If there is an official name for this, I don’t know it. I call it the Reverse Rashomon.
The Japanese film Rashomon tells a story from more than one perspective, and the camera shows each character’s contradictory version of the tale as if it is truly happening. Though we humans tend to believe our eyes most implicitly of all our senses, to “see” contradictory portrayals short-circuits this tendency and forces us to grapple with ambiguity.
Some movies use a different trick in order to banish ambiguity. Imagine that a Vigilante Hero has tracked down the Douchebag who he thinks stabbed the Doe-Eyed Virgin. As the Vigilante Hero prepares to slay the Douchebag, naturally the Douchebag protests, “I’m innocent! You got the wrong guy!”
Now, to kill the wrong guy would make our Hero a bad fellow—but don’t worry, the movie is here to help. Flash! We see an earlier scene, with scary lighting and handheld cameras, where the Doe-Eyed Virgin cries out, “No! Please!” as the Douchebag leers and chuckles and flicks his switchblade.
Flash! We’re back to the present: the Vigilante Hero blows out the Douchebag’s brains, and justice is served. Any qualmishness the viewer may have felt about this violation of due process under the law is wiped away by the Reverse Rashomon: an editing technique which shows us evidence of the Douchebag’s guilt which the Vigilante Hero himself has no way of knowing.
This sort of thing coddles and spoils the viewer. A “bad” act is actually good—here’s the qualm-free dramatic catharsis you paid your twenty bucks for! How do we know the Douchebag is guilty? We “saw” it with our own eyes—the perfect negative of the Rashomon technique. Deeds which would be ethically questionable in reality, because they would lack justifying evidence, are lent a moral credence that is impossible in real life. It is an incorrigibly escapist tendency in modern storytelling.
Americans in particular might not like to think that our CIA is grabbing innocent people off the street (whose faces might superficially resemble suspected terrorists’) and waterboarding them in black sites to extract information the poor victims haven’t got. How reassuring it is for a film to demonstrate that the Heroes have impeccable insight allowing them to identify true Douchebags without needing to follow all those pesky rules about due process and burden of proof. All doubt is laid to rest once we “see it with our own eyes.”
Another form of Reverse Rashomon is the flash-forward that illustrates a counterfactual: what is fated to happen if we don’t take an action. The character then takes said action, averting said consequence—and, in a way impossible in real life, viewers can be sure a preventive act was preventive: messy and unpredictable reality has been transmuted into a facile Trolley Problem in which all outcomes are perfectly known in advance. Nothing really works that way, but it can in movies—which is great, if the viewer’s desire is to escape, not confront, reality.
Perhaps the Reverse Rashomon bothers me less in literature than it does in movies because I simply dislike movies and am ready to find fault. Still, I think the visual element of film makes the Reverse Rashomon feel more dishonest than it may in print.