Curse of the Golden Flower

[Guest guest]

Hi everyone,

 

People have mentioned the recent film Curse of the Golden Flower and its

depiction of . At first glance the film appears to show herbal

medicine in a negative light, being used to poison the empress, but in a larger

sense the film could hardly show medicine occupying a more central role in the

affiars of state. An emperor practices medicine, writes prescriptions, takes

pulses. An imperial doctor is given the governorship of a province. The fact

that the doctor is not actually supposed to reach the province is another story.

 

What appears as the assasination of the empress later turns out more to

resemble punishment for the seduction of his eldest son (and not unrelated to

the coup d'etat which is the film's main event). Her motive for seducing the

eldest son appears to be ambition on behalf of her own son, who was in fact

slated to succeed to the throne, had he followed his father's advice not to

attempt to take by force what would be given freely. So the seduction of the

eldest son is in effect an act of rebellion, and the empress is from the

beginning of the film (though we as audience don't yet understand) guilty of

fairly serious offense. The emperor punishes the eldest son indirectly by

keeping him around the palace in the role that he had in effect chosen for

himself, male concubine. The empress is given poison to make her lose her mind,

which strangely is the punishment for having already lost her mind -- in having

an illicit affair with the crown prince. The imperial doctor's

willingness to add the black fungus to a formula for anemia at first appears

wicked (the kind of act that Hippocrates expressly forbids in the Oath) but

later seems like a not entirely unreasonable service to the emperor's terrifying

prescience.

 

In terms of efficacy, however, the medicine is shown to work. It achieves its

aim.

 

At a deeper level, the power of Chinese medicine comes from its ability to

connect directly with the forces of life within the human body and within

nature; western medicine employs instruments to assess the numerical and

biochemical patterns of life, almost algorithms of life, and to treat by

analogues to those patterns. The Curse of the Golden Flower depicts a medicine

that takes a different stance, a radical advocacy of the righteous qi in an

individual and a state rather than radical distance from the exercise of all

power. At first this depiction will seem uncomfortable (rather like a first

accupuncture treatment, or the first taste of a decoction) but upon reflection

this film unveils new possibilities for intelligent action in the world -- even

in a world full of unspeakable vice and ruthless enforcement.

 

Carl Ploss

 

 

 

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