing. Her name was Alice Liddell, she was born in 1852, she died in 1934 (at the age of 82) and she never once fell down a rabbit hole, as far as anyone knows.

This Alice lived a perfectly average, non-fantastical life, the details of which are entirely her business. She married, she had three children, she volunteered for the Red Cross during World War I and she no doubt experienced a lifetime of unique and personal moments that were entirely hers.

But all of that is entirely irrelevant to the millions of readers who met Alice-the-literary-character; the perpetual 10-year-old who took tea with a Mad Hatter and dallied with the Queen of Hearts. We know virtually nothing about the one Alice, but we all know a great deal about the other. What must it feel like to live your entire life in the shadow of a ten year old version of yourself over whom you have no control?

This is the question asked by Dennis Potter's 1985 film Dreamchild.

Loosely inspired by an actual historical event (another example of writer inventing Reality with words, by the way) the film follows the 80 year old Alice Liddell Hargreaves in 1932 as she journeys to New York to receive an honorary degree from Columbia University on the centenary of Charles Dodgson's birth.

Mrs. Hargreaves is a stern, upright Victorian woman encountering the United States for the first time, but everyone she meets is only interested in the little girl who fell down the rabbit hole (and continues to fall down the rabbit hole, every time someone opens the book). 

Alice-the-woman has been thoroughly upstaged by her own literary construct, as written by someone else.

As she revisits her fading memories of a childhood encounter with a man whose feelings towards her she wasn't mature enough to comprehend, Alice Hargreaves tries to come to terms with what it means to be Alice.

Dreamchild is a surprisingly subtle film that manages to avoid many of the pitfalls of Dennis Potter's other work, but the true revelation here is Ian Holm as Charles Dodgson, who brings a great deal of dignity and pathos to a role that could easily have been ugly and disturbing.

But at its heart, Dreamchild is asking the same question that every Rashomon eventually asks. Which story is real? Who gets to control the narrative? And what is truth?

When you're the one telling the story, Truth is whatever you write it to be.

We will screen Dreamchild at 7.30 on Thursday, the 9th of July at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.