Learn English – Idiom for two people having two drastically different appraisals of an event

idiom-requests

What's an idiom for "two people have two drastically different appraisals of an event they were a part of"?

For example, two people on a date. One thinks it was great and hopes for another, and the other thinks it was terrible.

Best Answer

This sounds like an example of the Rashomon effect. From Wikipedia (footnotes omitted):

The Rashomon effect occurs when an event is given contradictory interpretations by the individuals involved. The effect is named after Akira Kurosawa's 1950 film Rashomon, in which a murder is described in four contradictory ways by four witnesses. The term addresses the motives, mechanism and occurrences of the reporting on the circumstance and addresses contested interpretations of events, the existence of disagreements regarding the evidence of events and subjectivity versus objectivity in human perception, memory and reporting.

So for example if A and B go on a date, A might remember that the food was terrific and they were incredibly witty, but then B got increasingly tipsy and there was a weird digression into French art criticism that tanked the whole date; while B remembers that the food violated their dietary restrictions and A kept telling total groaners, but the wine was terrific and there was a fascinating conversation about French art criticism that really made them want to see B again. And the waiter might primarily remember that A and B totally stiffed him on the tip in spite of ordering three appetizers, two desserts, and three bottles of wine.

To address the request for an idiom: The term Rashomon, applied as an adjective to various nouns, has come to be an idiom1 for this kind of encounter. For example (bolding added; other emphasis original):

This turned out to be what I call a Rashomon date, where the perspectives on how it went differ wildly.
Kashmir Hill, "My Weird Hobby: Matchmaking Lawyers", Forbes, February 14, 2011


Watergate's Rashomon moment: Fans of All the President's Men . . . may have wondered why the anonymous source then known as Deep Throat didn't simply reveal everything he knew. In telling the story from the perspective of Deep Throat . . . writer-director Peter Landesman helps us understand the G-man's justified paranoia. The film is a thriller, but the current occupant of the White House may find it to be a horror film . . . .
Simon Houpt, "The TIFF movies we can’t wait to see, from a tiny Matt Damon to two tennis tales", The Globe and Mail, September 8, 2017 (describing the film Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House)


Let’s face it: We live in a Rashomon reality in which every event is instantly captured from a dozen angles and given at least as many interpretations . . . .
Antonio García Martínez, "Journalism isn't dying. It's returning to its roots", Wired, 02.10.19

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the use has picked up quite a bit in US news reports in the past few years.


1 I am taking "idiom" here to mean "an expression whose meaning is not predictable from the usual meanings of its constituent elements" (Dictionary.com), since the usual meaning of something like "Rashomon encounter" would be "an encounter with Rashomon".