“Did you ever hear the story of the Wise King?”
Posted July 18th, 2010 by Murray By Moonlight
Filed under: Folklore
The last place I expected to encounter an intriguing piece of folklore was in the middle of a gritty crime movie like Serpico.
In Serpico, Al Pacino plays the part of an honest cop who is trying to cope with the rampant and widespread corruption of his colleagues in the New York Police force.
It’s a confronting and tense drama – one that saw Pacino nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor in 1974 [1].
What it isn’t, however, is the sort of movie in which you expect to encounter a fairytale; and yet, in a scene in which Serpico and his girlfriend, Laurie, are talking about his dilemma, the following story is told:
"Did you ever hear the story of the Wise King?"
"Nope, but I got the feeling I’m gonna hear it."
"Well, there was this king, and he ruled over his kingdom. Right in the middle of the kingdom there was a well. That’s where everybody drank.
One night, this witch came along… and she poisoned the well.
And the next day, everybody drank from it except the king… and they all went crazy.
They got together in the street and they said… ‘We got to get rid of the king, ’cause the king is mad.’
And then that night, he went down and he drank from the well.And the next day all the people rejoiced… because their king had regained his reason.”
On the surface, the "Story of the Wise King" is simply another way of expressing the phrase, ‘If you can’t beat them, join them.’ In the movie, Serpico struggles to maintain his ideals in the face of growing hostility and mistrust from the very people on whom his life depends – the other cops in his precinct. Laurie, his girlfriend, suggests that maybe it’s time to think of his own safety first – drink from the well, join his colleagues in their corruption. Then his safety would no longer be at risk from them.
But there’s a more nuanced observation in this fairytale. In the story, the poisoned people think the King is mad, even though he is the only one who hasn’t drunk from the well. By drinking from the well, the concept of what is ‘normal’ has changed for the people, and now as far as they can tell, it’s the King who is insane, because he is no longer like them.
In the movie, Serpico’s colleagues have drunk from the poisoned well of corruption. From their perspective, Serpico is the villain. He threatens their sense that, ‘we aren’t really hurting anybody by stealing money from bad people.’ He also threatens their safety – if he refuses to take dirty money, then maybe he will testify against them. He refuses to drink from the well, challenging their idea of what’s ‘normal’, and as a result he’s the bad guy.
Of course, the audience understands the story differently – we see Serpico struggle to maintain his honesty and integrity, we see him attempt multiple times to do something about the corruption surrounding him; and, as the story unfolds, we see the consequences of his decisions.
In the end, unlike the Wise King, Serpico chooses not to drink from the well. He doesn’t regain his reason by joining his colleagues in their corruption, and unlike the fairytale, there is no rejoicing and no happy ending.
Footnotes:
| 1. | He lost to Jack Lemmon in “Save The Tiger”. |
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